Planning Commission

City Planning Commission uh it's September 5th 2024 uh Heather oh so close Elizabeth can you call the role please yeah Barbara plasket here Russ whby not here Mike Estus here Scott Jones here Rose Lup not here and Jed blue here thank you okay um I don't believe we had any minutes um so uh tonight's agenda we have a work session on the Bellingham plan talking about growth strategies um so no no hearing we're not we're not deciding um formally on anything um but we would like to do a general public comment so if anyone at home or in the audience wants to give public comment to the commission now is your time any interest in public comment from the audience okay uh if you're at home on zoom and wish to give public comment please raise your hand your Zoom hand going once twice last call for Zoom hands okay uh we'll go ahead and close the public comment and uh turn over to Chris for presentation all right sorry about that good evening Commissioners and again um tonight is just another uh work session we're we're uh continuing to add detail to these conversations and progress forward as we as we move through the periodic update to the comp plan which we calling the Bellingham plan um tonight's agenda we'll be uh touching on a couple of things we've given you some higher level detail on before we'll revisit real quickly the growth projections countywide which we presented to you a couple of meetings ago and then we'll talk a little bit more specifically about the allocation of

growth to Bellingham which is still uh has not happened um it's still draft in nature or preliminary but we do have a little bit more uh detail on some of those numbers uh we'll talk about the land capacity methodology which uh we have not talked about yet we've we've mentioned it but we' now have a preliminary land capacity estimate so we'll talk about both the kind of changes to the meth methodology this time around uh compared to the last time we've done this and some new things we've Incorporated and then just uh do a quick review of kind of what the preliminary numbers are so we get a sense of that what our growth capacity is and then um finish up with uh a growth strategy discussion just kind of looking at um we've shown you kind of before three sort of prototype uh illustrative growth Alternatives that we could look at and we've kind of started to pull that a little in a little bit tighter kind of incorporating different elements and seeing uh based on what the preliminary capacity estimate is kind of how we might add from a menu of choices to get to what we feel like might be the the reasonable amount of growth that we could accommodate so that's kind of the agenda for tonight um there will be a couple of touch points where we'd like to get kind of initial just just uh Comfort level or feedback from from you folks to help us move forward um into the next few steps and then followup meetings we'll uh touch on similar topics um we'll be talking about Transportation

we'll be talking about um actually the the meeting that we have scheduled for the 19th one of the things we'd like to address is um introducing you to the new document format that we're looking at it's a going to be a fairly big departure from previous comprehensive plans from the previous two plans that we've had uh much more streamlined more consumable um more kind of graphically oriented and uh we're hoping we'll provide a little bit more accessible uh Vision um be able to kind of more readily see what the what the kind of guiding um uh growth policies and overall kind of community priorities are from that document so um we're excited to kind of get into those conversations with you too as we are again kind of just moving through this update so with that um we'll begin into this and um I'll pause at a few different points for discussion and then and then at the end of course just um leave time for whatever you'd like to respond to or have me respond to questions so so looking at countywide growth projections uh this is from the Leland report that was done um the county and all the cities um combine their resources each time we do these updates and we hire a consultant to refine the state's uh fairly uh um broad um high medium and low forecasts and we have them refine that into a narrower range that's a little bit more of a of a workable range for us to consider for planning for future growth and you can see that number in the middle there that um 292 714 29274 residents

countywide is the 245 projection that ofm has said is the medium which is their their what they feel is the future that's most likely to actually occur based on what we know now um Waton county has historically over the last 20 years tracked very closely to that Medium uh projection that ofm provides so we have a reasonable level of confidence that's a that's a pretty reasonable number to plan for um but then Bellingham would just be a a percentage of that total um because some of that spread out to the other communities the other cities and then of course to the the rural areas and one of the first things that we do when we look at that number is we take that number of of uh people that change over time which is um 56,18499 population growth figure into how many housing units um that we would need to to build in Bellingham and across the county to accommodate the the expected population growth and if you remember the last time we spoke about this I Illustrated kind of a a breakout that some of this is for um new housing some of it's to make up for uh housing for people who are currently unhoused in our community um some of it's to uh arrive at a more healthy vacancy rate so instead of the somewhere close to 2% community wide vacancy rate we experience today we would hope after 20 years if we build these many units we would have something closer to a 6% rate is what what um the state builds into those projections and then um and then there's also a percentage of that housing

that would be for people who are maybe currently in housing today but they're cost burdened so they're they're renting above their means and so again just providing that additional Supply in the income bands that um will better meet the needs of our community based on the incomes that um that that the people that live here today are are able to have so that's just kind of a overall again reminding you kind of what we talked about before so around 31,300 new housing units and then this is where we look at how many of those would um would Bellingham accommodate um compared to the other cities or to the rural areas and uh historically over the last um from 2013 to 2023 so the last 10 years uh Bellingham accommodated about 49% of all new housing built in watom County um and so if we were to just take that as a starting point and say 49% of this 31,300 it's about SE about 15,750 new housing units that that would be the the target for us to accommodate within our within that 20-year period that that's not to say that we have to agree that 49% because that's what we've accommodated in the past 20 years that that we need to do that going forward we could of course agree to accommodate more than that and and that could be there could be a variety of factors um growth management as as you know encourages growth in urban areas and tries to discourage growth or sprawl into resource lands like agricultural lands or forestry areas mineral resource lands um and to preserve those rural areas

um where it's more challenging to provide urban urban levels of service uh more expensive to provide those kinds of services and to concentrate growth in urban areas so there might be some good policy reasons why we decide to maybe push higher than that um I just put some example numbers up here to give you an idea of what that looks like um if Bellingham was to accommodate 55% of future County growth um and then you can kind of see what that looks like in a units per year uh uh production number um what we've been doing um in the city has been something reasonably close like I said we've been accommodating 49% of growth if we do that going forward that would be just over 700 units a year and then over the last 10 years you can see that that's just a little bit more than what we've been producing on average over the last 10 years so there there conceivably are ways that we could get there um with some fairly minor changes to our our land use map or to our regulations again just to give that some context this is um the chart I think you've probably seen this a few times before but um kind of our history of building permits that we've issued for housing units uh the orange bars are multi family style housing and the yellow bars are the single family style housing um you could see the big dip here for the years during the Great Recession and the years before that and the years since then and in the last 10 years which are circled here um we averaged about 750 permits each year

that we issued and then these are the again basically the same pattern on the chart but these are the permits that actually went through completion and went through a final inspection and got an occupancy permit so you can see that 750 issued during that period and 672 per year average um completed some of that differential is probably due to housing units that were um permits that were issued in the last year or two but maybe haven't been completed yet um and some of it would just be units that permits are issued before but they never got built for one reason or another financing Arrangements changed or people's just decisions about whether they were going to build or not changed um this number the 672 is about 90% of the 750 so that kind of gives you you know that that's a number that that flexes and changes year by year but that kind of gives you an idea of about that that most things that come in and get uh considered for permits where those get issued um about you know um it's a safe bet that the majority of those will be finally built and occupied in this case the 10year period it was about 90% okay so that gives you a little a little bit of context about how many houses we've been issuing permits for how many we've completed and kind of how that compares to what we might want to accommodate um you could see that that 49% number we're not too far off based on recent production numbers that's not a huge stretch as far as how many permits we've issued but we want to look

at the land capacity and say going forward is that realistic to expect that we would have enough zoned land in various categories to accommodate that many housing units and so that's why every time we update our plan we do another land Capacity Analysis it's one of the the critical steps to see um do we need to change either development regulations or change the amount of land in different zoning categories um or potentially add land to the city um to to accommodate some of that growth so again there just stating kind of the purpose of that analysis I'll step through a couple of slides here um not going to dwell on these for a long period of time but just kind of Step through the pieces uh that relate to the previous time we've done a Capacity Analysis which was for the buildable lands analysis a few years ago um again very similar to the land Capacity Analysis that we did for the 2016 plan just looking at a different time period um and again the buildable lands methodology followed a lot of the same steps but was really kind of looking at how did we perform in the previous five years and then looking forward how do we expect we'll continue to perform but all of those times that we've done that analysis we always subtract all of the uh what we call critical areas and so the big the big pieces that are in our CR critical areas deductions would be mapped Wetlands the associated buffers with those uh steep slopes flood planes and then set packs from shorelines and regulated

streams and based on our current land Supply and the buildable land that we're working with it equates to right around 52% of the total area of of that that land that we designate as being currently vacant or partially developed or having some kind of Redevelopment capacity so it's it's a significant piece can I ask a clarifying question when you you're you're iterating out some subtractions here are you starting from empty lots today or are you starting from I what are you starting from like or or should you consider like an under devel veloped area a lot that has half of its Zone capacity compared to what it's allowed today so both so we have um did I go there it'll come back there it comes back um so uh great question and so we include both so we do have um the uh we classify every single uh piece of land in the city public and private and for the privately owned pieces we look at things that are either completely vacant so they have no improvements on them they might be forested they might not but they don't they don't have any kind of development on them today we look at those partially developed pieces an example would be a single family detached home with a very large sidey yard where you could fit another full home next to that place next to that home and you'd still meet the density requirements of the zone that you're in um so you could carve off a lot basically um and that could also be true with commercial or industrial or institutional development where you've

got something happening building of some sort and next to it enough vacant land that's not used for storm water or other purposes that could also be used for another building so so we look at those two things and then we also look at what we call underdeveloped land or underutilized land and so that could be land that looks fully developed today but the zoning might allow something more intense and so again the example I usually point out to people would be a a single story building in one of our Urban Villages where you could build a six-story building um so that would be again an example of that um so those are kind of the three kind of uh types of what we call buildable land we also in this analysis for the forward-looking uh capacity totals we look at things that are currently in the permit system pipeline so things where people have come in and applied for permits and we apply the number of units that they're applying for the number of square feet of other kinds of non-residential construction they they might be applying for um because we have a little bit more assurance that that's what might actually happen there because they've come in and had a pre-application meeting have talked with maybe Architects and build you know uh the development community and figured out what's really possible there so um so we also include those and then we also include master plan um information from our institutional Partners in the community like the the university uh the other colleges

