Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Okay, good evening, everyone. We'll call this, what is it, the July 23rd, 2026 Planning Commission meeting to order. And we'll call roll. John Bachman. Here. Said Safavian.

Here.

Azi Panawalla? Yeah. Isham Al-Khawad? Here. Ajay Chakrapani? Here. And I'm Mike Bresco. I'm here. Sudha is unable to attend this evening. So next is the agenda. Are there any changes to tonight's agenda? We've got basically one major thing, which is new business related to town center. Okay, hearing none, agenda's approved by common consent. And the minutes from, what is it, June 18th, last meeting. Any changes to those minutes? Okay, seeing none, minutes approved by common consent. And we have a new, like what, you're the interim acting city manager? Welcome. Glad to have you here. And is there anything that you'd like to say before we jump in or are you just going to observe? I'm here just to observe. Okay. All right. All right. So next is a non-agenda public comment for three minutes.

Who will be?

You know, one of these days you two will have decided that ahead of time, so you don't... Oh, there we go.

Hello, Planning Commissioners. Paul Stickney, Sammamish. I sent an email last night. Maybe you had a chance to read it, maybe not. I'm not saying that you should have or could have, but I wanted to hand out a copy of that. What I'm talking about here is a little bit, it's the same thing, but it's in not the same way. I'm actually here to say that we need to go back and remedy and alter our comprehensive plan and its effects on land use and housing, which includes town centers and other centers and future land uses on non-CCNR, missing middle locations. So what I'm talking about here is to pause those land uses and instead focus on city side, city wide. City side is the side of growth that comes from internal imbalance in a city. Regional side of growth comes from the prescribed means of the state to multi-county to county to the city and town cohort, and then we negotiate our share of those regional people. simply a share of what's coming in. I'm not talking about that. City side is how does the housing supplies that we have on the ground that 85% came from King County before we incorporated or in the pipeline and thereafter, and then the choice is we as a community made for 20 years. And I know for a fact there was a lot of pushback when the city incorporated on the pace of growth. But what was never dealt with were the types and the varieties and the amounts. So I'm not going to reread what's here because you have it in front of you and I sent a copy with the attachments last night. But I will state that I believe it's correct to use the extensive data and research that's been compiled, which is part of the PDFs I left you. When I put all that together, starting in roughly 2014 for a year or two, and then in 2022 for a year or two, I studied all aspects of state, multi-county, county, private, and came up with housing factors that were clear and then interpreted those, in my opinion, what they meant, which I've shared. All that is on links in the documents I left behind. So I think it's time to do city-side housing needs on a city-wide scale before making major land use decisions going forward. Appreciate this chance to speak. Thank you. Okay. Thank you, Paul. Who would like to speak next?

Three minutes or not. Yep.

Hi, Mary Wichter. I've lived in Sammamish for 25 years. So I sent two emails today. One was rewind on the things I passed out. I'll speak to you later. And the other one is a 10-minute video clip from the internet. It says suburbia is subsidized. It's done by a guy, Jason, not just bikes. And he uses the data from Urban 3. Urban3 is a nation and international company that goes and looks at cities and says, hey, how much are their finances and everything? And they actually did that for the city of Sammamish. So that's where this comes from. It's actually from that consultant and through Framework, who is our local consultant here. So just to review from suburbia, and I did attach this to the email. And you really should watch. If you do nothing else that I ever said, you should watch that video because it is very informative. So I have Sammamish as 85% single family homes, but actually we're 87% now because we just keep building them. And when we had annexed that area in, which was a master plan community in 2016, they had 1,000 or 2,000 of the missing housing units. So we got those by drawing a line around somebody else. We didn't get them by building them. And expenses are not currently being met by revenues. So we have a fiscal structural imbalance. And even if we keep doing taxes, we can't make it through that way. So we need to use our centers and our town center area to fit the missing middle rate housing, missing market rate housing. The zoning for town center right now, which you're going to speak about, doesn't allow enough units to be able to build the things that need to get built. And if you want to have affordable built, you need to be able to allow the market rate ones to get built so you can get some affordability. So anyway, so in the the graphs, these are just taken from the actual video itself. So this is urban three. And it says this map shows the municipal revenue per acre. And it's got green areas, which those are outer and like where the residences are. And then it's got a big spike here in the city because usually in the centers, that's where you make a lot more of the money. And then they also do it in red and black, and they do it in 3D. And then they even just do it flat here. So this is in the black where you get net positive, and this is all the areas that are red that are net negative. And pretty much those correspond to suburbia needs to be subsidized by the density in the centers area. And like I said, this guy is like on the internet. Urban 3 is very large. It's not just Mary Wichter here speaking and showing pictures again that I printed off the internet. And so then they did one in 3D. He starts in Lafayette, Louisiana, which is why I watched it first, because I went to school there. And then he goes to Guelph, Ontario. He goes to New Zealand. He does Oregon. And he shows you, and then he talks about in Oregon how most zoning doesn't allow... For the types of housing that we need. So anyway, it's worth watching. I emailed it.

Thanks Okay, thank you Mary I'm not seeing anybody else on the list for non-agenda public comment. Is that correct? Okay, and anybody online? All right, so David I think you're up on our new business for this evening

Great. Thank you, Chair Bresco. For the record, David Pyle, Department of Community Development. Also wanted to highlight this morning that with me I have Miriam Laettner, our planning manager, and we also have Andy Parks as a visitor. He is our interim city manager, and he's here on learning mode, listening in, just wanting to learn a little bit more.

Hi, David. Sorry to interrupt you. I misunderstood about the timing on the comment. Would it be okay with you if I just do my comment right now?

No problem.

Okay, so most of last year I was arguing with David about growth. I'm here tonight to be his warm-up act, basically. We've had a lot of discussion recently about growth, fast growth, slow growth, what kind of growth we want, et cetera. So maybe she isn't growing. Boom. So did you know that? If we look at the... What's been going on? Sorry, I wasn't very good at that. What's been going on? I have the county growth rate in population, the state, and this line popping down here. That's Sammamish. Last year, Sammamish added 20 people. We have 65,000. We added 20. So... The other part of that story is that housing is doing the same kind of thing. The state and the county are somewhat maintaining their housing growth rate, and Sammamish has basically cratered. The implication for tonight, and admittedly this is a bit background, is that the county has assigned some amish a certain amount of growth over the next 20 years that's shown by the blue line here and i wish my eyes were better i know this is hard to see these are the actuals down here and we're bending away from the curve basically so it would take something dramatically different from current conditions to come close to meeting the King County mandate, both for housing in general and for affordable housing. That said, of course, we should do what we can. And I believe David's going to talk about that tonight. Policy changes things I'll mention that are not explicitly in his list, I would guess. One is that King County pretty soon is going to come out with some new growth projections. We ought to be talking to them early in that process, saying, hey, we ought to be realistic and not just pretending about this. And the other thing, of course, is that the city, I don't know what they're using for growth projections in terms of their financial planning and their other policy work, but they really should be paying attention to our current thing. This is not a blip. This has been going on since 2020. And we really need to recognize that the heavy growth is behind us. Unfortunately, the feeling, at least in the county, is a major part of it, unfortunately, is that we're losing international immigrants. And that situation is not going to improve over the next three years. So there is a cause for what's going on. And I think it's important that we recognize that. Thank you.

Thank you. Was that a great warm-up? Great lead-in, right? It was a great comment. Thank you.

All right. And appreciate... It's good to see data. Yeah. Right? Absolutely. So... David Pyle, Department of Community Development. And this evening, we are here to discuss revisiting the project direction for the city's Town Center Plan and Code Amendment updates. As a reminder, the city has a one subarea. It's our Town Center subarea. It's been put in place many years ago and has been on the books and in effect for quite some time. We're going to talk a little bit this evening about the rate of development the capacity that remains Some of the state mandates and the challenges that we have and really trying to meet those the role that was envisioned in the comprehensive plan for the town center and whether or not that is actually materializing and whether that's being implemented with the regulations that we have So to start off with, we're going to talk a little bit about the town center subarea. The area in red is the town center. And you can see here that since the town center was adopted in 2008, we've seen quite a bit of growth in the city, although not as much recently, in our single-family neighborhoods. However, growth in the town center itself has been slow to start and slow to continue. When the town center was originally adopted, it was envisioned in part as a place to put the growth. However, the opposite, you could argue, actually happened. And instead of growth happening in the town center, the growth continued to happen as infill in the neighborhoods in the form of single-family residential subdivisions. We started the work on the town center plan and code update after receiving direction in October of 2023. It was originally envisioned to be taken on alongside and as part of the city's comprehensive plan update that was due in December of 2024. However, we realized quickly that this work was more complicated and required quite a bit of community engagement and discussion, and we decoupled that from the comprehensive plan at that time with the intent that that work would wrap up in the fall of 2025. The work was delayed somewhat in 2025. as we continued to work through some challenges related to traffic impacts analysis and others. Really appreciated all the community engagement on that effort. Ultimately, we did issue a final supplemental environmental impact statement right about the same time that the 2025 election took place. And with that election, there was a change in council composition or council direction. And the new council directed us to suspend the work on that effort and to bring it back up a little later in the year once we had sorted through our priorities as a city. I want to highlight that the comprehensive plan does still identify a role of the town center in us in the city meeting our inclusionary affordable housing requirements Or I guess affordable housing requirements and that has not yet been implemented in the form of updating the town center sub area plan or the development regulations If you recall, in past meetings, we have reviewed what the code audit findings were. As part of the town center plan and code update, the city performed a code audit where we worked with consultants, we worked with developers, we worked with community members to identify where the challenges were in implementing the city's town center plan. Where were the barriers? Why were we not seeing development happen at the pace and rate that was originally envisioned back in 2008. It was determined that the code is confusing, hard to administer. It relies heavily on reviewer interpretation. The density allocation makes it really difficult. This graphic here shows how density allocation works. You can see that for a parcel that is 1.84 acres in size, and if you're building a three-story residential low-rise, and if you were doing that at 18 dwelling units per acre, you could see how efficient in use of land, the efficient use of land is not happening. You can jump up to 40 dwelling units per acre, and you still see that the amount of lot coverage and the use of land is still quite sparse and exurban or urban, if you will. The residential density and commercial allocations are very prescriptive and not flexible, making it difficult to design projects and phase development in the town center. And there are duplications of other citywide standards where the duplication might have a refinement that is not really consistent with how we do it in the rest of the city. The standards lack clear visuals and really are difficult to interpret and apply. Commercial space allocations don't align with market demand. For example, most of the commercial space is not located along streets such as 228th, where there's a lot of visibility. The key incentive programs were very minimal and are depleted, such as the affordable housing bonus pool and transfer development rights. The unified zone development permit process is difficult to navigate. This is a three step process that we have in the town center whereby if you want to develop certain types of development, you're required to first go through an administrative unified zone development permit. Then you're required to go through an administrative commercial site development permit, and then you're required to go through a ministerial construction permit process. So the three-step process is different from the development review process in the rest of the city, which is two-step, making it a much longer review process with multiple appeal opportunities and presenting a lot of risk to developers who tend to shy away from risk because it ultimately adds a lot of cost and uncertainty to development. The proposed zoning updates that we had worked on in 2025 are shown here. The original plan had a village concept where there were multiple smaller centers. You can see those as the A1 zones, or excuse me, the A zones, A1, A2, A3, A4, A5. We had proposed consolidation into a common core, and the original plan touts a wedding cake concept, except what it really is is multiple wedding cakes. So what we're trying to do here is to refine it down to a single wedding cake concept where we can focus on infrastructure deployment, such as roads and pipes and stormwater management, as opposed to having to do that to multiple centers. So where we left off in February of this year when we suspended work on this project was outlining things that we felt we must do, things we felt we should do, and things we felt we could do. The must-do are really intended to get us to a point of compliance. We are currently not compliant in Town Center with... 2023 HB 1110, 2023 HB 1220, 2023 HB 5290. Those are fairly significant laws related to housing and housing production. And we do need to bring the town center area, town center geographic area into compliance. If you recall, we had made amendments to our comp plan and to our development regulations outside of town center.

