A debate is playing out in Bellingham over the city's recent decision to permanently eliminate minimum parking requirements for new developments, and the conversation is drawing pointed responses from residents on both sides. Two community voices published in the Salish Current on August 14 offer a window into how Bellingham residents are thinking about housing, transportation, neighborhood character, and what kind of city they want to live in.
The debate was triggered by an earlier opinion piece by Taimi Dunn Gorman arguing that removing parking minimums would harm Bellingham residents, particularly seniors and families who depend on cars. The two responses published this week push back on that framing in different ways, reflecting the genuine complexity of a policy change that touches nearly every aspect of how Bellingham grows and functions.
The Case for Removing Parking Minimums
Sara Gould, a Bellingham resident who commutes by bike, argues that the framing of parking minimums as a protection for vulnerable residents actually gets the question backward. She draws on the example of Amsterdam, which in the 1970s faced the same pressures as American cities to widen streets and build more parking, before a wave of traffic deaths led residents to demand a different approach. The result, she argues, is a city that is more livable precisely because it was redesigned around people rather than vehicles.
Gould makes a personal case through her mother, a senior who walks to the grocery store and the doctor and who is renting in Fairhaven because there is nothing affordable for her to buy in town. For that resident, the ability to get places without a car is not a lifestyle preference but a form of independence. Gould contends that housing built in walkable locations, close to services and transit, serves seniors and families better than the alternative of sprawl that requires a car for every trip.
She also invokes the concept of "viciniamicus," a term coined by friendship researcher Kat Vellos of Better Places Studio, to describe the local friendships and connections that make a place feel like home. Vellos emphasizes that walkable neighborhood design is not just convenient but functions as the actual infrastructure for those connections, the chance of running into a neighbor on foot, the mix of shops and residences that creates a living street rather than a dead one. Gould cites Sunnyland, with its walkable access to Trader Joe's, as an example of what Bellingham already does well and could do more of.
The Case Against Eliminating Parking Requirements
Karen LeAnn McKay takes a different view. She agrees with Gorman's original argument that the city's elimination of parking requirements benefits developers more than residents, and she challenges the assumption that Bellingham's residents are ready to live without cars. Everyone she knows in Bellingham, she writes, owns at least one car, including the most committed bike riders. And those cars need to be parked somewhere.
McKay also points to a gap that transit advocates sometimes underweight: Bellingham is a city where buses serve many but not all destinations. There is no public transit to trailheads, she notes, and the outdoor attractions that draw residents and visitors to Whatcom County require a car to reach. Eliminating parking minimums in new developments does not make those destinations more accessible; it just shifts the parking burden onto surrounding streets and neighborhoods.
Her concern is not with walkability as an idea but with the practical realities of a city that has not yet built the transit infrastructure that would make car-free or car-light living viable for most residents. Removing parking requirements before that infrastructure exists, she argues, serves developers who can build cheaper without parking structures while leaving residents to compete for an increasingly scarce supply of street spaces.
A Policy Already in Place, a Debate Still Unresolved
The Bellingham City Council gave final approval to permanently eliminate minimum parking requirements for new developments in August 2026, ending a provisional policy that had been in place for a trial period. The decision puts Bellingham alongside a small but growing number of American cities that have moved away from mandatory parking minimums, including many in Oregon and California following statewide policy changes.
The research on parking minimums is fairly consistent: they drive up construction costs, reduce housing density, and incentivize car use by ensuring that parking is available and free at every destination. Cities that have removed them, particularly those with strong transit networks and walkable cores, have generally seen more housing built with less parking than required, suggesting that developers and residents alike are responding to market signals rather than regulatory mandates.
What the research cannot resolve is the transition question, how a city gets from a car-dependent present to a walkable future without leaving current residents, particularly those who are older, disabled, or live outside the walkable core, worse off in the short term. That is the tension at the heart of the Bellingham debate, and it is unlikely to be resolved by any single policy decision.
For residents who want to follow this conversation, the Salish Current has been publishing responses as community voices come in, and the Salish Current community journalism site covers civic topics across Whatcom, Skagit, and San Juan counties. The City of Bellingham Planning Department is the agency responsible for implementing the new parking policy and can provide information on how it will apply to specific development applications going forward. For context on the council vote that made this permanent, check out coverage of that decision from earlier this month.
