The Vashon Affordable Housing Forum, hosted by Vashon HouseHold on Oct. 3, was a response to affordable housing becoming a significant issue.

House and rent prices have soared, the number of sales and rentals available has decreased significantly, and Vashon is quickly becoming a place where even those with modest resources can no longer afford to live on the island where they work.

Vashon has experienced similar inflation of housing prices in the past, but seldom at the magnitude we see right now.

Housing on Vashon has always featured a range of dwellings, from very modest small homes to very elaborate large homes; from single-family homes to rooming houses, hotels, and apartments; and from small temporary shelters to large permanent structures with many different living spaces.

There are seven phases to this history of housing on Vashon:

The sxǝbabš, the Swift Water People: Time Immemorial

The first phase of Vashon housing is when the sxǝbabš, the Swift Water People, inhabited the Island for millennia before they were removed from the island by the Washington Territorial Government in 1854. The sxǝbabš lived mainly around what is now named Quartermaster Harbor because it had fresh water, ample food supplies, trees for building homes, protection from invaders, and easy travel to other communities.

The pre-contact population of sxǝbabš is estimated at between 10-15,000, similar to the island’s population of 11,054 in the 2020 census.

The permanent villages consisted of communal longhouses that averaged 100 feet in length and about 20-40 feet wide. Several extended families lived in these immense buildings. Each family had a fire pit in the center of the building near their space. The walls were lined with platforms. Thick mats of cattails were used as mattresses. The longhouse at Manzanita was reported to be over 200 feet long and 50-60 feet wide.

Some villages included pit houses that were 40 to 45 feet square and dug six to eight feet into the ground for protection from storms and wind. Woven cedar mat houses were temporary and were easily transportable. They were used at gathering sites as temporary housing while resources were gathered and preserved and were also used as temporary housing at village sites when visitors or families visited.

American Settlers: 1870 to 1890 (500 residents)

The second phase of housing on Vashon was in the 1870s to the 1880s, when early American settlers first arrived and lived in temporary shelters or abandoned logging cabins until homes could be built. The Sherman family’s use of “Fort Necessity,” an abandoned logger’s hut, fits this pattern. Cabins were easily constructed from the readily available trees, and construction of balloon frame, clapboard homes was made possible using dimensional lumber available from island sawmills.

The log mills, fishing camps, and early brickworks often had rudimentary bunkhouses and many workers built their own cabins or homes.

Boom: 1890 to 1920 (2,800 residents)

The third phase of housing on Vashon from the 1890s to the 1920s was notable for settler family housing and for housing for the emerging wage workers frontier — workers, particularly single young men, working for wages in the expanding natural resource extraction industries of logging, fishing, farming, and brick making.

Homes ranged from large Victorian mansions such as “Sutter’s Castle” on Maury Island, and Dockton’s “Piano Row”, the dry dock’s managers’ homes that were the only ones with a parlor large enough to hold a piano, to more modest two or three-room bungalows.

During this phase, Vashon first saw large commercial multi-person housing with the construction of hotels, rooming houses, and resorts for visitors. Communal housing came to the island with dorms at Vashon College in 1892, the Baptist Missionary Children’s Home residence in Burton in 1895, and the Vashon YMCA in 1904.

Hotels and resorts (some of which were rumored to have been brothels at various times, but no concrete evidence exists) in Dockton (1893), Burton (1908), Magnolia (1906), and resorts at Lisabeula (1902), Spring Beach (1912), and Luana Beach (1914), are only some of the varieties of housing that emerged to serve the growing island.

As farms grew in size and profitability, families built large farm homes, with outbuildings, and sometimes built “picker cabins” to house seasonal workers.

Stagnation and Depression: 1920 to 1945 (3,000 residents)

With the end of the wage workers frontier, the conclusion of the Great War (WW I), and the end of the 1918 flu pandemic, housing on Vashon in the 1920s to the 1940s was primarily housing for families, for the declining number of wage workers, and for the growing number of seasonal pickers who came to harvest crops from mid-May into early October.

