Opinion: Farms, Housing and Who Gets to Be Urgent

By Dylan Quarles, Port Townsend Planning Commissioner

As I watch the debate around the Quimper Growers comp plan amendment play out online, in the press, and in council chambers, I keep coming back to something bigger than any single amendment or docket decision.

We live in a system that is very good at responding to organized, articulate, property-owning voices. When landowners and business operators show up, write letters, fill chambers, and get sympathetic coverage in the local paper, things move. The urgency feels real because it is real, to them, and they have the tools to make everyone else feel it too.

But there are people in this community whose urgency rarely makes the front page. The family paying half their income in rent. The worker commuting from Quilcene because they can't afford to live where they work. The young person who grew up here and has quietly accepted they probably can't stay. Their crisis is just as real. But they don't own the land they're standing on, which in our system means their voice carries less weight, almost by default.

I want to be clear: I am not saying the urban farmers are wrong to advocate for themselves. These are people who love this community and this land, and they are doing something meaningful for their neighbors. The work they do matters and they are determined to protect it. 

I just think the anxiety driving this instinct is worth naming honestly. The same comp plan update that firmly enshrined urban farming in Port Townsend also opened the door for more density and development. Those two things happened simultaneously, and I understand why that feels threatening, even if the city's intentions were never hostile to farming.

Here is what I want people to know. That comp plan, adopted four months ago, explicitly names urban agriculture, community gardens, and local food systems as essential to Port Townsend's future. That language is in there. In writing. Adopted by this council. As such, the comp plan amendment proposed by the Quimper Growers Co-Op should not be viewed as an issue of values, but of sequencing. 

The housing crisis doesn't pause while we sort out that sequence. Every month of delay is another family priced out, another worker looking elsewhere for employment and housing. That context needs to sit alongside this amendment, not behind it.

Bly Windstorm, a spokesman for the Quimper Growers, echoed this himself when he recently wrote that Port Townsend has room for both housing and farming. I share that belief completely. Housing and farming are not competing for this community's values. They are competing for finite staff time and a docket that has real constraints right now.

Those constraints are not abstractions. This city is carrying vacancies in its planning department. We have an active Growth Management Hearings Board appeal from Affordable Hometown consuming staff time and legal resources every single week. It’s not just the planners who are affected by this. Every implementation action requires attorney review before it can move, meaning this is not simply a hypothetical burden, or a talking point. It is real, and it is happening right now. And to top things off, we have a housing crisis, one this city formally declared, backed by the white paper from 2023 that is still waiting on meaningful follow-through three years later.

That last part is where my frustration lives. Not with the growers. With the gap between what we've promised working families in this community and what we've actually delivered. The people getting priced out of Port Townsend are also counting on their local government to act. They just aren't the ones whose urgency is being amplified right now.

This is the thing about zero-sum politics in a small, tight-knit community: it is almost always wrong on the facts and almost always damaging to the relationships that make a place like Port Townsend function. When the only print newspaper in town frames a docket sequencing decision as a test of political will, it is making a choice about whose crisis counts. That choice has consequences.

I support the growers' goals. I want this proposal to move forward. But forcing a large code overhaul through a docket that cannot absorb it right now does not get that done faster. It threatens to get it shelved. As a Planning Commissioner and a community member, I do not want that outcome. The path forward is patience and sequence, not a fight that leaves everyone empty-handed.

Port Townsend is a small enough town that the people on all sides of this debate probably know each other. Probably like each other. We should not let ourselves be divided, or seek to divide one another. This is a community capable of holding space for a wide range of issues. I believe we can govern like that is the case.