Mayor Lund's "Year of Housing Action", gave Bellingham ONE TINY HOME VILLAGE, and a $133million Dollar a Year Shortfall in Funding. The State of the City Didn't Mention That.

Real Briefings Civic Commentary | Real Housing Reform Initiative | realhousingreform.org

Mayor Kim Lund's 2026 State of the City address is a polished nine-minute video covering Bellingham's past year and the road ahead. It's worth watching. It's also worth reading against the city's own documents — because when you do, the gap between the vision language on screen and the numbers buried in the city's housing plan is no rounding error. It is $133 million dollars a year.

The Time Tells a Story

The mayor calls 2025 "a year of housing action." Housing does appear in the address — but the dedicated housing segment runs approximately seventy-one seconds out of a nine-and-a-half-minute speech, about thirteen percent of the total. The budget and infrastructure section — covering the $10 million shortfall, Post Point Wastewater Treatment Plant upgrades, and water system improvements — runs nearly 2.5 minutes, more than double the housing airtime. Recreation and downtown activations combined receive comparable time. The new Little Squalicum Pier gets nearly as much individual attention as the entire housing crisis.

A scripted, produced State of the City video is an editorial document. Every second is a deliberate choice. And the choice to allocate seventy-one seconds to housing — in a year the city calls a housing year — says something the words alone don't.

North Haven Tiny Home Village

What makes that seventy-one seconds even thinner is what's inside it. The only concrete, completed accomplishment the mayor could point to was the North Haven Tiny Home Village — about sixteen seconds worth. Everything else was process language: "we've been working on solutions," "modernizing our rules," "getting to yes faster." No units built. No funding committed. No timelines. Sixteen seconds of deliverable, fifty-five seconds of aspiration.

The Sixteen-Second Accomplishment

North Haven Tiny Home Village is a real project and a genuine partnership accomplishment. People experiencing chronic homelessness deserve safe, stable shelter and a path toward permanent housing, and the city and Homes Now deserve credit for delivering it.

But North Haven is a shelter program for people experiencing homelessness. It is not workforce housing. It does not help the teacher, the nurse, the tradesperson, or the young family trying to afford rent or a first home in Bellingham. It addresses the most acute end of the housing crisis while leaving the affordability problem affecting the vast majority of Bellingham residents — working people across all income levels — essentially untouched.

That was the headline housing accomplishment in a year of housing action, in a city with a documented and growing workforce housing affordability crisis affecting tens of thousands of residents.

Who Created the Shortage?

The most striking line in the housing segment is the mayor's acknowledgment that "the lack of housing supply holds us back from being a thriving community." It's a true statement, and a direct one. But it immediately raises a question the address never asks: why is supply constrained, and who is responsible?

City owns 50% of the Yew St Annex area...right up against the city limits!

The honest answer, in large part, is local government itself. The Growth Management Act, under which Bellingham operates, establishes the planning framework. Comprehensive Plans — required under state law but authored by cities — contain housing projections that everyone in the room knows are more aspirational than achievable. The planning department administers the zoning code, manages permitting timelines, enforces density limits, and adds months and cost to every project that tries to move forward.

This is the regulatory machinery of supply constraint. It is operated by the same city government delivering the State of the City address. Politicians in virtually every city with a housing crisis do this — they stand up and lament the shortage while presiding over the environment that created it. It doesn't require bad intentions. But when the mayor's own administration is simultaneously the cause and the proposed cure, residents deserve to understand that clearly.

The Land Acquisition Paradox

The mayor highlighted a genuine environmental win: Bellingham nearly doubled its city-owned land in the Lake Whatcom watershed, acquiring over a thousand acres of forest to protect the city's drinking water source. That protection matters. Lake Whatcom matters.

But every acre the city or county pulls into permanent public ownership is an acre removed forever from the developable land supply — an acre that can never be rezoned, permitted, subdivided, or built on. Whatcom County is doing the same thing at a larger scale with its own conservation acquisitions. The cumulative effect of decades of land conservation, however well-intentioned, is a dramatically constrained land supply that drives up the price of everything that remains.

