Buried behind a storm of mammoth projects are yet more potential development proposals in Downtown Bellevue. While these projects don’t possess the scale of the mega-projects addressed in the previous article, they do jockey for their potential place in the city’s skyline and will impact the look and feel of the neighborhood for years to come. When you combine these budding projects with everything that has been completed since 2018 and under construction, Downtown Bellevue emerges as a pincushion that developers are jabbing their high-rises into. The result will be a very different skyline in the not-so-distant future.
If the 24 projects in permitting counted for this article are constructed, 25 new midrises and towers could be added to Downtown Bellevue. In total this could result in the construction of 2439 residential units, 1.1 million square feet of commercial space, and over 5301 parking stalls. This doesn’t even include figures for three high-rise developments whose details are less accessible at the moment.
Aggregating these figures with projects constructed since 2018, under construction, and the mega-projects, Downtown Bellevue has seen the construction and is expecting the construction of 118 new midrises, high-rises, and skyscrapers. All together downtown is counting over 13,100 new residential units, over 16 million square feet of commercial space, likely over 2,000 hotel rooms, and over 43,300 parking spaces constructed since 2018, under construction, and in permitting.
In the interactive map below you’ll find details on the projects in different stages of development that pepper Downtown Bellevue, including completed, under construction, construction-ready, and also inactive projects. While the projects that have fallen through are unlikely to materialize, they represent the increasingly limited development capacity left in Downtown Bellevue.
Blue pins indicate completed projects. Dark green pins indicate projects under construction. Light green pins indicate construction-ready projects. The pins with special icons represent “mega projects.” Purple indicates a “mega project” under review. Yellow pins indicate projects in permitting. Red pins indicate inactive and dead projects.
As with the past Bellevue developments articles, I will be highlighting projects from north to south and west to east. Downtown Bellevue can roughly be broken into nine two block by two block sections. I’ll be using that compartmentalization to navigate the many projects under review and stalled.
In permitting
When you separate out the “mega-projects” out from everything that is under review by the City, you lose all of the super tall buildings. Many mid-rises and 10-15 story towers remain for this batch of projects and some taller ones do standalone here. Height isn’t everything of course, and both positive and negative standouts remain in this faction.
Seemingly dead projects and future potentialWhat has been left to develop appears to be old strip malls, commercial low-rises, and parking lots. All the projects that have been dropped or shelved fit these categories. A fair amount of these sites look to be left in Downtown Bellevue, but they appear to be rapidly being snapped up for redevelopment.Bringing it all togetherAt this rate, Downtown Bellevue does actually appear to be running out of development capacity. This depleting capacity is clearly the result of unambitious planning and a highly constrained zoning policy. The demand for new housing, office, and retail space in Bellevue is evident. As it begins planning for its new comprehensive plan update, Bellevue should keep in mind the capacity bottleneck that it may further constrict. Just look at all the single-family zoning immediately surrounding Downtown Bellevue, high-rises and middle housing would fit in great there. Maybe upzone Bellevue Square even more, which will offer a prize when it’s ready for redevelopment.*Many of these figures are taken from permit descriptions, actual figures will warp throughout the permitting and design process but generally stay close to those original figures.