Sorry, are you taking questions right now or should we hold on? I just want to know. Chair? Sure. Just for my understanding, I understand the state laws and all that. Do we have a slide or something showing the gap between the state law where we should be and where we are so we can understand?

Right. We have those and we've done that in multiple past presentations. I'd be happy to find that and send it over to you. For this evening, we don't have that due to the level of conversation. Thank you. Right. But I did want to remind everyone that we did bring our the city is largely in compliance with those bills and with state law. However, we did not implement that in the town center because we were working on the town center plan and code. Right. So it is a carve out within the broader city that where there where we're not in compliance today. Things we should do are things we felt that would really facilitate development in the town center. Moving to a form-based code would remove a lot of the ambiguity and uncertainty related to how we apply zoning controls. Centralizing density, as is shown on this plan here, would be a really good place to go to help facilitate development. Overhaul the affordable housing approach and integrate new tools, such as multifamily tax exemption, just as an example. and update unclear and conflicting information and hopefully really streamline the town center plan to operationalize it and make it more of an implementation plan as opposed to a completely separate and independent mini comprehensive plan. We also would want to reduce the administrative discretion required. It's not something that I like to have in the case of this type of development. I like clear and concise development regulations that are easy to apply. Now the things listed on the right side that could do, these are things that may be more controversial in the community. Increasing density for additional affordable housing. We had proposed raising the capacity of the town center to 4,000 units to allow for low-rise and mid-rise building types. We'll talk about that in a minute here. Enhancing community desired features such as trails, park space. which might also at the same time incur costs on the city because then that would add to our CIP in terms of what we have to bring alongside development. And also to integrate climate resilience and emergency preparedness into the plan. This was quite a conversation and the source of a lot of comments during the Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement. I know you all heard quite a bit about emergency preparedness, evacuations, all those things as part of your meetings on these topics.

Just a quick note. I think the opposition was not against affordable housing. The opposition was against doubling the density, period, not specifically towards affordable housing.

Absolutely, however part of the conversation was in order to accommodate and to Facilitate affordable housing in order to make that market builders build that there is a need to increase the the production of market housing alongside it If it was publicly funded or if it was funded through housing philanthropy, that's a different story however in order to make affordable housing work whereby the market is building it, there does need to be an incentive for them to do that. So that's part of the tension here is how do you plan for, accommodate, and deliver that housing where the market builder ultimately builds it?

There was because I'm one of those that's why I'm speaking up because I remember I was asking show me the road map if we double the density or Quadruple the density. How will it get us to affordable housing? I want more affordable housing But I do not want to quadruple or double the density and the developer they end up building townhomes like what they're building Understood.

No, it's it's a great question and it is a challenge and Yes.

David, one question. Can you go back to the previous slide, please? And I'm seeing this for the first time, so I don't know if others have seen this, but I'm trying to understand this. Because your current zoning regulation plan, the color codes you have are not aligned. So I'm trying to make sure that it's apples to apples I'm comparing here. Because you have these things in dark blue, which says TCA, but here it becomes urban core. So I'm trying to reconsider what does that mean? Do you have an explanation of what this means? Urban core, urban mix, garden mix versus TCA, BCDE, which is totally some... I mean, I don't understand.

Right. Yeah. So the way the current zoning is set up is and I have additional information on this and subsequent slides. TCA is the highest density zone in the town center currently. TCB, the second TCA is really oriented towards mixed use commercial where you'd see. you know, a five over one type building being built, low rise, mid rise. TCB is going to be low rise to townhome to middle housing. TCC is going to be middle housing to single family and TCE is going to be single family. TCD is the city's lower Sammamish Commons Park area and is the civic space. So when you look at this and you kind of envision clusters of density, you could kind of see, you know, how the A1, the A2, A3, A4, you might find a few mid-rise buildings a few low-rise buildings that are then surrounded by low-rise and middle housing and then you get down into the tcc along the edge there and you start to see it step down into um you know duplexes and single-family homes and in the wedding cake wedding cake concept is the way it's best described however it's multiple wedding cakes Whereas we look at consolidation here and the urban core would be where you would find those mid rise and low rise buildings, the five over one mixed use buildings where your commercial space would be, your retail activity, your activated streets, all those sorts of things. The urban mixed would be was where you see your low rise and your your your townhome style development happening. And you might find within those areas, you know, maybe a street corner business or maybe some live work units mixed in there. And the garden mixed ultimately is going to be really middle housing and maybe even some single family where you'd see larger residential units as it blends into the adjoining residential districts to the north and to the west. okay and and this also includes things that are already constructed right like the sky apartments and the met market and all that it does yeah so if you look at the urban core that's where the trf development is you know that's the the sky apartments and the met market it also would include um the In the urban mixed, you'd find the Plateau 120 apartments that you can't even really see back there, right? That would be considered to be more of a low-rise building type that would fit into the urban mixed. Okay. The Ichijo Sammamish townhomes, which are to the east of 228th, would be in the urban mixed. That might be a template for development that you'd see throughout the rest of the city. On this, the challenge is that we're already seeing part of the urban core being built to the east. west of, excuse me, the notch property, which is that that appendage of yellow that goes up from the lower Sammamish Commons. That's known as the notch. And to the left of that and going north is where the We're currently seeing construction about to start on, actually, that's the green just to the side of that. So, yeah, the challenge is that this could all start to be built up with townhomes pretty quickly. And it's whether we want townhomes there or whether we want to drive this towards low-rise and mid-rise buildings with some form of commercial. But the townhomes have already started. So how would that align with this? Right. The townhomes themselves are not being built on the blue yet. They're all on those green parcels to the west. So you have Brownstones West, which is that far parcel, and Brownstones West continues to the middle right there. You have 222nd, right above the Lower Sammamish Commons. That's Brownstones West. Then Brownstones West continues and transitions to Brownstones East, which is the easterly edge of the green, which then transitions into what's known as UZDP Phase 1, which is Block 4. five, which is a mixed-use, six-story, five-over-one commercial and multifamily. It's where they are proposing to put Merrill Gardens, which is 55-plus, I think, retirement living.

And this also includes the Sammamish Children's School and that church on Southeast 8th Corner. Right.

So those are current uses. And the vision would be is that those would eventually be redeveloped. The children's school may be integrated into a ground floor of a larger building, something like that. You know, the church itself on the corner of 8th and 228th. has expressed a lot of interest in this plan. They'd really like to redevelop the unused acreage around the church. They are very supportive of making changes in zoning. They'd like to sell the property in order to reinvest back into their church property.

Thank you for the explanation. That's clear. Sure.

David, I want to follow up on most of your questions. This is the first time that I see these two slides. Let me ask you the question. The supplementary environmental impact analysis that was completed but was never adopted last year was based on that current distribution of the different kind of use from A1 to A4?

Respectfully, these have been presented multiple times to the Commission. They are included in the supplemental environmental impact statement. And they are included in all the project documentation that was published in support of the project.

But the analysis, the traffic analysis was then based on those distributions, right?

The traffic analysis was done based on the proposed regulating plan.

Proposed regulating plan.

how how would that relate to the different a1a2a3 and a4 location it the traffic analysis was done based on the the image to the right proposed regulating plan whereby it assessed the impacts based on the proposed number of units that could fit into those areas and what type of uh improvements might be needed etc

So in other words, what you're saying that the traffic modeling analysis was based on a proposed regulation?

That's correct.

Okay, thank you.

Yep, and I'd be happy to send a copy of that your way if you'd like. Thank you, appreciate it. Okay, thank you. So when was the traffic analysis done? The traffic analysis was done as part of the environmental analysis in the summer and fall of 2025 leading up to the issuance of the final supplemental environmental impact statement.

And just for clarification, the analysis was done, but the databases was 2023.

Okay. There was quite a bit of debate and community comment about the origin of the data, where it starts, and how it was adjusted over time, etc. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah.

Thank you. Thank you.

Okay.

I have a couple of questions. I get this on the current and proposed, and everything is fine. My question is, where does Saffron and Plateau 228 fit into this thing?

This is just looking at what we have in the town center area.

That's correct. Shouldn't we look at that when we are looking at your earlier problem of what could be and what must be and what can be?

Great question. I think we're on slide eight, and I think I've got... Oh, so I jumped ahead?

Yep. Okay.

You know, whenever we talk about the wedding cake, that confuses me because I get hungry at that time. So that's the reason. That's the fault. Need a little sugar boost. Yeah.

So, going on to the next one. So, we want to do a recap of Town Center development and what's been built. I think it's really helpful to understand what's on the ground. But first, I want to talk a little bit about, and this is in response also to a question and some comment received earlier. I want to go do a little overview of the zone density and really where the biggest challenge is in the Town Center is in this table. And if you look at the table to the left, densities and dimensions, and you go down to the second row, and you look at the allocated density across the different columns, if you look at the TCA, the by right allocated density is 16 dwelling units per acre. Going on to TCB at 8, TCC at 4, TCD, which is the city's property, that that is the lower Sammamish Commons is 8, and the TCE is 1 dwelling unit per acre. It's worth noting that the surrounding zoning around the town center is R4 and R6. So just right away, there are areas in the town center that are lower in density by right than the surrounding zoning. All of them?

I remember the 13 parcels that we talked about last year. Those are R1.

Right. So going back to this right here.

They surround the town center. So not everything around the town center is R4.

I'd have to go back and look. I'm pretty sure I'd have to look. But almost all of it is, I know for sure.

Yeah, I'll take almost, but not all.

Okay, fair. I'd have to go back and look.

So one question quick. I'm just looking at row two. You said, so TCA is 16 dwelling units per acre, and that includes the Sky Apartments and things. So how is that number so small?

It is because if you look at the row above it, maximum residential density, you can achieve 40 dwelling units per acre. And even 40 dwelling units per acre is low for an urban center. However, what they're able to do is to harvest the density off of the broader site. So in the case of the TRF, the Met Market property with Plateau 120, or excuse me, sky apartments, they were able to capture the density from the entire site, the residential density, and push it into one corner and build a taller building. The rest of the property is covered with commercial space.

Okay, so that's, it averages out, got it.

Right. But if you were just building a residential project and you didn't have, so we're also dependent on commercial allocation here. So if you don't have any commercial allocation, you're only left with building residential. But if you don't have any density, you can't make the residential density work. At a low density, it doesn't financially make sense to develop. So looking at this, this is a really important piece of the puzzle here is you could see that the allocated residential density in the TCB and the TCC are quite low. The TCE is at one dwelling unit per acre. So far and and again, you know, we're seeing units being delivered now. So these numbers do change as The brownstones West townhomes that start to be delivered but as of now housing units produce 326 units Affordable housing units produced is 56 units affordable housing bonus pool units used 150. This is kind of confusing because what that means is those are market rate units that they were given as a bonus in order to provide additional affordable housing units.

