Segregated Port Townsend
A community divided by class and social status. In the 19th century there were two distinct Port Townsends. In Uptown and Morgan Hill, the prim and proper wives of captains, bankers and customs officers never had to rub elbows with the roughnecks and Chinese along the waterfront.
Crime was confined to the lower reaches of the city, where prostitution, drugs, alcohol, violence and shanghaiing were not only common, but economic pillars. Looking down from the widow’s walks on their Victorian mansions, captains could see their ships at anchor, accompanied sometimes by rowboats ferrying landlubbers pressed into virtual slavery as involuntary crew for voyages that might last years.
“Bloody Townsend,” our fair Victorian seaport and arts community was known up and down the west coast. But that moniker did not apply to the genteel, refined, abstemious upper class on top of the hill and bluffs.
Stairs to Port Townsend’s Victorian Uptown
Maybe for a period of time the city escaped its segregationist past. People who have been here for decades talk wistfully of a less stratified Port Townsend. But in recent years, Port Townsend has returned to being a segregated city, and it is getting worse. How we got here will be the subject of future articles on why Port Townsend is far from being a “strong town.”
Not really a “progressive” city
Port Townsend has undergone economic class cleansing, reestablishing the higher elevation areas of the city as the very exclusive domain of the well-to-do. Now even downtown has been swept of lower-economic status residents. Workers have been driven to the city’s edges or to the Tri-Area or even further away. A growing number of Port Townsend workers commute from homes in other counties because they cannot afford to live here.
The policies of “progressive” city councilors and county commissioners are only making the segregation worse. For the past twenty years the city has accomplished economic segregation by exclusionary zoning and building codes.
The prized Victorian neighborhoods were not planned. Those mansions were not built after waiting endlessly on building permits or having to pay city employees a high hourly rate to explain codes and regulations. But now they and the entire city are subject to a straitjacket of codes, regulations, and ordinances that stifle the more intensive and dense development of PT’s urban center.
Social policies have exploded building codes and made every type of construction more expensive. It is not all about safety and structural integrity. There are aesthetic elements in those thick codes, as well as the products of lobbying and policy aspirations.
“Snob” zoning hit Port Townsend about the same time real estate interests gained control over local government. Preserving or enhancing real estate values was a goal of these exclusionary and barrier-raising regulations. Real estate appreciation has been pushed as a major economic engine in and of itself. Planners suddenly had much more power.
The burdensome regulations had the effect of making new construction and remodels more expensive, or prohibiting up-zoning so that old buildings could not be repurposed for multi-family units. Manufactured housing, the portal to affordable housing for tens of millions of Americans, was excluded from most areas of the city. Regulations that sounded innocuous, such as requiring so much off-street parking per unit, drove up prices and restricted supply.
In the face of a housing emergency declared five years ago, only now, at its March 24, 2022 meeting has the city Planning Commission done its “first touch” on considering loosening the off-street parking requirements for ADUs. It is worth noting that prior to 2007, city codes did not require an off-street parking space for an ADU. That requirement was added in 2007. Fifteen years later, city government is only now “considering” revising that habitation-killing requirement.
Historic building designations are perhaps the most exclusionary regulation — only those with the resources to meet the astounding costs and legal requirements (and legal fees) for maintaining a historically-designated, preserved property can get in. If you want to avoid having poor, even middle-class people for neighbors, move into a historically designated neighborhood.
The regulatory framework leveraged more power over development by allowing homeowners to impose their will on other property owners and get in the way of building affordable housing. Page back through The Leader’s archives and you will find incidents where proposals to provide more affordable housing have been stopped by opposition from private citizens who already “had theirs.”
Snob Zoning on Steroids
City councilors, joined by county commissioners, are now concentrating the poor people and working families on the south side of the city, away from the moneyed hoods on the hills and up around North Beach and Fort Worden.
Lower income housing is already heavily concentrated near the QFC and blocks to the south. That’s where you will find the mobile homes and most apartment buildings. That’s where the county gave land to OlyCap to build its multi-story affordable/low income apartment building.
Olycap’s low-income housing project under construction across the street from mobile home park
Not far away, the city approved the “wooden tent” encampment called Pat’s Place. This love-driven project was built by volunteers and private donations. They had to creatively shoehorn the project into a narrow slot in city codes. There is no “tiny homes” zoning allowed in Port Townsend, but there is an emergency tent encampment exception to the strict prohibitions against camping anywhere beyond a few select locations (e.g., the Fairgrounds). Hence, “wooden tents” appeared instead of “tiny homes.
The city charged the group $52,000 in permit fees for a settlement that under current regulations is limited to 180 days plus one 60-day extension. The good people behind the project raised the funds and built the project on faith that the city would relax that time provision. It has still not been relaxed, though City Council is supposed to take this issue up at future meeting, after it has worked its way through a thicket of other procedural steps. This critical correction was only at the “first touch” stage for the Planning Commission at its March 24, 2022 meeting. City Council has to wait for the Planning Commission to make its recommendation on what to do with this ludicrous obstacle to providing emergency shelter for people who otherwise would be living under tarps in the wet woods or in their cars.
Pat’s Place
The city did waive the outrageous mountain of fees. This was a project sponsored by a nonprofit dedicated to providing low income and transitional housing. The city can get around the state-law prohibition on gifts to private entities under an escape hatch for charitable works. Private individuals seeking to build an affordable home or an ADU don’t get this gracious treatment from the city. Their effort at building something affordable runs head on into the city’s crushing building fee demands.
A little further southeast, at Mill Road and just outside city limits, the county bought about 30 acres in order to relocate the open air drug market and homeless/transient camp that had taken over the Fairgrounds inside the city. Plans are in place to expand the Mill Road development to be a “housing hub” for services and accommodations for the unhoused and those seeking transitional housing.
Mill Road encampment
The Mill Road camp also allows city law enforcement to remove the homeless from downtown PT and transport them to the city’s edge, or send them packing in that direction. The drugs that plagued the Fairgrounds (now mainly Fentanyl) are still prevalent in the county-sponsored camp to a shocking and depressing degree.
People surviving out there are not getting better. Many, maybe most, are enslaved by their addictions and killing themselves slowly or dramatically (the young man who hung himself outside Manresa Castle) or harming, even killing others (the young man who murdered two of his family members earlier this year).
For the rich and privileged of Port Townsend, the problems are out of sight, out of mind, handled more neatly and cleanly than when the Victorians could not avoid seeing Bloody Townsend at the bottom of their hill. Very, very few of PT’s upper crust will ever see the Mill Road camp or even be aware of its existence.
In November 2021, the city bought 14.4 acres directly across Mill Road from the OlyCap development. The city hopes to build its own low-income planned community. This concept is currently known as the Evans Vista Project. Upon completion, it will go a long way toward finalizing the concentration and segregation of the city’s remaining indigent, working poor and low to lower-middle class households in an out-of-the-way location removed from the city’s elites.
The city has land in the affluent areas of town. It could be driving a bulldozer through the morass of codes, regulations, permit fee schedules and time consuming procedures to clear a path for a radical change in the city’s housing and demographic landscape. It could be doing something other than resurrecting the segregated Port Townsend of the 19th century.
It isn’t.
Next: Why Port Townsend is Not a “Strong Town”