Housing & Zoning

Housing policy should serve the people who live here and the people actually coming — every housing type included.

Kirkland is already one of the densest cities in Washington, third in the state’s official density table behind only Seattle and Mountlake Terrace, and it has said yes to decades more growth. This page is a primer: who decides what gets built, what the plan assumes, what the market is saying back, and where the decisions are live right now.

In short:

• Kirkland chose bigger housing targets and faster rules than the state required. The market is not cooperating

• The city’s own staff, data and Planning Commission now point toward moderation. The council is the open question, starting September 1

• Every housing type counts, including the standard single-family home most Kirkland families actually want

Who decides: the state sets more of the rules every year

• The State Legislature now sets the floor for local zoning, and it raises that floor nearly every session. Middle housing is required in single-family zones (HB 1110, 2023). Parking minimums are capped near transit (ESSB 5184, 2025). Any homeowner’s lot can be split by administrative review (HB 1096, implemented in Kirkland June 2026). Density and 20-year tax exemptions are required near transit stations (3SHB 1491, 2025), and housing bonuses are required on faith-organization land. A state Department of Housing is now being formed. More housing decisions move to Olympia every year, which makes the discretion Kirkland still holds more valuable, not less

• Regional formulas assign Kirkland’s housing target through King County’s planning policies (How Kirkland’s housing target was set)

• The City Council adopts the zoning code. The state’s floor is a minimum, and Kirkland has repeatedly chosen to go beyond it

• The Planning Commission holds the public hearings and shapes recommendations before the council ever votes. In the last year its recommendations have twice pointed toward moderation

• The market decides what actually gets built. No ordinance can force a project to pencil

What “affordable” means, and what the target asks

In official programs, an “affordable” unit is one with a covenant tying its rent or price to a percentage of area median income (AMI). King County’s 2025 limits put dollars on the tiers:

• 30% AMI — about $33,000 for a single person / $47,000 for a family of four

• 50% AMI — about $55,000 / $78,500

• 60% AMI — about $66,000 for a single person

• 80% AMI — about $85,000 / $121,000, more than many Kirkland teachers, nurses and firefighters earn

• Median (100% AMI) — about $110,000 / $157,000

Kirkland’s 2044 target assigns the city 13,200 new homes, and roughly 87 percent of them are designated for households at or below 80% AMI, including 7,388 at or below 30%. Note what the formula does not count: the standard market-rate family home. The housing type most Kirkland families actually seek earns the city almost no credit against its target. (The full story of how that number was set.)

Kirkland chose to go faster and higher

The record is consistent. At each step, Kirkland went beyond what was required:

• In the regional negotiation, Kirkland supported the allocation option that gave it the largest deeply-affordable target, roughly 2,151 units (about 39 percent) more at the lowest income tier than the baseline formula

• The 2024 draft Comprehensive Plan proposed reclassifying all residential neighborhoods as “Residential Mixed-Use.” It was reversed in late 2024 after extensive public engagement, proof that public comment changes outcomes

• The June 2025 middle-housing package went beyond the state floor: more units per lot than mandated, parking reductions ahead of the state’s timeline, and a new affordable-housing fee aimed at larger single-family homes. Projects over 2,000 square feet owe 10 percent of units as affordable, or $15 per square foot on every square foot above 2,000, effective January 1, 2027

• And production followed. Kirkland led the state in middle-housing code, with cottages, ADUs and DADUs, years before the mandates. The city’s own May 2026 data shows middle-housing permits “continue to be very strong, even in challenging market conditions”

Where the fee money goes

The affordable housing fee doesn’t build anything by itself. It goes to ARCH, A Regional Coalition for Housing, which Kirkland and its Eastside neighbors formed in the 1990s. ARCH is worth understanding, because it’s the main mechanism Kirkland has for housing at the income levels its target is mostly made of.

• How it works. Every member city pays into one pool each year, and the pool makes awards to projects across the region. Those awards then draw state, federal and private money behind them. A single city’s contribution is too small to finance an apartment building. As part of a combined award, it moves one. Since 1992 ARCH has put more than $120 million into East King County, funding 110 projects and more than 6,000 homes

• What Kirkland puts in. About $15.1 million since 1999, roughly $7 million of it from the in-lieu fees developers pay instead of building the units on site

• What Kirkland gets back. Twenty-four ARCH-funded projects sit inside the city, holding 1,243 affordable homes. By our arithmetic on those figures, Kirkland has supplied about 13 percent of the pool and hosts about 21 percent of the homes, in a city that is roughly 16 percent of the coalition by population

• Where it goes in a given year. It travels, and in both directions. In the round council approved in February 2026, Kirkland committed $1,261,800 across seven projects. One was in Kirkland. The others were in Bothell, Bellevue, Redmond and Issaquah, and they include 25 permanently affordable three-bedroom homes and 200 apartments with family-sized units. Other member cities fund Kirkland’s projects the same way. Council approves the annual allocation by resolution, traditionally on the consent calendar

Our analysis: a home built in Bellevue counts toward Bellevue’s target and not Kirkland’s, and residents are right to want that said plainly. But the balance runs in Kirkland’s favor, and what the pool buys is the housing the private market does not produce at any price. The 1,243 affordable homes inside Kirkland were paid for substantially by Bellevue, Redmond and Bothell.