uh the airport um the places where we have uh institutional Master plans where there's a a forward-looking number where they say we're going to add half a million square feet of development in this amount of time um something like that we would add that that total to the to the Future development Capac capacity as well but for those vacant underdeveloped and underutilized or partially developed and underutilized pieces um that's where about 52% of that buildable area that's left is is consumed by environmental constraints of one sort or another that we would we would preserve through the development process you can see we also subtract lands for uh the kinds of things that maybe aren't delineated on the map yet but that we have plans that call for things like future public facilities so we look at our our park and wreck plan the Pro Plan and we look in the the capital Improvement plan for that and we know that there's 104 acres of developable land that's needed for um not just not not open space but things like sport courts parking lots buildings playgrounds things that are um built kind of items that can't be built in critical areas uh things that have to be on dry buildable land so we subtract what we know about those um those could also be water and sewer pump stations or other kinds of public facilities and that works out to be about 5% 5 and a half% of the buildable land that's uh out there and then we also subtract for quasi public uses and those would be things that

are allowed in many different zones um and that could be like churches or uh private utilities and those kinds of things so um we know that those are those are things that get allowed as conditional uses in a lot of different zones and and they do consume land um so we we have an allowance for that as well because we know those won't be occupied housing units and then we also know that as part of the development process you have to leave space for roads and you have to leave space for um storm water treatment storm water ponds and different kinds of storm water features and similar kinds of things and those those include deductions depending on the zoning of up to 24% of the buildable area and that's based on looking at development projects over um the last 10 years or so and saying what was the average for residential development um or for commercial development or institutional development and um come up with a we come up with a number based on the performance of of real development projects and say yeah the average was about this much of the buildable area and then the last deduction we make is a market factor and that's to account for things that are um they look they are completely buildable right now they look like they they could be built on tomorrow but for different reasons um different pieces of land just don't don't develop during a particular planning period and we know that there will be a percentage of properties that are held open because of um they they

somebody wants to preserve a view somebody just likes having uh a little bit of extra space around them if they're U living in a residential area and they have a larger a larger uh piece of property um or if they're commercial or industrially zoned there might just be particular challenges associated with um you you know the the different owner combinations or with uh physical orientation of a property something like that it just not might not be the right time for someone to develop and so um we we deduct between 20 and 35% of the developable capacity um based on kind of patterns that we've seen and um when we did the buildable lands analysis we did a variety of property owner surveys of all um property owners in uh watom County the everybody that had any vacant or buildable land and got a sense of how many had an intent to develop in the next 5 years 10 years 20 years um and how many Saw particular challenges in different areas and came up with some numbers for each community based on that and those are those are what our numbers are largely based on this is just a snapshot to give you a just a reminder of kind of the what the different critical areas or um environmental constraints look like for Bellingham um and you can see that that uh we're blessed with that abundance of of critical areas um which is great for a lot of reasons um but it also does cause or pose challenges for development and so that's that's why we build that into our process so that we're we're

realistic about the numbers that we think we can accommodate and now I'm just going to highlight a couple of slides that um that document the changes um it's not every single change but it's more the just the significant ones where we've um introduced new uh information or where we've um kind of changed methodology to to reflect change circumstances based on new regulations the first thing was from the last time we ran this analysis in in 2021 we updated all of the permit information the ownership information and then again the development status information so identified you know things that were vacant several years ago just confirming that okay are they still vacant or maybe there's been a building permit that's been completed on that project and now there's there's some kind of De element there so reclassifying the land Supply and then again importing new permit information and updating all the owner information we've also um updated the zoning across the the land capacity uh layers to reflect any changes in The BMC that were adopted in the last few years and we've had um you folks know because you've you've reviewed all of the rezones that have happened um there have been a few and uh so those are reflected in there as well one of the more significant changes from a land capacity standpoint was um the city recently passed the landmark tree protection ordinance and so we um we don't have a lot of trees that have been nominated and documented and certified yet so we needed

a placeholder for that so I'll talk about it a little more detail on on um following slide here but we deducted a percentage for areas that are mapped with um taller trees to account for potential candidate Landmark trees so that we get a sense of what the impact on the land Supply might be and then uh finally we applied larger and more widespread deductions for infrastructure gaps and those are areas where um areas that are within the city's service area for urban services within the city or within the urban growth area um but today they're deficient in one or more critical elements like maybe there aren't roads that are built there um arterial streets uh maybe there's a missing water reservoir or the water reservoir isn't large enough to support additional growth um in some cases there isn't Sewer Service in a particular area yet um so any of those kind of critical missing Urban Services aren't there um they might be in one of our um infrastructure plans in in most cases there are actually all those elements are identified in a lot of cases the network analysis for water and sewer has been done and the transportation pieces are shown they just aren't funded yet and there's no way a lot of them are um tagged with something that's called like developer participation or developer funded projects and so those are ones where we would look at that and we would say okay well what's the the likelihood that those pieces will be completed within the the 2020 425 to uh 2045 window and

so we we account some growth but we discount um that number because we know that some of those things will take a long time to get funded designed and build so that's another another piece that the uh Department of Commerce guidelines uh encourage us to do to to make sure that our numbers are more realistic and we don't um unduly constrain our land Supply and then we also um we evaluated our have evaluated our infill toolkit and accessory dwelling unit um permit uh the number of permits that we've been processing in the last number of years and we've estimated kind of what our annual production related to Middle housing and related to accessory dwelling units is and use those uh the numbers the annual production numbers to estimate what uh regulatory changes especially around House Bill 1110 might result in in the way of increased uptake or increased participation as we open our zoning across the city up to allow the toolkit in more areas and to allow a few more of those middle housing forms um what that might mean um we've already seen and I'll talk about it in a few minutes an uptick in the number of accessory dwelling unit permits that have come in um since the um House Bill 1337 code was incorporated into our the Bellingham Municipal Code um last year so um we would expect to see a similar a similar increase in the based on the house B 1110 middle housing regulations when we when we get those in place um and then in process we're coordinating currently with the county and

the cities to figure out what those House Bill 1220 House housing by income range totals would look like for Bellingham whether that's whether we take 49% or 50 or 55% or more of countywide growth um whatever that percentage is that we agree upon and that the other cities in the county agree upon with us um each City will then get um that number will then be sliced into income ranges and that'll give us the total number of units in each income band that we need to plan for and make sure that our development regulations allow those those numbers to be um to be realized so that'll be a critical piece and that's still being worked out this is just illustrating where some of those infrastructure gaps were deducted from um just showing kind of the the base map is the the um you don't really have to worry about what the colors are right now the purple are all the developed properties and some of the other colors are where we have vacant and underdeveloped land but these pieces that are highlighted in these light blue or cyan outlines are where we have um uh those are areas where they're currently are not um pipes in the ground for instance for water or maybe sewer or sometimes both um and also a where there are not arterial Street connections or even in some cases local streets servicing those areas to provide um provide transportation links in and out of an area um in some cases there are areas that are um beyond the the um response Zone uh the uh response times for emergency

services in some cases and so there there could be a variety of reasons why they're highlighted and again and some of them are only missing one type of service and so they might be having a smaller deduction maybe like a 30% deduction some are missing all or or multiple um critical services and they might have like a 75% deduction in their capacity so um again those are areas where those those deductions affect the the total built capacity it's not to say that someday they won't get there it's just to say that by 2045 we're counting a discounted number and then this is giving a little bit of detail about the the um trying to accom uh account for what the uh Landmark tree protection ordinance might do with with respect to buildable land we have our our light R tree height data um you could see an example of this is a area in watom Falls Park and you can get a a cross-section of the canopy and kind of see how tall each tree is and so what you see shaded on the map here in green are all of trees based on the light R data that are 100 feet or taller in the community and it's showing the canopy extent for those so if you think about the spreite of the the branches and leaves or canopy of a particular tree that's that's roughly equivalent to the root protection Zone where you wouldn't be able to to excavate and and have pipes in the ground or a foundation for building those kinds of things and so when we subtract those pieces that intersect with those vacant or partially developed

or underutilized properties these are the the the net impacts on the buildable area uh from those and again just um we already have sub ractions for critical areas that were're taking off these properties so these numbers reflect just the impacts on areas that are Beyond those wet lenss and buffers or steep slopes or flood planes those kinds of things so it's just the area that's not already impacted by um an environmental constraint um and you can see they're they're not insignificant um for vacant land it's about 20% of the buildable area partially developed properties it's about 8% and those underutilized properties it's about 7% you combine all these together it's a aggregate of about 12% of the buildable area um and again this is a placeholder in this analysis until we get better information but right now it's kind of a best guess 100 foot tall tree could be 36 in diameter base height it could be bigger could be smaller um really depends on the species the you know on-site conditions how much water it has access to all kinds of things but um but again just for purposes of this analysis that was our our number that we used was 100t tall tree was kind of a placeholder for a landmark tree okay so again we've we've reclassified the land Supply up to our kind of current um 2023 2024 era conditions we've subtracted all those things and what does that translate to based on today's zoning um and so again this is this is the the what we call Baseline it doesn't include any future

assumptions about changes we might make to our zoning to our boundaries to the development code um it does include those Adu amendments that were passed last year so it includes that but it does not include like the house bill 1110 changes to the code you could see residential single housing um just under 2,000 housing units you were to translate that into like a 22-year time period it's about 90 units a year middle scale housing so those things that are between residential multi and residential single two to two to six unit types and that would include Town Homes um about 1500 capacity for about 1 1500 units or just under 70 units per year and then the residential multi- housing units which could be Condominiums could be Apartments um we certainly seen more in the form of apartments in recent years as we haven't seen very much condominium development um about 9,800 units which would equate to right around 450 is um housing units and then accessory dwelling units um we're estimating around 2,000 and what that's based on is is a uh not based on um how much land is out there it's based on kind of our production numbers because accessory units can be built on existing developed property and so um we're assuming about 90 per year and that's based on since 2018 we've been averaging about 40 per year and then like I said last year after we passed the new uh you the new rules that allow two units per lot allows them in all zones and allows units to be a little bit bigger and a

