Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

The light's on. Now it's I think we're ready to go. Oh, perfect. Okay. Good evening. I would like to welcome everyone to tonight's meeting. It's s 08/25/2025 and the time is now 06:01 p. M. This meeting will come to order. Tanya will you

please call the roll? Is excused Ben reed?

Here.

Kesterson? Here. Dionne Dittmar is excused justice phelps? Here. Sandra Pereira reynolds? Here. Todd Oyo Fessel? Here. For the record there no remote attendance for board members. This meeting.

Thank you, Tanya. Are there any added items or changes to the agenda from staff?

Good evening. No changes to the agenda. I did want to note that we did update the minutes from what was originally sent in your packet. The last item originally said it was the Q4 twenty twenty four ECD update, and that has been updated to reflect that it was Q2 twenty twenty five. So just for you to note when you get to that agenda item. Otherwise, no other changes.

Perfect I think we note we mentioned that in the last meeting to if I recall correctly okay so the minutes from the previous meeting have been presented to the board including the change that Kristen just noted I call for a motion to approve the minutes of 08/11/2025, as presented with the change that Kristen just mentioned.

This is Justice Phelps. I move to approve the minutes.

This is Ben Reed. I second.

Is there any discussion? I call for a vote to approve the minutes. All in favor say aye.

Aye.

Those against say nay. Vote is approved five to zero. Thank you. Tonight we are holding a land use and planning board meeting in which staff will give presentations on the rediscovered downtown plan update and an introduction to recode Kent creating housing options Phase two. If there are no objections from the board members at this time, we are ready for the presentation on rediscovered downtown plan update. Carolyn, you may begin.

Thank you. Today, we'll be providing an update on the downtown plan. And as part of that, we have a guest, Bill Ellis from Economic Development, will be joining us. He's remote to share data that they've been looking at to understand where people are going downtown to help us understand how we can increase foot traffic for businesses in the downtown area. So I'll start by turning it over to Bill, and then when when he's finished, I'll share the other part of our update.

Hi, everyone. Nice to see you again. Oh, I'm gonna be a little confused by seeing my face and there's been a a regress there, which is always interesting. But hopefully, it's not appearing on your end. But thanks for the remote option today. This is a presentation I gave in person last week to the downtown advisory panel, and I'm going to make sure I'm gonna get my PowerPoint here. Oh, there we go. So I've been asked to share a little bit of some of the data that we look at in economic development. There's a lot of different sources out there, as you can imagine. Everything from US census data to history data, you can purchase Visa card data, there's a variety of sources.

The one I'm gonna hone in on today is sort of a more contemporary data set, which is from Placer dot ai and also from Datify. So through our lodging tax arrangement with JRAY, we have access to a third party provider data called Datify. Through our parks department, he's also interested in attendance and visitation to parks. We have a pretty well known service now through placer.ai. It's imperfect as any dataset is.

There's exclusions that make sense. Just for those who may not know, when you have your cell phone open, you might notice when you have your apps open, it gives you this option to be tracked or not. And, typically, you want for privacy to put private. I don't wanna be tracked. But for all of you who may have missed that on one app or or another, that gets bundled and sold.

And people from retailers to developers to all sorts of different uses, including parks departments, track that data. They purchase the data. They wanna know where people are really going. So what I'm gonna run through today is a little bit of a an analysis of where people are are coming and going using their mobile devices and tracking, information from there, as well as, some, other data that we have around car trips to, I think, lead people through a discussion as to what's going on within the downtown sub area. So first up, I just want to give some level setting information.

Typically, what you're seeing in the lower left hand corner is that most people visit downtown between the hours of ten in the morning and starts to go down again at 08:00 at night. Throughout the course of the calendar year, you can see there's a little bit of a surge that we haven't really been able to explain yet, June, but it's actually remarkably consistent all throughout the year. You can see that kind of up and down activity, but if you put a through line through it, visitation roughly in Downtown Kent as defined by the downtown sub area, it's roughly 30,000 a year. Monday through Sunday, also pretty flat. So, so far the information is not that interesting other than to remark, it's not that interesting.

It's kind of interesting in itself that we have a lot of flat visitation. First thing I wanna run through here is just the visits to shopping centers in and around our downtown sub area. I picked three here. You have Kent Station, which everyone's familiar with. Meeker Square, this information is is going back in time now to when Big Lots was still at that location.

And then Langston Landing where it's also most people know it is where the Safeway is. This is starting to get your intuition pump going as to where do people travel, what types of businesses do they most frequent. And you can see with these top three, Kent Station has visited almost twice as much as Langston Landing. So the Safeway Center with 1,700,000 annual visitors is still quite a bit less than the Kent Station, which gets 3,200,000, which is quite a lot less than Beaker Square, which is 550,000 annually. Let's put this into some context for folks.

So every single day, the sounder train has a northbound boarding, and that's about 423 commuters. Every single day on Central Avenue, average daily trips is about 23,000. Every single day on Washington Avenue, you get about 29,000 car trips. It drops off quite a bit when you look at 4th Avenue, 10,000 to 15,000 drive bys per day. So, again, think about the visitation and think about how many people are passing through each day through downtown.

Obviously, a lot more people pass through downtown than stop to visit. Let's look at grocery and food as a particular subset. Where if you were to rank the top 40 grocery and food visits in downtown sub area, you'll find that actually a very large number of the top 10, top 40 are clustered where Meeker meets Washington Avenue. That's an interesting finding, I think, or maybe it'll strike people somewhat obvious. You have an East West route, and Meeker Street meets a very important North South route or state highway, West Valley Highway.

That's a location where visitation ramps up. Isn't it also the place where a lot of businesses locate to take advantage of that visitation? Kent Station, again, arterials. So one of the things I think people are thinking about Rediscover Washington, sorry, Rediscover Kent here is just where should our infrastructure investments go? What kinds of infrastructure investments do we make?

How much does that help determine a path for how growth goes? And so Kent Station took place pretty close to Central Avenue, which is one of the major North South routes, but it's also at the confluence of James And Smith. And What you see there is, again, East West major arterials meets another major arterial, and then parking fields are designed to take advantage of that. So it's not an accident, again, when you look at some of the top 40 in terms of businesses that in terms of annual visitation, you see them clustered near those roads. And what's the color coding here shows is, those in purple are, outside of the historic district boundary, and those within are sort of this is KDP, the Kent Downtown Partnership, self defined borders.

Those within those that are colored orange are those that are within the historic downtown boundary area. So again, some of the most visited businesses are taking advantage of those big traffic throughputs. And again, in terms of the intuition of how much visitation do these types of businesses get, keeping on grocery and food for a moment, Hong Kong market is number three overall in Downtown Kent, right? Just going back here. Number one is Safeway with 947,000 annual visits.

Number three is Hong Kong Market with nearly 400,000 annual visits. Lohrta, a Mexican grocer, is at 286,000 annual visits. Public Halal Market, which, with the sole exception of Jack in the Box, is the most visited business in our historic downtown, has a current visitation annually of about 96,955. Now this was the part of the presentation when I was in person. Got to sort of scan the room and see if this was any notes of surprise on the list.

