Constructing the San Juans
Balancing growth with the environment
by Ellen Hiatt Watson

Tourism may well be the top industry of the San Juan Islands, but construction is a close second. On islands where wide-open spaces and beautiful views are highly prized, that fact worries many, and is driving a trend toward “low-impact” construction.
The construction industry tallied up to nearly $60 million in taxable receipts for 2003 in San Juan County. A study conducted for the state Department of Community, Trade, and Economic Development concluded that tourism had taxable retail sales of less than $8 million in 2003, but the impact of travel spending and “earnings” created a $151 million industry for the islands in the same year. Though fewer numbers of people are employed in construction, the wages are about twice what they are in retail, making construction a big industry on the islands, said Richard Civille, executive director of the San Juan County Economic Development Council.
According to the Friends of the San Juans, San Juan County’s housing count grew at a rate three times the state’s average, and, at 60 percent in the last decade, the fastest of any county in the state. These figures are even greater than the growth in population, which showed an approximate 40 percent increase in the same decade.
A great number of these newly constructed houses aren’t going to the local population. Many are summer and weekend homes for the part-time islander. Some of them are enormous.
“People here, including me, [are concerned] by the huge 5,000-square-foot house and up, particularly those that are used only on the occasional weekend,” explained Karin Agosta, chair of the county planning commission.
The concerns are myriad. There is the impact on environmental resources and aesthetics. There is the economic impact of builders using outside resources, both of material and of labor. And there is the detrimental effect on affordable housing, which has been described as a crisis situation.
Dan Lowe, owner of Lowe Construction in Friday Harbor, said construction work has been steady. Most of Lowe’s clients are mainland residents who are building second homes in the islands as a weekend getaway.
The common perception is that these new houses are “mansions” in size. But Stephen Amsbaugh, director of Community Development for San Juan County said the average size of newly permitted single-family residences is between 2,000 and 2,400 square feet.
According to Amsbaugh, the average residential permit was valued between $160,000 and $180,000, over the past two years. In 2003, the county issued just 10 single-family permits valued over $500,000 and in 2004, five single-family permits were valued over $500,000.
Large or small, though, many owners of summer homes bring their own off-island contractors, said Civille. And some homeowners and builders may hire a sub-contractor who lives on the island, but has to go off-island for its crew. Some contractors say they end up doing a lot of what would be the lower-end of the pay-scale work—such as a journeyman plumber digging the ditch for a pipe—because there is a smaller labor pool in the San Juans.
Gary Miller of Miller and Company, Inc. said he finds the lack of labor requires him to do more than he otherwise would. In the last few years, though, Miller’s business has turned to strictly low-impact housing construction, sometimes requiring even more labor.
Low-impact often means minimizing the disturbance to the property, sometimes putting up fencing during construction, and backing heavy equipment into and out of property to tear up less ground.
To Miller, it also means making use of as many local resources and materials as are available, “with the least amount of embodied energy.”
“Everything manufactured has a certain amount of energy cost associated with it,” Miller said. “Maybe it didn’t take a lot to manufacture it, but if you had to ship it all the way across from the Eastern seaboard (it has a lot of embodied energy).”
The size of home is also a significant factor. A larger home demands more energy to heat and requires more materials to construct.
Last year, a conference was held among builders and island residents to discuss low-impact development. Storm water management, reduced infrastructure costs, and preservation of the ecology and environment were all on the table.
Despite the conference, Miller still doesn’t think enough is being done when it comes to building homes that are sensitive to the environment.
“People give lip service to it,” he said. Builders and homeowners want to get their home up as fast as they can. “There’s no commitment to it,” he said.
A home he is working on right now is an exception.
“I’m doing a project right now on a site that was heavily wooded. We milled the wood right on site. The entire garage is going to be built out of it, as well as the interior trim and the exterior of the home,” said Miller. A lot of it will be used green, but some of it will be dried at an island kiln, an under-utilized resource, said Miller.
It makes more sense, he said, than logging the site, selling the wood to be shipped off the island, and buying milled lumber from off-island to be shipped back on. He said it would have cost about $1.25 per board foot for most of the lumber to be bought. But the more laborious method of milling lumber on-site cost only 50 cents a board foot.
“We preserved so much of that site. It was really difficult to work—initially you have to back in and out all of the equipment—but it won’t have to be landscaped,” he said.
“It will really shine. It will set itself apart from other houses being built,” he added.
While all of this involves more effort, it doesn’t necessarily cost more money, he said, adding that last year he built a home at a lower price than most homes are being built. “You can achieve all of this,” he said.

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Karin and Bill Agosta wanted a house that fit into the landscape of their new community on San Juan Island.
Nearly two years after starting construction, they let the first builder go and hired Peter Kilpatrick of Ravenhill Construction on San Juan Island, counting on him to achieve a multitude of unusual design elements. In January, the American Institute of Architects gave the Honor Award for Outstanding Architecture for the project to Patkau Architects of Canada.
The Agostas’ home was completed in 2000, and the couple relocated from Manhattan. From their new island home, Bill Agosta continues with his non-fiction writing, and Karin has retired from book publishing. Their home and their lives reflect a continued personal interest in land use. And the San Juans is a hotbed of land-use issues, long discussed and as yet unresolved.
Many islanders, including the Agostas, find distasteful the million-dollar summer and retirement homes with equally large floor plans, fancy knot gardens and high privacy fences. But their home is not, in fact, part of that trend. It is 2,775 square feet, and the only thing fenced is the garden—to keep the hungry deer out, something any islander can appreciate.
Karin Agosta is now the chair of the San Juan County Planning Commission, and president of the board of the San Juan Preservation Trust. Bill Agosta is president of the board of San Juan Island Community Home Trust, a committee working toward affordable housing. “We came with the idea of working on preservation of undeveloped space,” said Karin Agosta.
Their own home is located away from all of the roads and can’t easily be seen. The property is 43 acres, much of it covered by forest. Ten acres of the land are dedicated to a perpetual conservation easement.
The building section is “battered,” walls and roofs sloped like the property. The walls in the southern and northern planes are canted at a 15-degree angle so that the house is shielded from the winds. The house is composed of exposed heavy-timber fir framing and conventional stud framing, clad in painted gypsum board, laid on a slab with in-floor hydronic heating. The exterior is clad in light-gauge galvanized sheet-steel, addressing the possibility of a wildfire in an area with limited firefighting services.
“There were a lot of challenging aspects” in the design, according to Kilpatrick, explaining it took a little over a year for his company to build the home. The firm also used low-impact construction methods.
“Our goal is to make homes look like they were almost dropped in,” said Kilpatrick.
The American Institute of Architects also noted the builder’s high quality of construction when awarding it the AIA Honor Award, a nod to the contractor that’s rarely given, according to Kilpatrick.
The Agostas were also pleased with Kilpatrick’s work. Said Karin Agosta, “It took us two tries to find a contractor who was deeply committed to the concept of the house and was in a position to put the time and effort into the details.”