little bit taller and it simplifies that approval process to a type one process um we've seen uh we're on track this year to uh have 90 or more of those in 2024 and so um just taking that forward basically it's a net increase of about 50 units per year we're assuming about 90 over the the planning period per year so just under 2,000 adus [Music] so this works out to a total when you add all these together a total capacity of just over 15,000 housing units or just under 700 housing units per year if you remember back to those numbers I was talking about about how many permits we've been approving and how many have been finaled each year that number is right in that ballpark um between 650 and just over 700 units a [Music] year and then looking at some of those different growth allocation scenarios I talked about like you know the the top one is the default one that's that's being plugged into the countywide environmental impact assessment at this point and then um introduced the idea of maybe exploring if we went five or six% higher than that or maybe another another uh 10% or so higher up to potentially 60% these are the housing units that we estimate would be needed to accommodate those those higher growth totals and then these are the shortfalls compared to our Baseline capacity you can see we're we're just under our Baseline capacity uh is just under the the kind of 49% number just about 300 units under um we significantly under the the kind of 60% number about 3,500 short

and just um just under 2,000 units shy of meeting that 55% threshold so again just just keep that those numbers in mind and then this is this is basically like a menu of choices or a a series of options as to how we can increase our our capacity within Bellingham and there's a variety of ways of doing that a couple of them are mandated um for instance House Bill 1110 is a required element that we'll be processing in this plan and um that's where we we talked about looking at that infill toolkit development history in recent years uh because the infill toolkit is probably the closest equivalent to what we'll end up developing for Middle housing code um because those are the infill tool at are really those middle housing forms that house bill 1110 is is uh is aiming at and um if we look at that we've averaged about 108 units per year um since 2018 and if we assumed about a 50% increase based on expanding that toolkit to additional areas the rest of the what today are residential single family zones um making it a little bit easier and also just allowing four units outright so that there weren't density restrictions um on those kinds of projects then we felt like um and again this is a very preliminary number but but if you assume a 50% uptake and the number of units produced each year under that development code that would get you about 55 more units per year which over the planning period is just you know about 1100 additional units beyond what we would expect under existing

conditions for um Transit oriented development which is something we've talked about recently with with Transportation Commission and with watom Transit Authority if we were to uh Zone Transit Orient development corridors within a quarter mile walk distance of the current go lines and um develop Zoning for those and if we assumed two to three midsize projects were completed each year in those in those zones um that might equate to about 75 units a year think about a couple of the two or three of the kind of size projects youve you seen in like the fountain District on Meridian over the last few years being completed on either the blue gold green or Plum lines and um that would equate to another 1275 or so units over the 20-year planning period and then um I'm going to come back to the targeted infrastructure improvements um there are two areas we're looking at potential expansion of our of our Urban growth boundary with the idea towards future annexation um one of those is the the north Bellingham ug Reserve um kitech being the majority owner in that in that area that's North Bellingham Golf Course um looking at the South half of that property which is currently a reserve area and then the other being the South UST Street ug Reserve which historically was part of our growth area it was removed in 2009 um and and uh if that was brought back in we feel like that could also have some development potential and also help us with some key infrastructure pieces in that area of town

and you can see there's there's some detail built into some of these assumptions for how many units might be produced there um the uh high-tech numbers were a little different here than what you see than compared to what we uh emailed out to you earlier this week I was um in conversation with some representatives from the owners up there and they were talking give me a little more detail about what um a phased develop development plan up there might look like and so um a little bit more updated information you can see the numbers here looking at around 70 units per year um starting as early as 2028 and um that would result in about just over 2,000 units during the planning period and then there would be more development capacity after that in that area and then for the South UST Street area there's a few more kind of critical infrastructure pieces missing there so this assumes a little bit longer time before things start getting built down there um and there aren't isn't as much buildable land so uh some fewer unit units um per year and then a smaller overall total during the planning period um with more capacity to happen beyond that one of the critical pieces for the UST Street area is that if we paired that with some targeted infrastructure improvements the surrounding areas that are in the existing growth area and the samish neighborhood across a top of the on the top of the hill up there um it would open up capacity in areas that have been zoned residential for decades

but really we haven't seen any development because they're missing roads they're Miss ing a water reservoir um there needs to be some improvements to the sewer system down there um so that's where some targeted improvements to our Capital infrastructure over the next 5 to 10 years would um get at some of the me bounce back to this would help unlock capacity in some of these areas you see in the city here in the city here and then in the growth area here and then this would be that South UST Street area so it's kind of a completing a missing piece of the puzzle down there and allowing um some Corridor planning for critical kind of transportation and utility and Greenways elements that could all kind of connect and interact down there and support each other so again um a variety of ways to approach that um and I should also point out that um not all of these improvements would be down on that South Side there's also um things like a Reservoir in King Mountain which is um in the the city's Capital Improvement plan um and once that's completed that will open up capacity for additional development around that King Mountain area and also in this um the urban growth area Reserve area at that North End of town that that would also um some of this could start based on existing infrastructure but then to get to the the larger numbers things like that Reservoir would be a critical piece to to allow that development to continue one of the main points I want to I want to make with this is

first all these numbers are preliminary but this aggregate number is in the ballpark of what we'd be looking for to have the flexibility to imagine some of these higher percentages um and I think one of the important pieces to recognize is that it's important to have a variety of approaches um if you think about some of the different um groups that might be building housing um or or uh square footage that could accommodate future jobs some of these things are are accessible to very different groups um some of them are larger developers with more resources and larger uh ownership blocks that they've Consolidated and then some of them are uh a patchwork of much smaller owners across the city that have different different financial resources and access to different kinds of building resources um and then some of them are more keyed into things like our future Transit development and can benefit the community in a variety of ways that way so they're kind of they they kind of hit different um growth priorities and they are um having a kind of a a varied approach I think is important because changes in the market and um the economy um are less likely to impact all of these at the same time um in the same way and it might give us a little bit more um assurance that we could build the units we we feel like we need to to accommodate the growth okay um going to stop for just a second there and see if there are any initial questions before we launch into the the growth strategy with the

60 or the 49 55 60% um are we expecting that say building up to the 60% that that would bring in more population to Billingham yes so this is so and there's two there's a couple things in motion but that's that's one possibility is that Bellingham one possibility is that the ofm medium projection countywide stays the ofm medium projection all the communities agree to that Bellingham agrees to take maybe a higher percentage and there's less pressure on the smaller cities and the rural areas to accommodate growth there's obviously a variety of things that would need to happen to to make that work Bellingham would have to have there' have to be enough of an incentive in Bellingham based on available land and development regulation and potential incentives for building to make Bellingham more desirable than for instance already buildable Lots out in the rural areas where someone could put into a septic system and sink in a well and and build a home um because there are I think the rough estimate is there's about 11,000 of those lots in the county today um I don't know if they'll have water but um or if you could get a septic system on all of them but but there are a lot of buildable Lots in the rural 5 acre and 10 acre zones today um so um so there's some like policy choices that communities could make to make it more attractive to build in cities versus the rural areas and there's obviously difference in the level of service that people get when they live in a you know some

people choose to live in a more rural uh uh location um there's also and we've seen some initial willingness for other cities in the county to take a higher than the ofm medium projection so multiple cities could choose to take more growth um and then and then it's up to Waton County for them to decide if they want to take less or if they want to stick with the medium or not so there's a lot of those things are still very much just in the mix right now and nobody's decided anything over the next month or so we will be working on the interjurisdictional resolution where all the communities kind of put their preference out there and the county wraps that up and takes it to their Planning Commission and their Council and that becomes the agreed upon number that we plan for it's not Stone it's a non-binding resolution but we do our planning work over the next year based on that and if we come out the other end when we get to the legislative approval process and all the communities are still in the same spot that becomes the countywide growth uh strategy um but we're just beginning the conversations on those so there's a lot of that part that's still up in the air so but but one path forward could be we take more growth the other cities either agree to go with the medium or take more um or potentially they could take less and then and then it's a decision about what happens in those unincorporated areas in between all the all the ugas so two more things on the same subject what

happens with our vacancy rate if it goes to 60% and the people don't come if we um well so here's one way of looking at it um we plan for a number we don't um you know the city doesn't build the housing right the development Community does so um the way that the market typically works is you're not going to if if sales slump in a community they're not going to keep building so so there's some there might be a little bit of lag in that we might you know um I I think the hope is that the vacacy rate does go up a little bit so that we have you know um I'm not a a real estate expert but you know the the 6% number is a number that Commerce has 6% came from the 49% right if we get to the 49% we if if we um all all of the scenarios that we would plan for like if we decide we're going to take any of those numbers the the housing total that that the hap tool from Commerce spits out has 6% baked into it okay so it's just a bigger it's it's the whether we take less the medium amount or the the most you know that we're comfortable with there's going to be a 6% cushion built into that regardless so so that's that part will be there regardless um whether occupancy rates stay as they are and that really shakes out over 20 years as anybody's guess but that's what we're building in at the start and what the state has required us to do um again we we evaluate this every five years so can adjust courses needed but that's what we're starting with finally have you seen any uh changes in folks not

moving to Bellingham at that rate for over the last 10 years due to the cost of living here and more people uh more cities pulling away at that number because it's less expensive in say Ferndale Blaine or out in the county proper where we won't actually meet those 49% uh growth numbers because people can't afford to live here right now and so we just will never quite get it back again because the trend leans towards elsewhere so I'm trying to think if am I understanding your your question is has like over the last 10 years for instance have we seen percentage shift between like how many many people Bellingham has been accommodating versus the other cities or I know is 10 years is is where we're at but like in the last two years when since our real estate has really grown in in prices and and employees of the city and and others have to live in Ferndale and and commute in are we losing those people and who we lost them forever and we're never going to meet that 49% again because it's just too expensive I I don't think so I think um yeah I think we've we've see examples and it's it's difficult to tell where people are where people are moving from when when they come to Bellingham but I know we've we've seen anecdotal evidence of you know a good number of people that move to Bellingham are moving from somewhere within watom County so we do see it's hard to say if they're keeping the same job if they were commuting in and now they're still working at the same place or not but um

but we have we certainly do have a good number of people that move to Bellingham from London or fale or just out you know on the in the rural areas so um but that's absolutely something we'd want to kind of keep tab Zone going forward is kind of like who is moving into our community are they people that are new to Washington or um watom County or are they just people that are moving from other parts of the community so yeah um I wanted to dive in on the middle housing form uh Baseline numbers if you could pull up the housing graph the housing um completions graph almost at the beginning um so the blue and the green are duplex Triplex fourplex like middle tier right they're not yeah and it's it's it doesn't include like five and six unit projects but it's yeah so it's the smaller end of what we call midle right yeah um yeah and then I notic the permit graph doesn't break it out by that right right um do you have any so if I look back at 2007 there's a real big blue graph there this seems like the trend prior to the recession was for more middle uh scale building and then since then it's just teeny teeny teeny um do you have any any insight on why what that Dynamic was prior to the recession yeah I know i' I've looked at that I haven't looked at the other years but 2006 and 7 I have dug into that a little bit because that blue that one's always caught my attention too um and we just we had quite a number of duplexes and fourplexes completed that year for some reason it's um