I can't really see your faces quite so clearly today. Is there I'll I'll just stop for a moment, ask if anyone wants to interject. Just looking at this data, and hopefully, you can see it well on your screens there. Anything striking striking you at this moment? That's surprising in terms of where what businesses are most visited.

Did you skip over number two, Bill? I'm I'm sorry. This has been

Yeah. I I did because that's number two is Safeway gas.

Ah, okay.

Haven't come to it yet. And please keep in mind, you know, there is some limitations to the data. So immediately people glommed on to and rightly and I don't have a good explanation as to why Maggie's isn't in the dataset we purchased, but Maggie's is not in the dataset we purchased. Right? Some other stall words that we thought would have high visitation like Altas didn't appear in the data set. Is that because it's so small that those numbers didn't appear? Is it because the folks who went there didn't have their cell phone things clicked on? Was there some other reason why it wasn't geocoded? It's unclear to me. I I don't have a a great answer for that.

But still, I think the larger point is made with the dataset we have and, like, scanning this list of names as to where people are going to what types of businesses are they currently visiting and where those are geographically clustered, where north, south, east, west.

Other comments or thoughts on this initial conversation for presentation

part? Just

trying to make sure I can see everyone a little better. There we go.

I yeah. I don't think we have any other comments. Thank you.

I will continue. Yeah. I'll continue. So just to continue with this, shops and services, similar, seven Eleven, Safeway Gas are one and two there. You got Dollar Tree.

At the lower end is a Jiffy Lube at 25,000 annual visitors. So then if you look at more shops and services kind of around the downtown, you'll see, like, the city smoke shop kind of goes higher on the list. Wells Fargo is a little about roughly the same as Public Law Market with a 102,000 annual visitors. If you look at some of the leisure and entertainment, you know, includes the parks, say, Gearsan Park where the Lunar Rover is, gets about 13,000 visitors right now, whereas the AMC movie theater gets a half a million visitors or the Excesso Showers Center gets 482,000 visitors. So focusing in on the historic downtown for a moment, because the historic downtown is the part of the downtown sub area that I think is furthest from the major arterials and is furthest from the traffic.

The types of businesses that are there that are bringing business into that area with the exception, of the Jack in the Box, they're having to find other ways to bring their customer than is just put a sign up, make the parking stall available right in front of your door. They're finding other ways to attract customers. So someone like Wild Wheat, with 38,000 annual visitors, also makes money off of selling bread, distributing bread to grocery stores. Public Halal market might have a a pretty good network of people that are seeking out their bakery in particular. And I think one of the things I covered last time I presented this was just the idea of anchors and shopping centers.

So just back up here for a moment. Obviously, Safeway Gas, Safeway, these are sort of what's known in the retail business as loss leaders. They don't make as much money on the property owner doesn't make as much money leasing to a Safeway, really. They make their money on having the Safeway there and then all the little businesses where they they they have higher rents in order to capitalize on people needing to visit the Safeway. That's how they get more visits. So one of the things I want people to think about when they think about the historic downtown are what are some of the proximate anchors. Right? So for Kent Station, that might be the AMC movie theater. But in the historic downtown, when we look at it, some of the real anchors for visitation might be the Hong Kong market. It might be, the public halal market.

If you're just going by where people are most often visiting right now and what are those sort of drivers to people in the area, you should think about what are some of the, anchor businesses that we have, some of the anchor visitation places. Gonna pause here again for just reaction to this. Is there anything kind of surprising on this list to people's expectations? Are these some of I mean, this is a part where presenting this last week, a lot of people interjected and said, I had no idea that Rafiki was visited that often. Any other surprises, I think, so far in the information?

Just the relative what's visited more than other places or less. Just trying to scan the room here. Nope. I don't see any real reaction to that. So, is there a question?

No? Okay. So one of the things, I guess, you should be considering, and I think one of the things that came out of the conversation last week with the rediscovery advisory committee was, how do we make the most of the pass through visits that we have in our downtown? Something I presented once to the city of Kenmore when I was discussing with them, I was a technical assistant or, sorry, analyst to a little sort of two day shred they did with the Urban Land Institute. A lot of the, visitors, I mean, city manager in Kenmore was kind of concerned that they had a lot of new apartment buildings, but the apartment buildings weren't generating sort of the restaurant traffic that they had expected.

They expected to have a lot of new restaurants. They're they were very, envious and wondering what were they doing wrong compared to, Bothell. Bothell was just a few minutes up the road. Bothell seemed to have lots of new restaurants. It seemed like all the residents of Kenmore had to go visit Bothell for all the new restaurants.

Then he interviewed the local business owners, and the local business owners were very concerned about parking and that the city wasn't apply supplying adequate parking for the new residential apartment buildings. So some of the advice that was given to the city of Kenmore was, again, reminding them there's 43,000 customers a day that travel by Bothell Way right by the front door of Kenmore's little downtown versus maybe with four new apartment buildings, 400 to 600 new residents. The real market opportunity to get their ultimate goal, which was a more lively downtown with lots more eateries, was to find a way to capture and draw in more of the people passing on Bothell Way that could start to substantiate a business plan for a restaurateur in Downtown Canmore. We also indicated that it was not they weren't performing poorly compared to Bothel in terms of growth. They were performing quite well relative to the opportunity that they had.

Bothel has a very large biotech cluster, a lot of employment right at the at the at the doorstep of their downtown. And then they spent twenty five years working their roads in a way deliberately through where they wanted new development. They basically tried to harness Bothell Way to drive it through and create a downtown where they've had a lot of success with apartments and so forth. So a lot of the things that we're talking about now in terms of a downtown sub area plan, Bothell went through, like, twenty five, thirty years ago. And they thought very carefully about how did they harness the car traffic that went through the area and then harness that in a way that made viable a walkable downtown area with eateries.

So it was a similar advice to Kenmore's. It was just you can't simply ask for apartment buildings and think that will make for a, vital, vibrant, set of small businesses. Small businesses need to be supported in what they're already doing well. They need to be, encouraged. They need to be helped.

And they help make the attraction that could, in future, draw apartment buildings. But part of that and part of having a vital, walkable downtown area was about how do we get the people from nearby roads to know that that's the location. So in the breakout sessions, we talked a lot about the barrier that Central Avenue represents right now visually and psychologically from residents from the East Hill, which are some of our most, approximate, neighborhoods in which people empty into Central Avenue and either usually typically go north to go to commute trip to, to work on 167 or South, but rarely do they go West Of Central Avenue unless they are taking one of those major arterials and going into Kent Station. So how do we work on signage? How do we work on wayfinding?

How do we work on strategies that try to harness the nearby active streets that have tens of thousands of people driving, through them and encourage them to stop at the downtown business? I stopped sharing my screen just for a moment here to have more of a conversation, see people better.

So I saw lots of head nodding when Bill said Central. Any other comments or input?

Is the thought or the suggestion Bill, if you're saying that most of the traffic are you saying foot traffic stops from East Hill at Central?