So...

So the affordable housing bonus pool results in a builder being allowed to build more market rate units so long as with those market rate units, they deliver additional affordable housing units. I can't recall offhand. Half of them? Less than that. 10%? Do you know offhand?

I don't know offhand, but I can tell you if we have 326 units, the requirement for the inclusionary zoning is 10%. So that would be about 32. So if you do the math, we have 56 units. It's that difference.

So out of the 150, they provided 20.

So because they provided 24 units, they were able to build 150 additional units as the incentive.

And these affordable units plan or units producer Edison 56 is this in which income group is it 0 to 30 80% and above 80% above so nothing below 80% nothing below 80% But we still call them affordable because they're 80% However recall that our inclusionary affordable excuse me our affordable housing allocation is in deep affordable units so that is the challenge because we're able to produce a small number of not so affordable units, but we're required to produce a large number of deep affordable units.

So it also says that we have not used any TDRs.

There have not been any TDRs used as of yet. That's this slide here, which is the pipeline.

Oh, my God. I'm jumping again.

So the numbers on the last one is that that's been in the I guess the history of town center.

Correct. Yep. So now, and this does not include the Brownstones West townhomes. Brownstones West townhomes are included in the planned or pipeline. They're just being delivered now. And within the permit process or in some form of construction, we have 837 units plus 94 sleeping units, which is the Aegis Assisted Living facility that is proposed off to 28th. Of those, we have 87 affordable housing units, and we use 194 TDR credits to achieve that. Oh, excuse me. 194 affordable housing bonus pool units are used, similar to this where 150 units are used. And we have... A range of TDRs proposed. It really depends on the final product that the builder ends up building and how they go about extinguishing their TDR credits. However, it ranges from 328 to 433 TDR units.

David, what's the reason that we haven't seen any developer taking advantage of TDRs?

is that is that the cost more to the developers and more challenging is that environmental issues the affordable housing bonus pool was more attractive tdrs require that you purchase credits from the county there's a bit of a process there and you have to make an investment in those credits and it's a bit of cash you have to put up front however they have all been purchased or are in contract to be purchased and I think they've been holding them, trying to strategically use those in the most efficient way possible. And they've been watching what we're doing with our town center update, I think, in part holding, trying to see if maybe there's a better condition that might get them more units down the line.

Is that more advantageous to the developer to build more TDR based?

Depends what zone you're building in. One TDR credit from the county equals five units in the TCA and three units, I think, in the in the TCB. So using them in the TCA is more advantageous. However, phasing of construction is challenging and trying to bring projects online in a manner that is Strategic with infrastructure with roads can be challenging especially when you're trying to sell those projects to a builder Who will then build them and bring them to market?

So Based on your previous one, which is the existing and the planned put together I can see that the total number of portfolio units planned is a hundred and forty three and That is, compared to 2100, it's getting somewhere, it's about 7% of the, just being affordable units. So I know you'll say that, you'll probably say that it's coming up, but the fact is that aren't we then on track to build better units? or build more as we are going for it? Or are we really falling behind on this thing? Because I can see 143 here. That's not a small number.

It's, you know, every city makes progress in different ways, right? It really depends on the conditions in that city, what opportunities they have. Some cities have light rail stations and are able to build transit-oriented development around those stations very quickly. Redmond, for example, Bellevue, for example. Commissioner Elkwad identified the biggest challenge that we have, and that is that we either need to find a way to fund it and pay for it to see it built or work with housing philanthropists or find ways to have it be built, or we need to find a way to get the market builder to build it alongside market units, which then results in a much higher number of units being brought online. It's a challenge. Maybe the answer is somewhere in the middle. And we want to talk a little more about what we have forecasted. We've got quite a few slides here to go. Okay, so I'll keep quiet now. Yeah, no, it's good.

Yes. Just one quick question. On the math, so in the previous slide that you had, and you explained to us how this bonus pool use calculation came about, if I go back to the next slide now, and I apply that same 10%

Housing units plan rule to that so that's 83 Affordable, but you only have 87 so only four came from the 194 bonus pool Where on the other side you got 24 out of the bonus pool I can talk if you don't mind a little bit the the very short answer is it's really complicated So that there's no affordability requirement when you're using TDRs and so While everything worked out very nicely on the slide before, here it doesn't work out quite so nicely because you have some larger multifamily buildings that are built through the TDR bonus and not through just our regular inclusionary requirements. So that's why the affordable units are less than you're seeing on the other slide. I hope that makes sense.

Yeah, I had the same question in mind.

No, it doesn't make sense to you. Why is the number so low?

Because of the TDRs. They are using TDRs here.

So in a regular building, you have a 10% inclusionary requirement. However, the inclusionary 10% doesn't apply to TDR units. And so when you have an apartment complex, let's say 300 units that are built 90% through TDRs, there's no inclusionary requirement. So you might see maybe like three units instead of 30. Correct.

Okay. So where the TDRs are then proposed in the same area, right? So they would also count as affordable, would they not? They would not. They would not?

So you're hitting on something here, too, that has been part of our conversation over the last few years. You'll hear a lot from community members and some that are really interested in TDRs. And TDR program is a great thing, right? Transfer development rights. You get to conserve land and, in theory, move density from where it shouldn't be built to a place where it should be built, right? However, that is not in alignment with affordability. So you kind of need to choose, do you want a land conservation project or do you want an affordability project? Do you want a land conservation focus or an affordability focus? It is really difficult to do both because the cost of land conservation is real. In order to buy TDRs, you're locking up land that could otherwise be developed and transferring that somewhere else. We have looked at ways to try and integrate the two. There are some really creative programs out there. Seattle has one where the two are commingled. They're not used very often. which tells us that they're complicated, they're expensive. So we have backed off on the TDRs and the town center, understanding that our focus has really been affordability due to state mandates. The state does not have a land conservation mandate. Instead, it has a housing affordability mandate.

But who decides on the areas that I can go and buy TDRs? Is that the county or the state?

It's the city and counties in our local agreement that has a geographic area mapped out as to where the sending sites are located.

Yeah, I know. It's that green belt. Things change. If it changed to the point that people they need houses, maybe it's time to take another look at that green belt before you start packing the middle, go and start cutting more trees.

in the green belt. So we have talked about that in past council meetings. There are several presentations and discussions on that topic. And I agree that it's always worth revisiting. The conclusion that we've come to is that if we want affordability, that TDR programs are at odds with affordability because the way TDR programs work whereby you can conserve land and acreage is where you're able to multiply the units when you locate them in an urban area. And if you're already multiplying the units, then the opportunity to produce affordable housing with market builders through unit multiplication incentives is diminished because you've already given away that incentive. You can't do that then again to gain affordability.

But at the end of the day, we need to find the right balance between these. It can be either or. We need to find this and that. And just like we're amending the codes and going to the form-based, maybe it's time to take another look again at those.

It's a great comment. No, yeah, we'll carry that with us. And we'll get into some conversation about this soon. And I think that would be a good point to carry forward. So review of the city's affordable housing requirements. Under HB 1220, the city is required to plan for, accommodate, remove barriers for, incentivize, and reduce the funding gap for affordable housing. So we, by and large, through our comprehensive plan, plan for it. We generally accommodate it through adequate, Zone density now recall that this has to be delivered in a low-rise or mid-rise building typologies We there is a commerce. We find it in here housing guidance document that is really sets sets the tone for how cities are to plan for the accommodation of uh deep affordable housing understanding that most of our affordable housing is in the zero to thirty and thirty to fifty percent range if you look at this this chart here for a high cost community like sammamish you can see that it's identifying that um Low rise and mid rise multifamily is where you can accommodate extremely low and very low and low income. But it is even then with subsidies and incentives. So the challenge is that it's really hard to accommodate the deeper affordability and it has to be done through low rise and mid rise building types. And it has to be done with subsidies and incentives. So that's what we're talking about here is we have to demonstrate capacity for appropriate housing types. The city has to demonstrate that we have adequate capacity in a low rise and mid rise building typologies that meets or exceeds our housing allocation. So just a quick reminder, because there is always some confusion on this. The city's housing allocation is not the same as the city's growth target. They are of different origin. They are created with different models. And they are very different. They just happen to align because the county decided back in 2023 to use a methodology that was aligned with growth targets. So I want to make sure to get that out there because I, even today, still hear people confusing the two. Understandably, it is very confusing. And this is a recap of where our affordable housing allocation stands. You can see it in the real deep zero to 30% permanent supportive, non-permanent supportive, getting up into 30, 50%. And as you get up into the 50, 80, and then above 80, our numbers diminish. So talking a little bit about density efficiency, one of the things that we heard a lot about during the comprehensive plan update process was wanting to think forward as a community about how to grow in the future. whereby we are not growing out into neighborhoods and where we're growing into centers. If you follow the January 17th, 2023 and March 7th, 2023 city council meetings, you can see where this growth plan comes about, where there is quite a bit of discussion about the future land use map and the city's future growth plans, extensive conversation on the topic. We wanted to bring forward an example of a mid-rise. I think it's one where most of you have been. It's the Together Center in Redmond. And this is a 280-unit affordable apartment building with ground floor social services and services like daycare or other not-for-profits. It's on a 2.42-acre site. And what we did was we stamped that out and we... It made an example of how this would roughly be fit in on an R16 site, an R24 site, an R48 site, and an R116 site. And you could see that the cost per unit changes drastically as the density increases. So in the case of a residential development in an R-16 scenario, the land cost in the town center would be approximately $400,000 per unit. This is dropped down to at R-24 to $270,000, at R-48 to $130,000, and then down at R-16, it washes out at about $55,000 per unit in just raw land cost. Oh, just land cost. Just land cost. And the point here is that if we are trying to build affordable housing in the town center and the builder is required to obtain the property, that right out the door, it doesn't pencil at an R-16. And given, if you go back to the slide that shows the city's densities in the town center, you can see that our densest zone in the town center at the allocated density is R16. If you get down into the R8 and R4, it gets even worse. The point being that affordable housing is infeasible at densities like R16. If you try to move it up to R24, I would say it's still infeasible. R48 is where you kind of get into it being somewhat feasible. It really depends on the project. But if you get into the R100 range, that is where it starts to become more feasible just based on land cost.

Exactly. This is all just based on land cost. Correct. Yep.

which is the first consideration.

The one in Redmond, the one that we went to, who operates that?

This is the Together Center. Yep. Oh, yeah. Who operates it? I thought it was Arch. It's a not-for-profit. It is the Together Center. Together Center.

It's a not-for-profit that operates it. Is that different than Arch?

Arch is a tenant.

Oh, Arch is a tenant. I see. It's an office.

but it's all rental right it's all rental yeah correct david the density on that complex in redmond is that close r r 1.6 that is r116 based on the 2.4 acres of the site and based on the 280 units of affordable housing um that is the density okay five story building right it's uh yeah four story plus floors five stories but yeah it's a five star four four it's a four over one

And that right now is about what, about a block and a half covering? It's like a block and two blocks. Two blocks.

