| If you thought housing in North Kitsap has been getting more expensive relative to the cost of living you are right, just look at these numbers.
The local Seattle/Tacoma/Bremerton area inflation rate has increased by 9 percent from 1998 to 2001. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) increased 12 percent during this same time. Many folks in Kitsap County’s wages are based on these indexes. The average appreciation in the overall housing market in North Kitsap has been around 36 percent from 1998 to 2001. Some of that appreciation might be due to restrictive land use policies.
North Kitsap new construction is a bigger story.
In 1998, prior to Chris Endresen placing a building moratorium on new home construction in North Kitsap’s most affordable area, new home prices were running around $70 to $75 dollars per square foot, including the land. In 2001, North Kitsap’s most affordable new home construction was selling for about $130 to $136 per square foot including the land in the newest plat. For those without calculators, that is around an 80 percent increase per square foot in only three years! That is 80 percent! That is unprecedented in new home construction in North Kitsap!
Many would think that is purely due to “local appreciation” I would say that maybe half of it might be but half of it is not “just” appreciation.
The other half represents the added cost of construction due to restrictive land use policies like the Growth Management Act and the current related fad of “Smart Growth” thinking. If you were a new home buyer looking to buy a 1,400 square foot home in North Kitsap you would have paid and had to finance $46,200 extra due just to the added cost of land use restrictions in Kitsap County — over the cost of land use restrictions already in place in 1998.
The difference is what a new home would have cost you versus what that home now had to cost in order for the developer and builder to navigate the “Land Use Jungle” and still stay in business. If you are new home buyer during this time you really got burned by land use regulations.
Thank your Kitsap County Government and Washington State. So what is in store for the cost of new homes in our area and the coming “Smart Growth” thinking? Think unaffordable, think small, think mostly urban and think even more expensive per square foot.
It’s is clear to me that unless we figure out a way to provide better land use regulations to local builders and developers, the only new homes that will be built will be the very expensive homes on large acreage and affordable homes built by government entities like; Kitsap County, The Navy and the Indian tribes.
Is that what we want for Kitsap County? When was the last time that you drove through a Government or Indian housing project and thought “what a nice neighborhood?”
The middle class dream of privately built, new and affordable North Kitsap home ownership has been hijacked by the Growth Management Act and might soon to be completely destroyed by Smart Growth. The predictions we heard about the Growth Management Act have come true for privately built North Kitsap affordable housing in 2001. Let’s not let “Smart Growth” kill the dream completely.
Watch the “dollars per square foot” new home sales figures and make your own barometric observations, you might be shocked at the cost of our current land use regulations for the new home buyer.
Michael Svardh
Hansville, WA. | 
