News and Analysis

I had written a previous post on co-living, boardinghouses, and SROs, but now I’m hoping for your input on what is worth doing for Bellevue in the next few months before co-living is implemented here (as required by HB 1998).

There’s a nice webinar video explainer produced by Commerce here. Note: The image below from their presentation shows a 1/4 mile radius, though the 6 unit allowance is actually based on walking distance.

For the parcels that allow 6 units by right or are in mixed use areas, owners may create any of these co-housing types starting in January 2026.  

1) House retrofits

This is the most straightforward way to add households to existing homes. You just need to put a lock on the bedroom doors, and bedrooms already have to be at least 70 sqft, with at least 50 sqft per person living in it (video, 28:51). There would be a shared kitchen, shared bathrooms in some cases, and possibly other shared living spaces, but it seems likely that living rooms and dens would also be converted to be rentable. 

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Here are some reasons builders might choose Bellevue if they’re looking to put two homes on one lot. 

In Seattle, you don’t get a reduction in setbacks until you put three homes on a lot, but in Bellevue, you only need to build two homes to get the “Middle Housing” setback reductions of 10’ to the front and 10’ to the back, plus side setback reductions in some cases. If each home is 60’ wide and three stories tall, that could be an extra 1800 square feet of potential building size for each, and it’s not uncommon for new construction here to sell for upwards of $1000/sqft. 

FAR allowances in Bellevue wouldn’t necessarily allow you to maximize your use of that area, but unlike many other cities, we don’t count the ADUs toward that allowance (see page 12), and we give each home and each ADU an extra 300 sqft that may be used for storage or garage space. ADUs are allowed to be at least 1200 sqft, but can exceed that if they are all on one level. 

Redmond has a payment-in-lieu to provide funds for affordable housing, and in 2027 it will be $30 per sqft, starting at the first unit. If there are two 3000 sqft homes and two 1500 sqft ADUs on a lot that’s approximately 10k sqft, the Redmond homes will be $270k more costly to build (though Redmond’s fees are lower in 2025 and 2026 as the policy is ramped up). 

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This is the longest list of fun events to be featured in the newsletter so far. I hope you’ll check these out, and consider signing up for the newsletter with the link in the upper right.

8/1-8/3 Seafair Weekend (link)

8/1-8/3 First of three weekends for A Fairy Modern Midsummer with Bellevue Youth Theatre (link)

8/5 Primary Election ballots due 

8/5 Multigenerational Pinwheel and puppet-making at Highland Park, 12-3pm (link)

8/5 National Night Out at Crossroads Park, 4-7pm (link)

8/5 Art on the Avenue guided tour 5:30-6:30 (link)

8/5 Downtown Movies in the Park: Cars Entertainment begins at 7pm and the movie at dusk (link) 

8/6 Abridged Romeo and Juliet at NWAC Theatre on the Green, 6:30-7:30pm (link)

8/7 Lunchtime Line Dancing at City Hall Plaza, 12-1:30pm (link)

8/7 Fraggle Rock Crew breakdancing showcase at The Eight (new building) plaza, 5-6:30pm (link)

8/7 Crossroads Movies in the Park: An American Tail Entertainment begins at 7pm and the movie at dusk (link) 

8/8 Scrap Cooking Club, 12-1pm at BBG (link)

8/9 $5 Yoga in the park (link)

8/9 Watercoloring postcards with live flute/cello music, in Spring District Plaza, free, 10am-noon (link)

8/9 free Archery Tag Adventure at Ashwood Park, 4-7pm, ages 8+ (link)

8/10 Free Plyometrics class at Robinswood Park 6:30-7:30pm (link) also 8/17, 8/25

8/12 Startup425: Startup and Small Business coworking in Bellevue (link)

8/13 Aesop’s Fables at NWAC Theatre on the Green, 6:30-7:30pm (link)

8/13 free Multigenerational Fabric and Twine Flora Crafting, Ashwood Park 12-2pm (link)

8/14 Northwest Pops Orchestra at City Hall Plaza, 6-7pm (link) 

8/15 Bracelet making, North Bellevue Community Center 1-2pm (link) 

8/16 Nike and TruFusion HIIT class (link)

8/16 Salsa Social at City Hall Plaza 6-9:30pm (link) 

8/17 Storytime for Kids at BBG (link) 

8/21 Spring District Summer Market (3-7pm) Reptile Show, Face painting, and Movie Night: Inside Out (link)

8/22-8/24 Arts in the Garden at BBG, with Master Gardener Plant Clinics (link)

8/23 BelRed Arts Night Market, 3-9pm (link)

8/26 Seattle Steel Pan Project at Bellevue City Hall Plaza 11:30-1pm (link) 

8/28 Spring District Summer Market (3-7pm) Magic Show, Face painting, and Movie Night: Guardians of the Galaxy 2 (link)

8/29 Open Mic night at Third Culture Coffee, 7-9pm (link)

8/30 free Boxing for Belonging workout series in Downtown Park, 1-3pm (link)

8/30-8/31 Ganesh Ustav at Crossroads 

9/13 Keep Bellevue Beautiful Signature Streets cleanup (link)

Recurring events: Flowers, produce and music events 

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Enrollment is trending upward, as shown in one of the financial presentations from the June 26th school board meeting.

It is important to note that the number of out of district students has increased, but the comparison is just to a single point in time, so a time-series would be more helpful in understanding this. I also don’t mind if some students are from out of district, since it is likely that their parents work in Bellevue or they have another connection here, and they’re still bringing in state per-pupil funding.

You might say the post-pandemic bounce back is unsurprising, but there were previously dismal forecasts like the one below, from 2022-2023.

In order to support enrollment in the future, BSD is keeping kindergarten class sizes small and is creating a Welcome Center.

The Welcome Center is for families and students as they enter the district, fostering a sense of belonging and connection while helping them navigate the school system. In addition, the Welcome Center will serve as a central location to connect families to the services, supports and resources available through various district departments and community partners. It will be opening on September 26th, 2025.

I’ve frequently heard from other parents that there are amazing things the Bellevue School District offers, but it’s not always easy to find out about them. I can’t comment on K-12 yet, but I was so impressed with the Pre-K class my child was in, and there was relatively little information available about it beforehand (I found out about the January info sessions a week after they’d been held, and they weren’t offered again).

If you are looking for information about Kindergarten enrollment this summer, there will be staff at the Bellevue International Festival on August 2nd to help.

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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