WATERFRONT PROPERTIES ARE STILL GOVERNED BY RENT GRADIENTS.

A Strong Towns post hails the end of parking mandates in Bellingham, Washington.

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.”

I have a strong prior belief that the best thing a government, whether local, state, or federal, can do to ensure "affordable" housing is to go away.  Bellingham, however, appears to be prime real estate, subject to the logic of the rent gradient.

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.”

"Work from home," particularly with cheaper internet connectivity and more dependable servers, disrupts the thirty-minute commute more effectively than the streetcar or George Jetson's flying car.  If the amenities of Bellingham life are appealing, telecommuters whose work colleagues might be in Seattle or San Francisco or Chicago will bid up the price of those former parking spaces.