Car traffic, especially.

Car traffic, they're either turning left, right or going on to I-five, right? They're going 167 or

Yes.

So if I'm understanding correctly, then would the data suggest like we need to clear signage like along James or Smith, like those two that are going east west that cut through there, but also go by the bigger like existing draws like Kent Station or Showaere or something like that?

Yeah. I I that is what I'm suggesting and, as part of a key part of it. I think the other thing is to think about it's not always a transportation or land use, but try to also think how do we lean into the marketing of the anchors that we have. So if we have local businesses like La Verta or Hong Kong Market or Public Halal that are drawing 6 figures of annual visitors, How do they become anchors and visitors for other businesses in the downtown, and how do we facilitate that? But that's that's the I mean, I I think more focused on the built environment component. I am suggesting way finding signage is inadequate. And, even in the era of Google Maps, we still have eyeballs. We're not all hot wired yet with meta Googles and all the rest. We we, we still experience reality. Signs still matter.

That's why you'll see when you walk around our downtown, a bus bus sandwich boards out because, really, that hasn't obsolesce just in the same way a hammer hasn't gone obsolete. Technology of the sign hasn't gone obsolete. But a lot of our signage is just, I would say, not professionally done at this point with really legible clear direction that, hey. Something is going on in this direction or not. Here's just another image of what I'm trying to share here.

So you can see, again, this is a map now of those two sort of hot spots I described before near Langston Landing and the big where Big Lots was, and then on the other hand, all around Kent Station. You can see the big clusters of activity on either end and then sort of a drop off in in in businesses that reach that top level list everywhere in between. And partly, yep, I'm gonna go back here to this slide, jumping around here just a little bit. Please please bear with me. Partly, this is because in our downtown, what we really have is a concentration of right now is sort of government and social services that are, tax exempt.

It's also, places of worship. But if you look at our downtown area, currently, the regional growth center, 63.7 Percent is exempt from property tax. Right? So that is a very high percentage of what is typically your biggest property tax producing area of a town given over to sort of non business uses into non commercial activities. And so it's a little bit imbalanced at this point and it has consequences for the city's financial sustainability.

That's a partial explanation as to what we're looking at with that earlier graphic I had up of the two clusters. But it's not the only explanation. The other explanation, of course, is just where the East West Roads beat the North South routes.

I did have another question, just bringing the topic back to, the example that you spoke about with Bothell. I just I kind of want to know what came first in their development. Was it more of a local business growth effort? Or did it start with directing foot and car traffic where they wanted it to go? Or, did you would you say that they started with focusing on parking volume?

It's a great question. I did meet with the senior planner some years ago to talk about it before he retired. It was like a work of his career. It was like twenty five years. They've been very like I said, they were very intentional that they wanted to siphon off awful way into their area. They had capital resources to do that that I'm not sure that we possess at this time. Okay. But, so, you know, you have to take all these types of case examples with the grain of salt. You do what you can with the resource base that you have. Here's what I will say.

It does start with jobs. To me, there isn't a chicken and egg to this type of conversation. There is kind of a right answer and a wrong answer. And so part of their right answer, right, was the canyon, the sort of canyon area where it's Bothell's very famous for all those biotech business parks. They used to be warehouses, but they had good proximity to Bellevue and some of the talent that they needed for medical device manufacturing. And then they got some other biotech companies, and they've just really worked on their zoning to be accommodating and helpful to those types of companies that had sort of high wage pay. That was one part of the equation. Right? Okay. Some of that, it's kinda hard to say if the government would've, you know, would've happened without government intervention or not.

But they definitely leaned into it. That's one. Two, they really united their public works investments with their plan, and they really thought deliberately about the state highway and how they could work with one city with advocacy and with financial dollars to reroute parts of Bothell Way that created more buildable area. One of the issues that we have in our downtown is that as the second oldest downtown in King County, what you have is very small lots. Lots of the properties downtown are very, very small, probably about 5,000, 10,000 square feet.

In our region, though, to make something pencil for, let's say, multifamily or what people anticipate is, like, growth in their mind's eye, which is like a business on the bottom and, you know, residences above it, that sort of podium style, That's very hard to pencil anywhere in South King County without subsidy, and most of the examples that you'll see in Kent have subsidy. But especially in Kent, even for something that is surface parked, you need at least three acres to start to get to the unit level that starts to make that work financially because we have a different rent profile than our than some of the other cities in King County, but we have the exact same cost to construct. So that differential is a disadvantage. And I think another disadvantage is that usually when developers are putting together projects, they're there's nothing more precious than their own time from their own perspective, of course. But they're not under construction loan yet.

They're not having someone else pick up the tab. So actually making the phone call property owner by property owner by property owner and resting a different price. 10,000 square foot lot at a time to get to a 120,000 square feet, they have to do six or eight transactions to get that assembly together. It's just not worth their time. It's it's something called transaction costs. It's a bit of a barrier. So, again, some of the successful examples you see is getting the downtown going. You see activist cities, what they will do is actually try to make the assemblage happen and make deliberate moves in such a way to encourage development assemblage to come about. And that was part of the Bothell story too. So it wasn't necessarily just something like wayfinding or parking.

It's a lot of different things that they worked on over years. But they did understand, I think, appropriately that you need an economic engine. And that engine flows through people getting to and from work. It starts from an origin of a place of a job. And these are the types of things that underwriters for residential developments also look at. Right? They look at jobs. They look at wage growth. They think about what that will mean for rent growth in a certain number of years. These are some of the things that they think about before they they they plant a flag in the ground to build a new development.

For small businesses, I mean, runs a gamut because you're dealing with a lot of different types of people who are working at the small business level. Often, sometimes people are just choosing a location because it's the most affordable commercial space they can find. That's one reason they choose a location. Other times, like I said, they're paying a premium, but they're doing it because they want the parking field, they want the anchor, they want that traffic, and they know that their business is gonna depend on that traffic because they're not gonna have the money to do the budgeting themselves. Mean, the budget to do the marketing themselves.

So I think think these are some of the different considerations that when we're thinking about growing our regional growth centers, like, is what are the economic drivers in Kent and by what roads do they travel, and how do we associate our downtown areas with those economic engines?

Thanks a lot for answering. So I'm sure everybody here would agree that the Kent Valley, the manufacturing, the aerospace industry is definitely a big driver here in Kent. But I'm not too sure about Bothell's biotech industry. What's the proximity between their downtown and their industrial complex, I guess?

Like five or ten minutes by car.

Five or ten minutes. So same

as Kent. Okay. Cool. It's very similar. It's one of the reasons why I saw him out to have those conversations.

Thank you.

So I apologize, I'm going to ask you something that I think you covered before the sound quality of the Zoom and my hearing aids are not getting along so well tonight. I believe I heard you say that you were mentioning that you were surprised that Maggie's was not on the list. But you that were in general, you're mostly looking at general patterns as opposed to specific items.

Correct. That's correct. Yes.

Just wanted to make sure I had that right.

