If you’ve seen one of our signs or received a flyer, you may be interested in knowing what’s changed, especially since there were a bunch of changes at the April 23rd Planning Commission meeting.
First, there was a vote to count any detached DADUs toward the unit count, so if someone builds two DADUs, they would then be able to build only two or four Middle Housing units (depending on the area and/or if they pay a fee-in-lieu of $150k per unit). There will still be some advantages to building an ADU, such as reduced fees, but they are allowed to be 28′ instead of 38′ tall and are only up to 1200 sqft + 300 sqft of parking or storage. That 300 sqft is up from the 250 sqft that had been in the draft prior to the April 23rd meeting.
Attached ADUs are still allowed in addition to the four or six units. I think there could be an 8 unit building where all units are the same size, or, more likely, 6 homes that are all the same size, at least two of which have an internal ADU. While it’s likely that the AADU is not sold separately, it is a bit of future-proofing that enables more flexible uses in the future, and might be a nice way to share a larger home as a multigenerational option. Large homes like this wouldn’t uncommonly have wetbars on some floors anyhow, so it’s not as if that extra kitchen requirement is a waste. An attached ADUs does have the possibility of being more than 1200 sqft if it is all on one floor.
Hello Robin Cookies is now in Bellevue! This is a great new option for rounding out a trip to Downtown Park, with cookie flavors like lemon glazed poppy, molasses, snickerdoodle, s’more, salted butterscotch, vegan chocolate chip, birthday cake, and lavender milk chocolate. They also have a kids’ special that’s a cookie and milk for $3.
It is late to be wading into the question of sidewalk width, but this is something that could come before City Council soon, so here are the basics:
Developers hate* wide sidewalks. For every added foot of sidewalk width, the width of building adjacent to it is decreased by one foot. Therefore, they perceive sidewalks as shaving away their profits. The Wilburton LUCA does allows buildings to overhang the sidewalk, but there are limits to how much that can allow added space on the upper floors.
In the FEIS for the Comprehensive Plan from last year, it is clear that travel speeds along 116th will be very slow because of inadequate capacity at the intersections with NE 12th, NE 8th, NE 6th, and NE 4th. Even in the Alternative 1 growth scenario (see page 232 of 1257) which estimated an added 4,500 housing units in low density areas (page 79 of 1257), the vehicle over capacity (v/c) ratios for those four intersections were all significantly over 1 during rush hour. Once you get over 1, actual results are hard to predict, but cars stack up more and more with each light cycle because the intersection can’t handle demand. It seems likely that the cars could be traveling more slowly than the pedestrians, though the analysis I did before focused on the Preferred Alternative with even higher density (See March 2024 letter and the response here).
Given the limits on road capacity, we will need as many people to walk in Wilburton as possible, and there should be enough density to provide useful destinations that are within a reasonable distance for the residents who will live there. Unfortunately, it is hard to imagine a thriving pedestrian scene if the sidewalks end up being narrower than those in Downtown. It is important to create a pedestrian environment that is comfortable and safe and can handle people flowing in and out of 45-story buildings.
Summaries for upcoming public meetings, and opportunities to comment or volunteer is sent out to the mailing list about once or twice a week. Here is the latest, and below are links to past mailings.
I was just looking at this YT channel, because they posted an excellent video of the Montlake spite house a year ago, and noticed this feature about a New Hampshire grouping of cottages. See update below with added FAR comparison.
I think Bellevue residents would be really happy to see a project like the above in our neighborhoods. In a 2022 Bellevue survey with 567 respondents, cottage homes were the most popular housing type.
From the survey report, “Many commenters … would prefer to see small-scale, low-density options like duplexes or cottage homesbuilt instead of these muchlarger scale single-family homes.”
Let’s take a look at the differences between the pocket village shown in the video and the proposed Bellevue rules for cottages.
Cottage height: These look like they’re about 16 feet tall, while Bellevue’s would be allowed to be 38 feet.
Cottage square footage: These are 384 sqft with a 160 sqft loft. Bellevue cottages are allowed to be 1750 sqft plus 300 sqft of bonus garage/unheated storage space that doesn’t count toward the FAR limit.
Open space and lot coverage: These have tons of open space. A common open space in Bellevue would only be required to be 15′ across, and if it’s a 15′ strip of a 75′ wide lot, that’s almost enough to satisfy the requirement for 12 units (100 sqft each).
Impervious area: Bellevue would allow 70% impervious surfaces, as long as 25% is porch area. This can bizarrely produce more walkways than needed and huge porches, that potentially account for more than half of the footprint of the buildings. In the common open area, 75% could be impervious rather than landscaped, possibly only allowing a 4-6′ strip of grass down the middle.