Some farmers and business owners built substantial homes, while others built more modest bungalows. The national agricultural depression of the 1920s caused prices to drop and shrank available markets, followed by the Great Depression of the 1930s. Island residents struggled through these dual depressions and the construction of new homes slowed.

What did increase during these decades was the use of seasonal pickers, because as farm families grew smaller, jobs were scarce. The move to grow berries and other seasonal crops that were still in demand created the need for more seasonal pickers.

Most farms had some form of picker cabins or bunk houses to shelter pickers while they were here. Most were rudimentary at best, and the living conditions were often harsh. The use of picker cabins continued into the 1960s when reforms began to address the issues of migrant workers, and as island farms began to disappear.

Sub-urbanization 1945 to 1980 (7,000 residents)

The Post-World War II phase of housing on Vashon, from the 1940s to the 1980s, was largely the result of the arrival of a new population of commuters, many of whom were professionals, and the arrival of the Baby Boomer generation — both of which intensified the sub-urbanization of the Island.

The Boeing Bust and Gas Crisis of the 1970s provided an opening for counterculture and alternative-culture individuals and groups to find affordable housing as other islanders moved away to find new job opportunities.

These counterculture residents moving to the island — often characterized as hippies —came because of readily available, low-cost housing as many of the small farms were abandoned and rented when the island’s agricultural economy collapsed.

This drop in housing prices during the early to mid-1970s was reversed in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Interest rates rose rapidly, and along with interest rates, housing prices also rose. These both foreshadowed the emergence of a gentrification of the island that began in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

This period also saw the emergence of the first housing developments on the island with the construction of Oakwood Terrace housing for the Nike Base, and the development of Gold Beach, Patten’s Palisades, and Fir Ridge. This was also a time when intentional communities “found” Vashon.

The Wesleyan Community near Inspiration Point, artist communities, alternative lifestyle communities, and others seeking a rural community lifestyle found what they were looking for on Vashon.

Gentrification: 1990 to 2015 (10,000 residents)

The beginnings of gentrification on the island in the 1990s into the mid-2010s brought new issues surrounding affordable housing and intensified the already growing split between the housing “haves” and the housing “have-nots.”

The Quiet Ferry Revolution of the late 1980s and early 1990s increased capacity by 31% for autos and 66% for passengers, including the passenger-only ferry to downtown Seattle.

This opened Vashon to a new commuter population who sought a rural lifestyle yet close to urban amenities.

Significantly, a group of far-sighted islanders formed Vashon Household in 1990. This organization recognized the need for affordable housing on the island and sought to ensure housing alternatives were available to help maintain a broad cultural and economic diversity.

The first $1 million sale of a house on Vashon occurred in 1997, and the first $2 million sale was in 2006. These high prices validated the concerns of the founders of Vashon Household as rising housing prices began to shut out many from home ownership.

While the emergence of what some would term “McMansions” on the island affected home prices — and more importantly they impacted assessed values, thus raising real estate taxes, leading to increased “pricing out” of homes for middle- and lower-income individuals and families.

The significant issue was not only rising prices for homes but also the accompanying loss of lower-priced homes that those with modest means could afford.

And, of course, none of this addressed the needs of what would ultimately become the island’s unhoused, who were relatively few in the 1990s but grew significantly over the next two decades to become an important issue for the community to address in the late 2010s and the early 2020s.

The 2008 Great Recession provided a break in the inexorable rise of housing prices and created an opening for younger families with children and those of more modest means to move to Vashon. The median island house price, in 2008, at the beginning of the Great Recession, was $537,000, and by 2012 the median house price was $337,000.

This drop in value, by nearly one-third in four years, slowed the gentrification, but by 2023 the Vashon median house price had nearly doubled to $825,000. Gentrification accelerated following the recovery from the 2008 Great Recession.

