Bellingham Housing Co-op Resource Center

https://www.theurbanist.org/2024/04/24/phinney-ridge-apartment-complex/

Phinney Ridge Apartment Complex Pioneers Unique Communal Model - The Urbanist Delivering 35 new family-sized homes, Shared Roof features a unique financing model catering to a range of incomes, built-in community, and hip cafes spilling into a public courtyard. Is the model replicable? The developer thinks so.

An unused plot of city-owned land near downtown Bellingham could be the site of an affordable homeownership project being proposed as a way to address local housing concerns and bridge the affordability gap.

A Bellingham-based company, Madrona Community Development, sent a memo to the city in July detailing its proposal to redevelop the public land on the corner of C Street and Halleck Street across from the Municipal Court in the Lettered Streets Neighborhood.

“The basic idea is the reuse of underutilized, publicly-owned property taking into account what the community needs and what the neighborhood needs but not just sitting on property that could be doing better, doing more, doing good,” Madrona Managing Director Paul Schissler said.

The project would include permanently affordable apartment units available for purchase on the upper levels of the development. The street level of the development would feature non-residential, neighborhood-oriented space.

Read more at:

Affordable homeownership project proposed on city-owned land in Bellingham The proposal suggests the reuse of underutilized property to build cooperative-owned apartments.

https://www.bizjournals.com/portland/news/2022/08/15/creating-paths-to-affordable-housing-in-oregon.html

Creating new paths to affordable housing and home ownership in Oregon - Portland Business Journal In 2022, Oregon Community Foundation is helping to drive several diverse, innovative and potentially scalable solutions to the state’s homelessness and housing crisis by providing critical early-stage support and leadership.

The City of Bellingham has a survey about housing equity that includes a question about limited-equity housing coops! Please take a few minutes to fill out the survey and let the city know that housing coops can be an important part of the affordability solution in Bellingham! https://engagebellingham.org/cp-equity/survey_tools/https-www-surveymonkey-com-r-housingequity-cob

"Co-operatives are a cost-effective, proven way to create stable, affordable housing, but we aren’t supporting them." https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2022/04/19/Co-op-Solution-Housing-Crisis/

A Co-op Solution to the Housing Crisis | The Tyee Co-operatives are a cost-effective, proven way to create stable, affordable housing, but we aren’t supporting them.

https://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/article257745618.html

These new homes are first in Pierce County to be ‘permanently affordable’ under new model U.S. Rep. Derek Kilmer visited the new development in Fern Hill last week.

We can learn a lot about building co-ops from Vancouver, BC:

Vancouver Needs Way More Co-ops. Here’s How to Get Them | The Tyee The key lies in policies that skew the price of land to favour this affordable housing option.

Fascinating video about affordable housing in Vienna

Vienna's Radical Idea? Affordable Housing For All As cities around the world grapple with a crisis of affordable housing, Vienna has been keeping it at bay. How the Austrian capital got there may offer a mod...

What a beautiful building! Collectively-built, self-developed, mixed-use, multi-generational, what's not to love? Also note this is not in some big city, it's in Tübingen, Germany, a small university town with about 90,000 people. Sound familiar, Bellingham?

wohnBAUMoffensive on Twitter “if homes like this are illegal in most of your city, is it any wonder there is a housing crisis?”

Land value capture defined: Land value capture is a policy approach that enables communities to recover and reinvest land value increases that result from public investment and other government actions.

Land value capture makes more sense than the current, broken system that makes homes and land unaffordable for over half of us who live or work in Whatcom.

Please join me in learning more about this. Thank you.

Paul Schissler
Community development planner
Independent contractor

Much to be thankful for, much to be thankful for in the future, if all goes well.

For your consideration, much to be thankful for in the information about Land Value Capture presented by a panel at the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy in late October. The one-hour program is now on YouTube under the title, Planning and Financing Sustainable and Equitable Cities: Global Views on Land Value Capture

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5y5utfUiKU

Thanks in advance if you can take time to view this.

Planning and Financing Sustainable and Equitable Cities(75th Anniversary Lincoln Institute Dialogue) Planning and Financing Sustainable and Equitable Cities: Global Views on Land Value CaptureA 75th Anniversary Lincoln Institute DialogueLand value capture is...