Contact the Bellingham Plan Team

Turning open space into surface parking on private land turns neighborhoods into parking lots. Clustering housing and arranging parking areas is key to preventing all our land from
becoming hardened surface. Large trees must be allowed space, and this can be accomplished only by limiting size of houses/footprint and clustering. Continuing the single family form just in smaller pieces-a driveway and parking, house maxed out for sites is going to create unlivable and unsustainable environments. Row housing, courtyard condoes and other forms need to be considered rather than the diagrams that show smaller cut up areas that will inevitably have smaller setbacks (no space or more parking in remaining spaces).

Owner occupancy also needs to be considered as speculative ownership always results in less desirable outcomes for neighborhoods as profit, not livability is the driving factor. A reasonable example are the 60’s era condoes on N Forest St. This provided secure housing but has not been repeated often. Clustered small housing efforts are also rare but should be pursued on larger lots. We should be raising height limits downtown and in Urban villages, and penalizing speculative locking up of properties (Macs, parking lots off Meridian, PH former Joe’s site, empty downtown sites etc) instead of destroying historic building and open space.

Hi. I was not able to attend but had a question about the Parking plan. I looked at the survey and didn't see something I was thinking about as an answer.

Is there any thought to keeping or even INCREASING parking requirements, but then eliminating street parking to make more room for bikes, bus lanes, larger sidewalks, etc. If we could move cars off the street and onto private residential/commercial property it would do a lot for the mobility of the city as a whole.

I'm confused about how eliminating parking spots on property is going to allow us to reduce parking spots on streets to make room for bike lanes.

Yes there should still be single family housing on larger lots. Providing a variety of housing means exactly that, and one type is traditional single family neighborhood. Some people prefer to have more space and less noise. It needs to continue to be an option Bellingham

Excited to learn more about your plans.

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