Bellingham Eliminates Parking Mandates, Makes Room for Homes
A mural in Bellingham, Washington, showing its traditional development pattern, which features a variety of home types in the background. (Image source: iwona_kellie on Flickr.)
On January 13, 2025, the city council of Bellingham, Washington, eliminated parking mandates citywide. Championed by Mayor Kim Lund, this decision is a key step in reducing barriers to housing development and aligns with the priorities outlined in her executive order issued the previous month.
“We’ve reached a critical point for housing affordability in Bellingham,” Lund said in her executive order. “Over the years, housing costs have increased, and incomes haven’t kept pace. In the last five years, the median rent in Bellingham has increased by 37% and the median home price by 56%. Additionally, 24% of homeowners and 56% of renters are cost-burdened, meaning more than 30% of their income goes toward housing. This order is designed to increase the supply of housing, which can increase vacancy rates and, in turn, helps keep rents and home values from rising – or even reduces them.”
Map of Bellingham’s housing types. (Image courtesy of the city of Bellingham.)
Part of the motivation is compliance with state law — Washington just passed its own parking reform package —but for Lund, there’s no reason to wait for state-mandated deadlines. “Much of the intention behind the executive order is to accelerate these actions, because we do not want our community to wait longer than necessary for action, and so we are proactively jumpstarting this process,” she told the city council.
This puts Bellingham ahead of Seattle when it comes to becoming housing ready. A Housing-Ready City is interested in removing the restrictive policies that limit where and how people can live. It’s interested in uprooting the barriers to small-scale, incremental development. A housing-ready city makes it easy for people — homeowners, citizen developers or neighborhood builders — to create new housing options that fit within the existing fabric of the community. And it appears that Bellingham is doing what it can to become a Housing-Ready City.
“I think we have a pretty unified city council here in terms of being open to promoting density and promoting infill development,” local housing advocate Jamin Agosti told The Urbanist, a Seattle-based news and advocacy nonprofit. “We’re not going to get 30-story skyscrapers and we’re and we’re not having the kind of the same conversations that Seattle is having… It’s really, how do we promote investment in Bellingham, where we’re not currently getting it right? We’re fighting for homeowners and developers to come and build. And the question really is: Where can we get it, and can we get it in a way that kind of aligns with our community goals?”
The need for this kind of reform was clear. Home and rental prices had been climbing for years, but the shift to remote work during the pandemic intensified demand, straining an already limited housing supply. Bellingham’s rental vacancy rate plummeted to approximately 1.7% in 2020 — well below the healthy benchmark of 5-7% — and by fall 2021, it had dropped even further to just 1%. With housing options dwindling and affordability slipping out of reach, city leaders recognized that they had to act. Removing barriers like parking mandates was one of the few immediate steps they could take to ease pressure on the market.
“You only have so many levers to control affordability and production is really one of the strongest levers you have as city government,” Agosti added. “So I’m glad to see that the mayor is leaning into that, even if it’s not a silver bullet to the affordability crisis.”
Some of the housing Bellingham can now build because of eased restrictions. (Images courtesy of the city of Bellingham.)
Next up for the city is fertilizing the ground for “missing middle” housing, or options that bridge the gap between single-family homes and large apartment complexes. “Currently, 75 percent of land zoned as residential in Bellingham is developed with single-family housing,” Lund stated in her executive order. “Building more ‘middle’ housing types — ADUs, townhomes, duplexes and other small multi-family housing types — is an essential part of helping us achieve our community’s shared goals for more, denser, and affordable housing.”
If you’re an elected official, the time to act on housing reform is now. Don’t wait until housing shortages reach a crisis point, until families are priced out of their own neighborhoods, or until your community is left scrambling for solutions. Start the conversation today. Remove the barriers that make small-scale housing development difficult. Create policies that allow your neighbors — homeowners, local builders and small developers — to invest in their own communities. Strong, resilient cities don’t just happen; they’re built by leaders who are willing to take action before it’s too late.
If you need inspiration, look no further than Bellingham. If you need resources, Strong Towns just released a toolkit. Click here to download "The Housing-Ready City: A Toolkit for Local Code Reform" and take the quiz to find out if your city is housing ready.
This kind of parking and housing reform is part of the reason Bellingham was selected to compete in this year’s Strongest Town Contest. Click here to learn more about the competitors and cast your vote.