Arborwood, a subdivision project 30 years in the making, is about ready to embark on its development this spring.

Vice president Jon Rose of Raydient Places, the development company behind Arborwood, noted that changes in the real estate market showed it was finally time to move forward.

“The market just wasn’t ready for Arborwood up in North Kitsap, and now three things are happening that make this a good time to start the project,” Rose said. “The first thing is Kitsap is on the radar screen of the home builder and buyer in a way that it never was in the past. Also the implementation of the fast ferry service to Seattle and then, of course, COVID has changed the landscape where people are leaving the city in a way we have never seen before.”

The only impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had on Arborwood has been on its ability to get its engineering documents approved by the county.

Phase 1 will begin on the south end of North Kitsap Heritage Park and just across the street from White Horse Golf Club with the development of 163 single family lots. The total build out for the development will be 750 housing units ranging in 40- 60 foot lot sizes. Phases 4 and 5 show the potential for townhomes and some multifamily residential.

Raydient Places is still trying to nail down a home builder and what kind of plan should be put in place, the company has been negotiating with various companiessince December.

“We’ve been analyzing the idea of developing the lots for the builders. We’ve been analyzing the idea of having the builders build the lots themselves, and then looking at the idea of also selling the project in its current state to one of the builders,” Rose said.

The project will be completed in a total of 6 phases, though they may not go in numerical order necessarily according to Rose.

Arborwood started out as a 1,160-acre property that once belonged to Pope Resources, which is now owned by Rayonier following last year’s acquisition.

In 1989, Pope floated the idea of taking 730 acres of the property and converting it into a golf course. Shortly after another property owner, Bob Screen, said he would build what is now White Horse Golf Club.

“The whole community started flipping out because golf courses in general are seen to be a massive environmental impact,” Rose said.

Rather than go forward with the golf course, the company kept its development application open but decided to focus on housing.

“A couple things happened. One was the Growth Management Act had passed in 1991, which really changed how land use was done in the state. We kept the application but we decided to drop the golf course and instead went for this clustered subdivision,” Rose said.

Under the GMA, cities and counties are required to accommodate growth and find and create places for population to go. Arborwood is an example.

“Kitsap is somewhat behind in North Kitsap. They’re realizing their population allocations and their growth may be changing,” Rose said.

In 2004 when the county began working and defining what Kingston’s Urban Growth Area was going to look like, Raydient Places, which was then Olympic Property Group, notified Kitsap County that it wanted Arborwood to be in the UGA as that would make development of area easier. An unexpected development from that process was creation of Heritage Park. About 800 acres was sold to the county for the park, leaving 360 acres for subdivision development.

“So now we have this awesome amenity that we helped create with Kitsap County,” Rose said.

As the project gets going, there is a concern that building may not be done by the time weather gets bad next fall.

“We are worried about getting behind in the construction season because the soils out here are very moisture sensitive, and there is a fair amount of slope and topography on Phase 1, and there are wetlands down the hill of Phase 1 and most of the other phases so we really need to make sure that when construction starts this year it has a chance of getting buttoned up before the wet weather begins,” Rose said.

What will help the development save time and get construction going sooner rather than later is tree removal.

“In total we are going to remove

about 45 acres of trees in Phase 1, but we are not going to clear and grub the land because we are just not ready to do that. We want to get sorted out on the builder relationship, but more importantly we don’t have engineering plans approved yet either,” Rose said.