One block wide, two blocks long. It's two and a half acres.

Two and a half acres. So if you go back to the next slide that you had, affordable housing goal that we have is 2100 units and even by doing an r116 you're only getting 280 dwelling units that means you need at least nine of these to get to your 2100 target is that correct wait wait and a question becomes where do you put them and that's i'm not even i'm just saying that's where we're going here so

2,100 affordable units?

2,100 units. 2,100. Our housing allocation, different than our growth target, is 2,100 units of deep affordable housing that we have to show that we're planning for accommodating and removing barriers to being delivered. We don't have to build it as a city, although recently with the Mercer Island case, there is this whole new thing called address the funding gap. And we have to show that we are making contribution towards addressing the funding challenge that that type of housing is presented with.

Okay. So if that's the case, then can we just say we will do 10% and use the rest of it in good... I'm not trying to find a way around it, but maybe I'm finding a way around it. is to say that we will use the remaining to try to address the funding gap. So we are looking at 210 units instead of 2,100 units.

But we have to show that we're providing, that we have capacity for 2,100 units in low-rise and mid-rise. And we currently do as a city, we're right on the edge, and we'll get into this here in a sec, but it's the challenge is, do we have zoning that can accommodate low-rise and mid-rise building typologies? And if so... Does the permit process lend towards an easy permit to get, right? Have you removed the barriers? And are we doing things to incentivize it, such as providing some form of an expedited permit process or trying to think of other ways we could be, do you think of any ways we'd be incentivizing?

Reduce impact fees.

Removes permit fees. Yep. Also reducing impact fees. Yep. All those.

How large is building 120?

Building the site. Well, if I go down.

The city owns it. Can we put one of these over there? And that will be the city's participation to build affordable housing.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's on 228, it's next to schools, it's next to groceries, it's next to transportation.

And it is 280 units towards 2100. I know, but it's a big step. That would be seen regionally as a huge step. And it would be something that would really help us show that we're in compliance and that we're evolving.

And we can do commercial in the first floor. This way we can get revenue from commercial and put apartments above.

So to add to that, I mean, you mentioned the example of Redmond, you know, and I don't know if I'm jumping ahead here, but in Redmond, what they did is they had all those single floor, one floor, whatever, strip malls or whatever. They removed them and they put five plus one or four plus one or whatever in that. We have the QFC complex, the one in Klahani we have, and the Safeway complex and 120. You just rezone those all and you can solve your problem, I think.

I strongly recommend watching the January 17th, 2023 and March 7th, 2023 city council meetings. January 17th and the March 7th city council meetings. We're resonating the conversation that they had at those meetings.

But the council changed since 2023, so it's different opinions now.

But it's still out there. So I think there is an interest on the council from those that I've talked to about understanding a citywide approach. How are we looking holistically at the city to account for this? And we'll get into that here in a second. Let me get through a few more slides so that we can... The conversation. I'm biting my tongue for questions. The 2024 comprehensive plan includes a future land use map. The future land use map identifies that we have one existing subarea, the town center, that's in the pink there, and that we have three additional centers where we could see future subareas and future growth go. That's the Englewood, as I call it, the Pine Lake and the Kalahani. And then you can see there are four neighborhood centers envisioned in the pink dots. And one of those is the Eastman property, for example. So the concept of the future land use map here, as described in the comprehensive plan, is that we will likely see continued growth in the neighborhoods and infill. That's unavoidable. However, if we are going to grow over time 20 years 30 years 40 years we should be focusing our growth pattern into these areas and That's what I still understand to hold true I think across all the council that that is the right approach for the city and that regardless of the details of town center first then the other sub areas or neighborhood centers first that this pattern is something that I think holds true and

which is the right thing to do, spread it out. But I thought we were just talking today about town center. That's why I did not want to go to those.

And we are, but we are talking about the whole city. So great point, and we'll get to this conversation here in just a minute. Let me just get through a few more of these. Talking about the capacity in the city, and this is really important to understand, is that we have a limited amount of zoning in the city that can accommodate mid-rise and low-rise buildings. It's primarily found in the town center, although as we see in the zoning table that I showed, it's very limited. It's also found in the Englewood, the Pine Lake, and in the Kalahani areas. We have the community business zone and the office zone, which allows those types of buildings to be built. As part of our compliance strategy, if you recall, we included what we call the bonus parcels, the faith-based and public ownership parcels, where we allowed low-rise and mid-rise buildings to occur. So Sammamish Presbyterian Church, for example, up off Inglewood Road, right up there across from the Mercury Coffee, I think, there's quite a bit of property to the east side of that church where they have contemplated putting a smaller five-story apartment building and it would accommodate I want to say it was 85 apartments and that is That is a prime example of how this, it's one of those red bonus parcels shown there, how this capacity was included. So we were able to be deemed compliant because we have this strategy to apply affordable housing allowances to the bonus parcels on the faith-based and public-owned parcels.

What is that one in blue? Is that 120 building? The one in dark blue there?

No, that's further up. That's farther.

I know what, you know, I think that actually is.

Yeah, I think building 120 is 120. Again, this is good. This I don't think you will get the community opposition you got when we said or I did not say so. I'm not going to use we when it was proposed to go from 2000 to 4000 in the town center. That was the opposition. So if you spread it out,

I think you will get more acceptance from the community. So on that line, we want to talk a little bit about the town center capacity for affordable housing. Again, remembering these zones. the current and the proposed. So if we look at the existing capacity and this is based on the table to the left shows the comp plan density and the table to the right shows the actual zone density. So in our comprehensive plan, we had envisioned the town center TCA going to 40, TCB going to 20, TCC going to 8, TCE going to 20. I think this is a typo, actually, because TCC should have been 20, TCD 8, but that's fine. So that would have been 1,250 units based on the different zones, according to the... according to the comp plan of additional capacity then based on the current zoning we have 560 units of capacity remaining in the town center that is not in the delivered or pipeline units so we'll add those together here clarification so the in this case the left table is the same as the right

Illustration of the proposed zoning for town center.

No, the left table is also the same as the left. because we had not yet, at the time of the Comprehensive Plan adoption, created the proposed Regulating Plan. We would have to update that altogether. It's kind of complicated.

All right. I just wanted to make sure I knew what I was looking at because I was confused if you could get back to that prior. So the current density, I thought that the left side of that illustration you just had up with the two figures

WAS THE CURRENT DENSITY. THIS IS THE CURRENT UP AT THE TOP. THE COMP PLAN DENSITY IS WHERE WE ENVISION AND WE CALCULATE HOW MANY UNITS OF CAPACITY WE HAVE AVAILABLE IN THE CITY. AND THE COMPREHENSIVE PLAN ALSO ENVISIONS LAND USE AND ZONING CHANGES AND HOW THAT MIGHT AFFECT CAPACITY. So within the comprehensive plan, there is an analysis that shows TCA going from R16 to R40, et cetera. And it calculates out that there is 1,250 units of capacity in the town center. However, the reality of that is that based on the zoning today, because that was not actually implemented. It's theoretical. The zoning was not changed. It's just the comprehensive plan. The actual zone density today for the remaining land, excuse me, the zone capacity today for the remaining land is 560 units.

And the 1250 is not for the remaining land. Is that right?

I mean, it's only in the comp plan and it's only theoretical. Okay. And the challenge there is that when we show our capacity for low rise and mid rise, we're using the comprehensive plan math. But in reality, when you look at the zoning, it's far less than that.

But I thought that the calm plan is the one that was approved and it's the one that we sent to the state And we said this is the future plan.

It will allow us to get up to 2,000 units Right and going back to these meetings I was watching these earlier today and I was reminded of something that we were we're challenged by this because you can't Your compliance with state law cannot depend on a hypothetical scenario. Your compliance with state law, and Kirkland faced this with their comprehensive plan, your compliance with state law needs to actually be by right zoned and implemented. So what I mean by that is, so Kirkland, as part of their comprehensive plan update, they are required to accommodate far more units than we are. Their numbers are much higher. And they identified sub areas, future sub areas that they wanted to put into effect and zoning changes that they would be putting into effect in order to show they had capacity for the numbers that they were given. the state said hold on you can't do that you need to actually implement the zoning in order to achieve that or in order to show compliance so we have not implemented the zoning changes in the town center but again once we implement the zonings to put us in compliance with what we said

we will be in compliance. The big issue we have as a community is going from 2,000 to 4,000. It's not going from zero or from whatever to 2,000. It's going from 2,000 to 4,000. That's where the issue is.

Right, except that part of implementing it is increasing the capacity of the town center. So we were not able to implement it. Therefore, the numbers that remain in the comprehensive plan are not consistent with the actual zoning that we have on the ground. So what we did last year was wrong? Not wrong. We just were not able to accomplish implementing the numbers that are envisioned in the compliance.

I thought we did everything in compliance and we showed we will achieve and then at that time someone said 10 years ago council said when you hit that number take another look and see if you can accommodate 4,000 instead of 2,000 and that what led to what we are talking about now.

Right. So I'm not saying we're not compliant. What I'm saying is, is that we haven't finished the process because while we went about implementing the comprehensive plan in the whole city, we did not implement it in the town center. So and we were trying to do that through the town center plan and code updates. and that was suspended. So because we did not increase the zoned capacity of the town center, the town center zoning is not consistent with the comprehensive plan.

So aside from changing the zoning, what do we need to do to show the community that going from 2,000 to 4,000 in the town center will not hurt the community?

Right, and that's why we're here tonight to talk about this. And it's not that we have to take that approach. There are alternatives. There are alternative paths, and we'll get to that. However, the point that I want to make is that we're compliant, but we have some work to do still.

But we want to increase the capacity. I want to see more affordable housing. What can we do to show the community that going from 2,000 to 4,000, it will not hurt you, it will not bring misery to your life. What work do we need to do here other than code changes? Just, I'm a normal citizen living here. I'm a normal resident living here. What can you tell me to convince me that what you are proposing will not hurt me? That's why city council changed.

Sean, let me give you a very straightforward answer. Mitigate the impact of the change going from 2,000 to 4,000. There you go. So how do we do that? One, two, three. The land use, the water, the energy, the traffic, all that. Mitigate, mitigate. The word of mitigating, there is nothing in the town center plan that says how we're going to mitigate.

I know. That's why I'm asking this. Because everything we say here, it will still not allow us to go from two to four in the community's eyes. Right. We have to be able to go to the community and they all come here and we tell them, this will not hurt you.

I find it, okay, we are taking examples of Kirkland and Redmond and then bringing it down to Sammamish as it is. The problem that we have, which these other cities, Redmond and Kirkland don't have, is the access. to the thing. Correct. So I don't understand how changing it from two. I understand. Okay. Let's take Eastman. Let's take, like you said, let's divide it up. Let's not make it town center focused and other things. Let's build around it. Even if you build around it, we've not solved the original problem of access to I don't know, we'll call it motorways, like 520 to the highways, 520 or 405. The train is not coming to Sammamish. So we're not going to be able to solve any of those things that we set out for if we increase from 2,000 to 4,000.

And city residents, I don't think, have a problem going from 2,000 to 4,000. Their problem was when you go from 2,000 to 4,000, what's going to happen to water? What's going to happen to traffic? What's going to happen to the quality of life of mine? And that is not changing by just upping zoning or whatever you're doing here. Where is the new roads? Where is the new wells we're digging?

