King County is advancing plans for a new, six-story underground parking garage adjacent to Harborview Medical Center. The parking project will put the first shovels in the ground on the major hospital expansion approved by voters in 2020. The $189 million garage is needed, county officials say, to mitigate the loss of hundreds of parking stalls when construction on a new Harborview medical tower begins next year, an inpatient facility that will add critical capacity to the strained hospital campus.
The garage's pending construction, set to commence next year, comes as costs on the overall Harborview bond program continue to escalate, going from $1.74 billion when it was approved six years ago to more than $3 billion today. That recent cost update, provided Tuesday morning to members of the King County Council by Harborview Construction and Infrastructure Division Director Tony Wright, is hundreds of millions of dollars more than had been communicated just a few months ago.
The parking garage is set to be constructed on what's currently a vacant lot at Ninth Avenue and Alder Street, which the County acquired in 2024. The project is advancing through permitting as a two-stage development that would see a multistory medical office building built sometime after the parking-only phase. But no funding has been identified for that second stage of the development, a project that falls outside of the core scope of the Harborview bond program.
The garage's total number of stalls – somewhere between 700 and 730 – stems from the site's zoning, which sits within the larger Yesler Terrace master-planned community (MPC). The total number of parking stalls within the boundaries of that MPC is capped at 1,350, with 749 stalls currently available after recent residential developments have opened in recent years.
King County did consider building a fully standalone parking garage on the site, but a recent report looking at parking alternatives notes that this is "likely not an allowable use" within the Yesler Terrace MPC.
When the new medical tower opens as soon as 2032, with approximately three stories of underground parking of its own, the net amount of off-street parking within the total Harborview campus will have increased by 550 stalls compared to today. If the medical office building is ultimately built at Ninth and Alder, some stalls would be lost due to a need to create a loading dock.
Harborview is the only Level 1 trauma center across a four-state area that includes Alaska, Montana, and Idaho, making expanding its inpatient capacity a pressing issue of regional significance. But it's not clear that Harborview has in fact utilized all of the tools in the toolbox to be able to enable patient and staff access without more vehicle parking.
During Tuesday's discussion, King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci pressed Wright on the decision to lead with construction on a parking garage, given the fact that the timeline to open the new medical tower has already slipped by four years. That new tower, in addition to providing badly needed inpatient beds, would also "provide surge capacity for the hospital to effectively respond to a disaster or mass casualty event," according to a recent program update.
"I would just love [it] if we were not breaking ground on a parking garage and spending all our time and money on a parking garage first," Balducci said. "I would rather we would get right into building the tower, which we so desperately need, and I just I hear everybody say in a very confident way, based on their personal experience and anecdotal observations, we need the parking. We cannot live without the parking. I have not seen an analysis of any attempts to come up with temporary parking that would have enabled us to go forward with the tower instead of spending yet more time and money on a parking garage first."
Even though the total number of stalls planned at Ninth and Alder stems from Yesler Terrace's zoning stipulations and not the Harborview’s Major Institution Master Plan (MIMP), Harborview CEO Sommer Kleweno Walley pointed to an internal demand study that spells out the need for the added garage space.
"There was a very large study done on demand, and what we're differentiating is the demand needed for patients to come to the campus for clinics and for visitors to come to the hospital versus staff," Kleweno Walley said. "So what we have done is pulled out how much parking we will need to accommodate clinics being on campus, visitors coming for the certain number of inpatient beds we have, and then certain types of staff, i.e., the providers who need to be there 24/7, where you can't ship them in, you can't wait for them to be brought in from a shuttle. So that is the demand we're looking at."
Steffanie Fain, who served on the Harborview board of trustees before joining the county council, also weighed in on the history that has caused the county to arrive at a garage-forward construction plan.
"There were a few ideas when this came forward as an option [of] what to do with that space, and it was: do we build a temporary parking structure to get us through construction and then figure out what to do with it? But it seems wild to spend millions of dollars on something that you just tear down," Fain said. "The medical office building is the next best sustainable option and could really be utilized in the future. Ideally, it would have been a medical surge space, but that was so extraordinarily expensive that that option quickly went away."
While the new garage isn't expected to be complete until late 2028, construction on the new medical tower is scheduled to start before it wraps up. Other related projects, including the construction of temporary roadways and entrances in order to allow work to proceed while hospital operations are maintained, are also expected to begin next year.
Ryan Packer
