The Land Use Element is designed to help Redmond achieve its vision for a city that has gracefully accommodated growth and change, while ensuring that the community’s high quality of life, cherished natural features, and distinct places and character are retained. By the year 2022, Redmond expects to grow to a future population of 65,700 people and an employment base of 94,100 jobs.

 

Major ideas in the updated policies include:

• Reduce barriers to innovative housing. The updated policies allow cottages (homes under 1000 square feet facing a central courtyard) as a conditional use in R4 to R6 zones and likewise remove the restriction that limits duplex, triplex, and fourplex residences to subdivisions of 10 lots or more. New homes, especially innovative housing projects, are required to be well designed and fit with the neighborhood’s character, especially adjacent homes.
   
• Establish stronger site standards and design standards for residential development to achieve goals such as providing variety in building design in subdivisions, to promote compatibility with a surrounding neighborhood, to emphasize features typical of detached single-family dwellings as part of attached homes such as duplexes, and to minimize significant impacts on adjacent residents, such as loss of light or privacy, due to construction of very large homes on infill lots.
   
• For neighborhood commercial (NC) zones: Further emphasize the goals of fitting with adjacent uses and providing places for residents to gather and meet neighbors. Through updates to zoning standards create two NC zones: NC 2 would allow medium-scale retail and service uses like grocery and drug stores, while NC 1 would allow small scale retail and services like coffee shops and dry cleaners.
   
• Recognize that the primary use of Manufacturing Park zones is manufacturing uses. New residential developments allowed in the zone would be required to mitigate potential adverse impacts to residences such as noise and dust from nearby businesses.
   
• Simplify residential land use designations to three: Single Family Constrained (1-3 dwellings per acre), Single Family Urban (4-8 dwelling per acre), and Multi Family Urban (12-30 dwelling per acre).
   
• Update and simplify the City’s policies on transfer of development rights (TDR). The TDR program allows the potential density of properties to be transferred from sites the community wants to protect to areas where development is more appropriate. The updated policies remove the limit on the percentage of the TDR program that can be transferred to any one neighborhood, since other regulations limit potential transfers and allow for considering transfer of TDRs to existing residential neighborhoods.
   
• And more…

For more information: Lori Peckol at 425-556-2411 or lpeckol@redmond.gov.