The numbers are familiar by now: a family of four earning the county’s median income of about $106,000 can reasonably afford a home around $318,000. Yet the typical house in Bellingham sells for nearly twice that, and prices in Ferndale, Lynden, and Blaine are not far behind. In the first installment of this series, builder advocate Perry Eskridge argued that decades of tight land-supply restrictions under the Growth Management Act have created an artificial scarcity that drives those prices higher and pushes working families farther out.
This second piece turns to the other side of the table. Kaylee Galloway, the 2025 Whatcom County Council Chair and the elected representative for District 1 (South Bellingham, Fairhaven, and Happy Valley), spent years in legislative offices in Olympia and Washington, D.C., before winning her council seat in 2021. She is a co-author of the county’s Climate Action Plan, chairs the Climate Action and Natural Resources Committee, and has pushed for denser development inside existing urban areas while protecting farmland and forests.
I asked her the same opening question I’ve asked everyone in this series: How do you define housing affordability?
“Well, simply, it’s people, regardless of their sort of economic status or place in life, would have access to a place to call home that meets their needs,” Galloway said. “And I think I’m excited for the interview to kind of explore what this sort of different housing types for different people, what that looks like in the county.”
She sees the county’s job through two big buckets: land-use planning and human services.
On land use, Galloway pointed to the comprehensive plan update currently in front of the council. “There will be a housing element in that,” she said. “It has not yet come before Council, but I should hear the next month or so, and that is really going to be focusing on our land-use policies and zoning and urban growth areas, and really thinking about, how are we making sure that housing across all economic segments is being met right? That includes shelter, that includes permanent supportive housing, all the way up to affordable housing… all the way up to market rate.”
Like Eskridge, she acknowledges the Growth Management Act’s original intent, to keep rural areas rural and concentrate growth where sewers, water lines, and roads already exist, but she also sees why the system has produced bottlenecks.
“One of the intentions of the Growth Management Act was to drive growth into cities or urban areas,” she explained. “On one hand, that’s sort of a more efficient way to grow, a less resource-intensive way to grow, right, like you’re minimizing conversion of ag land or forest land… And the infrastructure expenses of urbanizing or maintaining rural infrastructure, you know, those are very sort of different conversations and ones that we’re grappling with.”
The rub, she says, is cost. “It’s wildly expensive to develop infrastructure, public infrastructure,” Galloway told me. “And so what we’re finding is that it’s not economical for cities to incorporate.” She cited Blaine’s recent de-annexation of a large residential area because the city simply could not afford to extend sewer and water.
When builders argue there is plenty of land inside existing urban growth areas that could be developed tomorrow if only the red tape were cut, Galloway doesn’t entirely disagree, but she adds layers.
“When you dig that layer deeper and start to actually look at the land that they’re claiming capacity, there’s a lot of barriers to some of that land,” she said. Wetlands, steep slopes, missing sewer connections, and critical-area ordinances all shrink the buildable acreage. “If you’re still proposing one unit per 12,000-square-foot parcel, you’re not getting to urban levels of density,” she noted about some past proposals.
Permitting delays are another frequent complaint from the development community. Galloway, who worked on Senate Bill 5290 to speed up review timelines statewide, is blunt about the county’s own staffing shortages.
“We do lack staff capacity,” she acknowledged. “Planning and Development Services has been chronically underfunded since the 2008 recession… We’re competing for general-fund dollars with the prosecutor’s office, with public defense, with law enforcement.” The county has begun rolling out online permitting and tracking software, but she admits the system is still catching up.
On the human-services side, Galloway is proud of recent progress. “One of the biggest policy shifts that I’ve sort of catalyzed… has been investment in shelter services,” she said. From severe-weather openings to longer-term tiny-home villages, the county is trying to move people out of encampments and into places where case managers can connect them to treatment and housing.
“You talk to the people who live there, and they are getting back on their feet, and they’re happy, and they’re finding community,” she said.
Most state and federal dollars are restricted to households earning 50-60% of area median income, but Galloway highlighted a local tool, the Economic Development Investment Fund, that can finance projects up to 120% AMI. “That’s where we get more into the community land-trust model, like the affordable home-ownership models,” she explained. “This is really kind of just another way of thinking about workforce housing.”
Galloway herself bought her first home in her mid-30s after years of renting and side jobs. “This current slash next generation, it’s just different than what our parents experienced,” she said. She supports accessory dwelling units that let adult children move back home or aging parents stay close. “Maybe parents are able to build ADUs and their kids are able to move home, or their parents are able to age in place.”
She often returns to a memory of living in Washington, D.C.: walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods where row houses sat next to corner stores and metro stops. “It was all just so there… dense, accessible,” she recalled. She knows rural Whatcom will never look like the District, but believes Bellingham, Ferndndale, and other cities can borrow some of those principles.
Galloway grew up in what she calls a “bipartisan family” and says that experience taught her to look for overlap rather than division. “We really need to leave some of the nasty politics at the door and really start building answers together,” she urged.
No one I’ve interviewed, from builders to council members, claims there is a single fix. Land-supply advocates want more acres opened up. Density advocates want taller buildings and fewer parking lots inside the areas we already have. Galloway sits near the middle of that spectrum: skeptical of sprawling outward, yet aware that the current rules have produced real pain for teachers, nurses, young families, and retirees.
“Our duty [is] to make sure our children and their children have land and have opportunity and have jobs and all the things that make this community work,” she said.
Whether the county ultimately adds more urban growth area, removes more permitting hurdles, funds more shelters, or all of the above, Galloway believes the conversation itself is healthy.
“I think among all of us there’s a shared value of wanting people to be able to live here and raise their families here,” she concluded.
The next installments in this series will talk to city planners, economists, and residents who have been priced out, to see where the common ground Galloway hopes for actually exists, and where the trade-offs remain hardest.
Greg Thames is a Citizen Reporter at BMN, For tips, email [email protected]
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