Kitsap 2108: Welcome to the future!

Do you ever wonder what Kitsap might look like in 100 years? In preparation for the upcoming Great Peninsula Future Festival taking place in Port Gamble Aug. 2-3, Kingston Community News writer Deirdre Duffy took a trip forward in time – to August 2, 2108 – to explore this question.

For her adventure, Ms. Duffy traveled Kitsap County via high-speed buses, electric trams and small private ferries, and met with Dr. Heydar Kitsilano, executive director of The One Room Schoolhouse, Kitsap’s own sustainability think tank, to learn more about how Kitsap residents changed their communities for the better.

DD: While traveling today I saw a lot of people working in local industries and businesses. Kingston’s waterfront brewery was spectacular, and I especially enjoyed touring the sheep farmers cooperative on Big Valley Road. I was amazed to see how they’d incorporated more than a dozen economic activities into their operation, from high-quality wool production to clothing manufacturing to meat production and fertilizers.

I was also really impressed with the electric bikes and cars they’re manufacturing in Port Orchard. Who’d have thought you could ship a car in a box! And almost every neighborhood I visited had small shops, cafes and restaurants within a few blocks of people’s homes. The economy appears to be booming. What happened?

HK: Well, as gas prices and congestion continued to increase, people in Kitsap reached a point where the old ways of doing business – through long-haul trucking, commuting, importing goods, and being consumers of last resort – was no longer economically feasible. And the global economic model, where raw materials were taken from one place and sent somewhere else for value-added enhancements, was also collapsing.

Out of all this, community leaders saw an opportunity to bring in new industry – electric transportation became a strong focus – and to build on the area’s shipbuilding history: we now make the fastest no-wake foot ferries in the world.

The community also committed to revitalizing our agriculture sector, and to finding ways to support the value-added activities that make agriculture profitable. And we used tax incentives and loans to create a climate friendly to small local businesses. All those things had an impact.

DD: In the neighborhoods I visited, there were kitchen gardens everywhere – no lawns – and the streets were full of people, walking or riding on slow-moving trams, bicycles and jitneys. What really surprised me was how the streets were both busy AND quiet. I had lunch at a sidewalk café in downtown Poulsbo and it was very enjoyable to watch the traffic moving past. In 2008 it would have been a constant stream of cars, and between the noise and the exhaust, I can’t imagine wanting to dine there.

HK: It’s funny you should mention the silence, but I suppose compared to 2008, when the streets were used primarily by cars, they probably do seem a lot quieter. You probably couldn’t hear the birds or the wind in Silverdale’s commercial district in 2008.

We certainly don’t have to deal with the chronic noise people accepted routinely 100 years ago. Some of that was deliberate: we developed stricter noise ordinances in order to help people learn to be better neighbors. But some of it was just a matter of refining how to get around more sensibly. Electric bicycles, scooters and jitneys are used for short trips – that means most trips, by the way, as people don’t need to travel as far – and the bigger, noisier vehicles travel only on the higher speed roadways.

Looking back, it’s hard for us to believe people used to drive cars everywhere. Today it seems obvious to locate work and services close to where people live, and find cheaper, less destructive ways to move around.

DD: I understand the population is higher today than in 2008, but it doesn’t feel congested. How did you manage the increase? I don’t see any high-rises.

HK: In 2008, we were facing a major design challenge: we had to find ways to allow for an increase in population, avoid expanding beyond urban-growth boundaries, and deal with the aging of the baby boomers. At that time, there was still a strong emphasis on the single-family detached home, even though it was incredibly wasteful and didn’t work for many people, including young adults just starting out, older people who didn’t want the maintenance headaches, working couples, artists/artisans, disabled people.

We approached this challenge by creating more attached and mixed-use housing – those row houses you see everywhere – and we also created policies that allowed for experimentation. One experiment involved letting LEED- and Earth Advantage-certified developers purchase foreclosed suburban houses for a small amount of money if they’d remake them into green mixed-use and multi-family housing. Co-housing became more popular. Every community now has housing options that allow people to age within their home communities, rather than move away when they can no longer manage a house.

DD: It seems you’d have to add a lot of new public sector infrastructure to make that possible. What about medical care?

HK: Medical care is a great example of how we had to shift our thinking. In 2008, the U.S. was focused primarily on illness care – not health care – and it was very expensive. Today, the emphasis is on wellness. Each community has a publicly funded clinic that provides routine care as well as nutrition, exercise, and stress management programs, and alternative health care providers share space with traditional providers.

If you get sick, we don’t just treat symptoms: we look at your habits, environment and attitude. And it’s important to note that the community emphasis on walking, cycling, gardening, and living in a smaller, more manageable spaces reflects a focus on quality of life rather than standard of living.

Today, our rates of violent crime, obesity, and chronic illness – especially depression and Type 2 diabetes – are much lower. But of course, people still get sick or hurt and need more intensive care, and Harrison is still a great resource.

DD: Some of what I remember as subdivisions are farms again. How did that happen?

HK: This was another of our experiments. In 2008, the average tomato traveled nearly 1,200 miles to get to the grocery store, while many local farms were going out of business. And agribusiness was having a terrible effect on public health and the environment – salmonella, E. coli – so as people began abandoning their suburban houses (in response to the mortgage and credit crisis), we offered homesteads to those who were willing to become suburban farmers. They could live rent-free in exchange for adopting organic agricultural practices, and if they stuck it out for seven years, the property was theirs. This Agro-Jubilee, as we called it, was hugely successful in restoring sustainable local agriculture.

DD: It sounds like once people learned the new rules of the game, “grow local, live closer to where you work, downsize your life” they adapted pretty quickly.

HK: I wouldn’t say that: it took time for people to adjust, and some were more ready to change than others. Gas prices – which drove a lot of the change at first – fluctuated up and down for about 10 years, but the era of $2 a gallon gas was gone. It really was the end of suburban, commuter life. Once people “got” that, they changed.

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