Thanks, Dick Conoboy, for your diligence in such tracking and reporting. If we are to remain strong as “We The People”, there has to be much more of this kind of community action. (Yeah, thanks also to John Servais, for so many years of this.)

So, if this specific case is closed, permit me to take a swing at the broader question within which it rests. (No, not City building permits, though that is often a concern.)

Dear Public;
If you are 60-years old or more, think about the dorms for university students “back in your days”. I was Class of ‘58, and the vast majority at my college lived in dorms on campus.  And we see at least a half-dozen student dorms on-campus here at WWU.

But when was the last campus dorm built? Has the shift to commercial residences been a good thing? What has prompted/supported that?

Is it symptomatic of some major shift in the roles of governments, education, and—gee whiz!—commercialization of our culture?

Just askin’.

Marian B

Marian,

WWU decided to get out of the dorm business in the 1970s and left it to the city of Bellingham to provide for university students.  WWU now has room for about 4,000 students in their on-campus dorms but it struggles to keep its rooms filled and finds a vacancy rate of about 8-15% in the spring when the freshmen dorm residents get an itch for the life of freedom that calls from the rentals in town. 

Up to the present,  a good deal of the slack has been taken up by landlords by stuffing single family homes with as many renters as possible which jacks up the monthly rent to levels that cannot be met by families who are priced out of the market.  Seeing a quick buck to be made, single family homeowners clandestinely convert basements and garages in to accessory dwelling units without permits and without registration causing older, establish neighborhoods to be come overcrowded with the resultant cars, litter, noise, blight and reduced property values.

Now we are seeing real estate investment trusts trying to game the problem for profit.  Go no further than the attempt to stuff a housing complex of almost 600 students into the Puget Neighborhood at University Ridge.  The now-defunct Campus View apartments on Lincoln street was also an attempt to lure students into these mini-country clubs for those who can afford to pay.  Rents of $650 and up to share an apartment with three other students or more in the case of a two bedroom unit.  This is not affordable housing but an effort to skim off the well-off students and let the remainder rot in housing that the city is having trouble deciding to develop a program to inspect for health and safety.

Spot rezones, such as Area 9 and Ashley St.in the Puget Neighborhood,  to allow for the building of apartments are approved for docketing with no guarantee from the developer that anything close to affordable housing will be built. 

Now the city is looking to increase density by expanding the zones within which the infamous Infill Took Kit can be used.  No developer has touched this tool kit since it was foisted on the public by former Planning Director Tim Stewart who then fled his job to greener pastures. The public was assured that this tool kit was not to be used in single family zoned areas but guess what the city wants to do now?