Twin eleven-story towers are in the works for Northgate Terrace, a strip-mall style office park a quarter mile southeast of Northgate Station anchored by Re/Max Realtors and AAA Insurance. The freshly laid site plans, however, are contingent on the Seattle City Council granting a contract rezone to provide a 145-foot height limit. This contract rezone process is often time consuming and could lead to headaches for the developer and delay the towers’ groundbreaking. If it doesn’t go smoothly, the contract rezone may even jeopardize the proposal from becoming Northgate’s first building to move beyond midrise and into highrise territory.
The site plan, prepared by Twist Design, proposes to split 308,000 square feet of gross building space between housing, offices, parking, and a small amount of retail. This plan estimates 158 homes averaging 785 square feet each, which suggests a good number of two-bedrooms are envisioned, and an estimated 163 underground parking stalls in a shared podium.
The Northgate Terrace site currently has NC3-75 zoning with a 75-foot height limit, but the developer is requesting SM-NG 145 zoning as the neighboring lot just to the north already has. That contract rezone would boost the affordability requirements as well.
While 11-story towers would reach new heights for Northgate, the 2019 Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) rezones of the neighborhood did grant 240-foot zoning allowing towers up to 24 stories tall immediately east of the station in a large County-owned lot. There was hope this would lead to a large mixed-income highrise development opening shortly after the station opened in 2021. That didn’t come to pass, however.
The Urbanist has covered the reasons why more housing hasn’t yet materialize on the publicly owned land right outside the light rail station. Problems first started brewing when King County Metro was not satisfied with the proposals it received in its initial Request for Proposals (RFP) back in 2018, leading them to initiate another RFP. Metro picked a developer, but eventually those talks broke down and plans were abandoned. The delay caused by the second RFP led Councilmember Debora Juarez (whose District 5 includes Northgate) to say: “I’m disappointed that Northgate may become the textbook example of how not to do transit-oriented development.”
Salvaging the situation, Metro switched to an all-affordable proposal from Bridge Development that will add a 232-unit, seven-story building on the north corner of the site. This preserved a park-and-ride lot on the remainder of the site for a few years longer until the Lynnwood Link extension opens in 2024. At that point, highrises for the rest of the site might be back on the table, but there’s been no word so far — though King County Metro did pledge to begin planning the second phase at some point this year.
Needless to say it’s been a bit of a saga trying to bring about the transformation of Northgate from car-oriented mall to people-oriented urban neighborhood. We’re still waiting on the first highrise development near Northgate Station, although thousands of apartments are going up in midrise and lowrise zones farther east of the station, such as along 5th Avenue NE. In contrast, two light rail stops to the south, the University District has seen a bonanza of highrises proposed, permitted, and constructed. The zoning in the U District is more generous, the neighborhood is more walkable, rents are higher, and the close proximity to the University of Washington makes it very attractive to students and developers catering to them.
