Edit: Paragraph about SB 5184 added to end, and correction made about fee-in-lieu amount.
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 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.
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