The market has answered

• The 700-plus acres around the NE 85th station were the plan’s showcase for concentrated growth. In the city’s own July 2026 memo, the district “has not yet developed into the mixed-use center envisioned by the City.” Staff told council in April: “we have yet to see any significant development be initiated in the Station Area”

• A local builder testified in June 2026 that his projects pencil in Bothell, Bellevue, Redmond and Sammamish, but he cannot make one work in Kirkland

• The demand signal is unambiguous. Detached family homes draw multiple offers and bidding wars while many new townhomes and condos linger (Seattle Times, July 2026). Buyers keep paying a premium for yards, privacy, room for children and parents, and the chance to build equity

• Within eighteen months of the plan’s adoption, the city adjusted project terms to reality: affordability requirements reduced on the Michaels and Goodwill sites, ownership units allowed up to 100% AMI, pioneer provisions extended to the end of 2029

What’s actually getting built

Kirkland’s middle housing rules are working. Permits hit a record in the year ending February 2026, and the city’s own staff describe production as very strong even in a difficult market.

It’s worth looking at what that production consists of. Of the 663 middle housing units permitted since March 2020, roughly 95 percent are smaller than 2,000 square feet. That isn’t the market falling short of the policy. It’s the policy working as written, because ADUs and cottages are capped at those sizes by the code itself. Twenty-nine of the 663 are townhomes.

So Kirkland is adding homes quickly and almost none of them can hold a family. Both of those are true, and they don’t contradict each other.

The gap turns up when a family goes looking, because every other path to a family-sized home is closed off in its own way:

• Apartments could supply three-bedroom homes, and mostly don’t. Two recent Kirkland projects with unit mixes in the council packets total 855 homes between them. Nineteen are three-bedroom. One of the two buildings has none

• Detached houses do supply them, at a price. The median new single-family home sold in Kirkland between March 2024 and March 2025 went for $3,098,000

• Townhomes are the one type that delivers family-sized space for less, and Kirkland has permitted 29 of them in six years

Our analysis: this is not a failure of middle housing, which is doing what it was designed to do and doing it well. It’s that Kirkland’s housing policy has two different goals inside it, more homes and homes families can use, and only the first one is being met. The city counts units. A three-bedroom ADU and a studio count the same, and a 1,200-square-foot cottage counts the same as a townhome a family of five could live in. When Kirkland says it wants more middle housing, the type it has built the least of is the type that would do the most good.

Moderation is arriving, from inside the process

The correction is not coming from critics. It is coming from the professional layer of the process itself:

• Staff extended the pioneer provisions. Council carved townhomes back into part of the station area (May 2026)

• The Planning Commission recommended “incentives for development rather than added restrictions” in the station area, and recommended raising the affordable-housing-fee threshold from 2,000 to 2,500 square feet

• The city’s own branding consultant told council the station district’s problem is feasibility and zoning, not its name

• And on June 16, 2026, the threshold question reached the council. Ordinance O-4937, the Planning Commission’s recommended 2,500-square-foot line, failed on a 3–3 tie with one member absent. Builders testified that subtracting a garage leaves a 2,000-square-foot home with about 1,700 square feet of living space, too tight for aging-in-place suites or multigenerational floor plans. The other side argued no one has shown the fee chills construction, and that the change would be hard to reverse. Under council rules the ordinance was tabled. It returns September 1, and whoever is in the room will decide where Kirkland’s housing-fee line sits

One sentence in the staff memo behind that debate deserves every resident’s attention. Staff recommended keeping the fee structure partly to “counter-balance current market preferences for large, single-family homes that do not support the City’s affordability goals.” That is the city stating, on the record, that policy should push against what families actually prefer.

Our analysis: Kirkland went faster and higher than the state required. The market has since answered. And the record, from the city’s own data to its own staff adjustments to its own Planning Commission, is now converging on moderation. The open question is whether the council follows its own evidence. We think growth policy should be moderate, should be checked against how people actually live on a schedule and in public, and should respect every housing type, including the standard single-family home that most Kirkland families seek. The regional formula counts that home for almost nothing, and the fee structure treats it as something to counter-balance. Housing diversity that excludes the most-wanted housing type isn’t diversity; it’s substitution.

And to be clear about what we are for: the middle housing Kirkland pioneered, growth concentrated where infrastructure already exists, and incentives that make good projects pencil. The city’s own permit numbers show middle housing thriving here.

On one type we would go further than the city has. A townhome is the only home Kirkland builds that gives a family three or four bedrooms without a three-million-dollar price tag. Kirkland has permitted 29 of them in six years. That is the number we would like to see move, and it is why our support for middle housing isn’t a general sentiment. It is specific. The small units the code already encourages are working and should keep going. The type that would let a family stay in Kirkland is the one barely being built.

Moderation is not obstruction.

Where things stand (August 2026)

• September 1: the tabled fee-threshold ordinance (2,000 vs. 2,500 square feet) returns to council. This is the live decision on this page

• August 27: the Planning Commission holds its public hearing on the faith-based housing code, with automatic approval and height bonuses on 64 parcels owned by 37 faith organizations. At its August 5 briefing council supported broadening the affordability exchange, where one deeply affordable unit counts as two, so it applies to all required affordable units and not only to the units that earn extra height. Council adoption is expected in September

• Station-area code changes, including a minimum residential density, are on the 2026–28 Planning Work Program

• Citywide parking-reduction code amendments (ESSB 5184 compliance) are coming. The state’s clock is running

• Lot splitting is now live (Ordinance O-4938). One residential lot can become two through administrative review, and the new lot can be sold before anything is built

• Development agreements with affordability components remain in process at Goodwill, Michaels and Houghton Village

What residents can do

Two dates matter right now. Written comment to CityCouncil@kirklandwa.gov before September 1 on where the fee line should sit, and the Planning Commission’s August 27 hearing on faith-organization land. Beyond the dates, three questions serve residents at every housing decision. Which housing types does this policy favor and disfavor? At which income tiers, for how long? And what current evidence supports the assumption underneath?

Housing decisions are also school decisions, traffic decisions, and tax decisions, made years before they arrive on those bills. (See our Schools & Services, Transit & Traffic, and Taxes & MFTEs primers.)

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