I don't know, whatever you want to call it. And one last thing is that isn't this proving that point for us? We started with what seemed like a theoretical exercise to say 1250,000. But we are now going somewhere at 45%, less than 45% of that at 560.

That was existing, right?

Yeah, but then we are struggling to build it within the space because we have so many other constraints that we have to work through it. Which is why I think that while the intent is great, and we should probably give ourselves an A plus for intent, The reality is not going to match this up at any point in time. And that's where I have a problem. Not that I don't want to increase from 2,000 to 4,000. I definitely would love to do that. I definitely would like to have more coming into the Eastman property area and all of those things so that it becomes better and better. But then I struggle to find a way to align it all together. And then still say, oh, you know what? At every traffic light, you will have to wait four extra seconds. It doesn't feel like four extra seconds. And that's the thing.

Fair enough. And I, you know, so I'm not arguing either way about any of this. I'm just trying to get through the presentation and get to the discussion about, you know, getting feedback. Sorry, we didn't mean to pound on you.

I'm not pounding on you. Sorry. I've been leaning forward a little bit. Just how many more slides do you have?

I've got a few. If you'd let me just get through them, I could probably get to the end here.

Yeah, I'd suggest doing that because I think one of the things is I'm not sure that the problem we're trying to solve is 2,000 to 4,000 here. Really, at the core of it is where do we put and how do we incentivize and all those other things to get to the 2,100 affordable units? and clearly town center has a role to play with it and we need to do something with the codes but that won't be sufficient or maybe but there's other options just like you were all like building 120 and so forth so if we get too hung up right now in the two to four thousand without saying How do we get to the 2,100 affordable units, steeply affordable units?

We will get through the slides, but the intent of the meeting is to increase capacity. And it feels like, like he said, it's an academic exercise, but still, it won't hold when you bring the community here.

Well, that's what we need to talk about. And the feedback, I think, that David's getting loud and clear is if we try to put it all in town center by increasing town center capacity, it would move it up beyond 2,000. People are going to balk. And they have. They've spoken through the election process.

I also have to say that, you know, we did complete environmental studies. We did look at mitigation measures, and there is quite a bit of analysis and description on those. I think people just disagreed with those statements. They disagreed with the methodologies that are standard methodologies that are used in those types of analysis, and people disagreed. And that's their community, you know.

But I think we can agree that some of those studies, they can use some...

And I'm not the city's traffic engineer.

How did you know I'm talking about traffic?

So we start to look at what it would take to get the town center into middle housing compliance. We know that the town center does, there do need to be some changes made because the town center has not been brought into compliance with the basic requirements of HB 1110, which is middle housing. So in order to do this, we would need to bring up the zoning in a middle housing manner to what's shown here. And you can see that if we use the current zoning setup that we have, which, if you recall, is the one on the left, the current, versus the proposed, which is the one on the right, you would see that we roughly land at about 750 units of capacity above the units that are delivered and in pipeline, right? Right. so then if we go to a low rise density which brings the tca up to 48 dwelling units per acre and if you recall that's even low density for a low rise density it gets us to an additional 1600 to 1700 units above the already delivered units and pipeline units Then if you get to a mid-rise density of, in the TCA, 100 dwelling units per acre, that gets us to about 2,500 to 2,700 units above the delivered and pipeline units. So if you roll these all up and you add them all together and you look at the existing density based on the allocated density, the capacity, which includes the delivered pipeline and the remaining to be built land. That's about 1723 units. Um, if you look at bringing that up to middle housing compliance under current, it gets to an under simplified, it gets to about 1900 units. Um, And then if you look at starting to get into the affordable housing low-rise focus, we're getting up into the 2,700 to 2,900 units in total. Then if you get into the actual mid-rise, it's 37 to 3,900 units. The point here is that under the existing density, when considering units produced in pipeline units, which includes usage of all of the incentives, you can't even reach the 2,000 capacity.

I was focusing on trying to ask a question. I didn't hear it. So when you say affordable housing, is that The way I read the zoning differences would be actually maybe more correct to say mid-rise focus, and some of those units would be affordable, some wouldn't necessarily. It's just the number of units, and they may be built as affordable, maybe not, or they use incentives, right? So it's- Sure. Virtus capacity for mid-rise focus not that they'd been built out as affordable, right?

For us it was really the differences HP 1220 compliance Which is affordable housing so I could see it either way I think capacity is the easy way to say it's just capacity and

i think it's more realistic too because there's no way we're going to put 4 000 affordable units in the town center just simply no developer will do that for you it's a good point and you know we're going to do this presentation again in a few weeks to the council so we'll change that so thank you for the feedback so just going up to the

Sorry, going up to the equation that you have over there, the town center capacity is 326 plus 837 plus the existing density is 1723, which is the scenario capacity, right?

No, this is, let's see, let me make sure. Yeah, so that is the number you're seeing is this scenario right here. Existing capacity 560 units plus the units produced plus pipeline units.

Oh, so, okay. So 326 plus 837 plus 560. Right, 1723. 1723. Okay, got it. Now I'm there.

326 plus 837 is constant.

Okay, because I was like, if it's 1723, the meeting's over. We've already got to where we want to be.

David, a quick question on that slide.

Yes.

Can you define what is a middle housing compliance in relation to what Mr. Stickney always remind us about market rate housing? Is that market rate housing could be a part of the middle housing compliance?

Yeah, middle housing is market rate. Middle housing is market. And you would get 10% inclusionary in the current setup in the town center. You could change that. You could make it 15%, you know. But it's at 80%, so it really doesn't help us with our housing allocation.

But if we do it as 10% to 15%, we are making it less attractive for the builders if we do it that way?

It depends. You know, you're getting a density increase, so maybe there's a trade-off there. Oh.

Can you help me understand what's pipeline? Is it what's currently permitted and under construction?

Right. It is back up here. I apologize. Almost there. This is pipeline here. So these are permit. These are projects that are in either some phase of permitting or they are in some phase of development.

so the 326 those were already built those were have been delivered and are occupied and the 800 plus they are anywhere between permitting to moving in right yep brownstones west brownstones east ucdp phase one block eight or excuse me block nine blocks 10 through 13. um Aegis all those things are included so we improved because the curve that you showed earlier that showed this is what you showed two curves i think one was the state or the county and one was sammamish and you said we only did 300 so that curve would now turn up oh yeah that curve will will improve significantly when so long as the units are delivered but you said they are in the pipeline they are between permitting and moving in it means that they are going to build them

Hmm many of them have not moved to construction permit yet But they will what's the obstacle funding?

financing But that's something that you don't control No

All we do is track it as a pipeline project. How long have they been in the pipeline? Some of them for many years. Some of them are about to expire. So like all the notices around the town center here, those are counted? And it's a difficult environment right now to build, and I understand you probably know more about that than I do, but I understand financing is difficult. So we're at the down at the end here and apologize. Almost there. So we wanted to first present the capacity problem statement. The current code uses density bonuses that can create enough density in some zones to accommodate low-rise to mid-rise typologies. However, all town center bonuses have been used or are integrated into pipeline projects. And without code changes, the town center will continue to develop at allocated densities, which primarily promotes townhomes. If the town center develops at densities that support only middle or single family housing, the city will need to shift the anticipated capacity for low-rise and mid-rise buildings to other parts of the city. There are several compliance paths, and this includes some of the comments you've provided this evening, is to update the town center plan and code to apply middle housing densities. That would be, one, it doesn't necessarily address the housing allocation, but it does address compliance that is required for middle housing. I think this is one that we have to do. The next is to update the town center plan and code to apply affordable housing densities with the low rise or mid rise focus. And that is where we look at the table here and we see down on the lower section, the last four rows, Um, the next is to, um, update the town center plan and code to apply middle housing densities and also apply the same affordable housing overlay as faith-based and public ownership parcels. So, the idea here is that we could, we could There's a middle ground whereby we bring the town center into compliance with middle housing, but we also add capacity for deep affordable housing when it is being built by a not-for-profit builder. So we could allow a not-for-profit builder, so long as they pass traffic concurrency and they can show they have water and sewer availability, the ability to build a low-rise or mid-rise building outside of the density calculations that the town center require. And this is a strategy that basically is telling the state that we'd be happy if you want to fund affordable housing to build it here. It's not likely that would happen, but it does demonstrate that we have that capacity. So this is kind of a backup plan, if you will. It's fairly easy to implement, pretty easy to get into effect, and it would not be dependent on market rate housing to build the affordable housing alongside it. It really is dependent on public funding or housing philanthropy funding to build it.

So if I'm talking to Habitat for Humanities right now, and I invite them to come and meet with us to help us solve this problem because I know that they built one here and they just built one, I don't remember where, but I saw it in the news. We don't need to talk about it at this moment, but maybe when they come, we figure out a way to help them help us. And again, go back to the land we own. That's a good opportunity to partner with someone like them. Build commercial in the first floor, build affordable housing in the upper floors, and partner with Arsh too. Let Arsh manage it.

Absolutely. And there are other housing providers that we would definitely want to invite as well. Habitat is a wonderful operation. My understanding is they focus around 80% AMI and down into the 50, but not lower than 50.

No, they do all. I work with them. Yeah.

They do?

Yeah. They work in Redmond. They did with very low income people near Novelty Hill Road, Ivondale Corner.

Yeah. I'd like to see that project.

Many years ago, but they did it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

But I think that that's part of the puzzle. But under option three, that is a good path. It would include engaging the housing providers and working to try and figure out how to tailor our affordable housing overlay in the town center now you have to acquire the land but if we own the land and that's available or or if there's a housing developer that maybe donates land you know there's all sorts of scenarios unlikely but but possible so then the fourth option is the one you've talked about here and that is to shift plan density from the town center into other plan centers and address them simultaneously with a whole city approach um and that really is again looking at on the map here um the the inglewood the pine lake the kalahani possibly some of the neighborhood centers if there was opportunity there and looking at how to accommodate low rise and mid-rise building types around the city in addition to the town center does option four oh sorry does option four cover um let's say eastman it could okay

Okay. And does option four cover to what Commissioner Marzi said, which is like, you know, if you were to tell people, why don't you build in the Pine Lake area or in... Right, just improve further on the...

So, it could. The challenge with option four is it's a bigger lift, it could be quite expensive, it could be quite time-consuming, as opposed to focusing on... And one of the reasons why the city decided to focus initially on the town center was that it is an existing sub-area, And that when the sub area was put in place, they did study additional density beyond the 2000 units. So there was a history of studying additional density already in the town center. And that was the first one that we had decided to start with. And we had anticipated moving to Inglewood, probably the next, and then Pine Lake, and then Klahani, and then the neighborhood centers.

So I know you mentioned earlier also, David, that The whole idea here is to, as per those state laws that you quote, I don't remember them, but you quote it, is to have a plan and make things like remove barriers. But whether the execution happens or no is up in the air, right? So as Commissioner Jay said, and Commissioner Sam has also said, this spread out plan, whatever, right? We incentivize or say, yeah, like the QFC complex, you have the R16 or whatever, R24 zone, and open it up. A builder may decide, just like they did in Redmond, it's like, you know what, yeah, I can put like these high-end coffee shops and restaurants down the first floor, or even put the QFC down and then make a five-story or six-story building out there. They may do it or they may not. But it's on the plan. We have got the zoning done. We can tell the state we did this. Now, whether some builder comes in and does it, we don't know. And that's not up to us. Right. So we have given incentive. There's an option to build those 2000 homes or whatever.

