How does the Model Ordinance exceed the state requirements?
1) It does not count attached ADUs toward unit count. This adds about 60,000 potential housing units beyond what the state requires, but with CC&Rs and critical areas, a realistic estimate of the added capacity might be only 50,000.
Bellevue’s current proposal goes beyond this and creates the possibility of eight housing units on every single family lot with the fee-in-lieu option. Bellevue’s rules also allow an unlimited number of cottages that could particularly affect larger parcels. It seems that about 14,000 lots in Bellevue are either R-1, or R-1.8, and the smallest R-1.8 lot could have ten 1500 + 300 sqft cottages, so that would add another 28,000 units if all those parcels were the R-1.8 minimum size. Of course, many parcels are larger, and the number of units scales up in proportion to lot size, but the allowed number of cottages would also decrease in proportion to the area of the lot that has environmentally critical areas like steep slopes. There’s also the potential for dozens more units per acre if the cottages are small instead of 1500 sqft. We didn’t evaluate our ability to handle so many housing units per lot under the Comprehensive Plan FEIS analysis, so it’s unclear what range of impacts Bellevue might have from that amount of growth, but even if we were growing more slowly, we would expect traffic congestion impacts.
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