You have that right. And I would also just add that there's a couple of businesses on the list, that because of their scale of their visitation, we're surprising at the level. I mean, I'm not surprised really about Hong Kong market at 400,000 visitors a year because it's always, always busy as long as I've worked here, which is ten years. And even when I lived downtown, that was kind of the closest grocer for me. But, so I'm not fully surprised, but it's always interesting to see the actual number of visits and how they compare to Safeway, which is probably a lot closer than some people might, just sort of assume.

So, again, the point of data is not to assume. Right? It's to and to work on people's intuition on that. And I don't think it should be lost on anyone that Hong Kong Market's on Central Avenue and part of the old street grid to the historic downtown. So it's like, how do you get in between Hong Kong Market and Downtown Kent right now? Not not easily. Not well. Right? And so that would be a suggestion. Like, you have big anchors. You have great, travel on Central, but how does that connect to the rest of downtown? Right? And then maybe how do you focus scarce resources in a way to exploit that? And also thinking about how Central is a connection to the Kent Valley and how Central is connected to East Hill. Right?

And then start populating investments that make sense given those kind of connections.

Thank you.

I definitely think when you're looking and I kind of going back to your one question about where do we connect or how do we get people from the East Hill and West Hill Of Kent back into downtown. Are you looking at or do we have the data on where those people are going? So, like, on the East Hill Of Kent, I mean, we can take 18 if we want to get to I 5 probably faster at some points than going one six seven, or we can go down Petrovsky or go over to the Highlands to get on to 405. Are we looking at where they're going, and are we looking at where the West Hill's going where they can just pop on to I 5 right there and go wherever?

I would look more to East Hill and The Lakes. We started doing that. To be honest with you, the method for doing that is pretty arduous at the moment. It's very data entry, but we have started it. It it goes back to what I said earlier, bringing in other datasets. So that's a great question. We were thinking about longitudinal, employment, household dynamics, or probably screwing up that acronym. It's LEHD from the US census. It actually says where do people work, what city, what town, and it kind of pegs them to an income level that's not very finely grained, but it's available down to the block block level. So we've gotten as far as processing Scenic Hill.

We'd like to do a little more East Hill before we come back to you with that information, but it is something we're also asking our consultant team to kinda pick up the bantle from here on and and look a little bit more tightly. Because if you if you can if you can see where people from at the block level of their or their residents are going for work, you can start to make some inferences. But we don't have the same level of detail. The placer kinda shows where people showed up at, not where they originated necessarily, so it's not fully tracking that kind of individual. But if we know that these are the places as big as it start like I said, the pattern starts to tell one story, then I bring in a different dataset, let's say the LEHD, and we're saying, well, most people are commuting these following locations from these most close in neighborhoods.

You start to sketch out what the opportunity really looks like. And, so we are looking at that. I think it's a good question. I just, I don't have all the information fully compiled at this point, but we we can we can do better at it.

I think for the time being, Bill, we don't have any other questions. Did you want to keep going on your presentation?

I've of come close to an end of it, unless there's more back forth. Fine. I think the main points I think were shared and picked up on here, which was thinking about our economic drivers, thinking about the pattern of activity and then sort of using that as context for the next steps of the downtown sub area plan. I think we've got a good research question here. I'm just trying to restate what I've heard here. Correct me if I've missed anything, board members. But I think the other the last point is also, I think, really key, which is really where are people going from the nearest neighborhoods. And I do think that starts to suggest, like, this intersection, that intersection, this like, these should be special intersection. You know? How do we sign it?

What does it look like from a streetscape? How are we doing things to set the table a little differently that actually recognizes this is a place to stay? I think the the investment pattern you've seen so far in downtown, and it shows, between the historic train depot back in the night early nineteen hundreds where most of the building stock started to take shape till today, Last forty years in particular, we've been focused on blasting through sort of like freight truck routes through this area and not focused on our infrastructure as a way of capturing trips. And that's just a very different set of investments. So it's a long range thing that got us to a certain pattern of development, and it's going take another long range set of things to get us to a different set of pattern of development.

Thank you. And

Bill, to back that up, I was looking at I think we've updated the downtown plan five times since the '70s. And it was substantial to divert traffic around downtown and not to in downtown. So it really was an intentional planning effort at the time that made sense for freight and rail movement and everything else. And now, we're having a moment of re envisioning. But to your point, yes, for sure, it's actually in our planning documents. I don't know if you've seen But then the second point is time. It takes time and resources to pivot from an original idea or plan that we invested heavily in.

You, Bill.

We really

appreciate you making time to be with us and share that data.

Well, thank you everyone. Thanks for your time. Have Yeah. A good evening.

Thanks, Bill. Have a good night.

Awesome. So now we're going to share with you our draft vision and goals for the plan. This is something that we are still working on with our community advisory group, but we felt it was important to hear from you as well. And so I will walk through now the vision statement and the draft goals. And if you would like to just make any notes or any thoughts or comments that you might have, and then when we are kind of toward the end, we can get your get your feedback on these. I don't know if it's moving forward for me.

It's not?

Okay. If you can just yeah. Perfect. One more slide. Alright.

So I'll read through this just just so everyone can hear where we are. So our draft vision statement, as it currently is written, states, Downtown Kent is the vibrant, inclusive heart of the city, a place where people from all backgrounds come together to live, work, gather, and celebrate. It is anchored by recognizable landmarks, cultural institutions, and community events that reflect and honor Kent's diversity and identity. The welcoming public spaces within Kent's downtown foster connection, creativity, and a strong sense of belonging. Downtown is an economic hub with a strong residential base and a variety of housing choices, concentrating growth, and walkable transit connected environment that supports daily life and long term sustainability.

Streets and public spaces are safe, clean, and accessible, cultivating a lively downtown where businesses prosper and new ventures are inspired to locate in a destination known for opportunity and success. With a strong with strong connections to surrounding neighborhoods and natural areas, Downtown Kent thrives as a dynamic people first district at the center of civic and cultural life. And I guess with that vision statement as well, I should also state that this was written by our consultants based on input that we've received from the comp plan and other community engagement efforts. So so we're currently in this this state. So if you wanna flip through, there's a goal per slide.

Alright. So goal one is to create a safe, welcoming, and walkable downtown that is memorable place where people want to gather. Previous plans did call for walkability and place making, but we didn't have a coordinated urban design framework to support that strategy. So this time we're we're working toward that goal. Public input also has also highlighted safety, comfort, and having attractive spaces within the downtown as a key priority.

So potential actions to implement the goal are to create people oriented spaces, clearer way finding, and gateways that reflect Kent's diverse identity and create a more memorable core to the downtown. Goal number two is to tell downtown's story through art, design, cultural events, and meaningful public experiences that celebrate the history, diversity, and creativity that define Kent. So the reason we're drafting this goal is that wayfinding public art, cultural programming, and gateway features help to celebrate Kent's identity. And so as a cultural core for the city, that would be the place to do it. Enhancing the visual and experiential identity of the downtown also reinforces Ken's role as a cultural and economic heart.