FAR: If we don’t count the greenbelt, this project has 44 units on about 4 acres. Counting the entire loft space toward the square footage, that means a FAR of 0.137, or one square foot of building interior space for every 7.2 sqft of the lot. In Bellevue, the FAR for cottages (on lots under 10k sqft) is 1.5, about 11 times as much, and each unit also gets a bonus 300 sqft to be used for parking/storage. Bellevue also allows each lot to have 2 ADUs that might not count toward the FAR limit (not sure what the outcome of the latest planning commission vote was).
I’ve tried to come up with cottage layouts, and it’s not always easy to use all the FAR and bonus space, even if you assume you have 4 story buildings that are build right up to the more generous middle housing setbacks.
Unlike other middle housing types which are limited to 6 units of middle housing + 2 attached ADUs per lot, there is no limit on the number of cottage homes on a lot, as long as you stay under the FAR cap. I think 12-16 on a 10,000 sqft lot is possible, and this gets particularly interesting when applied to half-acre lots, etc.
Porches: These have nicely sized porches that face the community space, but Bellevue will have no porch requirement. You could make just the minimum walkways needed and zero porches, so people would just go upstairs to hang out in their towers, which I don’t think would create a sense of community
Separation from neighboring properties: it looks like there’s a nice greenbelt with trees, whereas existing Bellevue homes could have cottages towering over them, just 5′ from the side of the property boundary.
Space for trees: Bellevue is creating a special loophole in the Tree Code. In many formerly single-family zones, there would be a requirement for 5 tree credits per 1000 sqft of lot area if you’re building a single family home and 4 tree credits when middle housing is built, except that cottages would only be required to have 1 tree credit per 1000 sqft of lot size. Ten tree credits are equivalent to two 14″ diameter trees on an entire lot, -or- five 6″ diameter trees -or- ten saplings with 2″ trunks.
In the interest of “tree health” there’s also going to be an allowance that gives out bonus tree credits as needed, so that middle housing developments don’t have enough space for trees to *ever* exist will get credit for more trees than they plant, allowing the developers to get out of paying into the fund to plant street trees because it would be so terrible (/s) if they had to buy the tree credits at $1350 a pop.
In my comment to the Planning Commission on April 23rd, I highlighted this discontinuity in the FAR. Lots under 10k sqft get more space than in the state’s Model Code (Model Code line is not shown above, but it’s a 1.6 FAR that does not give bonus space for 2400 sqft of ADUs), and then between 10k and about 16k sqft, there’s a dip, because the FAR multiplier becomes 1.5 instead of 0.9.
This scenario assumes that two of the six homes on a lot would have internal AADUs to benefit from the bonus square footage, but there is no requirement that these be rented out separately. Once you get to the R-1 category, each of the houses in a six home development would be allowed to be over 5000 sqft, which means they’ll be unaffordable by definition. In these very large homes, it’s not unusual for them to have a wet bar, so we’ll get a little future proofing in case people want to rent it out separately later, but having the AADU probably won’t affect the housing supply right away.
My suggestion is to create a flat home size for lots between 10k and 15k square feet, and then a more gradual increase of 0.2 FAR for all lot area above 15k sqft.
Note: There is also a line showing some of the smaller minimum lot areas for LL-1, LL-2, etc, but these apply to affordable housing only.
Summaries for upcoming public meetings, and opportunities to comment or volunteer is sent out to the mailing list about once or twice a week. Here is the latest:
The City of Seattle is updating their residential code on the same timeline as us, and in October, they released a handout that provides a framework to understand common terms and shows potential designs. This gave people plenty of time to digest the options and know what things like FAR and lot coverage mean.
This guide defines common open space as something that is outside buildings and vehicular spaces and has a minimum dimension requirement to be counted. With no similar guide to go by for Bellevue, I went to Bellevue’s February 2024 in-person presentation with the specific question of whether vehicular spaces count toward open space (as seen in the photos of autocourts here), and was told that they would not. Things seemed to change after the March Planning Commission meeting (or perhaps my question was not stated to be inclusive enough of cottage developments), because now the first four cottages’ worth of open space in any Bellevue cottage complex may be met by driveway space. Establishing the definition of terms like this at the beginning of the process would help us communicate more efficiently during meetings and develop a shared understanding of the proposals.
There were many other questions from community members and commission members that would have been addressed by images such as those shown below as well. Seattle’s guide has eight different scenarios that show both how the calculations are done and how structures might fit into the neighborhood. The FAR in the example below is only 1.2 with four units, and Bellevue’s allowance for a similar lot would be 6 middle housing units with 2 AADUs for a total of 8 units; also, the FAR in Bellevue for a would be 1.5 based on the lot size plus 0.48 FAR for ADU space plus 0.48 FAR for parking/storage (now that it’s been raised to 300 sqft per unit), for a total of 2.46, which is probably twice as much as the Seattle example, depending on how Seattle counts garage space.
