News and Analysis

If you’re wondering why there’s been such a push to get single-stair buildings that allow four, five or six stories approved in the Washington State Building Code, take a look at this article. I think it does a great job of laying out the potential livability advantages like cross-ventilation, putting bedrooms on the quiet side of buildings, and allowing more daylight to reach all parts of the unit.

https://www.archpaper.com/2023/03/why-does-american-multifamily-architecture-look-so-banal-heres-one-reason/?amp=1

While SB 5491 requires that single-stair rules be included in the code by July 2026, I don’t think it ‘s guaranteed that this will be able to be used for all lot configurations. While it has been pointed out that other countries have these already, work is being done to ensure the necessary safety context is present for these buildings here too, and that might include ladder truck access to all upper units, etc.

When we do see it added to the building code, especially if the condo liability reform effort continues in the Legislature, we could have a shift away from the townhome format. Incentives might also be applied at the local level. Until recently, Redmond had a much lower fee-in-lieu payment for buildings with a stacked configuration, and there could be incentives like that to encourage units without stairs (or with stairs, in the case of stacked maisonette housing).

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Petition: Bellevue’s City Council has voted to approve Middle Housing changes which include a form of single family home that is being called cottages, but which are not being required to have porches or adequate common open space, and are being given an exemption for additional space to be used as a garage (rather than clustering parking on site). In addition, the “cottage” typology is being allowed excessive amounts of impervious surface and lot coverage, and when present on a large lot, they would be expected to have ⅕ as many trees as a single family home under the Bellevue tree credit system. Large lots might have many more units than the four required by the state minimum, and the four plus 2 ADUs that are allowed by the Model Ordinance. At an FAR of 0.9, there could be twenty-six 1500 sqft cottages (not counting garage) per acre. 

When added together, these modifications remove the community feeling that cottages are expected to offer, and we hope you will not approve this element of Bellevue’s intended code, if it is possible to apply the rules for cottages contained within the Model Ordinance.  If it is only possible to use the Model Ordinance in its entirety instead of Bellevue’s LUCA and BCCA that were passed on June 24, 2025, that would also be an appreciated improvement.

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Please email hello@newbellevue.com if you’d like to sign this petition. Just like the last one, there is a very short window, since the state deadline for HB 1110 implementation is June 30th.

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Edit: This petition has been provided to Commerce, but they clarified that their review is only to provide comments, not to approve or deny the rules. I’ll leave up this post and pass along any additional names of people who contact me to say they want to sign, but it looks like we’ll have the cottage rules as passed (and there’s also the fact that up to 400 sqft of driveway can be used toward the common open space requirement, which is unusually lenient).

From the User Guide, page 44 of the pdf:  

On the agenda at yesterday’s BSD public hearing and school board meeting was a consideration of binding conditions due to our shortfall in the 2024-2025 school year, which the school board voted for unanimously. With a $5.9M gap, it is estimated that this will take three school years to fully resolve. The annual budget for 2024-2025 was $432.7M.

Bellevue had already been having tough conversations with the community and previously announced steps to reduce costs by staggering busing schedules and letting a number of assistant principals, central office administrators, teachers, and mental health counselors go. On May 15th, the board also voted to approve a $13M interfund loan.*

Next year, Bellevue will be allowed to levy $500 more per student** as “inflation enhancement” as a result of House Bill 2049, and there will also be an increase in special education funding (possibly $1.3M), which was one of the areas Bellevue’s costs exceeded expectations. Bellevue may get $600k more for MSOC (materials and supplies) because of SB 5192.

We won’t be getting transportation safety net funding next year, which had been $859k in this year’s budget. There was also some difficulty matching staffing levels to the number of students (the Internal FTE Rollup, which staffing was based on, was higher than actual enrollment, so staffing was 1.4% too high). The continued uncertainty around enrollment is cited as a future risk as well, though at least enrollment is trending up.***

See the coverage in Seattle Times and excerpts in the Seattle School Blog . There was also a $70M apportionment shortfall that seems to have affected schools statewide in May and June, pushing payments to July, but that is not being pointed to as the reason that nine school districts are going into binding conditions this year (I imagine this didn’t make the situation better, though!).

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Note: Thanks to all who signed the petition, which was delivered to City Council at their June 24th meeting. Unfortunately, no motions were made to modify the Middle Housing rules, so each councilmember made a speech about their view of the process and then it passed in the same form it was in after the June 10th meeting, with a unanimous vote. 

