The rule change that made the math work

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

Last issue I mentioned a rule change from 2025 that made a lot of what I described financially viable. It has nothing to do with how many units you're allowed to build. It's about parking.

On July 8, 2025, the Bothell City Council eliminated all minimum parking requirements for new developments. The vote came ahead of a new state law, Washington SB 5184, which took effect later that month and gave cities the authority to do exactly this. Bothell didn't wait to be pushed. No other Eastside city has followed yet, though Kirkland's 20-year growth plan explicitly calls for the same direction.

Here's why that matters more than it might seem.

Required parking isn't just a line in a rulebook. It takes up space. On a standard residential lot, the parking stalls themselves plus the driveway access they require can eat up a meaningful chunk of the buildable footprint. On a smaller lot where someone is trying to fit a duplex or triplex, that's not a nuisance. It can kill the project entirely. The numbers stop working. Construction cost goes up, usable area shrinks, and the unit count that made the investment viable disappears.

Developers have always understood this. Most homeowners haven't had a reason to think about it.

Bothell changed the math last summer. The same lot that couldn't support a fourplex before may support one now, and that's part of what's behind the permit jump I described in the first issue. It wasn't just that more unit types became legal. The economics of actually building them got better at roughly the same time.

Kirkland is pointing the same direction. Its 20-year growth plan calls for reducing or removing parking minimums near its growth centers and for residential projects, including in-between (middle) housing types. That's not a new rule yet. But when a city writes something into a 20-year plan, it usually follows through, and Kirkland put this in writing last December.

If you own near a transit corridor in Bothell, these two changes together, more units allowed and no parking floor, shifted what your property can do. A lot of owners haven't looked at that yet. And for anyone comparing new construction across cities right now, parking requirements still vary significantly, which affects what gets built, how dense it is, and what it costs.

Next issue: a city that doesn't have the luxury of doing this gradually. Redmond's current building rules can't legally meet state growth targets. The rezoning near four light rail stations isn't aspirational. It's already committed.

Rami Al-Kabra
Real Estate Broker, eXp Realty
(206) 701-9272
[email protected]
https://ramialkabra.exprealty.com/

P.S. I sit on the Bothell City Council and work in real estate, which puts me in planning meetings most agents never attend and gives me a read on regional policy decisions that drive market change before most other agents do, and all of it is public. If you know anyone sitting on a real estate question, the best thing you can do is connect us directly. No strings attached. Just a conversation.

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