Goal number three is to provide housing choices so everyone can call downtown home. The reason this is a goal is to is that housing affordability and choice were top concerns that were captured during the comprehensive planning effort. And in order to meet PSRC housing targets as well and to remedy past inequities, the downtown should increase the variety of housing options and protect tenants, preserve affordable homes, and reduce barriers to development near transit. So in order to meet these PSRC requirements and also to comply with the direction of our comp plan, this particular goal would help us achieve that. Goal number four is to energize downtown with a mix of uses, supporting residential growth and strengthening Kent's role in South King County as a center for innovation and opportunity.

So as our regional growth center that's designated by PSRC, Downtown Kent must accommodate a significant share of the city's housing and job growth. And we also know that the comp planning effort as well promoted the downtown as a place, as a central hub for these types of uses as well. For goal number five, transform downtown by embedding health, equity, and sustainability into every project, program, and action, building a community where people and the environment thrive. This is a goal because public feedback has has really emphasized a desire to see more green spaces. So trees, parks, and open spaces have really been described as defining peep defining features for quality of life, And then also to meet our regional sustainability goals defined by PSRC, we also need to be protecting critical areas, creating equitable park access, and supporting state greenhouse gas reduction targets.

Goal six is to connect parks, trails, and public spaces to form a seamless network that encourages the exploration and activation of downtown. This is a lot of what we just talked about with Bill. So the current plan lacks a comprehensive strategy for equitable hang on. Equitable park and trail access. So our goals are to close these gaps to support environmental justice, ensuring pop vulnerable populations can benefit from nearby green spaces and connect downtown more seamlessly to our regional regional and citywide trail networks.

We're also really interested here and seeing the economic growth that can come with connecting these types of spaces as well. Okay. So for goal number seven, build a resilient, inclusive, and regionally competitive economy that is adaptive over time so that businesses thrive, careers grow, and opportunity is open to everyone. For this, we're really hoping that our downtown economy can be adaptive as markets change. We also hope to create opportunity for all, So supporting workforce development programs, priority hire programs, and local entrepreneurship to expand prosperity while reflecting our the city's economic equity goals and the PSRCs emphasis on regional competitiveness.

So goal number eight is to encourage new development in a manner that supports residents and local businesses, mitigates displacement, preserves affordability, and celebrates the diversity of Kent. So growth pressures can threaten existing residents and businesses that have contributed to downtown. So anti displacement strategies are important for us to consider when we're creating a plan that's gonna create new growth. We wanna make sure that we are maintaining the assets that we have within our downtown, our residents, and our businesses. So goal nine is to coordinate efforts and investment and infrastructure and capital facilities to anticipate and support future downtown development.

So with this, we're hoping that our capital planning will support and anticipate the kind of growth, the climate resilience, and emerging technologies that we hope to see. So upgrading utilities, broadband, sustainable energy infrastructure, storm water, schools, and other capital facilities will enable the downtown to be ready for long term needs that support both public and private investments. So if we wanna see development happen in the downtown, this kind of infrastructure is critical for us to plant for. Goal 10, expanding expand the multimodal transportation network to make it easy to get to and around downtown. Public input showed strong demand for better connections within the downtown and between downtown and surrounding neighborhoods.

This is a big conversation that we've been having with our community advisory group as well. So how can we use this particular goal to meet PSRC requirements, but also to meet the the desire to have walking and biking in transit more accessible, people wanting to travel into downtown and around the downtown. So these are the 10 draft goals as they are currently written. We would love to hear your thoughts, questions, feedback so that we can shape these goals to reflect your thoughts.

Okay. So, I'm sort of looking at this and a lot of these are generically good ideas that pretty much everyone would sign up to. It's like we want a safe walkable downtown. Well, nobody's gonna argue for an unsafe not walkable downtown. How would you, but I think one way to look at this might be, how would this be different if you were writing a Downtown Seattle plan or a Downtown Bellevue plan? How would it be different? How does this specifically address the issues of Downtown Kent?

I think it's an excellent point and we can certainly look at these goals through that lens and make sure that we're capturing that. Right now, it's it's sort of been an exercise of taking all of the comments that we've received and then just like it's like jumbling them together and then trying to create structure as well. So we've we've really been striving to capture everything that we've heard. And when you start to do that, it can start to sound some sort of generic. So I think our goal now is to refine these to make sure that they really are reflective of what we're hearing from the advisory group. And I think it's excellent advice. I don't know if do you have other yeah.

I can chime in. So, there are some that are very specific to what Downtown Kent needs or what we've heard. So, goal six, the effort isn't necessarily to expand our park system. We have a lot of really good parks and other open space and public spaces in Kent. What we and especially in downtown and the park and open space plan really calls out like downtown has a lot of assets.

Where there's gaps is the connectivity between them and also connecting them so that there's not just access to the parks and open space and public space, but also connecting them so that if you're coming off the Inter Urban Trail, if you're coming from these other park spaces, you're also going into downtown and hopefully spending money. So, giving you access to both. And so, some of some of the goals have been really tailored. The idea of, like, housing for everyone, right now, we have a plethora of affordable housing in the mix when you compare affordable housing that's income restricted to market rate. If we were in a city that has a high cost of living, many of our East Side neighbors, they would have a more specific goal that's targeting and emphasizing income restricted affordable housing.

In Kent, we don't have that problem. We actually need a mix of incomes so that we also have a mix of ages and a mix of spending abilities to support businesses in different time different activities at different times, right? So, if everyone has certain ages, like we have a lot of senior housing in downtown, we're not saying get rid of that. We want to keep it, but we also need to see market rate as well so that we can support businesses that stay open later or have other desires to support new businesses coming into downtown. So, these are somewhat specific.

I think where you would see the change would be in the actions that we're recommending under these afterwards. So, those would be much more specific to Kent. So, these are generally, you're right. No one's going to say, no, I want an unsafe city, or please, please make it harder to get around. So, some of them are big, broad goals, but they are somewhat tailored to what we have heard and what Kent's profile is in terms of economics and existing conditions.

So, Kristen, because you just brought it up, are very general goals and the I can't remember the word you used, but the detailed, like, action items under that, when do we see those? Because I think I know you sent them out, I think. Right?

No? If you've seen them, you're you're ahead of me. Okay.

Because you sent something out on Friday that was this, but then there was more to it.

It had more justification of where it's coming from and why we're revising the goals to include this.

Okay.

And I The old plan had eight points, and it was like environmental sustainability, economic development, housing. But it didn't necessarily it's like those are statement words, and they kind of are guiding ideas. The approach we're taking this time is a little bit more specific, instead of just saying economic development. We want it to be resilient, adaptive, providing job opportunities. And so that's we're taking a slightly different approach than the last plan. And so it's what you received is the explanation of why based on the feedback we've heard, why this is how it's been crafted.

Okay.

Not saying it's perfect, and we'll be working with the advisory group to refine it as well they have an opportunity. But those actions, that's what we'll be working on between now and mid to late September when the draft plan gets released. That's our work ahead. We just want to make sure we're framing these topics. Is there I guess maybe one question is, is there a topic we're missing? Something where you think, like, this is not incorporated in these other ones, or should be called out more prominently?

