The city that has no choice

Site Lines by Rami Al-Kabra
What's changing on the Eastside, explained by someone who helps shape it.

In April 2024, the 2 Line opened to Redmond for the first time, reaching Overlake and Redmond Technology Station. Last May, the Downtown Redmond extension added Marymoor Village and Downtown Redmond stations. On March 28 of this year, the Crosslake Connection linked the Eastside to Seattle by light rail for the first time. If you caught that last news cycle, you were watching the infrastructure story. The land use story is still developing.

Redmond's comprehensive plan states plainly that the city cannot meet its state-mandated growth targets under current zoning. The numbers: as of 2019, existing zoning had capacity for roughly 15,600 new housing units. The obligation by 2050 is approximately 24,800 units. That's a gap of more than 9,000 units that cannot be closed without rezoning significant portions of the city.

This is not a policy preference or a planning committee's vision board. It's a legal obligation under Washington's Growth Management Act. What's notable about Redmond isn't that the gap exists. It's that the city's own planning documents name it explicitly, quantify it, and identify exactly where the rezoning has to happen: Overlake, the neighborhood anchored by light rail, where the plan commits that a significant portion of zoning revisions will occur. That level of specificity is unusual and it tells you something about the timeline.

One more thing worth knowing if you're evaluating new construction in Redmond specifically. Since the 1990s, any development of 10 or more housing units has been required to include income-restricted affordable units. This is mandatory inclusionary zoning, encoded in the city's municipal code. Every future upzone that adds residential capacity will trigger an expanded version of that requirement.

In practice, that means new residential construction in Redmond isn't just going up in density. It's going up with affordability conditions attached, and that shapes the mix of what gets built and at what price point. That context matters when you're comparing new construction options across cities, or trying to read what the Overlake pipeline actually looks like.

For buyers, Overlake is the area to watch. The infrastructure is running. The rezoning is committed. Prices along that corridor already reflect some of that expectation, though not all of it, and not evenly.

For owners near any of Redmond's four light rail stations, the dynamic is simpler: the transit investment is now real and operating. The land use changes that follow transit tend to take longer than people expect. They're already in motion here.

Next issue: a different city, a different version of the same pressure. Nearly nine in ten people who work in Bellevue live somewhere else. Their entire 20-year plan is partly an attempt to fix that.

Rami Al-Kabra
Real Estate Broker, eXp Realty
(206) 701-9272
[email protected]
https://linktr.ee/kabrarealestate

P.S. If you know someone on the Eastside trying to figure out what their home is worth, whether to sell, or what's coming to their neighborhood, the most useful thing I can offer them is context most people don't have. I'm a licensed real estate broker who also sits on the Bothell City Council, which means I follow zoning changes, development proposals, and comp plan decisions more closely than most agents do. Send them my way. No pitch, no pressure.

P.P.S. This is the fourth issue of Site Lines. If you missed the earlier ones, you can find the full archive at newsletter.ramialkabra.com.

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