Accelerating Gentrification 2015 to The Present (11,000 residents)

The current phase of housing on Vashon began during the mid-2010s, following the recovery from the housing collapse of the Great Recession, and expanded rapidly until the COVID pandemic limited housing sales.

The COVID pause in housing sales and new building construction only worked to create pressures which provided an accelerator to trends already in place once the pandemic began to recede.

Those able to work remotely found Vashon an exceptionally welcoming place to blend their urban lifestyle with a rural ambiance and a quirky arts-focused community.

This acceleration has continued to grow in intensity as new construction lagged behind demand, as housing prices rose to unthinkable levels for many islanders, and as some islanders were forced to move off-island as reasonably priced homes were no longer available.

New islanders, coming from the East Coast, from California, and from many large urban centers, often found these high prices were actually “reasonable” to them.

The housing “pricing out” that emerged in the 1990s and 2000s was accelerated as Vashon recovered from the Great Recession. By the late 2010s and early 2020s, as many parcels with large homes and adjacent small cabins, and homes with attached or semi-attached apartments, began to shift those residences to short-term rentals.

Airbnbs and Vrbos potentially brought in more income than traditional long term rentals and resulted in a “hollowing out” of affordable housing.

In October 2023, there were about one hundred forty Vrbos and Airbnbs listed on the island. These short-term rentals removed longer-term rentals from the housing market and reduced the number of available places to live for islanders seeking affordable housing.

Another source of pressure on available housing was the increase in island homes becoming “second homes” — weekend and summer homes — for an increasingly affluent group of new “part-time” islanders.

The September 1, 2023, listings of properties for sale on the island is a good indicator of the acceleration of the changes and of the “pricing out” that is taking place on the island.

Of the 33 houses listed for sale, two were listed for under $750,000, eight were listed for between $750,000 and $1 million, nine were listed for between $1 and $1.25 million, and 14 were listed for $1,25 million and up to over $10 million. This is the impact of accelerating gentrification.

What this historic housing story means for Vashon is difficult to clearly understand.

Housing on the island has always responded to broader regional changes but has always reflected specific island conditions. At each phase, there are echoes of previous phases that help shape the way the new phase develops and builds on what was before.

The communal housing of the Swift Water People gave way to a laissez-faire approach that lasted into the 1980s — and that, even now, is often what islander Terry Sullivan describes as “bush permits” — “If you are behind a bush, you don’t need a permit!”

As the island gentrifies, regulations increase, permit processes slow down, and environmental concerns become more important, a new phase is beginning to emerge that will define what happens with housing on Vashon.

This conceptual history provides a framework for understanding the phases island housing has experienced but does not address a number of issues underlying these phases.

Some issues potentially limit the number of houses on the island.

Building permits did not appear until after WW II, and planning and zoning did not appear on the island until the 1960s.

The Open Space Initiative (1979) preserved farmland; The Carr Report (1983) identified water supply as a limiting factor; The Shoreline Management Act (1972), the Growth Management Act (1990), and the King County Critical Areas Ordinance (2005) all encouraged limits to the growth of housing on the island.

Other issues involve ways to increase affordable housing on the island but require policy decisions to make them available. If the island is to increase the availability of affordable housing, then home shares, easing permitting, encouraging accessory dwelling units (ADU), co-housing, increasing housing density, and incentives and tax advantages for multiple-unit housing, are all issues that need to be examined and considered.

There has always been a consistent pattern of diverse housing available on the island. What we see in the late 2010s and the early 2020s is the narrowing of this traditional pattern of diverse housing, which reflects the increasing gentrification of the island, the “locking out” of affordable housing for many who work on the island, and the need for us all to become more aware of the impacts our individual decisions make on the quality of life and the quality of community we have on Vashon.

Since the 1990s, islanders have chronically under-invested in affordable housing and allowed investment properties and short-term rentals to proliferate unchecked.

As we consider new planning guidelines and become aware of the emerging affordable housing crisis on the island, we must ask ourselves: what kind of island do we want to be?

Bruce Haulman is an island historian. Terry Donnelly is an island photographer.