Ferndale, Washington, a working-class city north of Bellingham that has felt the full force of the region's housing crunch, is on the verge of gaining 46 new homes that will stay affordable not for a generation but permanently.
Kulshan Community Land Trust, a Bellingham-based nonprofit that has been building attainable homeownership in Whatcom County since 1999, is moving forward with Thornton Village, a single-family neighborhood on a vacant parcel at 2039 Thornton Street. The project is being developed in partnership with Whatcom County and the City of Ferndale and is now in the contractor selection phase, with the full project details listed through the state's OMWBE bid portal.
The community land trust model works by separating the land from the home. KCLT holds the land in trust permanently and sells only the structure to qualifying buyers at below-market prices. Resale restrictions keep future prices affordable too, meaning the homes can never be flipped into market-rate speculation. The approach traces back to the civil rights movement and gained new credibility after the 2008 foreclosure crisis exposed how quickly traditional homeownership can collapse for lower-income families.
At 46 units, Thornton Village is unusually large for a CLT project. Most add five to 15 homes at a time. The scale reflects both KCLT's growth as an institution and the unprecedented level of public funding now flowing toward permanent affordability models in Washington. Whatcom County voters approved a dedicated 0.1% affordable housing sales tax in 2021, and the state expanded its Housing Trust Fund the same year. Those dollars, combined with city and county partnership on the Ferndale site, made a project of this ambition possible.
The timing matters. Bellingham's median home price has climbed past $600,000, pushed up partly amid an influx of remote workers relocating from Seattle and Vancouver, B.C. Ferndale, historically home to refinery workers and blue-collar families, has become a spillover market for people priced out of Bellingham. Without intervention, that pressure will only intensify.
KCLT expects to select a contractor by mid-October, with design and construction work to follow.