it's just you could see the duplex bar is well I guess the duplex bar isn't too much larger than other years but it's significant but we had a couple of large fourplex projects completed that year and then you can see the next year there was still a large number uh over that period of time um there's also some I I again it's it's somewhat deceptive looking at these there are also in the the orange bars um the five plus unit as we get further into the years where we had the infill toolkit uh being very active there are also some infill toolkit units in there that are um they're just permitted as multif family units because they might be a row of town homes that are not on Fel Lots or something like that um so if you build six town homes that would be an orange designation on this break yeah five six yeah exactly um if if they were and then and then on the other side of it you could build town homes and if they are on fee Lots um and sold that way they're permitted as single family homes and so they'd be down on the yellow bar here and so you're kind of getting the middle housing is really kind of as we get past um 2009 really although it was really about 2015 is when the infill toolkit really started to take off um there are infill toolkit units both in the orange and the yellow on either side of these blue and green bars so it's and that didn't exist prior to 2009 yeah this is really just an artifact of this this graph is Created from what we report to ofm and these are the

categories um I suspect they're going to change their reporting after House Bill 1110 goes into effect because they're probably also going to want to track that middle housing component more more with a definition that matches what the rcws have now um but this is just kind of a historic artifact of that and to the same point this is again just a simplistic kind of a binary single family or multif family and and just like I described on the other chart you've got uh town homes on fots are in the yellow bars and um those middle housing forms duplex Triplex fourplex are in these orange multif family bars on here for the most part so it's it's um it is a it's a bigger slice than what it looks like in these in these charts um okay I think i' see where the answer to my question is going but on the Baseline capacity I was thinking the middle scale number was a little the 68 there um on the Baseline back yeah the 68 for middle 68 units a year of middle scale seemed High to me looking at that first graph but the first so if you're going two to two to six units some of those are coming from the M the imperfect categorization there um can you so you think the 68 units of mental housing like as a baseline is realistic going forward with with no changes and is that pre 1110 that's pre 1110 and that's really like I said the the last um since 2018 the infill toolkit units we've we've been averaging again it's it's very variable year to year but if you take that whole period of time and

divide it up just in an even number of years we've been averaging um I think it was 108 uh let's see where is it uh about 108 units a year is what we've been averaging in the infill toolkit and so that's that's this is not too far out of alignment with that knowing that that um some of the infill toolkit you know that they're coming from a variety of zones um so that's that's kind of if you can imagine this is a kind of one of the largest pieces of that 108 units would be the 68 again on on properties that we would assume would like if we didn't adopt Health Bill 1110 we were non-compliant with state law and just marched forward but we still had our infill toolkit regulations in the zones they apply to today we would anticipate that we would get about 68 units a year we've been averaging you know 108 land is becoming more in short supply so going forward there's going to be fewer of those if we don't add land or change our zoning but this is kind of in alignment with that it's just it's a smaller number but we still have cap capacity for that okay that helps a lot the number stuck out as not as believable but I think I think we're in the I think it makes sense to me now go ahead yeah I was just um curious because it's so new um The Landmark tree ordinance it seems like that that's kind of you know we're we're just kind of figuring out how it's going to affect things at this point and some things that just popped into my head are like you know there's a lot of the more

undeveloped areas that are going to probably have more of those trees so if if you're in like Urban growth areas and places like that you know they they may be more affected or the less dense areas and so uh uh you know a few questions related to that is like one is kind of like do we see there being a negative effect of that in that people will just automatically developers or land owners be cutting down trees that are just shy of the size threshold in order to basically make it so that they don't pass that threshold and aren't given the ability to develop their properties um other kind of slant on that would be is what is the outcome of people who have been holding on to land with with lots of trees on them just to find out now that they have undevelopable land that is going to be kind of like mixed into these these neighborhoods that get developed um and and then I'm just also kind of curious about um you know like in in general has there been any discussion of like um the tree canopy of the city and if that pres prevents or presents a higher fire danger seeing that we have you know worse fires currently than we have in history and you know you see entire cities being decimated by uh forest fires in places where there's you know wooded areas within those cities yeah I I all all great questions and and all things that we've been talking about um mostly through the there's the landmark tree ordinance and then there's the the kind of bigger umbrella project of the urban

Forest plan which is is um still moving forward um um will be we don't have an adoption date on the calendar for that but that's continuing to to move forward and you see it in front of city council periodically um but but certainly the the um deductions that we've made here in the um you know to like I said take a stab at saying like where do we have you know kind of larger than average trees not knowing if they qual if as a landmark tree or not at this point um you know that's an effort to an effort on our part to say we know it's going to affect development um it's you know there are a lot of ways to work around trees um and and I guess one way to look at it is trees don't preclude development on property but they're a complicating Factor when you're preserving them and so it's just it it could add cost to a project it could influence the design of a project um sometimes in a in a good way or a great way but it's just it's just another piece to consider and it and it could impact capacity and so for this analysis which again is really high level and we're you know this is a there's things that are in the permit pipeline where we have some level of confidence on what's being talked about because it's it's had an architect it's had an engineer it's had a variety of people kind of look at it and say this is what we think will work here and they're in conversation with City staff in pre-application meetings and things um then um the for the the vacant and partially developed

and underu ized pieces it's more of a cookbook mathematical formula approach and that's where we have a lot of assumptions and so this is again just another one of many assumptions in that kind of stack of of variables that gets us to a guess at to what can we accommodate um we feel like it's a pretty reasonable guess I mean we're you know we're again just saying like what what do we think are going to things that are going to impact development um but whether you know whether you know they're undoubtedly will be properties that are completely covered with large trees that will be able to develop through some creative means and Creative Design that it might be a a more costly way to get there than if you were to cut all the trees down um but that's again that's where that's why we have you know professional developers in the community and professional City staff that kind of help figure that stuff out um yeah so so that's that's one thing I guess is it's it's never an absolute these are just you know they're not like completely written off as undevelopable but it's just one more challenge to kind of make development happen on them um the urban Wildland interface kind of fire question is part of the urban Forest plan and that's definitely it's an important piece there that's being talked about um our fire department's in active participant in those conversations um you know and our natural resources folks and our planning folks and the parks department who owns you know the

single largest property owner in the city when it comes to forested land is the parks department and so you know they're keenly concerned about those things too because they own a lot of that land so um yeah those are all great things to that that we're things that we're all thinking about and they definitely will again they don't all preclude development but they they influence development and want to make sure things are done safely I'm also kind of curious if there are perceived legal challenges to that um I mean I could think of scenarios of where you own a property or your neighbor has a landmark tree that is close to your property line which would basically you know make it so that you couldn't develop your own land because of being within that drip line or the area of the root structure um a lot of urban sites are pretty tight you're typically trying to hug property lines with uh access to the sites and things like that and I've already seen projects where it's been kind of like questionable whether or not things would work out based on that type of scenario and I'm I'm curious about you know kind of the legality of of of that aspect of it where you know through no doing of your own you you're AB buding a property with a large tree and then you suddenly can't do something that you had intended to do yeah that's that's beyond my depth of understanding of of both the ordinance and the the legal implications but but it's a great question yeah okay I'm gonna y Barb yeah

Barbara okay so um I'm want to harp on the adus here for a minute sure um we've got down here this assumed 90 per year and if we go back to the other graph these yellow ones um adus are not included in this and doesn't look like they're included in the other one either so um what I'm wondering is uh how many of I know that you know the permit process we started the pilot program what year uh 2018 was our first uh adus were made legal in 1995 and then 2018 was the the first Adu ordinance that expanded it into um more areas of town and then um and then last year was when we adopted code that made us compliant with House Bill 1337 which was the expanding it to um all residential zones and the larger units the taller units and the simpler appr process so we've been permitting them since 2018 then in within City Limits uh yeah yeah we have we have reliable permit approval data from 2018 forward on adus and that's that was that number of of about uh around 40 a year is kind of what we averaged during between 2018 and 2023 but my question is is that when we talked about this last year um I asked how many because we were basing all of our information on adus on how many permits went out but we didn't know how many of those had actually been built at that point when I asked last year and I'm wondering if we now know how many of those have actually been built and people are living in them so the um the numbers that that we're quoting the 40 per year are ones that are um I can't

remember what the total is I don't have it in one of these slides but those are based on on units that were um completed so those are those are ones that have been built so we're assuming 90 but we've only averaged 20 only averaged 40 right that's an average of 40 right this year right an average of 40 some years more some years less um and we've had applications this year that are on track for 90 or more of those for 2024 which will be the first first full year after are uh the new code was adopted so my question is is what is our average of permits um put out versus actual builds uh I think that was that was the number I I showed for like all housing types it's around again it's it's hard to say whether their units that haven't been built because of people have walked away from the project or maybe they just are still in the process but if you bracket it in that that 10 per that's what I'm trying to get at is that we keep talking about adus being a part of this formula and yet 40 per year doesn't sound like a lot and we don't know how many of them are rentals we don't know how many of them are actually helping House people that couldn't be housed before or how many of them are affordable and I just I I really I really hate that this is like a thing that we promote as being like one of the answers to this problem when it's clearly you know it's not housing anybody that couldn't be that wouldn't have been housed before it's not housing these people most of these people that

are that are my understanding is that a lot of these adus that are being built are being built for family members that don't already live here and we need housing for people who already live here but we keep adding adus into our formula as if it's some sort of end all Beall and and I think I would like us to change our our convers where adus are are related or where they are included so I guess what I'm hearing you suggest is that maybe we should discount it more than other types to assume that that maybe it has a lower occupancy based on some that are that are not permanently occupied um yeah and we don't know we we don't split any of these other types out by tenure so if their owner or renter that's that's um we we'd like more to be owner occupied than renter occupied because we feel like that's a a healthy thing for the community but but but that's not even part of the law anymore so I mean we required to just provide enough housing we don't we don't control the ownership format so sounds like you're suggesting though that we should take the the Adu component and maybe discount it a a certain percent to say like some of them might just be I just don't think it needs to be as important you know as other types of housing cuz it's it's I think it's much rarer than we think it is um and and again like I say we don't know how many of these are entering into this is just another family member moving in it's not it's not it's not actually helping with our housing issues I know

