Southside Under Growth Pressure: Is Fairhaven Bellingham’s Guernica?

David Carlsen has lived and worked in Fairhaven since 1989.

The Bellingham Planning Department has scheduled a public presentation addressing Southside growth at Fairhaven Middle School on April 6.

Southsiders have recently seen a shadow falling over Fairhaven, covering a thriving and liveable community under a curtain of unbridled large-scale development. The city of Bellingham administration is eagerly transforming the existing urban environment, “massing residential density” in “Urban Villages.” Forging ahead without an up-to-date plan and short-circuiting regulatory convention, the noble experiment has already failed in Fairhaven, drastically reducing stability and quality of life in Southside neighborhoods.

The invisible hand of market force disregards the historic character, human scale, sense of place and experience of community that made Fairhaven special. The market also disregards conventional standards for facility and infrastructure performance. With the approval of elected officials, city staff have fostered and encouraged exploitation of land in the area, voluntarily relinquishing municipal regulatory powers and surrendering evaluative criteria.

Southside residents, including members and officers of five area neighborhood associations, recently formed the Southside Coalition to address the rapidly decreasing quality of life and potential irreversible harm threatened in an underplanned, underregulated environment. The coalition recognizes that coordinated development is imperative for preserving quality of life in the neighborhoods. The growing membership organizes information of mutual concern for distribution within the neighborhood association network and appropriate public forums and media. The Southside Coalition meets at 7 p.m. on the third Wednesday of each month in the Fairhaven Library.

The coalition is actively studying:

•The explosion of development in Fairhaven.

•The necessary ingredients for successful high-density urban village implementation.

•The proposed developments of Chuckanut Ridge and Padden Gorge.

•The impact of high-density infill on area transportation systems and access.

Neighborhood associations and Southside Coalition participants are requesting that city officials and staff take action to assure reasonable standards are maintained during this explosion of development activity.

These actions include:

•The creation of an updated Fairhaven neighborhood plan.

•A limitation or freeze on project applications reliant on the 1994 Fairhaven parking district or dependent upon the creation of new parking districts.

•A limitation or freeze on applications accepted for larger projects (20 or more units).

•Completion of a long promised area traffic survey.

•Restoration of neighborhood-based planning to the Comprehensive Plan.

These requests are based upon a pattern of cumulative area impacts that have suddenly occurred in a new planning environment that’s heading in the wrong direction. Features of the new planning environment include:

•A series of presentations about “massing urban density” instead of a GMA (Growth Management Act) compliant public participation program.

•Elimination of neighborhood-based planning, actually required in Municipal Code Title 20.04.030.

•Advancement of broad land use reforms, originated by the city of Bellingham administration without neighborhood involvement, acting inconsistently with state law, city code and civic principle.

At the March coalition meeting, a representative of “Responsible Development!” discussed Chuckanut Ridge, citing plans for 739 dwellings inside 85 presently forested acres near Fairhaven Park and unveiling the organization’s OneHundredAcreWood.org Web site. Some neighbors find it unfortunate that “massed residential density” in Fairhaven has not prevented the need for sprawling Chuckanut Ridge development one-half mile distant. Neighbors now feel that city planning fails to adequately address the confluence of impacts from these large, new population centers on the Southside.

Regular visitors to Fairhaven will not fail to notice a recent increase in the number of new Fairhaven buildings possessing uncharacteristic scale and bulk. Plainly monolithic, these new buildings are not particularly intimate or monumental in demeanor. Applications are pouring into the Bellingham Planning Department to create many more like them. At least seven large-scale (25-100 unit) projects are receiving application review or are under construction in Fairhaven today. Several smaller projects are concurrently under development.

The Grimes Report, accepted by the City Council in 2004, outlines a community-planning framework utilizing a ‘High Density Urban Village’ (HDUV) model to promote a compact urban form and preserve scarce resources. Fairhaven is identified in the report as the blueprint for the creation of master-plans for HDUVs in 23 additional Bellingham locations.

Unfortunately, no HDUV master plan exists for Fairhaven. The high-density residential environment now under implementation is not anticipated in the existing Fairhaven plan, and Southside neighborhood associations have been urgently requesting that city officials create an updated Fairhaven Neighborhood Plan reflecting HDUV principles.

Fairhaven development has been guided, until now, by an obsolete neighborhood plan created in 1980. Like all Bellingham neighborhood plans, the Fairhaven plan was stripped of its regulatory authority by the City Council in 2004, after city staff realized that they could not meaningfully engage citizens in HDUV design and meet already long-overdue state deadlines for an updated plan.

The City Council adopted recommendations to eliminate the regulatory force and effect of Bellingham neighborhood plans. The recommendations were commissioned and presented in a report provided by the law firm Preston, Gates, & Ellis. The firm is one of the largest lobbying organizations in the world.

The Fairhaven neighborhood had fewer than 200 dwellings when the neighborhood plan was written in 1980. Small-scale residential infill brought that number to about 400 by year 2000. The Grimes report recommends an additional 450-550 dwellings, HDUV formatted, for the 20-year horizon. About 400 of these dwellings are presently under construction or in application. Many vacant lots remain available for further development. The market’s “invisible hand” will undoubtedly find older single story structures throughout Fairhaven attractive candidates for replacement with new, larger buildings.

The council’s actions are fraught with contradictions. Contrary to the Preston, Gates, & Ellis suggestions, the first recommendation of the Grimes report, also accepted by the City Council in 2004, is “updated neighborhood plans to reflect GMA (Growth Management Act) requirements and changes in the city’s planning policies.”

Indeed, Bellingham’s land use code declares in its statement of purpose: “In utilizing the comprehensive neighborhood plans as a basis of land use implementation, it is recognized that Bellingham is made of many unique and diverse areas each with its own characteristics, and further it is recognized that to treat these areas uniformly—on a city wide basis—would not conserve or encourage those peculiarities which distinguish Bellingham from other communities.” §