Cross the pedestrian bridge where the Railroad Trail clears Alabama Street, and the destination hasn't moved in years. Haggen is still the anchor. The Regal marquee still runs sixteen screens. Woods Coffee still has a line at the drive-through window. What's changed is everything the trail doesn't show you yet: a stack of zoning approvals, entitlements, and one construction fence around a lot that used to hold a driving range and a YMCA preschool.
Alabama Hill's connection to this corridor isn't incidental. The city's own neighborhood plan notes that Barkley Boulevard's construction in the mid-1990s, running from Britton Road to Orleans Street, opened the west-facing slope of Alabama Hill to the subdivisions that now line it with expansive bay and city views. The retail hub and the residential hillside grew up together. So when Barkley Village changes, Alabama Hill is one of the first places that feels it, on foot, on the trail, before it ever shows up in a listing.
What The City Actually Signed Off On
In August 2025, the Bellingham City Council voted unanimously to designate Barkley Village an official urban village and approved a development agreement with Talbot Group, the family-owned company that has controlled the 255-acre site since development began in the 1980s. The vote also adopted a Planned Action Ordinance and an updated Subarea Plan, according to Cascadia Daily News. The practical effect is that Barkley Village now operates under one coherent set of rules instead of the patchwork of ten different planned development contracts that governed it before.
The numbers behind that designation are worth sitting with, because they describe a gap between what's legally possible and what exists on the ground today. According to the project's final environmental impact statement, the new entitlements allow Barkley Village to add, compared to existing conditions:
- About 350,000 square feet of retail space, more than double what's there now
- About 1 million square feet of office space, more than a 200 percent increase
- 160,000 square feet of industrial space, a 74 percent increase
- 2,420 multi-family residential units, more than a 500 percent increase
- 100 single-family units, more than a 700 percent increase
Those figures come from the same April 2025 Cascadia Daily News reporting on the environmental review. As of the August vote, Barkley Village had 484 housing units total, mostly apartments, with nearly half of them subsidized for low-income residents. The old zoning would have allowed roughly 1,100 more units over time. The new entitlements open the door to more than twice that.
The One Project Standing Where The Promise Begins
Here's what that gap looks like in practice right now, in September 2026: one building.
The Manning broke ground on December 2, 2025, at 2401 Rimland Drive, on land that used to hold a YMCA Early Learning Center and part of an adjacent driving range. The groundbreaking announcement, carried by outlets including CBS42, described a 142-unit market-rate rental community with studio, one-bedroom, and two-bedroom homes, built by general contractor Exxel Pacific and financed by Goldman Sachs Private Bank. Leasing is expected to start in early 2027.
That 142-unit figure is smaller than what was originally on the table. Back in 2023, when the project was still in design, reporting from AOL described a 170-unit plan that paired two mid-rise apartment buildings with five 2,400-square-foot townhomes, plus a separate 4,000-square-foot retail building at the site's southwest corner. The apartments are what actually broke ground in December. The townhomes are still described as a parallel phase, with Talbot Group CEO Ben Besley saying the company is "starting to design" that piece to deliver alongside The Manning's main buildings. The name held. The scope split in two, and only one half is under a crane.
The site's history matters too. The YMCA Early Learning Center that used to sit there relocated into the ground floor of the nearby Trailview Apartments, Barkley Village's first affordable housing project, developed by Mercy Housing in partnership with the YMCA and Talbot Group. Talbot Group has also said it's pursuing a Green Globes certification for The Manning, a third-party sustainability rating covering energy use, health, and resilience.
Haggen's own store manager, Trevor Cowin, has watched this corridor's slower version of change since the grocery store opened in 1995. As he put it in the December groundbreaking announcement:
"Having started for Haggen in 1995 when the Barkley Haggen opened, it has been very endearing to see the growth of the village over the years. The Talbot Group's vision for the village has created a place where residents can get their needs taken care of without ever having to leave the community."
Bellingham Mayor Kim Lund tied the project to the city's own housing goals in the same release, noting that The Manning shows how the city's Multi-Family Tax Exemption program can pull new housing into the places the city has already decided it wants growth to happen.
The Grocery Store, The Movie Theater, And Everything Else That Hasn't Moved
For anyone walking the trail from Alabama Hill this fall, the day-to-day version of Barkley Village looks close to what it's looked like for years. Haggen anchors the grocery and pharmacy side. The Regal Barkley Village IMAX & RPX runs sixteen auditoriums, including IMAX, RPX, and Dolby Atmos formats. Jalapeno's still pours margaritas next to Overflow Taps and Blue Abode for anyone stopping for a drink after a movie. Woods Coffee and Starbucks cover the morning run, Zen Sushi & Bar sits near the theater for a bite before or after a show, and smaller shops like Hamman's Gallery and Statement Apparel round out the retail side.
The Scramble Nature Playpark, a pocket park built from locally sourced boulders, logs, and reclaimed materials shaped into climbing towers and balance beams, has already been open for a couple of years next to the Regal theater. It's a small preview of what the master plan promises at a much larger scale elsewhere in the village.
Northwest Gastroenterology's clinic building, developed by Talbot Group in partnership with the practice, and The Weatherby condominiums, which carry a 140-kilowatt rooftop solar array described as the largest residential installation in Bellingham at the time it was built, round out what's already standing. None of that changes because the city approved a bigger master plan. It's the baseline the new construction is being layered onto.
The Streets And Park That Exist Only On Paper So Far
The master plan calls for a new St. Clair Street between Barkley Boulevard and Sunset Drive, with Burns Street and Rimland Drive both extended east to meet it. Those roads don't exist yet. Neither does the 40-acre forested park with pedestrian trails that the plan sets aside in the northeast corner of the village, part of a commitment to keep more than half of Barkley Village's footprint as open space even as density increases.
One piece of institutional building is already underway: the Bellingham School District is constructing a new district office at the corner of Barkley Boulevard and Howe Street, according to Talbot Group's own project listing. The building is designed to include a training center, a childcare center, and space for nonprofit partners alongside district administration, consolidating offices that have outgrown their current space.
Why Alabama Hill Watches This Corridor Specifically
The City of Bellingham's Barkley neighborhood page still frames Alabama Hill and Barkley as neighbors sharing one boundary along Sunset Drive, with Barkley Boulevard as the road that connects them. That boundary is also the trail. Residents who use the Railroad Trail to reach the grocery store, the theater, or a Saturday coffee aren't walking toward a hypothetical. They're walking toward a corridor that just got legal permission to more than double its retail space and multiply its housing capacity fivefold, with one building actually rising to test whether that promise holds.
For now, the walk still ends the same way it has for years: past the Scramble park, under the Regal marquee, into the same Haggen that's been there since 1995. The fence around The Manning is the only visible sign that the next twenty years already have paperwork behind them.
If you're weighing what this corridor's buildout means for a specific street on Alabama Hill, Julian & Company tracks these filings as closely as the trail conditions. Reach out and we'll walk through what's actually built, what's still on paper, and what that gap might mean for your block.