one uh Insight I could offer from our internal staff conversations as we talk about House Bill 1110 and how many people might um you know we we have conversations about okay well what's the typical if if someone decides they want to utilize that new development code and they they live in a home on a lot right now but they have room around them to add more housing and they feel like they want to do that and say you know they can add four out right and up to six if they do affordable units you know we don't we don't really know what the average person will choose but if you can imagine like probably more people are going to choose to add one or two units than maybe add four or five to their property just just based on finances and resources and just desire to have however many units around them on or on a property um and if people are we're talking internally about how different housing forms get approved and how they're how the the building code works and if you were had an existing home and you wanted to add two units on your property if you can build two smaller homes and get them approved for the infil toolkit versus calling them accessory dwelling units um you might people might choose to call them adus at this point because the impact fees are 50% of if they go the other route um and you know the only time that maybe they that might not make sense is if they wanted to have them larger than a th000 square feet so there's there's a lot of that stuff is that adus are a tiny

little niche market that um we keep I keep seeing in the conversation of housing across our County and and other places I keep seeing adus being promoted Ed as this big portion but it is such a tiny little niche market and I just don't think it should it should give a I don't think should be wasting our time on it anymore personally I also would like to know um we talk about units and and going back to a little bit of the Adu we don't really know what our inventory is I'm not seeing anything in here that talks about what our actual inventory is how many empty houses we have around town how many of them are on Airbnb and that kind of stuff and I'm wondering how those kinds of how that fits in with all of this we can that's something we can we can bring back to you we can provide you know like how many single family detached middle housing forms do we have these numbers of how many how many um adus are being used as rentals and how many are being not just adus but just other housing all housing across this the the the city it's Sometimes It's Tricky like I don't think we can tell you how many adus are are occupied or not but we we do have um like we know how many units in town are registered in our rental registration program we know what our our vacancy rate is Citywide based on um we get quarterly US Postal Service vacancy rate data and we know Citywide we're right around between two and three% so I've been asking for these numbers for three years now okay well we can we can

bring I can bring those specific ones uh forward so we can yeah I want to know what our vacancy rate is across across all types of housing we don't we don't have the connection to housing types but we do have a CommunityWide number um the Postal Service doesn't they don't they don't track with the land use stuff they just know based they know it's a residential address they know if it's occupied or not but they don't they don't share the they give us the statistical numbers but they don't connect that for us with addresses so we can't tell you that but we could tell you how many of each housing type we have in the city um how many adus how many other so we don't have any way of telling how many units are being used as airbnbs across the city we do track uh vacation short-term rentals and we have those because we have a registration program for that so I can tell you that we don't connect that with the the housing type um that would be another another level level of effort to do that but we can certainly say how many active uh vacation rentals we have in town right now it's it's between two and 300 um we get reports on that every month I will we we will share housing inventory data with you we can certainly do that so okay I'm going to jump to the next section here and talk a little bit about growth strategy um just to give you just for the next few minutes here I'm going to step through this which is talking about Chang to residential zoning um briefly talk about kind of

priority growth areas and then I'll jump to the land use map and just kind of illustrate kind of what the visually just kind of what some of the main changes if you're familiar with our city-wide land use and Zoning Maps kind of what the changes look like when they land on the map and which areas are being being uh experiencing some level of change so this is this is a a um again still very much in process but this is the the um um approach that we are considering for residential zoning and again the main thing that's triggering this is that house bill 1110 um and basically the you know opening up what today are residential single zones to allow um a wider variety of housing so that we can meet the needs of our community at a variety of different levels um and especially those middle housing forms within the what today are residential single zones um at the top here I've got just because um it's always challenging to talk about our zoning code and then we have exceptions for the lake watom Watershed which we all understand why that's a a different uh treated differently in our community as our water source and a critical a critical Watershed piece and so to um solve that make it a little bit simpler to understand um the first step would be to combine the residential single and residential multis zones that are in the lake watom Watershed think about primarily that Silver Beach neighborhood um and then any adjacent areas that we would Annex at some point that would be still

within the Watershed and we would call that residential Watershed or RW on the map and that would be uh predominantly low density no minimum required density um it would allow residential single detached forms or residential multi where it's allowed today because there are a few R RM zones out there um but it would all be again predominantly low density um and then just like today um no infil tkit allowed there um so the house bill 1110 rules would not apply within the wed and uh no accessory dwelling units allowed within the Watershed either so that's a just again um just within those zones that are within the lake watom Watershed again which is predominantly the the Silver Beach neighborhood and then we have kind of a progression of residential zoning and if you were to look at some archival maps of like our 1947 or 1960s zoning Maps we had R1 2 three where kind of what we call their zones and so because we're diverging away from residential single and residential multi it seemed to make sense to go back to R1 R2 R3 um as a as a a naming convention for them at least so residential one would be um all residential single zones that are outside of the lake watom Watershed and also today's residential multi zones that have a low density designation there's only a couple of those and they're also predominantly built out at this Point um and I'll highlight those when we get to the map but it would be all of the residential single zones and then just the the couple of RM low

density zones that we have those areas would allow residential single development all of the info toolkit middle housing forms accessory units and then this is a question that we're we still haven't decided um there could be a minimum required density in these areas um that's something that we're considering and we'd be interested to hear your thoughts on that um that number could be something like the threshold that we have now for low density zoning which is um in our RM zones which is 7200 square feet or six units per acre um but this is kind of getting at the idea of do we want to think about our very low density 20,000 square foot zones that we have in the in today's RS zones and are those do we still feel those are appropriate for um the city of Bellingham are those areas that we want to potentially have develop at at very low densities this is all predicated on um you you also um would be able to do the house bill 1110 um for units per lot within anywhere within this R1 zone so again throughout today's residential single zones again outside of the Watershed areas all of the residential medium or residential multif family medium density zones would become R2 um they're again medium density they do have a minimum required density um that's that 7200 number that I was talking about um and they allow again the the residential multiforms so you can build apartments in those zones um the infill toolkit accessory units and you can build residential single there today um but a

limited amount of it there's a a I think it's a percentage limitation um I don't know I can't I'm thinking it's 2 5% but don't quote me on that so um but regardless RS is allowed but it's it's limited in how much you can build and then we would have R3 which would be today's residential multi- high density zones and again those would continue with high density with a minimum required which in this case those zones require at least a 3600 um a density of one unit per 3600 Square ft and then um they would allow again resident multi apartment style or condo style development the infill toolkit adus and again a limited amount of residential single development and then we have this new Zone that we're calling R4 which we don't have any on the map yet um these would be new areas and examples would be along Transit oriented development corridors so these would be those like could be within a quarter mile of one of the go lines um there could be other areas around town that would get this R4 zoning but that would be something we would evaluate going forward after the comp plan gets adopted and as areas become priorities for us um throughout the community but the transit oriented development corridors would be the first areas that we would look at that would would seem to fit that model they would be high density by Nature um but probably regulated more with a floor area R ratio similar to the way that our Urban Villages work um again just assuming kind of higher density and and also

assuming some mix of uses so allowing commercial development along with the res residential so that gives you kind of a preview of what you know instead of a zoning map with residential single and residential multis zones um it would be this residential Watershed and then these R12 three and four zones that allow kind of an increasing level of intensity as you go up the scale what what happens to today's Urban Villages this is mapping only urb Villages remain as they are so this is just just remapping the excuse me the um the RS and RM zones all the things that are currently zoned Urban Village and uh probably a good segue to jump to the map I'll come back to this um and the the what will become the Barkley Urban Village that's currently um going through the the process of being created um those would still be uh basically exactly as they are today and we would um and and our really kind of the Cornerstone of our infill strategy um they still are the area where we've made the largest investment ments for infrastructure and we still are counting um a very large uh fraction of our future growth in those areas um so those are how compatible is R4 and Urban Village is Urban Village like an even higher level of density allowed than R4 yeah I think the R4 zones like when we talk about and this is a future a future session for us to talk about the details of but if you think about um let me Jump Ahead here this is going to be a little disjointed if you imagine these are the trans

and oriented development Corp corridors you can see the the four different go lines here and then um thanks Elizabeth for getting us started the um blue cross-hatching you see here are the um areas that are you see blanks here where the urban Villages are these are the areas that are uh outside of urban Villages that are within a quarter mile walk distance um so looking at like where we have you know uh sidewalks and things where where pedestrians could get from a a 15-minute Transit line um and how far can they you know what's a quarter mile walk look like for them from that so that's why they're a little the edges are a little irregular based on where streets and sidewalks and things are today but these would be areas where we would look at at considering what we would call R4 zoning um when you look at Transit oriented development we talked about this a little bit with WTA um the last time we were together it's it's uh getting enough housing density but also as as uh Tim from WTA emphasized and and what Hayden described as well is there's also that critical mix of destinations that you have along a Transit Corridor and those are those those Commercial Services and other uses that you have along those corridors that provide that that density of of places where people want to board and and and deboard a bus as it goes along that Corridor and it provides that so it's not just two nodes at the end of a long stretch where there's not a lot of happening it's it's two big nodes

or multiple nodes around a loop and then a lot of smaller stuff where there's going to be continued interest for for ridership all the way around that Loop so there will be uh the bus will be more uh loaded with passengers all the way around and and it will make more sense to run the loop so so I think if you think about what Tod might look like the closest thing I would I would kind of point you in the direction of is Imagine things that look like the fountain District today where it's it's an Urban Village type development but it's maybe not the same scale as like a sish way or a downtown it's kind of a midsize and you do have a good density of uses along that Corridor um but maybe you'd have more residential in there as well so think about that kind of like multi-story but not necessarily six plus Story the whole way it would be kind of medium scale um and maybe not you know there might be tiers where you have development along the blocks that are actually on the route and then maybe as you step back there could be tear of density so so that's all yet to be exited but if you look at Transit oriented development in different communities and kind of the standard practice of developing those kinds of zones they they look at things like tiers and they look at that mix of uses along those [Music] corridors so kind of just I'm just going to do a quick tour of the map here to kind of Orient you um you can see in the lake watom water shed here we have this lighter yellow and

