REDMOND — Angela Birney remembers the outlet within the floor.
It was a gaping pit within the coronary heart of downtown, not removed from T & D Feed Retailer and close to some previous, little used rails that divided the town middle.
Birney, who has lived in Redmond for 27 years and was elected mayor in 2019, stated the outlet represented one thing in previous Redmond, the sleepy bed room neighborhood on the north tip of Lake Sammamish. An indication of neglect, maybe, or problem to enhance.
“They used to name it Deadmond,” Birney stated lately, from the grassy expanse of Downtown Park. “There was a very ugly strip mall right here.”
No extra. The pit was stuffed and, in 2014, a six-story, 134-unit house constructing placed on prime of it, its floor ground dwelling right now to an upscale burger joint referred to as The Tipsy Cow.
Deadmond, the commuter Seattle suburb, is lifeless. As an alternative stands Redmond, the transit-oriented metropolis.
This Saturday, that altering id continues as the town doubles its variety of gentle rail stations, including stops downtown and close to Marymoor Park, and trains push farther into Redmond. The transfer is each centered on the longer term and a sensible try to assist transfer its many staff, who swell the town’s inhabitants from about 80,000 to 147,000 on the everyday weekday and drive the town’s want for practically 25,000 new houses over the following 25 years.
Already, tall condos with broad rooftop patios and names like Porch + Park and Zephyr on the Park encompass Downtown Park, inbuilt 2018 and a simple stroll from the brand new downtown station. Yawning, excessive velocity one-way streets are actually skinnier, and visitors runs slower and each methods. Trails course via city, connecting neighborhoods, procuring facilities and to different Eastside cities. New eating places, bakeries and outlets dot the storefronts beneath a lot of the brand new housing.
The brand new stations arrive not a second too quickly. Because the nationwide discourse veers bleak — with warnings of recession and widening ideological rifts — and the Trump administration pushes a Twentieth-century conceit of what a transportation system seems like, many marvel if the kind of progress the Puget Sound area has undergone in recent times, with its deal with trains, buses and bikes, is at an finish.
Redmond, which as soon as boomed due to being on the finish of a freeway and on the daybreak of Microsoft’s international rise, has a brand new “extra inclusive and never car-centric” imaginative and prescient, Birney stated. Others describe the town because the area’s — and maybe the nation’s — greatest instance of a light-weight rail city that chased, and embraced, the change a brand new type of transportation may carry.
“They needed gentle rail to return, they usually acted prefer it,” stated Claudia Balducci, a member of the Metropolitan King County Council and a former mayor of Bellevue. “I imply, there was rooster farms right here not that way back. Now there’s a imaginative and prescient of the longer term you see right here, and it’s an city imaginative and prescient.”
For now, the imaginative and prescient solely connects Redmond to Bellevue on the Eastside’s 2 Line. This winter, although, trains will start operating beside Interstate 90, over Lake Washington and throughout Mercer Island, becoming a member of Redmond’s distant stations to these in Seattle and the north-south 1 Line.
Girding for progress
John Marchione was 4 when his household moved to Redmond in 1969, not too lengthy after the city’s first visitors gentle was turned on in 1966 and when it was nonetheless authorized to journey horses in town’s sidewalks.
Marchione doesn’t keep in mind ever strolling round downtown Redmond, which ended simply previous the previous Workshop Tavern, its hammer and handsaw signal beckoning individuals from the close by 18-hole golf course, Redmond Golf Hyperlinks.
“You’d simply get dropped off someplace,” he stated. “I keep in mind driving within the Derby Days Parade, age 7 or 8. I had streamers on my bike and I assumed, ‘I’m bicycling in the course of Redmond Means. That is unimaginable.’”
Ask somebody in Redmond who was chargeable for the change from suburb to metropolis, they usually’ll probably say Marchione, although he may disagree. Possibly he was simply in the correct place on the proper time, however it’s clearly greater than that. By the point Marchione completed his three phrases as mayor in 2019, which adopted a time period on Metropolis Council, the town’s inhabitants had grown from about 49,000 to 73,000, and Redmond had reworked.