I think so with going bouncing actually right off of that, I think part of this is and we we talked about it at our last meeting. We saw it in the survey notes. And I look at goal 10, and I've looked at goal one yeah. Goal one. We have our community speaking out that they have been affected by bike lanes, by forcing more drivers off the road.

And I feel like these goals aren't listening to that community those community members when it was a large portion of our community that was speaking kind of out against it. And we you know, we've had other board members mention that as well. And so I just I'm concerned that we are leaving out a majority of people who have want to come to Kent want to come downtown, but we can't find parking in Kent. And so, you know, yes, it's great to have multimodal transportation, but unless you get King County to agree to do more bus lines off of the West Hill Of Kent or the East Hill Of Kent, where half of our bus lines have been already shut down, that where where do we go?

Yes. I I do know that we have heard those comments as well. And so trust that we're we're will be incorporating that feedback into crafting the actions that follow on this. A multimodal network, we specifically didn't write something along the lines of, like, increase bike ped transportation downtown. It because it is more comprehensive than just creating bike lanes on a roadway.

So we are looking at how can we support all modes of transportation coming in and out of downtown including people driving in cars. So I I think it is a goal of ours to make sure that when we craft the action steps around this particular goal that we make sure that we are looking comprehensively at everyone traveling through the area. But we do also wanna make sure that if people want to come downtown on a bike, that there is a safe path in and out for them. And that may or may not be a bike lane designated in a certain way, but it may be a lower traffic street that's that's crafted in such a way that it accommodates that kind of travel. So I don't know if Kristen you had other.

Yeah, I think so this is an interesting paradigm that we're in right now because we did hear a lot about taking away street lanes for vehicles being problematic, But then, we also heard at the same time, and we can't see who wrote the comments, but we can see a line to see the person who put comments across all. So, one person, and it happened frequently, where they said, no one's in the bike lanes, it's awful, like, stop taking away car space. And then, the next thing they would say is, it feels so unsafe to cross this intersection. And so, I think those two can exist in reality. I'm not saying they have to be competing, but what we have repeatedly heard is parking is a challenge, and then people want to do something similar to they want to walk around downtown.

So, want to be able to park and then walk between spaces. And, for a variety of reasons, including physical safety, roadways, multiple things, they don't necessarily feel like they can do that right now. And so, walking around and within downtown is something that we've heard consistently, regardless of whether there's bike lanes to or into downtown. And so, that multimodal transportation network can include bike lanes, but it can also include things like enhanced pedestrian amenities, like flashing signal for crossing to help with raising awareness that someone's in the intersection. It can be adding pedestrian pathways.

It can be other things as well. And we also are recognizing with sounder with light rail coming to the West Hill, there are buses that are going to be rerouted and recirculated through our downtown. And so, trying to think through kind of how do you arrive in downtown, and then once you're here, how do get how do we get people not just to the Sounder Station, but from the Sounder Station into all of the wonderful other areas of our downtown, and it so that people want to spend time here and visit multiple locations at once. So, here you on the bike lanes, and in no way are we saying, keep creating bike lanes right now, I think there's a long term conversation that's happening, But, we did clearly hear that being able to walk and feel safe while doing that was really important to people. Ben, I saw you nod.

Did you want to add something to that before we go to

Yeah. I just had a clarifying question off of that comment that the light rail is coming, but it is on the West Hill. And, like, you know, the sounder train is right here. So what, like, there changes that are coming? It seems like they're one way that could increase volume, right? You have these two main passenger, you know, mass commuting, but nothing they're both running north south, nothing east west to connect them. But it sounds like that was just my question. Was like, is there a way to capital? Like James seems like it could run directly. I think James runs.

They do. James and Smith. Smith turns under 256.

Yeah. So, South so King County Metro is currently doing a study right now. We will send you the link because it's open through the end of the month. I'm looking at Tanya so that she can remind us. But they have a survey out.

They've been doing some planning. I think they're in phase three of looking at bus routes and how to connect better to the light rail stations. And so, they did a presentation to council last week, it was an interesting presentation. I think Caroline and I both stuck around for it because we wanted to hear it and I think we have more questions than answers on it, but there are planned changes to bus service to help, because they don't need to all run parallel north south to get into Seattle anymore, because there will be other options. And so, this happened in other parts of their the light rail system when their stations opened.

The local transit service said, hey, how do we redistribute our lines so that we're not duplicating efforts of going to the same place, but helping increase access to those higher capacity modes. And so, there is a survey still open if you have strong feelings about bus routes or where they should or shouldn't go. They have now their proposal of what they're suggesting, and it does include connections from East Hill to downtown to light rail as well. There are conversations that are going and we'll share that link with you.

Yeah, you asked for things we're not seeing in there and one of the things I'm having trouble finding maybe it's there and I'm not finding it is improving the aesthetics particularly of some of the vacant buildings. You know, like if you compare the no k no versus the empty space that's next door to Maggie's, you could drive past and not even realize it's empty, whereas the Okay No, it's pretty obviously empty. So, improving aesthetics in general.

And I know that we have had that in here. Yeah. And it's we could make it more explicit. I think goal one and two are starting to feel somewhat similar to us and so we've been refining the language on some of these and we will continue to do that. But we certainly have heard that people are wanting to have an attractive downtown, that we need beautiful spaces, that we need memorable spaces, that we need kind of a landmark core for the downtown.

And so we certainly can look at the language on that, I think as well and make sure that we are capturing that adequately. But I think in our action steps, that's that's one thing that we would clearly want to see happening.

That might be under welcoming.

Yes, I think again, I think we're fine tuning a bunch of different ones and I think we might have to add another word in some.

Think goal for also starting with energizing downtown, I think that touches on it a little bit. We heard frequently, like, there's no there, there, I come for an item an action or two or an event or two, but I'm not necessarily drawn to staying in downtown. And I think the aesthetics and the vacancies of the disconnected nature link into that too. So there I think there's a couple of places, but I agree that it's missing right now.

And

goal one, I think originally was where it began because it talks about creating attractive spaces in the downtown. But we can look at the language in these and make sure that we're really capturing that desire.

And I'm not sure if we were trying to have a total of 10 goals, but I was just piggybacking off of what you guys were saying, how some of the goals are kind of conflating with each other. It looks like goal three and sorry, goal number three and goal number eight could have been put together, it looks like, and goal number four and goal number seven also. I feel like if we have less goals, I mean we could focus on each one a little bit more.

I like that. I think that's excellent feedback. We can certainly look at refining these and distilling them. We're a fan of being more concise. Actually, we took a pretty heavy line to this for the first round and we're happy to go back and look at these again and make sure that we're capturing everything in the most distilled way we can. Think that's the best way forward.

Was going to ask you all, so we've talked about downtown. I've heard parking and we don't specifically address parking here. What would you all think about having a goal about getting to downtown and then a goal about once you're here, what your experience is. And, that may be coinciding with one. It could be the same, but I think it may be a little bit different of how your transportation gets here versus how you're what your experience is when you're in the downtown.