that's that kind of residential Watershed or RW Zone and again that incorporates um you could see the green areas which are the public zones the parks out there today but those are the um residential single and residential multis zones that you find out there today and um there are a couple of residential single zones that are still medium density this would assume going forward that everything out there is predominantly low density um and um that that it again no infill toolkit and no accessory units because we just we have not allowed those in the Watershed the rest of the yellow on the map is all the um the R1 Zone which again is medium density and it's all of today's uh it would be all the remaining residential single zoning uh throughout all of the neighborhoods and would assume that those all get treated the same way instead of having you know 100 plus residential single sub areas each with you know many with different unique zoning thresholds it all goes to a a medium density format they all allow infill toolkit and accessory units um and then um every lot that's out there gets is is allowed for units outright as per the the state requirements and then uh the only you know like I said one of the questions we've been wrestling with is do we have a a minimum required density of say something like 7200 or some other number that we feel is is relevant to apply to those areas based on our our priorities as a community and that's that hasn't been decided yet but that's

something that we'd like to we'd like to talk about more the um light orange areas are those r two residential medium zones the dark orange are the high density uh residential three zones and then you could see uh the pink are Urban Villages and I would I would call your attention to Barkley Village which on today's zoning map is a variety of colors um because it constitutes several different zones out there but the timeline for that um that plan is being worked on right now the schedule is that over this next winter that will come through for the come before you and then go before city council for the legislative approval process um so we anticipate that that will be an official part of our land use map before this plan gets approved so we're we're coloring the current proposed brry as as being completed on there and in that pink Urban Village color the other one you'll note is Oldtown is pink on this map if you look at our zoning map today Oldtown is Urban Village but on the zoning map it's a commercial Zone um it was the first Village that Urban Village that we planned the first sub area and um we didn't start coloring them pink on the map and calling them the Urban Village zone until we got to the next one after that which I think was uh I think it was samish way that we did after that um so we'd like to go back and and that's not going to change anything in the Oldtown sub area plan or the way that we regulate development there or the development happens it would just be

a change we would move it to a different section in The BMC and the Urban Village section and just change the general use type from commercial to Urban Village and the sub area plan would continue to be the The Guiding document for that um as it is today so that's a kind of a cleanup if you will of the code to bring that in alignment with the other Urban villages we also have a variety of new uh green areas on the map and those are our public zones um those are not set in stone yet I met today with some represent from Parks and Public Works to go over a few of them and that's a conversation that they'll continue to evolve some examples of things we're looking at rezoning to public are the um northern Heights pordata and options High School are currently not zoned public and just for whatever reason they they never were um options is in an industrial Zone and the other two are in residential single zones and so it would be aligning those with the rest of the Bellingham school campuses and Zoning them as public um we also have a few other things um recent uh Parks Acquisitions uh some of them not so recent but in the past years uh we've got a a piece that has just north of Cordata Elementary that uh was purchased for the extension of Horton Road out to Aldrich and is now part of the parks department Holdings and is has a storm water facility on it but it's it's owned by the parks department have our Wetland mitigation Bank properties out here between Northwest and Pacific

Highway um the north Bellingham Regional storm water facility just north of Costco um which is the big pond out there um variety of things like vanen Wick Park and some Park Properties up off King Mountain so there's again a wide variety of pieces that are uh mainly related to either Public Works facilities or parks and green waste purchases that we would be flipping from residential or other zones to the public zone so that's another change across the map what kind of control do we have in the ug out towards the airport such as the yellow areas that are um just north of the industrial areas um are you saying so do we have the do we have any control over the zoning out in the ug we we work with watom County to establish that zoning I know uh two zones they're still gray on the map because the industrial zones are all gray on this map but the heavy impact industrial zones which are uh there's one here one here and then the the Mount Baker plywood site down here those are um I don't know if those were the ones you were referring to but okay the yellow above okay um we have colored all of in the urban growth area we've colored the zones um in anticipation of what they would become if we were when we Annex them and so that's part of the the 20-year planning exercise as we look at the land capacity in the city and in the urban growth area the Assumption being that we're going to Annex those properties when people petition for annexation and then what we currently assign to those

based on our interlocal agreement is the the um closest uh equivalent or comparable Zone I think comparable is the word that's used from what the county zone is what's the most comparable City Zone and so that's where like the residential medium kind of density is is what we would anticipate for these areas that are largely zoned uh Urban residential mixed use is what the the urx zone is what the county zone is so um yeah and as far as control goes we we participate in review of development and provide comments to watch County as they approve permits in the urban growth area um and there's there's a fair amount of coordination that happens with that so that things won't be non-compliant when we do Annex them so there is definitely a there's a process that's in place for that um other changes uh let's see the possible ug expansion we've again I've talked about that South UST Street Corridor which you could see our current growth boundary right here this is the north UST Street ug we've included the South UST Street ug as a possible area to include in the city and again important some growth capacity there certainly but also uh important to opening up growth capacity in the areas inside the city and in the ug to the north of that area uh with uh transportation uh Street linkages that would that would go through that area and into the other areas and also um things like a reservoir site and uh future sewer line improvements and those kinds of things so um again just kind of

completing the puzzle down there and then the north uh Bellingham Urban growth area Reserve that you see up here um one single large owner in the kitech property and a variety of smaller owners to the east of there along Meridian Street um kind of the South half of what today is the the north Bellingham Golf Course um it continues up to Smith Road beyond that but looking at those as areas that would provide um housing capacity during this planning period but also importantly set up for for continued growth Beyond 2045 um particularly because there's some critical infrastructure that's needed for um realizing the full potential of those areas so kind of looking forward and making sure we're we have enough time to grow into those areas the way that we want to um on the North kitech property you said one of the menu options was uh development of the South half of that property is that indicating you could consider uh including a ug of parti of that or is that what you anticipate building out in the next 20 years is only the southern half of that there's there's a currently the the the area that's designated ug Reserve today is just the South half of um it's what you see on the map here in yellow and there's a little bit of red I think where the golf uh Pro Shop is and then there's a placeholder for um a little bit of mixed use commercial here where their conceptual diagram which right now it's just a conceptual plan for that that uh area shows a a a small like almost like an

Urban Village like a small Urban node there with some mixed use development um and uh more like a like a Village Center I think was the term that they used um this boundary you see what you see colored in here is that Reserve area the ownership goes all the way up to Smith Road and so there's the possibility that in a future planning cycle we could consider uh continued expansion um that's like I said there there there are a lot of those conversations that haven't happened yet um but this is the the numbers that you saw on that sheet that we showed out through 2045 were just counting what what um at this point we would expect to see um again based on very preliminary information um what might be realized within just the area you see here on the map okay so we have we have City Limits we have UG and we have ug Reserve right and so the areas that are in the reserve status what what we're suggesting is that during this plan update um that what we're suggesting is that that we uh in areas like this if we want to include that growth capacity that this would be the time to expand our Urban growth boundary to wrap around these Reserve areas so that they would then be eligible for annexation over the next 20 years can you go down to the UST Street area so like the north half of UST street is in the ug today today the South half is a ugj reserve yes and so when we do our when we do our look back numbers we include ug areas in Prior growth like if you look back the last 10 years and

say we grew this much that includes ug areas that would include um the the permit approval numbers are just city of Bellingham they do not include our UG and the amount of growth happening in our unincorporated ug is very small um there are but we are planning forward in considering the current ug we're counting the forward-looking we're counting the capacity in our ug assuming that we will be annexing those areas just much like we're considering annexation right now of the Northern Heights neighborhood out of our so all the early uh estimations where you took buildable lands subtracted out critical areas all these different things that includes ug that includes the ug does not include the reserve areas just includes the UG and then um we have done again on that second one that shows kind of the ways we can go beyond our Baseline capacity there were those two lines that PR has been in there for this South UST Street area and for that North Bellingham Reserve area and so if the reserve area was added to the ug you said that might help unlock even some stuff inside the city because we would get a regional uh water tower or other other sorts of infrastructure planning why does including it in the ug but not yet the city help us plan for infrastructure costs it it helps us because then we would be able to site um things like like this southern area includes some high spots up on the the crest of the sish Hill there that we feel are good sites for um a reservoir that's needed down

there that could serve this entire part of town and um the other pieces are the the transportation Network that would service the the new neighborhoods that would be built um in and around this area uh the alignment studies that we've done a number of years ago um the southern Terminus of that is governor road which is right along the east side of that green box there so um we feel like planning for roads and infrastructure to service this area and this area really doesn't make a lot of sense unless we have the all four of those you the four pieces of the quadrant or or this this half and then both these two pieces on the East Side in in kind of an intact form that we would eventually be able to control once we had annexed them so that's that's kind of the the thinking there is that there critical pieces to complete the puzzle down there um we don't we we feel like the densities in in these areas are fairly low right now to support that level of investment which is one reason why we're talking about um do we want to consider minimum densities um and and the um the other challenges that this area faces that you don't see on the north end of town at the other ug Reserve area are there are um there are a lot more trees and there's a lot of challenging steep Terrain in this area so there might be some reasons why you don't see the same level of intensity of development as other parts of town but we still feel like there's there there's land that's been zoned residential here for

decades um even longer than that and uh we feel like it's it's one of the few areas that we can grow into um that does have some development capacity um and then there are again things like green ways connections that would you know connect like watom Falls Park to Padden Park and other kinds of community amenities that would come with that all right um so again this is looking at that that Transit oriented development which um is something that again our our growth policies in our transportation chapter in the land chapter have had trans and oriented development uh have been supportive of trans and oriented development for the last two plans the 2006 and the 2016 plan um but through those planning Cycles we you know we leaned really heavily into Urban Village Development and are still still doing that and like I said that's a key component of our growth strategy going forward um but we feel like this is probably a good time to to think about doing the transit oriented development as well um implementing that in a on the land use map and having zoning that supports that particularly because as we talk about um parking which will be coming before you folks um in another month with with the conversation about uh parking regulatory reform um and also just the fact that we are going to be having significant additional infill through House Bill 1110 um that all of those things benefit from transit and that's really one of the ways that we can especially from an equity standpoint

