Anybody familiar with their public comments would be forgiven the Bainbridge Island City Council supports affordable housing. If you’ve ever wondered why no actual affordable housing seems to materialize then perhaps a recitation of our recent attempts to build some might be illustrative.

Last year the council killed a plan to build a 15-room inn and three affordable homes on a parcel south of Pleasant Beach Village. Council members didn’t like the idea of more inn rooms, so a targeted moratorium was imposed to delay the project long enough for the code to be changed to prohibit it.

That project’s affordable housing component was dismissed with the cynical insinuation that it was nothing but a developer’s ploy to ensure approval, even though approval was never in doubt until the council intervened to remove it from the planning process (which largely exists to prevent precisely that sort of politicization.)

Chastened by that end-run around the planning process, we abandoned the inn project and began drafting fully permissible market-rate home construction on the site. That project requires zero special permissions. Galvanized by the Housing Action Plan, which noted that at least 127 housing units must be added every year to meet future growth needs as established by state law, we asked the city, “Could we also build eight affordable apartments on the site?” The market-rate homes will move forward with, or without, workforce housing. The affordable homes would be a gift to Bainbridge.

Wary of the council’s past capriciousness, we engaged directly with council members, city staff, local experts and neighbors to better understand what was needed for workforce housing desired on BI. The consensus that emerged was that BI needs both more housing and more types of housing. Especially needed are smaller, inexpensive rentals that might accommodate service workers, whose jobs makeup half of the 1,600 added to the island’s workforce since 2000.

We reasoned that a small studio apartment would have a single-wage earner. Assuming that worker makes around $25 an hour, anything greater than $1,500 a month for rent would be a burden. We began sketching building designs with that worker in mind.

The result was a multifamily building of four one-bedroom and four studio apartments subject to a 50-year rent cap set by the city to ensure affordability for decades, subsidized by the John W. Jacobi family. Rents would adjust for inflation, according to city-determined methodology.

We on the Jacobi development team are not experts on affordable housing calculations, which is why we gave the city latitude to set the rates. We hashed out an agreement with the city, allowing it to define the agreement in any way that it wanted.

We were shocked when it came to the council discussion of the agreement reached with the city that members said the rents would be $2,500 a month and that any thinking person could easily understand that is not affordable, or even “market,” rate for a small studio apartment on BI.

Sadly, the council’s deliberation on its own staff-drafted agreement proved to be just another litany of scorn, impugning our motives, misrepresenting the nature of the project, and berating us for terms its own staff drafted. Mayor Brenda Fantroy-Johnson questioned our sincerity, while “underwhelmed” Councilmember Joe Deets accused us of “wasting the council’s time.” Councilmember Kirsten Hytopolous complained that our prospect of eight new affordable units on BI “feels icky” and “needs to go away.” Unfortunately for people whose affordable homes will now never be built, Hytopolous got her wish.

Twice in less than a year, the council has bashed our good-faith attempts to build affordable housing. The first time they could argue it was a sad consequence of killing a larger project, but this time, no such excuse is available. Neither city staff or the council reached out to us to ask questions or discuss alterations, despite our willingness to conform the project entirely to their preferences.

So if you ever wonder why affordable housing remains elusive despite the council’s professed support, it’s worth considering whether developers are the only ones whose sincerity ought to be questioned.

Working together on this op-ed were: John W. Jacobi, majority owner; Joseph Raymond, general manager; Greg Gustafson, project manager; Kelly MacDonald, financial advisor