When land prices are driven high enough by scarcity, a further trap emerges. Low-density housing — single family homes, duplexes, small fourplexes — stops making financial sense because the land cost can't be spread across enough units to justify it. The only financially viable product on an expensive city lot becomes larger multifamily development: sixplexes, eightplexes, and above.

But here's the problem: the same regulatory environment that drove land prices up through scarcity is frequently the same environment that blocks the density now required to make housing financially viable. Zoning caps, height limits, design review processes, neighborhood opposition, and permitting timelines all add cost and delay on top of an already expensive land basis. The city has made low-density housing economically impossible and high-density housing politically and procedurally difficult — and then laments the resulting shortage.

The $133 Million Confession

Here is the number that should have appeared in the State of the City address. It comes not from critics or outside analysts, but from the city's own documents.

According to Bellingham's own housing appendix — a public document — and corroborated by Whatcom County memos and regional press coverage, the city's housing plan admits that current local, state, and federal resources for affordable housing in Bellingham total approximately $14 to $15 million per year. To "fully satisfy community needs" for affordable housing, the city estimates it would need an additional $133 million per year — every year — from 2025 to 2045. That is roughly ten times the current funding.

It would produce approximately 220 additional affordable units annually.

By way of comparison, $133 million per year is roughly equivalent to the entire payroll and benefits budget of the City of Bellingham.

That funding does not exist. It is not identified. It is not in any budget. And it was not mentioned in the State of the City address — the same address that promises "building a Bellingham for everyone."

The city "meets" its Growth Management Act land capacity test on paper. Simultaneously, its own documents admit that making its affordability goals real would require conjuring an amount of new public money every single year roughly equal to what the city currently spends on every employee it has. That is not a housing plan. It is an admission — buried in an appendix — that the current policy framework makes the state's housing goals mathematically impossible without either massive new taxes or a fundamental rethinking of the rules that drive housing costs in the first place.

Technically compliant. Functionally failing. And the State of the City said "building a Bellingham for everyone" without a word about any of it.

The Missing Half of the Equation

Perhaps the most remarkable omission in the entire address is one that becomes visible only when you step back and consider what was never said.

Affordability is a ratio. It is what housing costs relative to what people earn. More supply matters — and the city should absolutely be producing more of it — but if wages aren't keeping pace with housing costs, you have not solved the affordability problem. You have shifted it.

In nine minutes and thirteen seconds of talking about building "a thriving community that works for everyone," the mayor's address contains zero mention of jobs. Zero mention of workforce development. Zero mention of wage growth. Zero mention of economic development strategy or what industries Bellingham is working to attract and grow. Not a word about what residents should expect to be able to earn, or what the city intends to do to support the income side of the affordability equation.

For a working resident whose rent has outpaced their paycheck for years, the conversation about housing that doesn't include income is half a conversation — and the wrong half to leave out. A community where people can afford to live is not just one with more housing units. It is one where residents can actually earn enough to afford those units. The State of the City had nothing to say about that.

What We're Watching

Mayor Lund's address covers real ground. Infrastructure investments, environmental stewardship, the library renovation, the waterfront cleanup — these reflect genuine long-term civic commitment. The city team does real work every day, and that deserves acknowledgment.

But on housing — the issue the address itself elevates as central — the full picture is damning. Seventy-one seconds of airtime. Sixteen seconds of actual deliverable. A regulatory apparatus that the city administers that constrains the supply it says it wants to grow. Land acquisitions that shrink the developable pool while affordability worsens. A density trap built over decades of policy choices. A $133 million annual funding gap, the city's own documents acknowledge, but the State of the City doesn't mention. And not a word about income, wages, or economic opportunity anywhere in the address.

"Building a Bellingham for everyone" is a vision worth having. The city's own math says it costs $133 million more per year than current resources cover. The question nobody asked at the State of the City — and the question Real Housing Reform will keep asking at every meeting — is: what, specifically, is the plan?

We'll see you at the meetings.

Real Housing Reform tracks the Bellingham municipal government with a focus on housing policy, land use, and civic transparency. Real Briefings are published after every relevant city meeting. Subscribe at realhousingreform.org.

Source note: The $133 million figure is drawn from Bellingham's own housing element appendix (publicly available via the Washington State Department of Commerce), corroborated by Whatcom County planning documents and Salish Current coverage. Links available on request.