Infill, Sprawl, and Neighborhoods
"Put simply, there are no where near enough public green spaces in the northern half of our city, and this unfair inequality must be fixed."
Bellingham officials have been trying to develop a means to promote
more infill within city limits. One part of their solution has been
the creation of the infill toolkit, creating nine new housing types to
be built in the city. Do you support the infill toolkit? Why or why
not? Where should use be allowed?
Citizens of Bellingham overwhelmingly support limiting sprawl, because
we love the character of our city and county and we value and want to
protect our lifestyles. I support infill because it's one way that we
can create attractive and affordable places to live, work and play
within our established neighborhoods and within our city limits,
without the need for urbanizing rural areas around us.
I believe each of the proposed Toolkit housing types is a good idea,
when done in the right place. Most of these types already exist in
Bellingham, so we already have some "test cases" to learn from. A
one-size-fits-all approach will not work. We need to bring citizens
inside the planning process because neighborhoods know when and where
infill will work best in their neighborhoods.
It is important we respect the character of our existing single family
neighborhoods, in part by complementing them with nearby multifamily
and transitional areas where the Toolkit may work well. In my view,
multi-story, mixed-use development in urban villages, downtown, and in
the new Waterfront District have the potential to create far more new
residences, and to do so in a way that is both "dense" and attractive.
As I see it, the Infill Toolkit is only a piece of a comprehensive
infill strategy, not the entire answer.
What defines neighborhood character? What do you believe the city is
trying to achieve with things like the infill toolkit just adopted by
council? Is that going to be a tool that works?
The concerns I’ve heard about preserving neighborhood character are
actually surprisingly easy to address. The main issue has to do with
the difference between single-family areas and multifamily
areas. If, for example, there was specification that were
single-family-type housing models in the toolkit and only those would
be allowed into single-family areas after a comprehensive review
process, and
that multi-family types—such as townhouses and triplexes—simply
wouldn’t be allowed in a single-family area. In contrast, in
multi-family areas, it may not be the wisest thing for us to use many
of these single-family types because they will undershoot the possible
densities we could achieve otherwise.