On an island where the average three-bedroom now sells for more than $1.6 million, a nonprofit just broke ground on 22 houses it plans to sell for a fraction of that. Housing Resources Bainbridge held the groundbreaking for Finch Green on Oct. 25, a neighborhood of permanently affordable single-family homes on land donated by Bethany Lutheran Church (via Bainbridge Island Review).
The homes will have two to four bedrooms, and HRB expects a three-bedroom to sell for about $340,000. All 22 are reserved for households earning 80% of area median income or less. The Review cited Northwest MLS figures putting the average three-bedroom sale at $1,634,679 on Bainbridge and $700,130 across Kitsap County.
Finch Green will be part of HRB's community land trust. HRB sells the house and leases the land to the owner, and the ground lease caps appreciation at 1.5% a year, compounded, with future sales limited to income-eligible buyers. The island has 75 income-restricted for-sale homes, and all of them are in HRB's trust. "Community land trusts reset the whole notion of homeownership," said Phedra Elliott, HRB's executive director.
The site plan is tight on purpose. The homes sit on about 1.25 acres of the roughly six acres the church is donating, reuse the church's existing parking lot instead of individual driveways, and keep mature trees in the buffers and across the site. Seven of the homes will meet ADA standards, and the other 15 will still have zero-step, wider entries and a ground-floor bathroom that can take a wheelchair. Architect Jonathan Davis of Davis Studio Architecture + Design said he pictured "a multi-generational connected community that sits lightly on the land."
The project has been years in the making. In 2022, the Bainbridge Island City Council voted 5-2 to let affordable housing on property owned or controlled by religious groups get extra density, with Bethany Lutheran's land off Sportsman Club Road as the pilot site, the Kitsap Sun reported. Bonus units have to stay affordable for at least 99 years, serve households under 80% of AMI and top out at 1,400 square feet. The Sun said the bonus is set to open up to any religious property starting in 2028.
This spring, the Review reported that the homes would run 800 to 1,400 square feet, that HRB filed a subdivision application with the city in September 2025 to create individual parcels, and that building permits would follow subdivision approval. Funding so far includes $3.3 million from the Washington State Housing Trust Fund and $1.6 million from the state Commerce Department's Connecting Housing to Infrastructure Program, with the rest coming from home sales, donations and HRB's capital campaign. No builder or completion date has been announced.
Why it matters for Contractors
Finch Green is a small-builder-sized job: 22 modest houses, 800 to 1,400 square feet, clustered on a tight footprint with shared parking and rain gardens instead of driveways. That's the kind of work a local framing, finish or site crew can actually compete for, and the island's density rule for religious properties means more projects like it could follow after 2028.
If you build in Kitsap County, watch for HRB to name its builder and for the subdivision and building permits to clear the city. And if you've never done cluster housing with accessibility built in, it's worth learning: zero-step entries, wider doors and accessible ground-floor baths are showing up in more affordable projects, and they're easier to get right in the framing stage than to fix later.