One other question too, this is sort of a tangent but a line, that park and ride that is across from Shorewood, how, do we have a sense of like the capacity there? Like is that always it's huge space?

You may know a lot more about that particular space than I do.

So so the park and ride, my understanding, and this is my understanding, we need to look into the actual data, but my understanding is the park and ride being used as an actual park and ride is a little bit more limited. It helps significantly with overflow parking for the courthouse, for the regional justice center that's there, as well as the show where events that happen. So, it's used, but not necessarily as a parking ride. One of the things that was discussed in the city at one point was, I think originally Metro was thinking of using that location versus the Sounder Station for bus overlays and drop offs. And so, now that things are shifting closer to Sounder Station, that's a property that I think has pretty significant value for surrounding uses.

Thinking just on without having to build new structures in there. It's already paved. There's parking. There's foot traffic. But like, we've talked about before, like food trucks coming in. And then, it's right near the inner urban trail. Mhmm. Which is a direct shot to Blue Origin. And I I bike to My daughter's daycare is in the Blue Origin campus over there, and I bike over to along the inner urban, and I know I've passed a bunch of Blue Origin folks. They're wearing the merch and the swag like along there.

So, I know, and it's only like a ten minute ride. And you pass by that spot, and if there was a food truck there, if we know that it fills up on graduation, there's an overflow. I don't think there's a lot of lunch spots. You all work down here. There's a ton of lunch that seems like it might be if you're at the Regional Justice Center. That's not a far walk and it's there's pathways to show where right there. Like, you've got events, a hockey game Mhmm. And they can cross over, there's lights, there's crossings. Like, has that been pitched before?

Interesting idea. I don't know enough about how we could access the space. It would be my big question, I guess.

So, it's not owned by the city. It's owned Maybe that. That's the big the big issue. And, I know there's been lots of conversations by Metro, as well as by WSDOT that also owns Park and Rides of, like, what do we do with these spaces? At this point, we don't have any active conversations with King County Metro, who owns it, about different ways to utilize that spot for food trucks or anything like that right now. We haven't crossed that bridge and that conversation.

But it's a really interesting idea. I do think we can take note and see what we can follow-up

on. Yes. Hi. I wanted to return quickly to kind of the clarity of the goals. I feel like what we've been getting at when we've been saying like these goals kind of go together and maybe they could be conflated is that some of them are very, very specific and some of them are more specific than what we used to have, but still a little too general.

So an example that I might give you is goal number two is very specific and seems like it should be an action under the umbrella of goal number one. So how do we make a safe welcoming walkable that's memorable where people want to gather? Well, we should probably tell downtown story through art, etcetera.

I like that.

I think that it might help distill, like, kind of provide a little bit more understanding to go with the vision statement instead of kind of like twisting specific actions into goals. And then like the comment that Kristen made about should we have a goal about being able to come into downtown? Well, maybe goal four is a little bit too general and we kinda wanna say something like supporting the ability of people to come to downtown in many different ways. Something like that. Mhmm.

So some of them are a little bit too specific. Some of them are a little bit too general, and maybe look at defining some terms and creating some actions out of these goals. I like that. Does that make sense?

Yeah. Excellent feedback. Okay. I think you were

next. Yeah.

And I think so for me and it's I'm gonna go to goal three, it's really I recognize that we have consultants, and we have other people that are helping with these, but it's recognizing the terminology that we're using within the goals and when we're doing the defined tasks. You know, I heard protect tenants. I heard providing affordable housing. We have a lot of affordable housing already in Kent. We also already protect a lot of our tenants.

And reality is goals that should not probably be in a goal for us or in our defined actions because that is a much larger fish to fry that probably shouldn't be written into a goal or even put into it as a task. That is something that is currently being handled at the state level, at least protecting tenants. I get we have to watch our tenants. We have to make sure that we're doing right by them, but that's not something that these goals redefining downtown should be handling. It that is something that probably should be left out.

And I yes. So we originally actually changed goal three to this to the line that it is because we wanted to reflect that sentiment that we do have a very different situation than many other cities in King County in terms of the the housing makeup in the downtown. And the there is a PSRC requirement to protect tenants and to provide affordable housing and all these other sorts of things. So the why statement that's below that is just giving that as context for why we're discussing this as a goal. But the way that we paired that sentence down was specifically to reflect that our our our needs in Kent are different in terms of providing a a broader mix of housing.

And, again, a lot of the things that you just described are will not be considered, you know, action steps for what we need to be doing. It's more how can we broaden the mix and what are some of the strategies and approaches and so forth that we can use to do that.

Yeah. So there's some PSRC requirements that we can't get out of, and in order to maintain certification, we need to Speak to them. To speak to them. I'm currently having a similar conversation with King County because they when they reviewed our housing element, they said, you're not prioritizing you don't say specifically that you prioritize affordable housing near transit. And we say prioritize a mix of affordable a mix of housing affordable all incomes near transit.

And that's very intentional because without with existing programs that already are out there, we're seeing deeply affordable, income restricted housing near transit. And so, that's great. We're not saying we're not going to do that. We're not saying we're going to block it. We're not saying we're trying to remove it.

We need to see the full spectrum of housing, just like the state calls for. And so, this is where we removed in goal three anything that said specifically call outs to affordable housing and protecting tenants. There will still be actions under it to help support that and to promote those actions because we don't want to lose the affordable housing that's in downtown because that's so expensive to replace. And, it's there and it's good and it serves a purpose. And so, it's getting those details and nuances right under it that it's really important. We cannot remove and will not remove some of those requirements as

well.

So it's that balance and that game that we're trying to play, because most things that are written are thinking of high cost cities and not about the low cost cities. So they're written with the mind that they're trying to address issues that are in the higher cost cities and we just have different challenges.

You mentioned something about you know looking at how people get to downtown how they get out of downtown, it would be interesting to look at some of these objectives in terms of what proportion of the downtown could I reasonably live in without a car? What know if I if I what proportion you know how could I where could I get to downtown without a car? I mean I guarantee you from my house up on the East Hill you I can't get to downtown without a car. It's not gonna happen. And you know, but it's you know, it's like that's would be interesting to look at it from that kind of here's our objective. This is what we want to accomplish kind of vision.

So I think that's that's a really interesting comment as well because I think it also speaks to what we were talking about earlier, finding that multimodal network. And so we're trying to accommodate all of the feedback, you know, that we're hearing across the board and we recognize that there are challenges traveling into and around the downtown by foot, by bike, by car, all of the above. And so how can we really create a network that supports everyone? That's that's part of the challenge, I think, and the goal.

And I do wanna be cognizant of time because we do have one more agenda item. Yeah. So, we can keep going but I'd just say let's give it no more than five more minutes. I

was just going to say it seems like we have when it comes to the multimodal network, it seems like we have the ability for car like, the ability for cars to come to downtown but not stay downtown, so the lack of parking. But and then the opposite when it comes to pedestrians where a pedestrian couldn't come to downtown but might a little bit more easily get around downtown as it is right now. So we've talked about connections in a couple of different places and maybe in that transportation area to like some consider those connections.