Exactly. That's correct. And providing that flexibility across different geographic areas in the city so that if one of those scenarios worked out, increases the likelihood of it actually possibly happening.

Actually, I think it will not happen. No, I'll tell you why. Because there is more effort required for a builder to break down QFC and make something there versus town center, which is kind of... You know, an area which is not that developed, quote unquote, is easier for them to just run a bulldozer and boom. They'll just make buildings there. But here, they go to break down exit structure, get the people out, you know.

Demolition is easy. Sorry? Demolition is easy. Yeah.

No, no, but.

They're very fast knocking it down.

No, but QFC has to get out of lease and all those. If he has to get out, that's there. I mean, you have to get them all the tenants out and all that stuff, right? It's not that easy where there's an empty land here is what I'm saying.

Again, January 17th, 2023, March 7th, 2023. Really great conversations about these topics.

That's all good. But again, trying what we tried from before, we will end up with the same opposition that we faced from before. Yeah. It's the same community. It's the same people. Let's try something different. I know you said option four. You don't say harder. I think you said it needs more work. I would rather do the more work and succeed at the end of it instead of trying what we tried and we failed.

Right. So we already had on the work plan what we call a centers and corridors study. And the concept with the centers and corridors study is not so much traffic related. So it's part of it, but it's not really just traffic. It's focused on the relationships between the centers, the Klahani, excuse me, the Pine Lake, the town center, the Inglewood Center, and the placemaking, the different design standards that might go into effect, how the pedestrian connections work, trails, open spaces, how all those things work. That is a primary section of the city, and it also is The most challenging one of one of the most challenging traffic areas as I understand it In part because of school start times during the school year But really looking at the relationships in that corridor and then looking again at how Klahani fits in and is pulled into that Would really enable us to then strategize You know how to how to move forward and it doesn't have to be complicated when we start to look at So this is the Englewood area, right? And what I did was, again, I took the Together Center and I basically stamped it in where it could go. It could create frontage along 228th. Now, obviously, you would need Regency Centers to want to do this, but we would want to set up the zoning so that they could, right? That's the point. If you look at the Building 120 site, you could see how those 280 units might fit on the Building 120 site. If you were to look at Pine Lake, you could see how some of these buildings might fit. And this doesn't really require demolition. This requires integration. This requires connecting. You could keep the QFC open while you're building this. Um, and you know, it's something that is, is possible not in the near term, I would think, but longer term. Then finally, if you look at the Klahani, um, you could see how you could put a building there and these would include some, maybe one or two levels of underground parking. They would include ground floor commercial or services, and then they would include, you know, three to five stories of, of residential above them.

The biggest advantage of option four is if you spread it over six or seven, I think that we talked about it, David, the other day, six or seven different neighborhood centers or sub-areas, you distribute the traffic, which has been the major opposition of the community going from 2,000 to 3,000 because the town center basically infrastructure is not there to support even the 2,000. Correct. Because everything is depending on a 228 with so much of traffic congestion problem. Versus, you look at Kalahani. Kalahani has perfect access for a number of reasons. I don't know if you're following the Sound Transit. Sound Transit, the next stage is to extend their services to Issaquah. Klahani has perfect access, and within five, 10 minutes, you're in the access to the freeway, access to the future transit. And Klahani has really very good roads, road capacity, intersections, roadway improvement, infrastructure, and all that, that really helps us a lot as far as accepting more housing units, particularly for affordable housing.

So, David, I just want to point three things here in three different areas. So, Klahani, not just the Klahani QFC complex, but Klahani itself inside has got some townhomes or whatever, some multi-use homes, right, multi-family homes. You could incentivize those and say, you know, break those down and make five-story buildings in them because they already have kind of capacity. Second option is the park-and-ride that is there across from Pine Lake, the QFC. That's an open lot. You can just put the park and ride underground and put a five-story building on top. Exactly. And the third option I'm thinking of is, I don't know if you guys know, but there's this property on Snake Hill, 212th. When you just start to go down, that guy's been starting to sell that 20 acres land for a long time. I don't know the details on that. I know some of it is unconstructible, as I've heard, because I was trying to invest in that, by the way. So I've done some research. But that's 20 acres sitting right there. city can can do something outside the box thinking i don't know what we need to zone it whatever it is some construction we needed to make sure you know the drainage and everything's taking it up because it's kind of on a hillside but that's 20 acres you know which property i'm talking about right 20 acres down just when you start going down and that guy's been selling for a long time that part of that is a restricted wetland bank that's there But again, work out, I mean, 20 acres. You can have 10 acres of wetland, the remaining 10 acres you can use, and that's...

There's also the big block brewing old 7-Eleven property. Yes, that's another one on East Nexomamish.

You could put a low-rise in there.

Exactly, yeah. Yes.

Hey, I have... Just a question for clarification and then a suggestion here. You said option four, that there was a lot of, I think, expense or cost or effort or something with that.

What is that? Is that in terms of doing studies or whatever before changing zoning or?

Right. So we would, it depends on the scope. You know, it is possible that you could choose not to do sub areas in the Pine Lake and Klahani and Inglewood, although we would always like to see those developed. That's what the comprehensive plan envisions. But you could choose to simply just change the zone density of those zones, the community business zone and the office zone to allow for, additional density and building volume. That would be a very fast way to do that.

And we could learn from Redmond, right? Because I'm sure they did something similar on those Redmond town center area.

Yep. However, that would not address some of the other things that should typically go along with urbanization, like pedestrian connections and open space and trails and the things that would go into a sub area plan. So it depends on whether you would want to do that sub area planning or we could, for example, look at addressing that through the Transportation Master Plan and the Parks and Recreation Open Space Plan and really focus that effort there.

So I guess hearing that suggestion, because I said two things. And so the second thing was that, really, what are you looking for from us in terms of direction? And here's a possible example of that. So how I was understanding this in terms of capacities and so forth and what the community has said, and some of getting a sense of what some of the comments are, if I was to give direction, I would say we should consider how we could use essentially option four to disperse some of the capacity for affordable housing, which means that density. And option four probably has a couple of sub-options. And one of those is the sort of the, if I can paraphrase, the easy just change the zoning in some of those areas. And, you know, that may have some pros and cons to it. It's a little quicker. The other suboption B or two would be to really do a subarea plan. And there'll be more cost and studies associated with that and so forth. And it's still properties that are owned by... Yeah, so maybe, you know, at the end of the day, we look and say, if we can change the zoning to enable, right, maybe something will happen.

Maybe not.

But so anyways, from a direction standpoint, it'd be really good to hear from everybody. Like, I would suggest that we build out scenarios where we do disperse some of the density needed to meet our affordable housing allocations rather than try to build them all into.

I'd like to jump in because I want to back up to policy because there's baseline is we have tension between community interest, traffic, state mandates, but the one we've left out is fiscal. The city's facing a fiscal cliff, which means we need to figure out In fact, Mary, in her handout today, talked about that sort of thing. Seattle Times article in the last couple of days talks about Clyde Hill going out of business because of our state tax structure. The city's ultimately going to face questions similar to that. And so we have to be pretty strategic in our planning and zoning. And the first sub area that we're working on, and that's what we should focus on, is the town center. now admittedly these other options we can kick the can down the road a little bit but we're going to run into the same community issues whether it's a pine lake lahanni or englewood that we have in town center so my suggestion is let's focus on getting town center locked down we know we need to change the zoning to make the land use more efficient We don't want to lose out on opportunity costs here for potential revenue. What the exact density comes down to on town center then can inform us on what options we might need to look at in other areas. But we need to create certainty for builders. We've got vacant land there, a lot of work with the environmental studies that have been done. We've got to reduce the barriers for development and, as Syed said, mitigate the challenges of changes in density. So from a policy perspective, I think we really need to focus and not become scattered, a bunch of cats, focus on the town center and where that's going to take us and then how we can look at the rest of the community. Because sub-area plans are a huge lift as we've seen with town center. How long have we been working on this, David? two years and so many meetings so that's that's my suggestion yeah there's a lot of numbers here but from a policy perspective focus on town center and then that'll inform us where we're going

So let me kind of, John, respond to it because you brought up the good point that the city currently has a lot of financial challenges. But when you're talking about infrastructure, roadway improvement, I don't know if you guys have looked at the TIP or CIP that's supposed to be a list of the transportation improvement projects. We're talking about over $175 million. What do we have between, and as you guys, you know, the only two sources of funding for roadway improvement in the city, one is taxes that you and I will pay, property tax, the other one is impact fee. These are city numbers. The projected numbers between the two sources is $30 million. So $30 million is that what we have, $170-something million roadway improvement. And we're talking about the efficiency that we have as far as the roadway that we're supposed to be serving the community for the next six years. And if you concentrate on a town center, how much of that $176 million is going to be provided by the developer? The rest is going to be on the city. versus if you go with the other options, that you don't need to make that much of an improvement in the city because you have the infrastructure already in place that potentially could accommodate those additional dwelling units without investing a lot of public taxpayers' money to make the infrastructure to support that. So from the financial point of view, I have disagreement with you based on that.

So just to be clear, I'm not selecting any one of the four options. I'm just suggesting that we focus our energy on which option we're going to go with.

I want to suggest something a little bit different, and that would be, can you bring in four options, please? What about a possibility of option five that would be hybrid option? that we would include in those sub-areas that David was talking about in addition to the town center. So, because option number four says shift the plant density away from the town center, I'm saying that maybe the hybrid option, option number five, keep the existing density on the town center. Don't make any change in that, but include it in the analysis as A area, not D area.

I would actually appreciate and glad that you brought up John what you did because in my mind was there's some also essential things we have to do in town center for the middle housing for sure but also if you look at what was proposed for the land use and to move and consolidate that hasn't been really built the code to support what we'd really need to accomplish so to work towards increasing the density the zoning to allow more of the you know the mid high rise in town center is a you know if you just think about sequencing of work that's something that needs to be done really sooner rather than later and i have to build a little bit on that once that's done there's some old options around that i still for all the time i've spent on this i don't have a really good like what does this look like in terms of if say it's all built out you know i know that what the map is and we could have middle housing here and you know townhomes are going over here um but like if we just put a little model together and get a better sense of what this whole thing starts to look like and and then we could say you know really how far do we get in terms of the the uh affordable housing allocation and and what we need to then think about spreading that out or you know building 120 or whatever i don't feel like i've got enough information to be able to advise very clearly. Other than in terms of the current way that A zones are spread out versus consolidate, it just feels way better to consolidate that if I were making a decision and it would absolutely add additional density from what's there because we're not going to build out enough Units in town center with the current density or zoning allocations just doesn't pencil out. So Anyway, that's my sorry.

Sorry to interrupt you. We just had about five minutes left remaining So we propose a time extension because the discussion will go longer in five minutes. So if you don't mind I

so who wants to make a motion to extend the time yeah i'll extend them i'll propose a motion to extend it to 8 45 15 minutes second is that enough 15 minutes well we could we didn't we determined that we're three we have three more so yeah yeah yeah Oh, yeah, so then in that case, yeah, 30 minutes, sorry. I'd like to amend it to 9 p.m., 30 minutes. Second. Okay.

