How City Planning Fuels Bellingham’s Housing Crisis
- Brian Gass
- Oct 30
- 6 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
The Illusion of Scarcity
Ask any policymaker or planner in Bellingham why housing is so expensive, and you’ll hear the same answer: “We’ve run out of buildable land.” But that excuse doesn’t hold up once you read the City’s own reports. Bellingham hasn’t run out of land—it’s run out of honesty: honesty about its land-use practices, about its growing ownership of developable property, about its failure to follow the 20-year growth plan adopted in 2005, about how it controls what ultimately gets built, and, finally, about its disregard for what residents actually want.
The Data Doesn’t Lie In Bellingham's Housing Crisis
According to a 2024 Construction Coverage analysis, Bellingham now ranks as the most expensive city of its size in the United States, and fourth overall among all U.S. cities under 250,000 people. That kind of “award” doesn’t happen by chance. It’s the predictable result of two decades of planning choices that have systematically removed land from private housing use—all while claiming a crisis of “no land left.”
What Residents Actually Want
The city’s own 2023 Housing Preference Survey makes one thing clear: people want stability and ownership, not endless renting. Eighty-seven percent of residents said they prefer to own their home rather than rent. When asked what mattered most, 65 percent said a dedicated parking space—placing it in a four-way tie with safety, access to parks, and having a private yard or outdoor space.
But instead of listening, the City’s response was to eliminate minimum parking requirements for new housing while promoting more high-density rental development. Residents said they want ownership, space, and stability. The City responded with smaller units, fewer parking spaces, and more rentals.
The Growth Management Act: A Bait and Switch
Under Washington’s Growth Management Act (GMA), cities are required to “ensure sufficient capacity of land suitable for development” to meet their 20-year growth targets. The intent is simple—to prevent local governments from creating artificial scarcity through restrictive zoning or subjective opinions. But Bellingham’s planning process has done exactly that.
In the City’s own technical reports—the 2004 Environmental Impact Statement and the 2025 Land Capacity Analysis—the phrase “net-buildable land” doesn’t mean land you can actually build on. It’s a bureaucratic math exercise: start with total acreage, then subtract layer after layer of “constraints”—wetlands, slopes, stormwater areas, critical areas, and even market factors. By the time they’re done, half the potential land supply is gone—on paper—before a single acre is counted as “available.”
The 2005 Plan That Never Happened
Back in 2005, the City’s Comprehensive Plan explicitly said that the Urban Growth Area (UGA) would absorb most new single-family homes over the next 20 years—and that all UGA areas would be annexed into the city by the end of that period. That never happened. In 2003, Bellingham identified 1,594 acres of buildable residential land—enough for roughly 9,500 new homes. About 600 acres of that were within the UGA, reserved for annexation and single-family development. Two decades later, despite annexations like King Mountain and Britton Road, the City claims “no land left.” Only 133 acres of residential land have been annexed since 2005, nearly all in King Mountain, while other UGAs remain unannexed and largely undeveloped.
"the Urban Growth Area (UGA) would absorb most new single-family homes over the next 20 years—and that all UGA areas would be annexed into the city by the end of that period"
Meanwhile, the City permitted only 2,400 single-family homes in twenty years—barely one-quarter of what it projected.
The City as a Land Hoarder
Here’s where it gets worse. Since 2000, the City of Bellingham has purchased more than 4,000 acres of land—much of it through its Greenways and Watershed programs. We are all for "clean water" and "open space," all we ask is transparency.
The Greenways levy is the most concerning. What started in the early 1990s as a voter-approved plan to preserve open space for public use has quietly evolved into an all-consuming land acquisition and spending program with no real limits, no guardrails, and no real transparency. The original vision was simple: protect open areas, create trails, and keep green buffers that everyone could enjoy. But over time, the program has morphed into something else entirely—an off-the-books funding source that City Hall now uses to bankroll projects that have nothing to do with open space.
Is it too much to ask the Greenway's Levy and Watershed Program to pay the property taxes on the land that is taken out of taxation?
Yes, it's a public benefit, no matter what the reason
No, it sounds reasonable.
I never thought about it.
I didn't know that the city was billing the Greenways Levy
Greenway's money has been used to buy a skate park, resurface a football field, and even renovate an indoor hockey rink—the exact opposite of preserving open land for broad public access. These may be nice amenities, but they aren’t Greenways. Instead of functioning as a conservation fund, the program has become an all-purpose checkbook for the City’s own priorities—including paying staff salaries. The City now bills the Greenways levy roughly $4.5 million a year for parks department costs, while still using that same fund to purchase even more property.
On top of the Greenways levy, there have been MILLIONS of dollars collected for Park Impact fees each year, which are designed to compensate for the added impact of the development on services. But what if the city already has a "Park levy..aka the Greenways", isn't that "double dipping?"
Greenways and Watershed as "freeloaders" when it comes to property taxes...
Every acre of land the City buys removes it from the tax rolls forever—meaning no property tax revenue, now or ever. A single 20-acre housing development could generate $600,000 to $1 million a year in property taxes. Roughly 36 percent of that money goes to schools, with most of the rest funding police, fire, and other essential services. When that land becomes City-owned “open space,” all of that potential community funding disappears.
...and the City of Bellingham as well
And if you ask why the City doesn’t at least pay property taxes on its Greenways or Watershed holdings, you’ll be told, “We’d just be taxing ourselves.” But that’s not true. These funds come from specific voter-approved taxes, not the general fund. The City is using money collected from Bellingham city residents to buy property in Whatcom County, often outside city limits, while returning none of that lost tax value to the system.
If the City can charge Greenways millions annually for staff time, it can certainly bill the fund for its own property taxes. Doing so would reduce the tax burden for every other homeowner and force the Greenways program to live within its means.
And maybe that’s the real story here. Maybe the City has simply run out of properties to buy—and rather than give the money back to the people who funded the levy, it’s just finding new ways to spend it, even when those projects have nothing to do with the levy’s purpose.
A skate park. A football field. An indoor hockey rink.
All nice things—but none of them are Greenways. If the City can’t follow its own voter-approved mandate, it shouldn’t keep using taxpayers’ money to invent new ones. Voters didn’t sign up for that. And they certainly don’t support it today—not when housing affordability has collapsed and land that could support schools, homes, and families has been permanently taken off the map.
A Crisis of Their Own Making
The City has declared housing affordability a “public health crisis,” but its own planning choices created the shortage it now laments. For decades, Bellingham has treated land as something to control for political outcomes rather than plan for future resident opportunity. That mindset doesn’t just block homes—it blocks the future.
This isn’t about development for development’s sake. It’s about giving future generations a fighting chance to make a life here—the same kind of opportunity and affordability that past planners and policymakers were given and benefited from. They inherited a city where homeownership was achievable. They now preside over one that’s become the most expensive of its size in the nation—largely because of their own policies. (BTW, Bellingham is the ONLY CITY NOT IN CALIFORNIA!)
Bellingham can’t keep shrinking its footprint, buying up developable land, and refusing to annex the very areas it claims are meant for growth—and still call that sustainable planning.
Until the City takes responsibility for restoring that balance, affordability will remain a crisis of its own making. Or they can just change the name to "RENTINGHAM" and own it.
Except they won't own the website, cause I own the domain now :)
Transparency only happens when the public pays attention.
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