Within the early Eighties, when the inhabitants was simply 23,000, the “lacking hyperlink” of Freeway 520 between 148th Avenue Northeast and the bridge over the Sammamish River was accomplished, welding the city to Seattle with a large ribbon of concrete.
Quickly after and due to the simple freeway entry, Microsoft moved there — following different electronics corporations like Physio-Management, which created the primary transportable defibrillator; information storage firm Knowledge I/O; and Nintendo of America.
Simply weeks after arriving in Redmond in February 1986, Microsoft went public with shares in its firm, immediately making a “staggering” quantity of wealth, numerous millionaires and a handful of billionaires all new to a city named for an Irishman who ran its submit workplace.
Largely due to Microsoft, the variety of staff in Redmond tripled, from 12,000 in 1980 to just about 36,000 a decade later, based on information from the town.
In 1995, Redmond adopted its first long-term plan complying with the state’s Progress Administration Act, focusing improvement inside metropolis limits and, extra necessary, in designated facilities.
Redmond needed to spur large progress in two locations: downtown and Overlake Village.
In downtown, the golf course was torn out and changed by Redmond City Middle in 1997, and the open-air mall was instantly a vacation spot for procuring and employment.
Overlake didn’t want a mall. It was dwelling to Microsoft’s campus, which right now is 502 acres and has 95 buildings. Not coincidentally, the town’s first two gentle rail stations are in Overlake, and opened final 12 months.
Deal with downtown
Whereas Overlake appeared destined to develop, due to its deep-pocketed multinational company, downtown wanted assist, and Marchione noticed gentle rail because the galvanizing power, a lot because the freeway spurred the town’s progress spurt a long time earlier than.
“Downtown was my first precedence as a result of it was vacant,” stated Marchione, who took workplace in 2007. “There was no purpose to go down there, there was nothing there.”
Metropolis officers noticed a possibility.
In 2008, 57% of the area’s voters accredited the $17.9 billion Sound Transit 2 poll measure, which added 36 miles to the fledgling transit system, together with to Overlake Village.
Although the plan and spending didn’t embody an extension to downtown Redmond, Marchione knew it might come sometime.
“I used to be assured that downtown Redmond would get gentle rail,” Marchione stated. “Simply primarily based on the variety of jobs we had in our neighborhood.”
So the town started working.
First, Redmond’s leaders persuaded Sound Transit to incorporate some preliminary environmental research and engineering within the 2008 gentle rail poll measure for an eventual extension to downtown and Marymoor Park, though the 2 stations wouldn’t be funded till 2016, when voters accredited a further $54 billion funding to additional develop the system.
“We had been prepared for gentle rail earlier than Sound Transit was,” Marchione stated.
The largest factor to safe downtown’s future got here in June 2010, when the town purchased the tracks that minimize via downtown, a virtually 4-mile spur of the BNSF hall that ran the size of the Eastside.
With the tracks gone, the town started making good on its objectives of a metropolis core that was extra inviting and safer for individuals in and outdoors of vehicles. It constructed a road grid within the metropolis core, and complete new streets like Bear Creek Parkway.
The town constructed the Redmond Central Connector path, which intersects with the East Lake Sammamish and Marymoor Connector trails. Later this 12 months, the path will be part of with the region-spanning Eastrail path, which is able to sometime stretch 42 miles from Renton to Snohomish.
Redmond Means and Cleveland Road reverted to two-way streets in 2018, and the variety of collisions plummeted. Earlier than, Redmond Means noticed dozens of crashes a 12 months, with a peak of 73 in 2015, based on metropolis information. The previous 5 years have averaged 11 crashes per 12 months.
Don’t park, journey
From the rooftop deck of Marymoor Village Station — which is extra parking storage than gentle rail station — you’ll be able to see, simply over Blazing Bagels and the Muslim Affiliation of Puget Sound, The Spoke, a 211-unit house advanced that opened in late February.
Kim Faust is co-president and chief improvement officer of MainStreet Property Group, which constructed the advanced. She grew up in Redmond and now lives in Kirkland.