All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Sorry, David, I just wanted to make that. See you next time. Okay.

I was just going to point out that, so when I'm hearing this, I'm thinking that there's a continuum of choices, right? We're not trying to box you in so much on an option one through four. There could be multiple hybrid options here, right? These were just starting points for your conversation. The challenge that we have is, I want to point out, go back to the fiscal responsibility, is we have a limited amount of funding. to perform studies to build models to do all these things i would love to do all of them but we're at the end of the day we're going to need to figure out which ones we have to do and those are probably the ones we'll be left doing um so and the related question david and that is that do you have a time limit that you're given by the council

that how much of time you want to spend to get there?

Well, I think I think there's two time limits. There's well, three. There's the staff time available. We don't have a ton of staff time for this. The second is the bandwidth that you all have other things you have to do on your work plan and the council on their work plan. And then finally the tolerance of the state before the state targets us under the Housing Accountability Act that we're not fully compliant because we haven't sorted out how the town center fits into our comprehensive plan allocations. So that is something out there on the horizon and I'm pretty sure that our name as a city is written on a whiteboard somewhere in the state office as a city to follow. So I do want to highlight here that you know, we started out with things we must do for compliance in the town center But what else should be addressed, you know, for example, you could you could recommend When we get to it that that you know that we take on updating the town center plan, you know my like for example if I was looking at it, I would update the town center to shift to the new regulating configuration with core urban mix garden, et cetera. I would move to a low rise density and then I would look to move or look for additional capacity in other areas in the city through some fairly simple lifts like adding density through the existing zoning for now. that's where i would start it would get you pretty quickly to compliance so to speak the capacity would be there and then as we figure out our funding and our timing we could then take on doing sub-area planning in the other areas of the city that's just an example that and by no means is that meant to say that's what you should do but that that is something that would achieve compliance and it would also at the same time

um wrap up the town center to a point where we could move on and focus on other areas in the city so i would say one thing is that based on the last election and the mood of the citizens of the city and on one end we have the compliance that we got to do with state law etc we need to make sure whatever we come up with we try and not increase the capacity of town center because that was very clear out there. So whatever zoning or whatever we do, we try to remain within those 2,000 or whatever we had agreed upon on the town center that people are okay with and not try to increase it.

As long as we can say compliant, of course. So I would say that the minimum that you would have to do for compliance is something like this. And that is the middle housing compliance. So if you look at the roll-up of that, that is right around 1,900 total units in the town center. So that would be under the 2,000 units. So that is something that's attainable. But I would present to you that You must do this. That in order to be compliant, you need to bring the zoning in town center consistent with HB 1110, which is the middle housing bill. Correct.

That's what I'm saying. So we go to strike. That is a mitigation point. I think we have to read. This is the floor.

Yeah. David, do we have, again, back to those options, do we have to have a full-fledged sub-area plan in order to basically evaluate which option you wanted to recommend to the council?

No, I don't, you know, so we have a sub-area plan in the town center.

No, I'm talking about the other seven years.

The other seven years, you wouldn't have to do that.

So it's not really a lot of extra time-consuming effort.

It's the environmental analysis. Again, you'd have to do the traffic impacts analysis. You'd have to work with the water and sewer districts to see that there is hypothetical capacity there. You'd have to try and understand what impacts come from... pedestrian connections and parks and those kind of things. And we can study that. We could do another expanded SEPA checklist, which is not quite an EIS. It's short of an EIS on that. And that would be adequate for that. but you'd still have to make the middle housing compliance changes in town center. And I would propose to you that many of the changes we made to the town center plan as draft, you'd wanna move forward with. The town center plan is its own thing. It's one way to write a sub area plan, although it's not any way that I would recommend writing a sub area plan. And we had identified a way to really, streamline it down to you know about a quarter of the size that it is and make it really what a When you have a good comprehensive plan as a community a sub area plan should not be repeating the comprehensive plan all over again a sub area plan should be a geographic specific implementation plan on how you're going to achieve those things in that specific geographic area what the opportunities are how it all fits together and the current town center sub area plan is basically its own comprehensive plan plus that geographic specific implementation plan and we want to cut out all that comprehensive plan stuff and just make it a streamlined implementation plan so i would advocate that that is something you would want to do as well so middle housing maybe streamline the comprehensive plan or excuse me the subarea plan we've already done most of that work and then finally you might want to consider layering on top of the town center an affordable housing overlay much like the bonus parcels that would give us some additional capacity if if a not-for-profit builder wanted to build some affordable housing and happened to acquire the property they could do it but it would provide a lot of capacity for the compliance side

How much of effort is going to be if we concentrate on the town center and based on the 2,000 dwell units as far as dealing with the zoning change and all the other regulations that we have to update?

It would be minimal environmental work because we've already studied 2,000 years ago. We studied 4,000 recently.

We have to do the traffic study all over because it was not accepted by the public.

Except that we've already studied 2,000 and in theory that still stands. The 2000 was studied back in 2008.

So there is no need to update that. Yeah, but traffic has changed in 2008, right? Those numbers may not be applicable today.

Because we work in Sammamish, and because this community is very interested in this topic, and because we don't have connections, direct connections to freeways, state highways, county highways... And because we have to cross through other jurisdictions in order to connect to those roadways, you called them motorways, I believe, we likely would want to do some form of traffic analysis related to this here. I would absolutely agree with that.

The other thing that's unknown is that, at least my understanding, that next year we're going to be updating the transportation master plan. Isn't that correct?

I think it was initially proposed to be this year, but I understand that it's been pushed out.

Yes. Based on my understanding, based on conversation that I had with the public works director, that that is something that is going to come up. So are we going to be waiting till the TMP is updated?

It might line up by the time we get this off the ground, move it forward. It might just line up naturally. Thank you. Thank you.

OTHER DIRECTION?

THE ONLY COMMENT I WAS GOING TO SAY, I THINK YOU ALREADY SAID IT. In this beautiful city, Sammamish, that the land value is becoming very expensive, and it's landlocked. And I just keep going back. Let's think different. Let's think completely different than how people used to think 10 or 15 years ago, or even ourselves last year, to try to get to something that satisfies the community and satisfies the state.

Absolutely, but also to you know to the comment we heard earlier about you know, my warm-up comment Was you know that that we probably need to make some changes to the town center so that it can be built as it's currently Envisioned right because there are major barriers to that.

I agree with you those changes. They need they need to happen I keep going back going from two to four you have a City Council who was elected and because the community did not want to go from two to four. Spending any energy going from two to four, I don't think we will have any luck. If we focus on the other areas, with all due respect to what John said, if we focus on the other areas, I think we will have better luck and our limited resources will be put in a better use.

Actually, I saw in an article in the Seattle Times several months ago that they single out Sammamish as the only city on the east side that's actually losing population. Losing.

I was going to ask him earlier when he said, I was going to say, was that net add or was that gross add?

No, the article said losing population. Single out. Single out Sammamish. I have no doubt.

It depends on the data source and how it's calculated. The Office of Financial Management is the information or the data source that the commenter referenced prior, and I've seen those same reports. They were just published recently. However, I think it's the American ACS, which identifies that the population's actually dipping. Mm-hmm.

that and that's possible because we know we've got a lot of bedroom community homes here kids are growing up and going out to college and stuff and they're not being replaced right now right because people are not saying their homes and they cannot afford to stay yeah and they're not coming back yeah they don't come back here and that's what paul is constantly reminding us market rate housing all right any other comments so we can move to public comment well one question maybe kind of concluding is where are we going from here

What's the next step, Steve? Well, we're going to probably watch this video about five times and try and really understand what the feedback was. But I really appreciate the dialogue. And what I'm taking away is that, yes, we need to do the middle housing update. We have to. Yes, we should streamline the plan. Yes, we should make some of those other changes to how the permitting works and things that we don't get any value out of, but is just make work for the developer. but no we should not look at pushing the density up above 2000 and instead we but but yes we should consider consider and bring more information forward about doing an affordable housing overlay in the town center which might provide some additional opportunity for um affordable housing if it ever came forward highly unlikely but for capacity purposes it would be helpful yes we should look to assess how to increase capacity in the other lake lahanni neighborhood centers eastman etc and how how would that all fit together and could it be phased And ultimately, how far would we need to go to get to compliance? Can we do that simply through amending existing zoning in the case of the existing centers? Can we do some limited environmental review, traffic study, those sorts of things? How do we look to address other potential impacts such as pedestrian connections and traffic? street streets streetscapes maybe we maybe we implement some design standards in those areas to help address some of the issues that is really the approach going forward we're not necessarily fully interested in sub-area planning all the areas in the city right now due to the cost and the time associated with it however it is likely that there is a hybrid alternative where we don't have to do that we can still get what we need out of it and start to look at start to set the stage or set the table whatever you want to say for our future selves to continue to study those areas but this is the first move we would make in those areas

Can I suggest something? First of all, I agree with that approach, but can I suggest something that when you look at these potential new sub areas, as well as the town center, you would provide for advantages and disadvantages of each, the implication, if you concentrate on the town center, what would be the implication? and then the other areas as far as infrastructure, as far as the financial issues and so forth. So you have a list of the advantages and disadvantages of each. That would really be helpful.

Absolutely. I think that that is in terms of, as I've heard here this evening, you know, effectively communicating with the community. really making sure to study those and bring those forward early when we get to each of the geographic areas so that the people that live around there and especially, you know, I would want to get some feedback from ultimately we'll get back to this again in another meeting from you all and from the council about how public engagement should work because I don't think we got public engagement right the last time we were working on the town center plan. And I want to really make sure that we have opportunities for people to be involved in all manners whether it's us going out and doorbelling you know neighborhood neighbors around these areas maybe there's a couple commissioners and a couple staff people that walk around and doorbell and and you know get to know people and ask questions and talk to them about this on that kind of thing um that'd be really important um The one thing I think that for us that we need to understand is how far do we need to go and how do we know when to stop? Part of that is financial limitations. Part of that is our time that's available. So we'll be looking at that. uh but what i am hearing also is that we do want to prioritize making some changes to the town center plan not increasing the density but bringing it compliant with middle housing bringing it compliant with the permitting process requirements cleaning up the plan itself and that would also be a big benefit to Some people might not like me saying this, but be a big benefit to the developer because they might actually move forward and develop the town center under the current density. It'd be a lot easier if they weren't.

You can change the word from benefit to incentive.

Sure. Yep.

And can you also include building 120 into that? Because it has a lot of the advantages that you just... Isn't it in option three? Right. That's already included in option three.

I think that's one that I would bring to the council, but they might look at me sideways. I mean, it just is a simple matter of what do they want to do with that building? I've had some conversations recently with council members that have revealed that they might be interested in bringing it forward for some form of affordable housing, but that really hasn't been part of the conversation so far.

Could it be an item that we could agree as a commission and then send it to council?

Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm keen about because it's right there. It's near a bus stand. It's near a sub area. Everything is right there.

However, it's also an asset held by the city. And when we're looking at our financial condition, there is an implication if you chose to use it for something like affordable housing. So I don't want to get down that rabbit hole. I'm not the expert on building 120, but I'll stop there. I've summarized where I think you all landed.

Back to where we're going. Is it going to come back to us sometime?

