Bellingham's State of the City Said 2025 Was "A Year of Housing Action." Let's Look at the Whole Picture.
- Brian Gass
- Mar 3
- 5 min read
Mayor Kim Lund's 2026 State of the City address is a polished, nine-minute overview of Bellingham's past year and the road ahead. It's worth watching. It's also worth examining carefully — because when you look at what was emphasized, what was omitted, and what the city's own actions are doing to the housing market it says it wants to fix, the picture that emerges is more complicated than the address lets on.
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 for approximately 71 seconds out of a 9-and-a-half-minute speech. 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, downtown activations, public safety, and future-oriented 2026 priorities all receive comparable or greater emphasis than the city's stated signature issue.
To be fair, a State of the City address is a broad format, and infrastructure genuinely matters. But the time allocation in a scripted, produced video is a deliberate editorial choice. And that choice signals something about where housing actually sits in the city's hierarchy of priorities — regardless of what the housing section's language says.
WHAT'S MISSING?
NO MENTION OF JOBS, WORKFORCE HOUSING, or ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY
Perhaps the most remarkable omission in the entire address is one that becomes obvious only when you step back and consider what was never said.
Affordability remains a ratio. It is the ratio of housing costs to household income. You can add housing supply — and you should, but if wages aren't keeping pace with housing costs, you haven't solved the affordability problem. You've shifted it.
In 9 minutes and 13 seconds of talking about building "a Bellingham for everyone" and "a thriving community that works for everyone," the mayor's address contains no mention of jobs, workforce development, wage growth, economic opportunity, or the relationship between local incomes and local housing costs. Not a word about what industries
Bellingham is attracting or developing. Not a word about what residents should expect to earn, or how the city intends to support the income side of the affordability equation.
This is not a minor gap. For a working resident whose rent has outpaced their paycheck, the conversation about housing that doesn't include income is half a conversation — and it's the wrong half to leave out.The Missing Half of the Affordability Equation
The Unasked Question: 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 to her credit, it's a direct one. But it immediately raises a question the address never asks: why is supply constrained, and who is responsible?
The honest answer is that local government is a primary driver. The Growth Management Act, under which Bellingham operates, combined with Comprehensive Plans that everyone in the room knows contain housing projections more aspirational than achievable, and planning departments that administer zoning codes, manage permitting timelines, enforce density limits, and process design reviews — all of this is the regulatory machinery of supply constraint. And that machinery 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 position themselves as champions of affordability while presiding over the environment that makes housing expensive and slow to build. 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 dynamic clearly.
The Land Acquisition Paradox
The address celebrated what is genuinely an environmental accomplishment: 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 matters. Lake Whatcom matters.
But every acre pulled into permanent public ownership is an acre removed forever from the developable land supply — an acre that will never be rezoned, permitted, subdivided, or built on. And Whatcom County is making similar acquisitions on a larger scale. 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 the city simultaneously laments housing unaffordability and actively shrinks the pool of developable land, those two things are not unrelated. They are directly connected — and the address made no effort to acknowledge that tension.
The Density Math Nobody Is Talking About
When land prices are driven high enough by scarcity, the economics of housing development shift in ways that create a trap of their own. Low-density housing — single-family homes, duplexes, small fourplexes — stops penciling out financially because the land cost can't be spread across enough units to make the math work. The only financially viable product on an expensive city lot becomes a larger multifamily development: sixplexes, eightplexes, and above.
But here's the problem: the same regulatory environment that drove land prices up through scarcity is often the one 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, over time, made low-density housing economically impossible while making high-density housing politically and procedurally difficult. The predictable result is the shortage the mayor is lamenting.
The Signature Accomplishment
The headline housing win the mayor highlighted was the North Haven Tiny Home Village — a partnership with Homes Now that provides a path toward permanent housing for people experiencing homelessness. It is a real project serving a real and urgent need, and we're not downplaying it.
But it's worth being precise about what it is: a shelter program for people experiencing homelessness. It is not workforce housing. It does not address the affordability crisis for the teacher, the nurse, the tradesperson, or the young family trying to afford rent or a first home in Bellingham. It serves the most acute end of the housing crisis while leaving the affordability problem that affects the vast majority of Bellingham residents — working people at all income levels — essentially untouched.
That this was the headline housing accomplishment in a nine-minute address for a city with a documented and growing workforce housing crisis tells you something about the way the administration has defined its housing mandate — and who it sees as the primary constituency for housing action.
What We're Watching
Mayor Lund's address covers issues like Infrastructure investments, environmental management, the library renovation, and the recreation center — these exhibit genuine long-term thinking about community quality of life, and they matter.
A city that acquires land while lamenting land scarcity, that restricts density while bemoaning unaffordability, that presents a homeless shelter as its signature housing win, and that never mentions income or economic opportunity in a conversation about affordability — that city is not reckoning fully with its housing crisis.
Real Briefings will track the 2026 council sessions to follow through on every commitment made in this address. When the housing executive order produces specific, measurable zoning changes, we'll cover them. When development applications move through the process faster — or don't — we'll report on it. When the Growth Management Act housing numbers come into focus, we'll put them in the context that this address didn't provide.
The State of the City is a starting line. The real work — and the real accountability — happens at the meetings.
Real Housing Reform tracks the Bellingham municipal government, focusing on housing policy, land use, and civic transparency. Real Briefings are published after every relevant city meeting.
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