Topical meetings
During the process of developing the model code, the state held stakeholder meetings about:
Edit: See added paragraph with proposed solution at the end.
Four stories are still allowed in the Middle Housing version being sent to City Council for their approval, but it was very close – if Commissioner Cuellar-Calad had not recently resigned, or if they hadn’t had this discussion after 10pm, it is very likely that the commission would have voted to cap the middle housing at three stories. It will be interesting to see what City Council decides to do with this issue, since the current wording may disincentivize peaked roofs and allow more floors than is intended.
Edit: Paragraph about SB 5184 added to end, and correction made about fee-in-lieu amount.
Edit 2: Mea culpa for complaining about the change-tracking; the lot size difference is actually already in our existing code. See more info at end. I’ve also added a note about this to Errata.
Minimum lot sizes are being reduced by 23% for affordable housing and slightly increasing for single family and middle housing otherwise. This means that if your lot is more than 1.52x the old lot size, you can split it into two lots. If it was a little larger than a double lot (2.28x), it can become a triple lot.
Of course, this only benefits people who have a particularly large lot, or multiple lots together, but it could be a meaningful boost for affordable housing on a useful number of lots scattered throughout the city. Offering the fee-in-lieu (which has been dropped to only $75,000 for each of the 5th and 6th units as of the April 23rd Planning Commission meeting) (Sorry, after listening to the meeting recording, it appears we still have a $150,000 per unit fee-in-lieu) was identified as something that would make it more expensive for affordable housing providers wishing to build six units to compete for lots with market-rate builders.
The change in minimum lot size happened [was featured in the strike-draft] after the public hearing but before the community was able to hear the perspective of any of the Planning Commission members. They had the public hearing to listen on April 9th, and then had their study session discussion on April 23rd. You can see the difference between the draft released on April 3rd* here (page 16) and the draft released on April 18th here (page 18).
While the 9 middle homes per lot initial proposal was removed, it will now be 2*(6 middle + 2 ADUs) = 16 homes in these cases.
Splitting a lot will also drop it into a higher tier of FAR in many cases. For instance, a 14,000 sqft lot in an R-3.5 area will be big enough to qualify as two lots under the new SR-2 zoning, which has just been adjusted to allow lot sizes as small as 6,700 sqft if affordable. Instead of 8 units at 0.9 FAR (avg size 2125 sqft), a builder can make 16 units at 1.5 FAR (avg size 1862 sqft) since the cutoff in the FAR table is lot size of 10k sqft, and it also means twice as much bonus space for ADUs and storage/parking.
The lot-splitting legislation from the state doesn’t increase the number of houses per lot (this was my previous misunderstanding) but it will make the transition much simpler administratively. Previously, there was a planned unit development rule, and the processes Bellevue should require for lots being split are also being hashed out now.
I did not have a chance to comment on this to the planning commission because the numbers were all changed but not highlighted in yellow in the newest strike-draft. I was also not expecting changes since the planning commission had not made any requests to the city staff during the April 9th meeting.
I think this is primarily meaningful for R-4 and R-5 areas where lot sizes support more natural affordability, but the only scenario I looked at so far is R-3.5.
*There was a draft issued on March 20th (attached to the Staff Report and linked on the project page), which has a fee-in-lieu amount blank. Another was released on April 3rd with the meeting materials for the April 9th meeting and public hearing. This one has a header of March 20th too, but i try to reference it by release date to help people keep it straight. The one released on April 18th for the April 23rd meeting also has a header of April 23rd on each page.
Update: It should also be noted that SB 5184 eliminates any parking requirement for affordable housing, making a large number of units like this more feasible, though we would have 18 months from the effective date to implement the rules corresponding to SB 5184 in Bellevue.
Update 2: It looks like the necessary update to the table header and removal of lot minimums for the R-10 through R-30 areas had not been included previously as an oversight (Kirsten Mandt explains the latter on page 146 of the April 23rd meeting’s Written Communications). I am sorry I didn’t notice the existence of this table previously by cross-referencing the existing code, because it could add more density than I think people are anticipating.
Although this allowance is not new, it didn’t have much of an impact when it would have allowed you to put two single family affordable homes on a $2M lot. In a scenario where it will allow 16 units instead of 8 market rate homes (that in some cases must also pay a fee of $300k), the relevance of this provision is much greater, and the exemption from parking will make the higher density more feasible as well. I am not sure how much economic analysis the legislature and Commerce did when determining that getting two extra units on a lot (HB 1110 scenario) would be a boost to help affordable housing providers compete for lots.
There is also another density bonus associated with religious entities of 50% in 20.20.128 E.2, so I think in some cases you might have 24 units on a lot that currently has one house and is required by HB 1110 to allow six affordable units.
