The major players in Quimper Peninsula politics all gathered around card tables for an evening with the hope that no one would lose their house.

It was the third public gathering hosted by the Housing Solutions Network in an attempt to work together on the housing crisis, and the first with this level of governmental support. The city council, the mayor, the port, the utilities commissioners, and the county commissioners were all gathered for Under the Tent on Thursday, Aug. 18.

Despite the abundance of top officials, however, movement on the matter still seems a monumental task.

The Intergovernmental Collaborative Group has had successes so far, which were shared with the public in attendance, but the simplicity of the community engagement workshop didn’t manage to push much past a rehashing of hopes and dreams.

After Mayor David Faber called the meeting to order, he made it clear why everyone was there that night.

“The point of this meeting, as I see it, is to connect with the various governmental bodies and the people in the community who care so much about housing policy to figure out what exactly we can do and how can we do this most effectively and quickly to start addressing just the dire situation we have locally around housing. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t recognize how bad it was,” he said.

County Commissioner Greg Brotherton then recalled some of the true successes that have been won at the county level.

“We really can affect the workforce housing … One of the ways that we at the county can do that is by setting the table with infrastructure. Our Port Hadlock sewer, which is in final design phase right now, is a good example of getting the infrastructure that allows that denser multi-family housing,” Brotherton said as he listed what would now be possible with the new sewer.

Still, the difficulties of the immediate crisis were clear, as they have been for years.

“Housing is our biggest problem and it’s going to be the hardest for us to address because there’s so many external forces working against us,” said PUD Commissioner Jeff Randall.

“We’re impacted at the PUD by housing,” Randall said. “Roughly one out of three of the candidates who make it through our application process ... is not able to find housing in Jefferson County and then has to turn us down.”

City Manager John Mauro turned everyone’s attention to the seven folding tables spread with paper and Post-It notes. The invitation was for community members to write down ideas that would fit on a Post-It note.

There were five categories: research, engage, remove barriers, set foundation/tactical wins, and outcomes. Facilitators from the various governmental groups were posted at each table to help guide the process and then to report what had been gathered.

As the reports from each table restated what had been written, it was clear from previous Under the Tent gatherings that not much new was in the air.

Wealth redistribution, taking over the golf course, ADUs, the Growth Management Act, and involving people experiencing homelessness in the discussion were some of the most frequent thoughts that had been raised at past events.

One of the new ideas, which was offered up by a few different tables, was to research the approaches that other areas have successfully used to create housing in order to understand what might work here.

The government representatives were then given a chance to respond.

“We do redistribution of wealth all the time … it’s just usually, we do it up,” Brotherton said to a round of laughs before mentioning that most of those decisions would have to take place at the state level.

County Commissioner Kate Dean said many of the solutions offered, specifically those revolving around the Growth Management Act, could erode the natural wonder of the land that brings so many to this place.

“I think it’s really important to talk about how constrained we are to have flexibility within growth management and how much that forces a really existential identity issue for us. We love the environment here, right? And every little revision we talk about making to code … to codes that are meant to sustain the environment, the tribes that I sit in meetings with every week will say, ‘That’s death by a thousand cuts.’”

“We will gently erode water quality, we will gently erode working lands, we will gently erode our shore lines, our salmon habitat,” she said.

“What we are hoping for right now is an almost impossible needle to thread, but I have faith that this community can do it,” Dean continued.

A bright light was flipped for an instant when Randall asked one of the most thought-provoking questions of the evening.

“Could we use, like, a professional housing person whose job is to advocate?” he asked to cheers from the crowd.

Whether such a position gets created is yet to be seen. No promises were made that night. What was most clear by the end of the event was that more needs to be done despite the difficulties. What that might look like — specifically more housing for poor and working people — has yet to come into focus.

The next Under the Tent event is planned for Thursday, Sept. 29.