REDMOND — Angela Birney remembers the hole in the ground.
It was a gaping pit in the heart of downtown, not far from T & D Feed Store and near some old, little used rails that divided the city center.
Birney, who has lived in Redmond for 27 years and was elected mayor in 2019, said the hole represented something in old Redmond, the sleepy bedroom community at the north tip of Lake Sammamish. A sign of neglect, perhaps, or challenge to improve.
“They used to call it Deadmond,” Birney said recently, from the grassy expanse of Downtown Park. “There was a really ugly strip mall here.”
No more. The pit was filled and, in 2014, a six-story, 134-unit apartment building put on top of it, its ground floor home today to an upscale burger joint called The Tipsy Cow.
Deadmond, the commuter Seattle suburb, is dead. In its place stands Redmond, the transit-oriented city.
This Saturday, that changing identity continues as the city doubles its number of light rail stations, adding stops downtown and near Marymoor Park, and trains push farther into Redmond. The move is both focused on the future and a practical attempt to help move its many workers, who swell the city’s population from about 80,000 to 147,000 on the typical weekday and drive the city’s need for nearly 25,000 new homes over the next 25 years.
Already, tall condos with broad rooftop patios and names like Porch + Park and Zephyr on the Park surround Downtown Park, built in 2018 and an easy walk from the new downtown station. Yawning, high speed one-way streets are now skinnier, and traffic runs slower and both ways. Trails course through town, connecting neighborhoods, shopping centers and to other Eastside cities. New restaurants, bakeries and shops dot the storefronts below much of the new housing.
The new stations arrive not a second too soon. As the national discourse veers bleak — with warnings of recession and widening ideological rifts — and the Trump administration pushes a 20th-century conceit of what a transportation system looks like, many wonder if the type of growth the Puget Sound region has undergone in recent years, with its focus on trains, buses and bikes, is at an end.
Redmond, which once boomed thanks to being at the end of a highway and at the dawn of Microsoft’s global rise, has a new “more inclusive and not car-centric” vision, Birney said. Others describe the city as the region’s — and perhaps the nation’s — best example of a light rail town that chased, and embraced, the change a new form of transportation could bring.
“They wanted light rail to come, and they acted like it,” said Claudia Balducci, a member of the Metropolitan King County Council and a former mayor of Bellevue. “I mean, there used to be chicken farms here not that long ago. Now there’s a vision of the future you see here, and it’s an urban vision.”
For now, the vision only connects Redmond to Bellevue on the Eastside’s 2 Line. This winter, though, trains will begin running beside Interstate 90, over Lake Washington and across Mercer Island, joining Redmond’s distant stations to those in Seattle and the north-south 1 Line.
Girding for growth
John Marchione was 4 when his family moved to Redmond in 1969, not too long after the town’s first traffic light was turned on in 1966 and when it was still legal to ride horses on the town’s sidewalks.
Marchione doesn’t remember ever walking around downtown Redmond, which ended just past the old Workshop Tavern, its hammer and handsaw sign beckoning people from the nearby 18-hole golf course, Redmond Golf Links.
“You’d just get dropped off somewhere,” he said. “I remember riding in the Derby Days Parade, age 7 or 8. I had streamers on my bike and I thought, ‘I’m bicycling in the middle of Redmond Way. This is incredible.'”
Ask someone in Redmond who was responsible for the change from suburb to city, and they’ll likely say Marchione, though he might disagree. Maybe he was just in the right place at the right time, but it’s clearly more than that. By the time Marchione finished his three terms as mayor in 2019, which followed a term on City Council, the city’s population had grown from about 49,000 to 73,000, and Redmond had transformed.
In the early 1980s, when the population was just 23,000, the “missing link” of Highway 520 between 148th Avenue Northeast and the bridge over the Sammamish River was completed, welding the town to Seattle with a wide ribbon of concrete.
Soon after and thanks to the easy highway access, Microsoft moved there — following other electronics companies like Physio-Control, which created the first portable defibrillator; data storage company Data I/O; and Nintendo of America.
Just weeks after arriving in Redmond in February 1986, Microsoft went public with shares in its company, instantly creating a “staggering” amount of wealth, countless millionaires and a handful of billionaires all new to a town named for an Irishman who ran its post office.
Largely thanks to Microsoft, the number of employees in Redmond tripled, from 12,000 in 1980 to nearly 36,000 a decade later, according to data from the city.
In 1995, Redmond adopted its first long-term plan complying with the state’s Growth Management Act, focusing development within city limits and, more important, in designated centers.
Redmond wanted to spur massive growth in two places: downtown and Overlake Village.
In downtown, the golf course was torn out and replaced by Redmond Town Center in 1997, and the open-air mall was immediately a destination for shopping and employment.
Overlake didn’t need a mall. It was home to Microsoft’s campus, which today is 502 acres and has 95 buildings. Not coincidentally, the city’s first two light rail stations are in Overlake, and opened last year.
Focus on downtown
While Overlake seemed destined to grow, thanks to its deep-pocketed multinational corporation, downtown needed help, and Marchione saw light rail as the galvanizing force, much as the highway spurred the city’s growth spurt decades before.
“Downtown was my first priority because it was vacant,” said Marchione, who took office in 2007. “There was no reason to go down there, there was nothing there.”
City officials saw an opportunity.
In 2008, 57% of the region’s voters approved the $17.9 billion Sound Transit 2 ballot measure, which added 36 miles to the fledgling transit system, including to Overlake Village.
Though the plan and spending didn’t include an extension to downtown Redmond, Marchione knew it would come someday.
