‘Buildable Land’ illusion: Planning led to Bellingham’s housing crisis | Opinion

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 buildable 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 about its disregard for what residents want.

According to a 2024 analysis by construction industry analyst Construction Coverage, 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. Out of the top 10, Bellingham was the only city outside of California. That kind of “award” doesn’t happen by accident or overnight. It reflects two decades of planning decisions that have systematically removed land from the housing supply while claiming a shortage exists.

The city’s own 2023 Housing Preference Survey makes it clear what residents want. Eighty-seven percent of Bellingham residents said they prefer to own rather than rent, and 65 percent ranked having a dedicated parking space as one of their top housing priorities. In fact, speaking of parking, it tied for second place among the top 5 most important housing and neighborhood characteristics — alongside “Feels Safe” (No. 1), “close to parks or trails,” “private yard or outdoor space” and “quality of construction.”

Yet despite that feedback, the city responded by eliminating minimum parking requirements for new housing — an action that directly contradicts its own results. Their answer is a policy approach that disregards residents’ stated preferences in favor of abstract planning models that sound progressive but deliver less livability.

Residents overwhelmingly want ownership and stability, and housing costs that don’t require a subsidy to live here. Unfortunately local policy keeps steering Bellingham toward a future dominated by rentals, density and scarcity — where even the basics, like parking, are treated as luxuries.

Under Washington’s Growth Management Act (GMA) cities are required to “ensure sufficient capacity of land suitable for development” to meet 20-year growth targets. The intent is simple: to prevent cities from manufacturing scarcity through restrictive land use, excessive deductions or subjective opinions. Yet Bellingham’s planning process has done exactly that.

In its own technical reports — the 2004 Environmental Impact Statement and the 2025 Land Capacity Analysis — the term “buildable land” doesn’t always mean land you can actually build on. It’s a bureaucratic exercise that begins with total acreage and then subtracts layer after layer of “constraints”: wetlands, slopes, rights-of-way, stormwater areas, “critical areas,” and even market factors — a planner’s guess that certain owners might not sell or build. These deductions have consistently exceeded the state’s own minimums, so by the time the math is done, half of the city’s potential housing sites have vanished on paper before a single acre is counted as “available.”

In 2003, the city identified 1,594 acres of “net-buildable” residential land after all the deductions — enough for 9,500-plus new homes under existing zoning. Around 38 percent of that land, about 600 acres, was within the 15 identified Urban Growth Areas (UGA) — the very land meant to absorb future single-family housing. Two decades later, despite annexations like King Mountain and Britton Road (which only added 133 acres of residential property since then), the city now claims for the next 20 years “there is no need to annex those previously identified UGAs.”

Here are the issues that we need to bring up:

Not only are planners removing a majority of the past UGAs (after only 70 of the identified 600 acres in them have been utilized), but they are also reducing the size of the city by 1,200 acres. The city owns more than 50% (500 acres) of two of the remaining UGAs with the “easiest areas for development.” Yet this is not disclosed in the 2025 Comprehensive Plan being presented to the public and Whatcom County.

Since 2005 the city has permitted only about 2,400 single-family detached homes — barely one-quarter of what its own projections anticipated, which didn’t even include the 133 acres from King Mountain and Britton. This shortfall can’t be blamed on geography or demand. It’s the result of policy.

Also, during this time the city has bought up more than 450 acres of developable land zoned residential use inside the city after the 2005 report. Finally, we aren’t supposed to ask “what happened to the rest of the UGA areas like North Yew, Geneva, Tweed Twenty, Hillsdale, Samish, and so on over 20 years — why they remain unannexed and largely listed as “available” even today.

The city itself has become a major landholder. Since 2000, Bellingham has purchased more than 4,000 acres, much of it through its Greenways and Watershed programs — properties permanently removed from potential housing (yes I know it’s voter approved). Yet some of this land still appears in capacity totals, creating the illusion of supply while the city simultaneously consumes it.

The Growth Management Act calls for an honest accounting of land suitable for development. Bellingham’s current approach fails that test. For decades, it has treated land as something to control for political outcomes rather than to plan for current and future resident opportunity. That mindset doesn’t just limit where homes can be built, or who gets to stay here, it limits their future.

This isn’t about development for development’s sake. It’s about giving those 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 and rents were reasonable; they now preside over a city that’s become the most expensive of its size in the nation, largely because of their own policies.

Bellingham can’t keep shrinking its footprint, buying up developable land, ignoring what residents need, 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 officially change the city’s name to “Rentingham” and own it.

Brian Gass is a licensed real-estate agent and editor-in-chief of the Real Issues Podcast, a housing-policy media initiative based in Bellingham.