That's a great I think that's a great observation. We can definitely.

And I do quickly just want to call out, do think it would be worth and I know we've all kind of agreed, but to look at a goal for how do we get get people downtown and keep them here to spend money. Mhmm. Because as we do look at goal 10 and you have, obviously residents who have said it's hard for us to get here and stay here, we're going elsewhere. Mhmm. You know, we're going to the Highlands. We're going over to the Landing. We're going, soon to be into Covington for their new shopping center area. So there are other options that if we want to be attractive,

we have to look at that.

Excellent. Thank you all very much. We really appreciate your feedback. Excellent comments that will be helpful for us incorporating this before we bring it back to the advisory group as well. So thank you very much. Thanks Carolyn.

All right. If there are no objections from the Board members at this time, we're ready for Recode Kent Creating Housing Options Phase two Intro. Staff, may begin.

Hi, you guys. So this will be really just an informative meeting. So you all can see where we're going with Phase one. So briefing on what we're looking for looking into on this meeting here. So just to recap what was adopted in phase one, which you all were around for.

I'll introduce some new resources, which I don't think you guys know quite yet, so that'll be new for you all, and then a preview of what to expect for phase two. So just an overview of phase one. So you know we had the zone consolidation. So taking 11 of our residential units and simplifying them and renaming them into six with NR two being our largest one combining for SR four Point five, six, eight, and MRD. We also have now a broader amount of housing options in counties per lot.

So the four to six units per lot depending on affordability as well as near if they're near transit stops. More unit types, so we had nine that we allowed with five plexes and six plexes being allowed near major transit stops within I'm sorry, one quarter mile of transit stops. And then we updated our parking standards. So basing those based off the proximity of trains as well. So let's see.

So if it's up within a half mile, there's no parking required and then there's some other stipulations regarding middle housing and the size of the units, the size of those middle housing units. We also add added scalable density to our NR 2 and NR 3 zones. So that's just the 24 units per acre which we talked about for a while there and added half story which we didn't have before. We didn't have a definition for half story so that's there now as well as some height incentives that we also added. We also added unit lot subdivision which was capped at nine units or nine short subdivisions.

We updated our step housing regulations, so we pulled out that permanent supportive housing, put that in our district regulations because we didn't have that before, and then we also clarified some development standards for other step housing units. And then lastly, we added site plan the site plan permitting process just so to make the ease of all the middle housing permits we'll have. A little bit easier for not only Kent, but also the applicants as well. So going to some of our new resources here. So we created a middle housing quick guide.

So this guide just gives Kent's residents a simple overview of what we just introduced in phase one and what would go into building middle housing within the city of Kent. We also introduced an interactive mapping tool, which you can see a screenshot here on the screen. So this tool just shows you our new zoning districts, those walk sheds, that quarter mile walk shed around major transit. The urban separators, which essentially would tell someone, you know, the middle housing is effective in this area or not effective if you're in the urban separators. And then utility service areas.

So when people are or applicants are wanting to get into developing, they know, oh, these are my utility areas for sewer, water and who to contact. And as I mentioned previously, we added the new site plan application process. So the big part about this one is it allows vesting for applicants and again just kind smooths the process on all those middle housing applications we expect to have. And that's just like an overlook on that site plan and preview. So you have the middle housing with no land division, so the condos, rentals, things like that.

And you also can do it for single family detached units and up to two ADUs. It's an optional process to go straight into site plan review. And again, it's just really for that vesting process. Now looking forward to phase two. So we have a couple action items here that we're really looking to hone on in.

So we have the middle housing site design, expanded unit lot subdivision, which could also affect the planned unit development standards. We have co living standards, design review, and then our Mill Creek Historic District. So our goal here for the middle housing site design is just developing that site like developing site design standards that work with all the middle housing updates that we've made in phase one. So this could be changes to landscaping, open space, or recreation requirements, residential design standards, parking and access, furniture standards, and diminished garages. We haven't actually narrowed everything down yet, but those are a couple things that we're looking at.

Just wanted to make sure, like, with everything that's coming out with middle housing, the sites are looking good, and it's not just all over the place, and we have some standards to create some type of uniformity or some type of outcome. We're also looking to do expanded unit lot subdivisions. So as I mentioned previously, Phase one limit the unit lot subdivision to nine units, and we've heard a lot from our development community that they wanted more units than just nine. So looking into how we can do that, and of course with more units allowable for unit loss division, it's more access for home ownership opportunities. And of course this may also require restructuring of our plan unit development standards.

So this wouldn't necessarily increase the amount of density allowed, it's just how the final ownership happens. So right now, we're keeping it to nine units through this unit lot subdivision process, which is a special division of land process, because we want to do the site design standards. That first slide that Deja presented is really the key and the crux of what we need to get right as a city before we move into expanding this and having the market fully embrace doing it because we want to make sure that there's some orderly process to it. So good point, Stija. I just wanted to clarify a little bit of these are intrinsically linked together.

We're also looking to do in Phase two an update to co living regulations. So co or co living is essentially residential developments that allow a rental of rooms with a shared living space or I'm sorry, shared shared spaces such as kitchens or like a living area. So currently, our current regulations allow co living through communal residencies, and they have existing requirements of a business license as well as no more than three rooms. So with state legislation, we essentially have to allow co living anywhere where at least six multifamily residential units can be. And this includes like any limitations on development standards or dimensional standards for parking and things of that nature.

So since we're just updating our codes, we meet state legislation for that. So we may have to get rid of some of these things or maybe just a refining of what we have. Next, we'll want to look into design review. So we're wanting to do not such a deep dive on design review per se, but we are wanting to do some updates so we can meet state legislation. So we did some updates regarding small residential development in our phase one.

So that was six or fewer units. Now we're looking to do six or more units as well as commercial and mixed use development. But again, this we're looking to do more of a light touch and maybe not such a heavy deep dive on changing our our design review, just making sure we're meeting that state legislation. And lastly, we have our Mill Creek District here. So we have Mill Creek Historic District standards that aren't necessarily in our code.

So we're we've heard from their community members that we want some standards in our code. So with all the middle housing permits that may or may not come in, we wanna make sure we're able to preserve that historic housing in that area. So just codifying what we have for Mill Creek Historic District as far as regulations. And then other topics. So we have those main five there, but there could also be some cleanup of tables and footnotes from phase one, maybe just optimizing development standards.

And if we can have some new legislation that just must be in code, then maybe adopting some new legislation. I'm addressing new legislation there, but that's totally up in the air. And then a timeline for that. So by the 2025, we're looking to have design review standards and co living regulations. And then into early twenty twenty six, we're looking to do the Mill Creek Historic District codifying those regulations. And then mid-twenty twenty six, we're gonna have that update to unit and lot subdivision and site design regulations. And that is all I have for you guys tonight.

Thank so much. Thank you, Deja. Any further business to bring before the board?

No. Fabulous. Were there any questions for Deja on the presentation? Okay, we're good. Great job, Deja.

Meeting is adjourned. Thanks, guys.