Last week, Simon Property Group and Compass Construction invited journalists to tour a major redevelopment happening on the Northgate Mall campus, across the street from the Kraken Community Iceplex.
In 2022, Simon secured a permit for a nine-story, 234-unit apartment building with 569 parking stalls, which they christened Everis. Today, that project has topped out and is nearing move-in this summer. Phase 2 of the development is under construction next door and will bring the housing total to 420 apartments, while utilizing the same parking garage around which both developments wrap, forming what is sometimes called a "Texas Donut."
Even accounting for a good chunk of those parking stalls being for the ground-floor retail, that's still a parking ratio above 1:1 – comparatively high for a site next door to a bustling light rail station serving both the 1 Line and 2 Line. The City of Seattle does not require residential parking in urban centers, but many developers still opt to build it – although most at lower ratios than Simon is building now.
Retailers announced for first-floor storefronts thus far include a Trader Joe's grocery store, a Joe & The Juice cafe, and a Mendocino Farms restaurant.
A bundle of parking
For the project's developers, the high parking ratio is a selling point. Simon Property Group Vice President Scott Travis said the team conducted market research on neighboring apartment buildings and found many of them "under-parked." Simon went in the opposite direction.
"So the parking is oversized, so that we have two and a half floors for commercial parking, for retail tenants to come and go," Travis said. "And then the residential is zoned via gate and access controls to the upper levels for all the residents. Residents essentially will be able to park on the floor they live on, and walk to and from their unit inside that building."
The high parking ratio allows Simon to include a reserved parking stall with each apartment, the cost of which is baked into the rent. Tenants can pay a bit extra to reserve an electric vehicle charging space. Travis said the initial policy is not to allow tenants to sublease their reserved parking stalls or get a discount for forgoing them, which would allow tenants without cars to recuperate the cost of parking hidden within their rent. However, he did grant that the parking policy could change down the road.
In passing a parking reform package in 2018, the Seattle City Council had intended to create a requirement that multifamily landlords "un-bundle" the cost of parking so that tenants who go car-free would reap a financial reward, instead of subsidizing other car-owning tenants. The council ultimately stopped short of adding real teeth to this requirement, allowing landlords like Simon to skirt it.
The gaping loophole: Seattle's parking policy does not actually require that landlords charge for parking, only that the parking lease is a separate contract or addendum from the housing rental agreement.
As last week's tour showed off, Simon has also designed deluxe common spaces, including a rooftop patio and party room, a gym, a lobby lounge with a fireplace, and a second floor coworking area, with sound-separated breakout rooms. Apartments include built-in air conditioning and in-room laundry units, and most include balconies or patio spaces. Just east of Everis is Northgate's park, community center, and library branch complex, along a restored Thornton Creek greenbelt.
All the parking and amenities do not come cheaply. The building will offer a variety of floorplans from studios to three bedrooms. The efficiencies start at $2,200, but the one-bedrooms start at $2,800, and the three-bedroom units at $4,800.
Left: Simon's Phase 2 construction (Credit: The Urbanist). Right: rendering of Phase 1 Everis building. (GGLO)
The huge parking structure has also contributed to a two-year construction period, with Simon officially breaking ground on the project in July 2024.
Broader Northgate development plans
Northgate Station opened in 2021, and it has kickstarted midrise development, but mostly along 5th Avenue NE, rather than nearer the station, where most of the land is owned by King County Metro or Simon Property Group. Both parties have been rather slow and deliberate about how they add housing on their large landholdings.
King County finally cut the ribbon on an affordable housing complex last month, with 235 apartments on one acre of its park and ride. Plans for the remaining five acres remain in limbo. Metro is still figuring out how to run another Request for Proposals process, after earlier ones proved unsatisfying to County leaders. For now, that prime County land remains a park-and-ride lot.
For its part, Simon Property Group is still moving ahead with additional phases of redevelopment. In fact, the developer earned a design recommendation on April 27 for Phase 3 of the redevelopment, which will include 268 apartments, 435 parking stalls, and more than 25,000 square feet of retail. Phase 3 would develop a vacant site at the southwest corner of 5th Avenue NE and NE 107th Street, just north of Everis.
Simon also has a Phase 4 in early planning. In total, Simon is planning about 1,000 apartment units and two hotels across its 55-acre site, in addition to retail storefronts at ground level.
A bolder vision for Northgate?
The Northgate Mall was a gateway project that attracted car-oriented suburban-style residential development to North Seattle when it opened in 1950. One of the first covered malls in North America, it took advantage of Interstate 5, which was still under construction in downtown Seattle at the time, to siphon in motorist customers from across the region.
With the completion of light rail, Northgate is seeking to embrace a new identity. But with its high parking ratio and bundled approach to pricing, it's clear Simon has one foot in the car-centered past and one foot in the more transit-oriented future. The seven-minute walk to light rail is a selling point for Simon, too, just to a lesser extent than ample drive-up parking.
Northgate has actually seen a litany of midrise development seeking to take advantage of light rail access. The Urbanist reported Northgate's development pipeline included more than 4,000 homes in 2021, and much of that has come to fruition. The lion's share is farther east along 5th Avenue NE and Northgate Way, with tenants needing to walk past the mall and parking lots, a fairly unpleasant pedestrian environment largely devoid of tree cover, to reach the station.
While a sea of surface parking used to define the Northgate Mall area, today that sea has been replaced – just with a sea of denser structured parking, from Texas Donuts, to multilevel parking integrated into strip malls, to Sound Transit's 443-stall parking garage. Housing being wrapped around some of these parking structures clearly is a huge plus, but it's also hard to ignore the opportunities that would be unlocked by designing Northgate with walkability, transit, and green space as the centerpiece, rather than window dressing.
Such a dream will need to wait for development phases yet to come.
Doug Trumm
Urbanist Staff