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I have the following petition which mentions Downtown; if you would like to sign the petition for a different area, you can also email hello@newbellevue.com to add your name and just say which area you’re from. This petition only talks about the Co-Living that would be allowed on single family lots in areas that are 1/4 mile walk around Downtown and the countywide growth centers (scroll down for maps). People who live in the directly affected areas are likely to want to sign and people who live within a couple blocks may also be affected by overflow parking and potentially reduced emergency vehicle access. If you have opinions about whether it is a good idea for Bellevue to allow 8 units in the place of every single family house and/or to make “cottage” rules to pave over Bridle Trails with 26 or more cottages per acre, please email council@bellevuewa.gov about those things separately.

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Petition: Bellevue is proposing Middle Housing changes exceeding the requirements of HB 1110, with impacts for our neighborhood that are temporarily unclear. Areas that allow six units per lot will soon have Co-living as required by HB 1998, but the rules for Co-living have not yet been determined for Bellevue (they will be defined in the second half of this year). Given this uncertainty, we would request that you avoid imposing Co-living in areas where the state does not require it.  Some options would include: 

1. Not adding by-right density in areas that are ¼ mile walk to Downtown (the state requirement in these areas is only four units total)
2. Creating a $1 fee so that the “by-right” number of units is no more than four plus two ADUs, while not preventing the addition of greater middle housing density. 
3. Using the Model Ordinance provided by the state so that only four middle housing units and two ADUs are allowed in this area.

Please email hello@newbellevue.com to add your name (you can specify which of the options above you prefer, if any).

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Below are some maps that show blue bubbles for the potentially affected areas; they include the larger 1/2 mile walk around Major Transit that was reduced to the state requirement of 1/4 mile walk in the May 10th council meeting.

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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. I redid the calculation with more accurate numbers of parcels and parcel size, and with about 2200 R-1 through R-8 parcels in Bellevue, the number of additional 1500 sqft cottages (if we don’t count the first 8 on every lot) is over 49,600 (keep in mind that the state minimum is to have 4 on each lot). 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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Edit: I talked to a developer about the cottage impervious area scenarios, and was told that Bellevue’s Fire Department is requiring a 20′ wide driveway. For comparison, the Model Ordinance states that private driveways shall not be required to be wider than 12 feet unless there are code/life safety issues, and I think the Seattle rule is also that driveways be 12′ wide. Bellevue’s rules are in the Transportation Design Manual and there is a 20′ minimum for streets in subdivisions, a 10′ minimum for single family lots, and a 16′ paved minimum for a residential shared driveway. There is a second draft attached to the agenda for the June 24th meeting that provides the clarification that the joint driveway rules apply where there are 2 to 6 residential units on 1 or 2 lots. Sadly, this means that the scenario for cottages below doesn’t actually work, and I will have to recalculate this from scratch. I won’t remove it for now because it gives a sense of what the cottage rules might allow on a lot that’s 10′ wider than the scenario, even if the percentages will be all different. End Edit

I was in strong agreement with Mayor Robinson’s take on the cottages at the May 13th meeting that the version which would have allowed them to be 38’ tall would have too many stairs for aging in place. It is certainly an improvement that the Council voted at their June 10th meeting to cap cottage height at 24’ – compared to 22’ for Seattle cottages – though that is probably still taller than most Bellevue residents were imagining when they responded that cottages were the most popular middle housing type in the 2022 survey. 

It’s also possible, however, to make cottages entirely flat, and here is an example of how the cottage loopholes could be used to put a second single family home on a lot. This would not optimize use of the FAR (it would only use 0.45 FAR, which is under the amount allowed for a single family house), but it would maximize use of the lot coverage and impervious surface loopholes. The footprint of these low cottage structures would be 36% larger than allowed for a single family house and 21% larger than would be possible for other middle housing, and the impervious area (driveways, walkways, and patio hardscape) could be about double as much as would be allowed for single family homes or other middle housing. 

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This week, the Bellevue City Council took votes to refine the Middle Housing plan that they’ll finalize at their June 24th meeting. The room was full but not overflowing, with much less intensity than was present at the Planning Commission public hearing or the Bridle Trails Community Club meeting.

Changed from the draft: 

Six units by right density near major transit stops (Link and RapidRide B [and Rapidride K starting in 2028]) has been reduced to 1/4 mile walking distance instead of 1/2 mile walking distance.  

Middle Housing height has been reduced to 32/35′ tall (this is equal for middle housing and single family if the roof is peaked, and middle housing will be allowed two extra feet if it has a flat roof). 

Note: There is still a 12′ height bonus that could be obtained through the tree code, allowing a possible 44′ building height, and middle housing has both the FAR and the exemption from facade height limits to make use of that. 

Cottages would only be 24′ tall, and the maximum square footage would be 1500 + 300 sqft of storage/garage space  

Note 1: Conrad Lee wants to come back to this point to increase cottage size to 1750 sqft + 300 sqft of unheated storage/garage space 

Note 2: The slides talk about “garage” space, but I don’t think any modification to remove the unheated storage language has been voted on or discussed publicly. 