“I was confident that downtown Redmond would get light rail,” Marchione said. “Just based on the number of jobs we had in our community.”
So the city got to work.
First, Redmond’s leaders persuaded Sound Transit to include some preliminary environmental studies and engineering in the 2008 light rail ballot measure for an eventual extension to downtown and Marymoor Park, even though the two stations wouldn’t be funded until 2016, when voters approved an additional $54 billion investment to further expand the system.
“We were ready for light rail before Sound Transit was,” Marchione said.
The biggest thing to secure downtown’s future came in June 2010, when the city bought the tracks that cut through downtown, a nearly 4-mile spur of the BNSF corridor that ran the length of the Eastside.
With the tracks gone, the city began making good on its goals of a city core that was more inviting and safer for people in and outside of cars. It built a street grid in the city core, and whole new streets like Bear Creek Parkway.
The city constructed the Redmond Central Connector trail, which intersects with the East Lake Sammamish and Marymoor Connector trails. Later this year, the trail will join with the region-spanning Eastrail trail, which will someday stretch 42 miles from Renton to Snohomish.
Redmond Way and Cleveland Street reverted to two-way streets in 2018, and the number of collisions plummeted. Before, Redmond Way saw dozens of crashes a year, with a peak of 73 in 2015, according to city data. The past five years have averaged 11 crashes per year.
Don’t park, ride
From the rooftop deck of Marymoor Village Station — which is more parking garage than light rail station — you can see, just over Blazing Bagels and the Muslim Association of Puget Sound, The Spoke, a 211-unit apartment complex that opened in late February.
Kim Faust is co-president and chief development officer of MainStreet Property Group, which built the complex. She grew up in Redmond and now lives in Kirkland.
Her company has developed 25 buildings over the past 14 years, all on the Eastside, and has paid close attention to how cities have changed their rules around development to encourage and guide growth.
“Redmond is ahead of all of them,” Faust said. “They believe in the (transit-oriented development) story, and so do we.”
It’s an interesting story, if one at risk of death by planner jargon.
In short, transit-oriented development is the opposite of American sprawl. A robust transit network. A dense mix of housing, businesses and shared public space within walking distance of a transit station. Few cars. It’s what you might expect to see in New York, or any number of European cities.
With light rail on the horizon, Redmond embraced that thinking. Though the city started making zoning changes to allow for denser development in 2008, the work continued all the way through November 2024, when the City Council unanimously approved its 20-year comprehensive plan.
The plan leans heavily into Redmond’s shifting identify from suburb to city, and light rail is woven into the report, as is the need for more housing, especially affordable housing.
The city’s population nearly doubles on the typical workday, thanks to Redmond’s nearly 100,000 workers and students.
Nine out of 10 of those 100,000 people don’t live there, said Kelli Refer, executive director of Move Redmond, a transportation advocacy group. They’re from Seattle, Bellevue, Woodinville, Everett, Kitsap and elsewhere.
That daily surge puts pressure on the transportation system, but it also stresses the city’s housing stock.
To try to relieve those pressures, the city changed zoning rules to boost housing capacity around the stations, allowing buildings up to 12 stories and eliminating any requirements for parking.
More than 5,000 new apartment units have been built within a half-mile of the downtown station in recent years, and 4,000 more are in the pipeline, according to Christina Wilner, a Redmond spokesperson. At Marymoor Station, nearly 1,200 have been built, with 200 more coming soon.
Refer, with Move Redmond, described Redmond’s work as exemplary. “It’s a really good model for other suburbs around the nation to look to.”
Those new homes around Marymoor come primarily from two new developments — Spectra Apartments and The Spoke — which sit amid the light industrial neighborhood the city is trying to convert to housing, using relaxed zoning to goose the market.
“The parking is the main thing,” Faust said. With no requirements for parking, Faust said it saved an estimated $1.5 million, considering that each stall costs about $50,000, and the developer cut parking down by about 30 spots.
The Spoke has 0.71 parking spaces per unit. If a tenant wants one, it’s $60 a month, but there hasn’t been a mad rush.
There was, though, a frenzy for affordable housing. Redmond requires that about 12% of units in new builds be affordable, depending on the development’s income restrictions.
In The Spoke’s case, 21 units are for households earning less than half of the area’s median income, which in Redmond is $137,949, higher than that in King County, at $102,594, according to the city.
More than 700 people applied for those 21 units, which cost from $1,091 to $1,621 a month. By contrast, the market rate for those units ranges from $1,985 to $4,850.
Megalopolis future?
Between the two log cabins built in 1938 by the federal Works Progress Administration in Redmond City Park and the elevated downtown light rail station, a construction crane stands tall over twin, six-story buildings that will have 376 apartments.
Birney, the mayor, said the juxtaposition shows Redmond’s commitment to both its past and future.
“It’s definitely a different Redmond,” Birney said. “But we’re maintaining a lot the things that people love about it. We’re trying to hang on to what makes Redmond Redmond.”
Balducci, the County Council member, agreed, noting that the connection to Redmond’s past is strong, but the vision of the future is even stronger.
“I’m married to a Redmond boy, so I’ve gotten the ‘used to be’ tour. This used to be that, that used to be this,” she said.
But in 50 years, the Eastside cities “will be what people think of as real cities, but it won’t be the megalopolis like you see from D.C. to Boston.”
Instead, Balducci envisioned swaths of forests preserved against development, an expansive trail system connecting the cities, affordable homes in pleasant communities. And, of course, light rail.
“That’s what I hope for,” she said.
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