We'll be going to the city council on, I have to think about what meeting. If we don't have a second meeting, if it's only two meetings, it'd probably be the third Tuesday in September.

Don't you think that would be better kind of bringing it back after hearing our comments and kind of before taking it to the council? Would it be better? have another meeting.

Maybe they just heard us and they're like yep we'll go with what they say. Would you would so what you're proposing is that we refine our presentation bring it back based on direction as we understand it right you take another shot at refining it again and then that ultimately turns into a recommendation to the council as to how to proceed and then that is presented to them maybe in third week of maybe in first first meeting in October and then that's considered as part of their work planning and budgeting. It might be too far down the line for that. That's where I'm looking at our city manager trying to make sure I got the timing of it all right.

That was a great summary. One thing that would be helpful, I think, if I were to see this again, or maybe the council, is I'm just thinking about some of the things that we've seen like this. Would there still be the high-rise mixed use in what you were summarizing if we just made the changes for the You don't have to answer just think through that and what what implications there would be because I'm wondering if there's a way to keep to that 2000 maximum capacity and trade off middle housing Versus right the way to do that is and again this goes back to traffic and other impacts is to increase the commercial allocation

Because you can end up with more development like the TRF Met Market and Sky Apartments development, where you're able to harvest the density for residential into one side, but you're able to then take advantage of the property and build commercial on the other side. And versus... The other scenario is where you don't have the commercial, and you're just building a tower of residential with a big open field next to it, and that is something that will not move forward, right? But if you're able to find a balance of additional commercial allocation to go with the existing 2,000 residential, you might start to see some additional scenarios kind of like maybe not quite as intense as the TRF met market development.

WE SHOULD MOVE TO AGENDA-RELATED PUBLIC COMMENT. UP TO FIVE MINUTES.

OK, Mary Wichter again. So the part you want to rewatch is where David Pyle starts talking at 8.27 to 8.37 when you rewatch this, because I thought it was very succinctly said. A couple things. Together Center, down by Bella Bottega and Redmond. I believe they own a 99-year lease that they gave to the people so then the developers get it built and they have to run that. I believe on TDRs there were 80 or 150 originally, and they all got bought up. In fact, I believe STCA did a first right of refusal so nobody else would buy them. And you couldn't use TDRs until somebody actually used the first couple, so I think we're getting into that. If you ever did in-city TDRs, which is an approved docket by moi, which is a good thing because the places you're building is in the steep slopes and landslide hazards in Tamarack and it's not working and the lots are sitting for 15 years with pipes and all the trees down. If you gave them multiple smaller units that they could build, that would incent people to put more smaller things. It's just a one-for-one. You go, you buy one of these crappy lots that the city calls unbuildable, and you get five or six where you can build smaller things. I think that would help. So don't get rid of TDRs yet, because they are still useful. And I know King County did theirs for the Emerald Necklace. As far as traffic, if you're getting an Aegis where there used to be one house and you're getting Merrill Gardens, those people don't drive a lot because they don't have all their kids and stuff. You're going to find things are different. I also, the Lutheran Church across the street, I think has been to two meetings now and said, Hey, and I think Miriam was at one of the meetings. Hey, we'd like to be able to rezone our things so we can go up because there in David's maps that he had the two side by side, the orange part, that's one house per whatever lot. And it really shouldn't be that. That should be erased and they should do more. And so like right now, I believe they rent part of their parking lot so that the students can park there from Skyline. So there are changes that you need to do. The first thing you need to do is change the town centre code. You've got a fruit bowl, which is what Paul Stickney called it when I first met him in 2015. You have a fruit bowl, and the stuff you can put in it isn't what needs to be there. You need to change the numbers. You have to do that. Otherwise, what's going to happen is all those townhouses are going to build out. You're going to be stuck not getting the taxes that you need, and you won't be able to put commercial there. And that would be really bad. And you only have one town center, and it's the fruit bowl ready to go. So I kind of like what John Backman had said there. And then the reason I brought these up again is... This is from, again, Urban 3. So watch that little 10-minute thing. If you've never watched it, it's really good. If you've seen it once, I've seen it many, many times. Suburbia needs to be subsidized. And everybody talks about the Highcroft development, which you can't see anymore. It's down just on the other side of the Habitat for Humanity. The Habitat for Humanity is just 10 cottages. The city owned the property. They were never going to build on it. They built some of the other past council members didn't like that. It got built. It's just 10 little cottages. When those first got built, they were $800,000 valued each by King County, and now that's been wiped away. And then Highcroft is the development right up next to it. So this is Highcroft. And so it shows you each of those houses pays about, in 2025, $13,000 tax per year. And the city only gets a portion of that. So the city gets $1,700. So the municipal tax per acre, and an acre is a football field size. That's what these are for. You're only getting $6,800, so $7,000. Whereas if you do the Sky Apartments, which was a conglomeration of all the commercial and goes, you are getting that building actually has 159 dwelling units in it. And it's only on an acre, 1.6 acres. So the dwelling units per acre is 96. And instead of just getting the 7,000 in city tax, you're getting $42,000, $43,000. So it's six to seven times the amount of single family homes. That's why we can't do this. We're 85%. We're going to 87%. Oh, everybody can build a 3,000 square foot house with no affordable costs, which unfortunately, I think those changes got passed through. Council. So we really need to go here. And then, so the Aegis is going to be, well there's the Presbyterian Church, the Aegis, and then there's the Ichijo townhomes. So you can see in here, so you have the Sky Apartments in here. These are actual data from Urban 3. Mary Wichter's just here presenting them because I watched all these things. I've been doing this for 10 years. And this was actually brought up by Framework. So you need to look at these. This is about 7,000 per municipal acre. This is about $18,000 per municipal acre. This is $42,000 per municipal acre. And even just a little hamburger joint with a drive-through thing, it's $8,000. So it's better than the single-family homes. So we've got to get off the single-family homes. You need to change the town center zoning at a bare minimum. And then listen to David starting at 827.

This was done with city council on Tuesday. Good evening Planning Commissioners, Paul Stickney, Sammamish. I appreciate this meeting and I appreciate everybody speaking where they are. I'm going to run through a couple things quickly that may be contentious but I don't intend them to be. I mean them to correct incorrect data, false premise or error. And we need to work on what's right, not who's right. And we need to understand numbers and their effects because those go together. A couple odds and ends. The land across from Pine Lake is owned by King County. So we'd need to get that back. And Don Jaron has a real story about that. A couple other odds and ends. The critical area report on Building 120 has massive impacts. That's something else that needs to be looked at compared to what it was at the time it was built. I'm not throwing cold water for just facts. And I'm not going to should on you with this, but if you would, if you could, take a little time and look at the email I sent last night, but more importantly, read the six attachments. They're all a page only. They have links. I want to give you a very critical piece of information in those that I'm not going to call out where it lives. I'd be happy to meet and talk about it. But here's what that is. Let me read something to you. The 2007 FEIS for Town Center, which studied 2,000 housing units. It overstates residential and commercial PM car trips and understates internalization. What's the effect of those changes? The effect is that the current 2007 EIS can add between 3,600 and 8,000 more housing units with no traffic beyond what it called for. And our city has built less than we anticipated since then. There's a lot to talk about. I'm interested in getting this right. What was out there during the election, some of it was accurate, much of it was not. It's time to share the... The city-side housing need, I agree with John Bachman on fiscal, but even of larger magnitude, 20% of our households make 80% income or less. 80% of our households make over 80%. That's the market rate I'm talking about. All of it is important. So is workforce. What are the true... need factors for economic, demographic, and workforce makeup of our community, and what do they suggest we do? That's what I talked about in my first comment, and that's what I shared with city council on Tuesday. What I handed out here, I don't have time to read the whole thing, but I started at the front with a fiscal thing. How about we don't pass the $10 million parks levy? How about if we reduce utility tax and roll it back? How about we keep other taxes from not happening? How? By figuring out what our honest and authentic market rate housing needs are and what the true effects are of meeting them. Read the six things I turned in. A couple of summaries. Our regional growth target was 2,000. That was one-third of our share. I agree with keeping it low. But I'm talking about starting with 5,000 market rate on a citywide scale and 2,000 affordable. That's only 70% of the lowest need number, and that would create less cars in traffic than one-third of the houses built in Sammamish since 19... Keep something else in mind at the end of this page that I handed out. If our budget as a city had 1,000 items, it's got a whole lot more, but if it had 1,000, could we precisely know income and expense on 200 of those and lump the other 800 into one category? No. If we have 100 wetlands, could we do a comprehensive wetland study on 20 of the 100, know exactly what they are, and lump 80 in one category? No. Then how can we lump 80% of our housing need where we have no darn idea of what those needs are? That's what I'm talking about. city-side needs for states of life and generations of life can guide all this and the effects are a lot less than you think. Let's talk further.

Thank you, Paul. And Mary, I forgot to thank you. Thank you. All right. Calendar, it's kind of simple. We don't have anything in August.

It's

Oh, yeah. Thank you. Anything on anybody online? Okay.

I'm not used to taking a month off. So if you're going to be speaking. All right, thank you. Yeah, I'm not used to taking the month of August off or any month off. So this is a little new territory for me. We did get the council to work August 18th. We have some serious issues to deal with, this being one of the biggest issues to deal with. If we're having David coming to us in September, He needs to be able to get something out of you before he's coming. So if you are available to meet in August, I would appreciate you being able to do that. Set a date. Thank you.

So I'm thinking in my head that what dates so the 18th being the Tuesday the council meets I am dropping my son off at college So I will be attending that meeting remotely, but I will not be here on Thursday. I'm off that day I'd rather not do tonight mean two meetings while I'm out of state on a vacation So the following week after that I don't have a calendar open but the I don't know if Miriam could pull it up real quick and tell us what the date is, the Thursday of the following week.

27th, I believe.

The 27th. That would be a possible date. I'm curious what you all's, knowing what you know, just offhand, if you're available and in town.

I'm okay. I'm okay. I'm in town today.

Mike?

I'm retired.

Would that be okay? Alternatively, we could go a week earlier, but that's, where do we stand right now? The 13th. We can try and meet on the 13th.

Yep.

What about that? It's the same thing. We're trying here. We would prefer the 27th as well as we have to pull together agenda materials, get everything ready, make a presentation. It takes a bit of time.

It's too late then. No, third? No, Labor Day is on 7th. Is everyone free on the 3rd of September?

Sure. That's a normal day for us anyway. That's already scheduled.

If that, then we could get to the council on the... Give us time to get the turnaround to put it on to the 15th. As an introduction item. Yep. Yep, that's the 5 to 631, yeah.

So we could do that too, if that's better for you all. Would you prefer to meet on the 27th or the third? The third. 27th. Third. Yep. Yeah, let's do the third then. 27th, right? Third. Yep, as scheduled. We'll maintain the schedule that we have. And the agenda that evening will be revisiting this topic and getting final direction and formulating a recommendation to the city council.

So no meeting in August then?

No meeting in August. Okay. You all get August off, whereas the council will be meeting.

Chair Brasco, you're at 9 o'clock, so you might want to extend just a few more minutes.

Done.

That'd be great, too.

OK. No, we adjourn. Raise your gavel. Oh, that's why I was off today. So OK, anybody opposed to adjourning the meeting? Opposed to adjourn. Second. All right. Meeting adjourned at 9.01, I think. Recording stopped.