Bellingham plans third tiny home village on city-owned land

Bellingham is moving ahead with a third tiny home village, this one planned for city-owned land in the Irongate neighborhood and sized at 35 to 40 homes. The new Division Street community will be run by HomesNOW! and is set to open in early 2027, giving the city another concrete test of tiny-home shelter as a repeatable housing response.

The new village is larger than a small pilot but still compact enough to track closely. A city post said the project will include up to 36 tiny houses, along with a community kitchen, hygiene facilities, case management and 24/7 staffing. That makes the site more than a row of units: it is being framed as a managed shelter community built around support services as well as beds.

Bellingham already has a working comparison point in North Haven Tiny Home Village. The city said North Haven officially opened on Tuesday, Aug. 27, 2025, in the Birchwood neighborhood near the intersection of Northwest and West Maplewood. The city also said Swift Haven and Unity Village, both HomesNOW!-run villages, had to move from their former locations on city-owned property, and that it worked with HomesNOW! to relocate them to North Haven.

Unity Village gives the clearest sense of how long Bellingham has been using this model. HomesNOW! says Unity Village was a temporary tiny home community for people experiencing homelessness in Bellingham and Whatcom County, operating from August 2019 until May 2025. The units from Unity Village were moved to the new North Haven Tiny Home Community, showing that the city and its nonprofit partner have already handled the logistics of dismantling and relocating a village rather than treating each site as a one-off.

The new Division Street village will be somewhat smaller than North Haven, which the city described as a 47-home village, but it still adds substantial capacity in a city that is using small-footprint housing as part of its shelter system. Choosing city-owned land in Irongate also matters: land access is often the hardest part of getting a tiny home village built, and public property removes one of the biggest hurdles before construction even starts. A local radio post said construction is expected to begin this winter, putting the project on a clear path toward that early 2027 opening.

For tiny-house readers, that is the real story here: Bellingham is not just experimenting with small homes for emergency shelter anymore. It has already opened North Haven, moved older villages into a new site, and is now lining up a third community with an operator, a neighborhood, a unit count and a timeline.