Note 3: For comparison, ADUs are allowed to be 28′ if over a garage, so potentially taller, but the ADU floor area is only allowed to be 1200 sqft plus 300 sqft of unheated storage/garage space. 

Note 4: Cottages are supposed to have their parking grouped in a lot on-site – does the extra garage bonus space make sense? 

Voted not to change from the draft:  

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Note: another example has been added at the bottom of this post.

Recently came across a thread about DADUs  where one person described how they’re using the garage/unheated storage bonus space.

Bellevue’s wording in the current draft is actually 300 sqft instead of 400 sqft per unit, but it would apply to all ADUs and middle housing units.

If we add 0.24 FAR (floor area ratio) on a 10k sqft lot, since each of the eight units could have 300 sqft, that’s 2400 sqft total (or more, if small cottages are built). The same 2400 sqft would be 0.48 FAR on a 5,000 sqft lot – that’s almost exactly the same as the FAR allowed for a single family house on that lot.  I’d want to be sure that by adding so much additional building volume, we won’t still end up with a parking situation that makes everyone miserable.

We can see that some builders will ask for more height when they can’t use their FAR within the building envelope that’s been defined (Written Communications for PC meeting on 6/28/25, page 5), and not knowing what the city will decide in a situation like this also feels like a risk. We also lose any leverage to create FAR-based carrots (senior housing, essential worker housing, skylights, enclosed parking, etc) when builders can’t use all the floor area they have, and there is a strong disincentive to add eaves, since they count against your building footprint.

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Edit: see added parentheticals below about Table 2 and cottage maximum size.

According to the Comprehensive Plan, “Bellevue is planning for sufficient capacity to accommodate the 35,000 units projected to be built by 2044.” There were also various growth levels analyzed as part of the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) for the Comprehensive Plan. Note: Bellevue had 63,200 housing units in 2019. 

FEIS page 69:  “The Preferred Alternative has capacity for about 216,000 housing units, about 152,000 additional capacity for housing units over 2019 housing units and about 111,000 over the capacity under the No Action Alternative. About 47 percent of the additional capacity (and about 61 percent of the capacity over the No Action Alternative) is in low-density residential areas, primarily due to the additional capacity created under HB 1110 and HB 1337.” 

The additional density under HB1110/1337 can be compared with the density added in Bellevue’s proposal. First, adding 3 units to most of the ~30,000 “single family” properties results in potential growth of 72,200 units in Low Density Residential areas (see Table 2-4). It is clear that this is not simply 30,000 x 3, so perhaps it takes into account the fact that some areas have covenants or environmentally critical areas, and I think the assumption is that a little more than half of the single family houses become teardowns (Table 2). If we add four more units beyond that with ADUs and a fee-in-lieu option, there would be perhaps an additional 66,300* housing units beyond what was studied under the FEIS, for a total of 138,500 new units in low density areas and 218,300 new units citywide.  

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If you can, please email City Council  council@bellevuewa.gov about ensuring adequate Wilburton sidewalk widths. You can also speak at the meeting; the signup link opens at noon tomorrow (Tuesday, May 20th). 

     As can be seen in the Agenda memo for tomorrow’s meeting, the Eastside Housing Roundtable is recommending 6′ sidewalks in Wilburton (in the vicinity of 25-45 story buildings), and still recommends maintaining space for on street parking on some of these corridors. Bellevue Chamber requests either 6′ sidewalks or the elimination of local streets entirely. I agree with the staff assessment that “This would diminish comfort, compromise safety and accessibility, and ultimately limit the area’s potential to thrive economically.” They also hope to get a reduction of the shared use paths from 14′ to 10′ – this change could create safety risks due to conflicts between pedestrians and cyclists, etc. 

There is some background on the sidewalks question in a post here, where I talk about our standards for pedestrian safety and level of traffic stress (PLTS) and Wilburton-specific transportation challenges.

    The Chamber is also requesting that some of the open space requirement be able to be met with private open space. I’ve seen that there are many amazing events that are only possible to host if you control the space and can have ticketed events, so it’s not unlikely that utility to the community would go up if some open space is private. Unfortunately, in general, the open space requirement for Wilburton was set quite low to start with, and things like sidewalks and access corridors get counted toward that. It is the hope that spaces adjacent to Eastrail may provide a sense of openness and public access. 

To balance these two considerations, I suggest that we allow up to two or three buildings (first to apply) to receive the 5% private open space allowance in exchange for a commitment to host at least three events open to the public per week, at least one of which is free but may require RSVP. 

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