I have been addressing housing issues as a volunteer with Housing Solutions Network since its inception, and have learned a lot as a result. 

What a complex problem we have! Solutions will require we cultivate creative involvement, valuing community, and a compassionate commitment within ourselves that recognizes the importance of an age and income-diverse community.

Market forces may erode our identity as a friendly, generous, and warm community in the face of escalating costs associated with local housing. People who grew up here, young people, farmers, heck, teachers, police, even those who keep our PUD humming often cannot find housing they can afford to rent or buy! I am worried. Are you?

I am a firm believer in groups of people working together on common causes to accomplish hard things - most recently with the Community Build effort to craft the emergency transitional shelters for those with no housing. But what about the whole spectrum of needed housing: permanently affordable, work force, and more? How are we going to sustain our local businesses, the restaurants we love, our local hospital, etc., when the workers who keep them operating have to commute from Clallam or Kitsap counties to find affordable housing, especially with the escalating price of gas?

Thursday, Aug. 18, we have an UNPRECEDENTED opportunity to meet with staff and elected officials from the city, county, PUD, and the port, to collaborate on what we might need in the way of local housing solutions. 

Under the Tent along San Juan Avenue at 22nd Street, from 5 to 7 p.m. Aug. 18, join forces to ignite our collective creativity in crafting the solutions we want, and need, to improve housing access.  Bring your respect for those who work hard to manage our governing bodies, as well as your creative ideas about what you dream might be the changes we could embrace, solutions we can devise, to realize the housing access that will sustain this place many of us have called home for a long time, and still LOVE. Please show up with your voice. Get involved!  

Judith Alexander
PORT TOWNSEND