provide options for people so we feel like having that conversation in this update about um follow-up actions to the plan about just like we master planned Urban Villages over a period of years that we start to look at these corridors and coordinate closely with watom transit authority and um as a community we plan what what these areas will look like um and again kind of like we talked about in our previous conversation with Transportation Commission these corridors even today the the green gold blue and Plum lines are all very different they all service different parts of town the the zoning that we end up deciding is appropriate for those to support more frequent Transit service it might be different in each of those areas so it's it's going to be an interesting process to go through um but we do know that you know they'll the the basic understanding is that it would be more intense than what's there today and it would provide a a mix of uses and destinations that would support Transit um and the surrounding neighborhoods that that rely on that so that's part of part of what's being shown here um the other piece I wanted to just back up that I skipped over and this will be part of a a further uh follow-up discussion with you as we look at kind of what are the priority growth areas and are there are different incentives in our code that we can explore or different ways of prioritizing how we do uh infrastructure planning across the city or that we um administer our fees um

you know our impact fees and other kinds of things um but looking at things just again a very diagrammatic approach here but you know we have our Urban villages we have commercial nodes and then if we do Transit oriented development corridors those would all be areas where we would we would make significant Investments as a community and already have in in many cases and so we would we would want to really encourage people to develop in these areas and so what are the regulatory ways that we can make it more attractive for people to develop in those areas and really concentrate that growth um and again it's all it's all about balance we're talking about expanding our growth area which we haven't done in the last two planning cycles and so we feel like it's probably time to do that to buy some extra space for our community to grow into at the same time we don't want to do that every time we update our plan and so we feel like really focusing into these kind of priority growth areas is also important um and again like I said on that slide with the variety of kind of menu choices for accommodating housing in different ways we feel like we need to do both we need to be P pushing on all fronts and so prioritizing growth into these kind of priority growth areas while also responsibly planning areas that we would be growing into in a new way um doing all that at the same time is is kind of is going to make sure that we we buy ourselves kind of the the biggest bang for the buck so to

speak because they will all of it is going to cost our community um that's that's what we want to make sure of is the way we're doing it is sustainable and that we do it in the the best way possible what are the chances do you think that we will Annex all the ugas or what percentage of the ug will be annexed in the next 20 years I I I don't think we're going to Annex all of them um I I could tell you that you know the last time we talked to um I think it was in 2018 we did some Community meetings on the ugas on the east side the Britain Road area Geneva and UST Street what we heard from UST Street was inconclusive they were fairly poorly attended meetings Geneva was well attended and we heard um very very unanimously that they were not interested in being part of Bellingham we don't really provide services to UST Street either from a utility standpoint that's Lake watom Water and Sewer that provides Water and Sewer Service um and South watom Fire provides the fire protection so um and and Geneva really is largely built out there isn't really any development capacity there so there's just really it's it's a historic artifact that it's adjacent to Bellingham and that's why it's always been in our Urban growth area um but we don't anticipate that Geneva is going to petition for annexation anytime soon we we might be surprised that but it we haven't heard any any incling that that might happen and the the indication at that meeting was that it probably wouldn't um the Britain

Road Northern Heights area was was a little more mixed there was definitely some folks that were interested because there is a little bit of development capacity there um and then as you look at the kind of more Northerly and the northwesterly areas um there's some interest in the um the Alderwood area there are some folks out there small individual property owners that we've heard from that are interested in annexation we haven't heard a a large kind of ground swall of support for that we did have some meetings right before um covid 2019 um we had some open houses out at Alderwood Elementary and talked to um both both uh resident renters and also property owners in the area and and it was mixed there was some some interest but also some concern about being part of the city and storm water fees and other uh rental registration and other kinds of things um but you know trying to we're trying to represent a kind of a fair and balanced perspective of what what the advantages of being in the city are and that's an area that bellingham's had uh been serving that area with utilities for for um decades and so that's that's largely why it's developed at kind of that Suburban level of development you see out there today so we feel like makes sense to bring it into the city to kind of complete the infrastructure picture and allow Redevelopment to happen as well and and to improve the area with more sidewalks and things but it's hard to say when that will when that will happen we we

hope you know it'd be great if we got a petition that we could consider there are some other ways that we can Annex areas with interlocal agreements um and other methods but um those are conversations we would have with watom County and with um um you know the other other uh service providers in the area um we currently have an interlocal agreement not to Annex the airport and so that kind of leaves the areas that are north and west of the airport off the table for the time being we don't know if that will will how long that interlocal will be in place or if um conditions will change where it becomes uh advantageous or or um make sense to Annex the airport that's another another piece of the puzzle too we have industrial zones between Ferndale and Bellingham and and um the Curtis Road area west of the airport um it's challenging because they are all highly impacted by critical areas so there there's some capacity for future industrial growth out there but not an enormous amount so it's um that's that's Again part of the analysis that we're doing is is if those were to come in what would we actually get versus what would it what would it cost to serve those areas so um we we have said that as a followup to the comprehensive Plan update in 2025 one of the first things we really need to do is update our Urban growth um or our annexation phasing plan um the last time we updated that was 2018 with the annexation strategy document um and so that's something we should just do

periodically and right after a comp plan update feels like you know that's we need to look at those and decide okay which ones do we feel like we should prioritize and really try and and encourage people to to maybe petition for annexation um but we are in this exercise looking at again what are areas that we should should we be expanding our growth area and maybe are there areas that we should be potentially pulling it back if if we don't think that they're ever going to come in um so we're in conversations with watch County about those things as well say like is it you know canaries become lams in the unincorporated area and not be part of a growth area um trying to better understand what the what the implications are for those kinds of [Music] things any more questions specific to like this this slide was one of the ones we were really Keen to get in front of of you guys um the idea of the specifically the the R1 zones and having whether whether it makes sense for Bellingham to be talking about a minimum density that applies across the city for what today are are residential single zones but in the future would would have um middle housing where every lot could do four up to four units and then in some cases you could do up to six if you did affordability as a component of it um are there other differences between 1 two and three besides the density number I'm thinking along the lines of setbacks parking requirements open SP like all the other thingsit count that's a great

point there was a again we need 10 more slides but yeah there are um and we can come back with some of that as well some additional detail but there are certainly between what today is our residential single development code and the residential multicode that would be largely like that R2 and R3 there are different requirements ments for those different housing forms for things like setbacks and parking and um different things happen depending on um how many units you're producing uh as far as like uh completing Street Frontage elements if they're not in place like K about CB Gutter and sidewalk kinds of things um different storm water treatment thresholds there's a whole variety of of different standards that come into play between the residential multi and single forms um and that's where um spending some time looking at like the the infill tool kit which has its own set of standards that are kind of in that middle space if you could imagine which makes sense they're kind of between the the residential multi and the residential single zoning um they have their own kind of set of requirements depending on which of the housing forms you're looking at um so when you map the current zones onto this or are thinking of doing it have you analyzed the potential net unit count from existing built areas and was that was that incorporated into some of the chart the tables of units in the projecting future yeah so so those those kind of net gain net gain if you will um that table

there's their Baseline capacity and that one that showed you know additional like with 1110 another during the planning period 1,200 I think some units and then what the different pieces would would allow um yeah that that's all part of the land land Capacity Analysis looking at okay which for instance um the utilization of the infill tool kit assuming like a 50% bump so we we kind of road test that with some spatial analysis where we look at our parcel layer and we say how many single family detached homes do we have on Lots in just in the city limits today that don't already have an Adu where it's just a home on a lot um and there's there's about 17,000 of those in Bellingham and then you know then we start peeling things off and saying how many of those are um are uh if we look at the building footprint on the property because we have a building Footprints layer how many of those have uh less than 35% of the total partial areas consumed by the building footprint so that we're not if we add a unit or two we're not bumping up against Lot coverage thresholds that we currently have on our code like the 70 I think it's 70% lot coverage that's allowed and then how many of those are on a street where you've got at least a 4in water man that would support additional fire flow for units on any given block and they have a a sewer man in front of them and an imp a street with a sidewalk on at least one side kind of thing so we start to look at those and we get that down to us you

know it it starts to peel things off pretty quickly um and then we looked at at of that subset of lots how many had because we have a canopy cover layer not looking at Landmark trees but just tree cover in general we said how many are less than 25% covered by some kind of tree canopy just saying like it's going to be easier to get ones on there and there's there's between three and 4,000 single family lots again without adus that are in you know of a sufficient size relative to the building where you could fit additional homes on them on a street with with Frontage improvements um and with you know 25% or less tree canopy covers so there's kind of ticking enough boxes where it's like these are likely to be easier to develop with middle housing forms than lots that don't have these characteristics so that's where we you know we say okay well between three and 4,000 lots and then if you know if we assumed you know um a percentage of those were to develop say 20% or something like that and then of those that's kind of like I talked about some are just going to do one unit two a few are going to do more than that but not that many and it's it's pretty easy to get to the numbers we're talking about where you talk about like you know 1100 to, units over the planning period so that was kind of the kind of the the behind the scenes math that we do to kind of verify like we think based on production numbers this is kind of the bump we would see reasonably and then does the land do we

have enough land to support that and so it's you know it was pretty clear that yeah we've got enough Parcels to support that that are like I said meeting enough of those kind of infrastructure pieces where and have enough space on them where people could do that um again it's all it's all an exercise we don't know what the people Liv in those units today what their preferences are um financially or otherwise um but um but we just you know we have verified that yeah certainly we have enough places where people could fit additional housing units and then it's just a question of like I said which ones are the ones where it's physically looks much easier based on available infrastructure and and things like tree cover not being you know over an entire lot the thing I'm wondering looking at the map so it it's great great to see the three or four zones consolidating for consistency between all the different um development regulations it it seems like we're mapping today's zoning Patchwork of very arbitrary lines onto a new s simplified but still quite arbitrary coloring uh the quilt work um and there's some zones I see that are low that are still like in the city core sandwiched between urban Villages oldest housing stock used to be zoned multi got down zoned the built environment is largely duplexed and single family mix are there opportunities to look at the map and and translate not just the current zoning but the current built environment or other opportunity factors sure yeah

