As reported on today’s business page, Bainbridge’s building boom and ever-inflating real estate market both seem to have taken at least a temporary holiday. Building permits dropped for the second straight year in 2002. Home prices appreciated, but at a much more modest rate than was true during much of the last decade.

We also note with some interest the state’s official population estimates for the island. The Office of Financial Management says that as of April 1 of last year, there were 20,920 of us, up barely 600 from the 20,308 that the Census Bureau counted in 2000.

What we are plainly seeing is another manifestation of a truth we sometimes fail to acknowledge: No island is an island, including this one. The dot-com frenzy that stoked much of the area’s economic boom has collapsed, and while Bainbridge may be cushioned, it isn’t completely immune. Fewer jobs in the greater Seattle area means fewer folks will be moving in – indeed, a few may have to look elsewhere to find financially greener pastures.

Like most phenomena, our present growth ebb is hardly new. Several efforts to establish an all-island city fizzled in the 1970s and ‘80s when a recession slowed growth, which in turn abated the sense of crisis fueling the home-rule efforts.

If developers created growth, as is sometimes supposed hereabouts, how do we account for the number of permitted but unbuilt homes in various projects around the island? The reality seems to be that if people are coming, they will build it, not the other way around.

The lesson we see is that growth is not a neat policy issue, but is the result of collective individual choices, driven largely by economics. Our present ebb, which many on the island no doubt greet with some relief, is not the result of any city

anti-growth policy, any more than the upturn that will inevitably follow will be the result of any supposed pro-development policy.

The difficulty of directing market forces through the city code is also at work in efforts to revise the city’s affordable-housing ordinance. The well-intentioned concept was to require developers to build a certain number of “affordable” homes in each subdivision, but, in essence, not counting those homes in figuring the total number of houses allowed in the subdivision.

In theory, this plan would integrate market-rate and “affordable” homes, removing any sort of stigma attached to the latter. In practice, the cost to build the affordables wasn’t all that different from the other homes, and, inevitably, the prices became similar.

The net result was that the “affordable” homes went to folks with modest incomes but substantial down-payments – worthy people, but those with other housing options.

We applaud the city council’s willingness to re-examine a program that may work in theory, but not in practice, and for the tacit recognition that some matters are beyond government’s control.

There are indeed some things that City Hall can’t fight.