Bellingham adds 1,000 homes this year, but the city still sees housing shortage
While Bellingham still has a long way to go, a new study indicates the city’s housing situation is starting to improve.
City officials gave a housing assessment update at a Nov. 18 planning and community development committee meeting. One component of the presentation focused on residential vacancy rates, which sat at 2.16% in the third quarter.
According to the data, it’s the first time Bellingham’s vacancy rate has been above 2% since the beginning of 2015. Chris Behee, an analyst for the city’s Planning & Community Development Department, said during the presentation that Bellingham’s vacancy rate has remained fairly low according to records dating back to the 1990s.
Those records indicate Bellingham’s vacancy rate is usually in the 3.5% to 4% range. Generally speaking, a healthy vacancy rate in the U.S. is somewhere in the 5-7% range.
Bellingham’s current vacancy rate could continue to rise, based on the amount of new residential units becoming available through construction. According to the building permit data, Behee said Bellingham is on track to issue permits for more than 1,000 units this year. That’s a big increase compared to last year, which had permits issued for 701 units.
Behee also noted that next year or two should also be a busy time for issuing residential building permits. Based on pre-application meetings to date, he estimates that developers are currently looking at building an additional 950 units.
Of all the residential permits issued this year through October, 77% were for buildings with more than five units, while 14% were for single-family homes. The other 9% went toward other types of housing, like duplexes.
Now that they have data providing details about housing units throughout the city, they can now start looking at what changes can be made to improve the situation, said Bellingham Mayor Kelli Linville. The numbers indicate progress is being made, she said.
“We started in an enormous hole,” Linville said in a Monday, Nov. 25, interview, noting the lack of housing units built following the most recent recession. For example in 2012 Bellingham issued permits for only 65 housing units, well-below the population increase in the city.
An upcoming committee meeting on Monday, Dec. 9, will focus on what the city can do to address the housing shortage.