we could factors but does going from one to two in a built environment yield net increase in units like that's what that's what I'm not sure about if it's even worth yeah no we can do that the other thing I would do is let me pull up the this version of the map so this here you're seeing that kind of changes in color on the map and you're also seeing those those quarter mile walk distance to Transit areas which cover a lot of those places you're talking about so those would be potential areas where we could um you know areas that we're showing on the the map absent Transit oriented development were showing a change from like residential single to to R1 for instance but when you overlay the transitor development there'd be a subset of those areas where we would have again this follow-up planning process where we'd say hey this area has um historically been zoned residential single it's largely built out today um the lot sizes are what they are um but it's within a quarter mile walk distance of a goal line and so that then becomes one of those priority growth areas and so then we'd start to look at are there ways that we could we could look at the the Zoning for those areas and come up with um some kind of new zoning scheme and that's that that kind of R4 idea of what what would that look like in any given piece of that Corridor on the green line or the Gold Line or the other ones um and it's probably going to be different context is going to be different in each of those

corridors but what would be the the you know we would go through a process and we would look at the existing uses we'd look at you know does it make sense to do something on the blocks that immediately face those routes and then maybe on the blocks that are behind those or behind those have like a you know a variety of um either you know regulating Things based on floor area ratio maybe on the line itself and then in the areas behind um maybe it is just House Bill 1110 that applies but maybe we provide incentives so that maybe more owners in those areas are are inspired to to redevelop with with um you know four units per lot or three units per lot or or maybe even just adding one unit um but if you get enough then it would you'd start to get some of those critical numbers that WTA needs to have a successful uh frequent Transit line operating and then you could have the support for those more um a wider variety of destinations along those routes for businesses and things so um it's kind of a generating an ecosystem that would support that environment right I always I always think of the I've seen Maps here before of like sort of overlays of of different amenities in the city be it Parks education jobs Grocery Stores um and like those are all what I think of as it's like if we allow proximity access to those opportunities like that's helping lift people up by giving uh a fair access to the nicer things in our community Community this starts to get a little bit at that like the

Tod isn't a perfect mapping but it starts like often we have Transit on areas that have interesting things going on Commercial centers jobs schools um and so this starts to make the first map address some of those concerns I had yeah yeah I think that's important to look at them together and that's why we feel like especially this this time around for this plan update that that's probably it probably is time to look at Trends and oriented development as you know taking those those policies we have in the current plan and really moving forward with them and and having um you know developing code amendments that reflect that as we go forward so yeah I don't want to take too much more of your time I think we're trying to stick to two hours tonight but um are there any other final comments yeah I mean I guess just on the R1 areas it I I feel like that area those the the differences between the parts of that zoning are so varied across you know where you are that to me it seems like that there would be varying density requirements based on the location of those r1s you know and you know maybe it's not minimum lot size but both minimum and maximum you know kind of like you know controlling both both sides of it because I it seems like in some spots you you won't have the infrastructure you won't have the roads you won't have all the things that you need to support a certain level of density whereas in you know other parts it's already pretty dense and you could almost even you know

I mean you could obviously make it more dense by allowing those um you know missing middle types of housing but um yeah to me I'm like I'm not sure that there's a one siiz fits R1 kind of scenario yeah and that's where I I I I understand what you're saying it's um it is tricky to to figure out ath path forward where we can fully Implement House Bill 1110 and also maintain the wide variety of residential single they would not be residential single anymore but those residential sub areas that are embedded in that old scheme um and that's why we're suggesting going going forward with something that's simpler from the from this simpler for everybody to understand for for property owners and for the city to administer in in a more fair and then really importantly in an equitable way as we go forward because that's a key part of how we need to do things moving forward is is have it be as Equitable as possible um the requirements for infrastructure and related elements those are those would still remain just uh that's that's part of our existing city-wide standards roads would still need to be built sidewalks would need to be extended where Frontage improvements are required um our parks department still has their level of service that they operate on that their their plans as they roll forward would continue to be updated with those as different parts of the city become more populated um so all of those pieces would continue um and also the you know the different uh other

infrastructure you know water sewer the the bicycle and pedestrian Master plans all of those would continue to flex and evolve as the city grows um and importantly the the land use map we would be approving would be keyed into those so they all are they're all adopted in the same same comprehensive plan the Bellingham plan would include all of that so um yeah so it's it's but you're right it's it's a big change I mean it's going to you know from over a hundred different types of residential zoning to you know four or five flavors of residential zoning is a big change um it's something that we feel is you know whether we can get there in one plan or if if if we get at least partway there with this exercise we feel like is the direction we need to go in to make it as easy as possible to get the housing that our community needs so it's it's part of that simplifying and making it all more more predictable um and and uh importantly that Equity piece making sure that it's it's not different in one neighborhood versus another that we kind of have the same lens whe whether we're approving a a form of housing in one corner or another of the city you brought up the equity part so I brought up before and I I emailed you this week the the amount of housing we need for our lowest income uh residents is 75% of our total housing stock needs for anyone below 100% Ami just having equity in Balance across the map doesn't really get us there I I'm hoping that we can you always have the

conversation that what do we do to be able to make sure that uh the housing for the lowest income the workforce housing actually is a part of this because it is 75% of our total housing stock need and if we're not always talking about how do we actually get the housing stock for those folks then none of the housing stock really matters so so so that's a big part of the the when we bring the the housing chapter discussion forward this is this is this is growth strategy it's largely keyed into the land use map it's it's you know the other side of the map so to speak it's all connected is that housing um the the house bill 1220 conversation about planning for housing by income and that's where we take these numbers we've been talking about total housing units capacity and is the boundary correct and the zoning types correct to support the numbers and then that next piece of the conversation is what are the income bands we think these housing for what's the mix of housing forms we think will land in each Zone based on what we're estimating growth will be what are the what are the income levels we we think for market rate houses in those forms what are we think the income bands that will be able to access the housing forms at market rate and then what are the ones where we would need to go further and either subsidized or have um things like the multif family tax exemption or other incentives to get those those um uh you know to to go below the market rate and have projects

support that and and that's a conversation we're we're going to be bringing to you um in late September we're scheduled to go to um city council late September early October um with the the multif family tax exemption report and kind of the next steps for that we'll come to you after that with that same information and give you a full brief on it and let you know kind of what what we've learned from that and that informs this exactly what you're talking about that informs this discussion of what does the market currently support and what would be um follow-up code amendments that we would that we would um propose that could um move us forward in that way and get us because we do have that that piece we have to do to be compliant with the the state's requirements for the Plan update to say here's the supply and of that these are the income bands the state says we need to meet based on our current economic uh condition as a community and the households we have and then going forward how do we how do we provide housing for the people that need it who are already here who don't can't afford what they're in and then also for the new growth what's the percentage that need to be in that that below 100% Ami or below 80% Ami category so that's all that's all coming and that's um in particular with the housing chapter the housing chapter this time will be um again we're streamlining the document the housing chapter will look dramatically different just because of that piece alone it

will have that that anal analysis and the the implications or the the kind of like path forward what that will look like that sounds really good I also wanted to mention during the WTA presentation and I I want to applaud WTA they've done an amazing job with with the community that they have but I found that during their uh proposal or their report of what they have currently and what they're proposing for the future that a lot of times it's about where they pick people up but we're lacking the destination for the person who must use the bus uh the lower income uh Workforce folks and often it's not where they're going where they want to go the destination is not a part of the bus plan it'll pick them up and this will pick them up also because their housing will be near the bus but the destination really isn't there and I think that's a missing part of it that I'd hope that the city and WTA can start finding ways of making sure that families and households can get to where they want to go on the bus not just get picked up I don't know if that's been discussed okay so I think you're you're describing like the differences between their can I get to a doctor's office can I get to a piano lesson can I get to the grocery store and then also get home but I can get picked up but I can't quite get to the grocery store I want to get to I can't get to my piano lesson I can't get to the doctor's office because the bus routes are based on getting from one bus hub to another bus hub and

getting there with the largest essentially the largest Road possible it seems like and I could be wrong about this but this is what I saw and sometimes there's other parts of the city where everything else is and that's what's lacking and I know it's an impossible task to put those smaller blood vessels out in smaller communities but that's where the destinations are and that's what's going to make it a solution that works for everyone to be picked up a quarter mile from the bus stop but also to be dropped off nearby also I think that's probably something we just need to be in more like more dialogue like what we did a couple weeks ago with them or last month um to do exactly what you're talking about to kind of have those conversations about there's the goal lines but then there's the other service lines and understanding that WTA has their different priorities for how they their how did they describe it their coverage versus their um the the higher frequency network but to make sure that those are addressing the parts of our community where where we feel like there is the the need for like you said those destinations for people so yeah I think there's more more come in that and I think our hope is that going forward that as this plan once this plan is approved that there is a um a very intentional relationship that I mean we've we've always had a great relationship with WTA but that we that we have that go even further and that we're just more shoulder-to-shoulder as we

move forward to make sure that those conversations are always happening so that we as development progresses and as zoning changes are considered WTA is always part of the conversation thanks yeah um I wanted to double check if Russ was on I don't see him on my screen but um someone asked the question came up if Russ is on Zoom I don't think he is if you wanted to weigh in I've got control of the zoom now so Russ if you're there we want to make sure you had a chance to weigh in okay that's what I saw I just want to double check okay um so we'll be back here in two weeks yes on the the 19th and we will be talking about um we're going to get a the the agenda will be posted soon we're still resolving a couple of issues we hope to have it out by if not tomorrow then then early next week um we'll be talking about the document design and kind of the layout and look and feel of what we feel like the plan will be so you get a sense of sort of level of detail and then um we are hoping to introduce um some more discussion of the some of like what what Scott what you were just talking about some of the transit related and the implications for Transit planning and what that might might do with the land use map and related topics so not 100% sure we'll get that on the agenda but that's what we're aiming for so um there's just a a lot of things we're trying to get lined up in the right way so um yeah so look for that agenda soon the other thing I wanted to mention was we had talked

tentatively after that Transportation Commission meeting that we we jointly did about shifting um keeping this as as your meeting space but the idea of meeting at 6: p.m. instead of 7 you all seem to be relatively open to that idea um we're the only you guys are the only commission that meets that late um it would involve me uh we would circulate uh an amended copy of the bylaws for you to review before uh the meeting and then you could vote at the next meeting to approve that if you so chose and then the first meeting in October would be at 6 p.m.

time slot so I'll I'll get that out for your consideration and you can take action on that at the next meeting if you like I said if you choose to do that so um I think that was the only other business item that we had so there's nothing else I think that's it okay um sounds great we'll adjourn and we'll see you in two weeks