Her firm has developed 25 buildings over the previous 14 years, all on the Eastside, and has paid shut consideration to how cities have modified their guidelines round improvement to encourage and information progress.
“Redmond is forward of all of them,” Faust stated. “They imagine within the (transit-oriented improvement) story, and so will we.”
It’s an attention-grabbing story, if one liable to demise by planner jargon.
In brief, transit-oriented improvement is the alternative of American sprawl. A strong transit community. A dense mixture of housing, companies and shared public area inside strolling distance of a transit station. Few vehicles. It’s what you may anticipate to see in New York, or any variety of European cities.
With gentle rail on the horizon, Redmond embraced that pondering. Although the town began making zoning adjustments to permit for denser improvement in 2008, the work continued all through November 2024, when the Metropolis Council unanimously accredited its 20-year complete plan.
The plan leans closely into Redmond’s shifting determine from suburb to metropolis, and light-weight rail is woven into the report, as is the necessity for extra housing, particularly inexpensive housing.
The town’s inhabitants practically doubles on the everyday workday, due to Redmond’s practically 100,000 staff and college students.
9 out of 10 of these 100,000 individuals don’t dwell there, stated Kelli Refer, govt director of Transfer Redmond, a transportation advocacy group. They’re from Seattle, Bellevue, Woodinville, Everett, Kitsap and elsewhere.
That day by day surge places strain on the transportation system, however it additionally stresses the town’s housing inventory.
To attempt to relieve these pressures, the town modified zoning guidelines to spice up housing capability across the stations, permitting buildings as much as 12 tales and eliminating any necessities for parking.
Greater than 5,000 new house models have been constructed inside a half-mile of the downtown station in recent times, and 4,000 extra are within the pipeline, based on Christina Wilner, a Redmond spokesperson. At Marymoor Station, practically 1,200 have been constructed, with 200 extra coming quickly.
Refer, with Transfer Redmond, described Redmond’s work as exemplary. “It’s a very good mannequin for different suburbs across the nation to look to.”
These new houses round Marymoor come primarily from two new developments — Spectra Flats and The Spoke — which sit amid the sunshine industrial neighborhood the town is making an attempt to transform to housing, utilizing relaxed zoning to goose the market.
“The parking is the primary factor,” Faust stated. With no necessities for parking, Faust stated it saved an estimated $1.5 million, contemplating that every stall prices about $50,000, and the developer minimize parking down by about 30 spots.
The Spoke has 0.71 parking areas per unit. If a tenant needs one, it’s $60 a month, however there hasn’t been a mad rush.
There was, although, a frenzy for inexpensive housing. Redmond requires that about 12% of models in new builds be inexpensive, relying on the event’s revenue restrictions.
In The Spoke’s case, 21 models are for households incomes lower than half of the realm’s median revenue, which in Redmond is $137,949, greater than that in King County, at $102,594, based on the town.
Greater than 700 individuals utilized for these 21 models, which value from $1,091 to $1,621 a month. In contrast, the market fee for these models ranges from $1,985 to $4,850.
Megalopolis future?
Between the 2 log cabins inbuilt 1938 by the federal Works Progress Administration in Redmond Metropolis Park and the elevated downtown gentle rail station, a building crane stands tall over twin, six-story buildings that can have 376 residences.
Birney, the mayor, stated the juxtaposition reveals Redmond’s dedication to each its previous and future.
“It’s undoubtedly a unique Redmond,” Birney stated. “However we’re sustaining lots the issues that folks love about it. We’re making an attempt to hold on to what makes Redmond Redmond.”
Balducci, the County Council member, agreed, noting that the connection to Redmond’s previous is powerful, however the imaginative and prescient of the longer term is even stronger.
“I’m married to a Redmond boy, so I’ve gotten the ‘was’ tour. This was that, that was this,” she stated.
However in 50 years, the Eastside cities “might be what individuals consider as actual cities, however it gained’t be the megalopolis such as you see from D.C. to Boston.”
As an alternative, Balducci envisioned swaths of forests preserved towards improvement, an expansive path system connecting the cities, inexpensive houses in nice communities. And, after all, gentle rail.
“That’s what I hope for,” she stated.
