While South Whidbey residents continue to struggle to find a place to live on limited income, there’s hope in Langley.

Three different affordable housing projects in various stages of the process are in the works within city limits, where access to sewer is a driver for development. Island Roots Housing, Habitat for Humanity of Island County and Whidbey Island Living Legacy plan to create 27 new units of housing.

Island Roots Housing, a nonprofit organization fiscally sponsored by Goosefoot Community Fund, is the first to take advantage of Langley’s new multi-family infill code with its Generations Place project on the corner of Second Street and De Bruyn Avenue.

The site will include 14 rental apartments with two or three bedrooms, with nine of them being for households making up to 80% of area median income and five of them for households making up to 60%.

So far, the project has received a $82,526 grant from Puget Sound Energy, a $1.1 million grant of federal American Rescue Plan Act funds through Island County, $1.3 million in federal HOME funds through a tri-county consortium and $1.6 million in state funds through a Local Projects appropriation sponsored by Sen. Ron Muzzall and supported by Rep. Clyde Shavers and Rep. Dave Paul.

In the past month, Generations Place has received additional funding in the form of a $200,000 grant from the county’s House Bill 1406 Affordable Housing funds. It will also receive funds from the city of Langley’s Connecting Housing to Infrastructure Program grant, which will cover an upgraded water main line running adjacent to the property, an irrigation water line and utility hookup fees for the 14 apartments.

Overall, donors have contributed $2.7 million to the project.

“While it seems like things have been quiet for the past few months regarding the development of Generations Place, there is a lot that goes into the pre-construction phase of even a small project like this one,” Island Roots Housing Managing Director Rose Hughes said.

The project’s team has been working to revise the site plan, following instructions from the city about an alternative approach to streetscape design. New federal requirements mandating that project materials and equipment be created in America have complicated the process.

“The good news is that we already prioritized products made as close to the project site as possible, to fulfill Washington State’s Evergreen Sustainable Development Standards,” Hughes said. “However, Canadian products made just over the border may now have to be substituted with products made several thousand miles away.”

As Hughes pointed out, these are standards that aren’t required of private sector projects, speaking to the truism that permanently affordable housing may be affordable for the residents but not for those who build it.

After those two processes are complete, the project’s budget will be finalized and a date will be set for groundbreaking, possibly sometime in 2025.

Kitty-corner to the Generations Place site, Habitat for Humanity of Island County is seeking to build seven townhomes on Third Street. The project is the organization’s first within Langley city limits.

The three-bedroom, one-and-a-half bathroom homes will measure around 1,500 square feet each. Individual parking spaces will be located off-street. Homeowners have not yet been selected.

Chief Development Officer Liz Chaffin acknowledged that it has been a long process since the Heron Park Townhomes were first announced. Habitat is currently managing multiple other projects, and Langley’s was further back in the pipeline while other things were completed first.

There have been several pieces to coordinate, from grant applications to technical aspects to working with city architects and engineers on the project.

In this case, because Habitat is using federal funding, there is an environmental review process required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that can be complicated and tedious, Langley Director of Community Planning Meredith Penny said.

The next step in the process will be for the organization to apply for a Type I administrative site plan and State Environmental Policy Act review.

The project is funded with $15,000 from the Langley Main Street Association, $125,000 from Community Frameworks’ Self-Help Homeownership Opportunity Program (SHOP) grant and $875,000 from the state Department of Commerce’s Housing Trust Fund.

“We are looking forward to starting this project as soon as possible,” Chaffin said. “Currently we are working through the final steps of a long and sometimes complicated process that comes along with building affordable housing. We will announce the groundbreaking as soon as we have a date.”

The recently formed nonprofit Whidbey Island Living Legacy, or WILL, has received a land donation to build permanently affordable tiny houses. The project is spearheaded by Coyla Shepard, who led a successful effort to build nine 264-square-foot rental homes as the founder of THINC, Tiny Houses in the Name of Christ.

This time, Shepard has set her sights on making tiny home ownership a reality. Though the project is in its early stages, she’s hopeful about the road ahead.

Part-time Langley resident and now a WILL board member, Richard Queen donated a 0.4-acre parcel of land on Camano Avenue that’s next-door to THINC for affordable housing. The plan is to put six 400-square-foot homes on the property, potentially with space for 133-square-foot lofts, Shepard said, costing over $100,000 each.

But with its towering trees, building on the site will be a challenge. Currently, the city’s tree code does not allow for the removal of trees that are more than a foot in diameter when measured four and a half feet from the ground or at chest height. Shepard said WILL is currently working with an arborist; the project will build around the trees wherever possible. The organization had a pre-application meeting with city staff this week.

Utility hookup fees are another area that is costly. The city’s fee schedule does not offer discounts for single family development based on unit size; discounted connection fees are only available for ADU development, duplex, triplex and apartments and developments submitting under the cottage housing code.

Next week, Island County commissioners will discuss a request from the Port of South Whidbey to expand a workforce housing feasibility study to include South Whidbey School District property.

(Photo by Kira Erickson/South Whidbey Record) Towering trees on the site where Whidbey Island Living Legacy hopes to build permanently affordable tiny homes might prove to be a challenge.