A major light-rail expansion stands to bolster commerce and communities across metro Seattle, where some say new lines and stations already are spurring development of retail and mixed-use projects. “The connectivity will benefit all submarkets,” said Sam Wayne, Seattle-based managing director of Cushman & Wakefield’s institutional capital markets group. “It will allow Seattle to become a regional powerhouse more like the Bay Area, with multiple nodes of work, play and living being immediately accessible along the light-rail system.”

Planned in phases stretching back nearly 20 years, the light-rail expansion is the largest project of its kind in the U.S., according to John Gallagher, spokesman for Central Puget Sound regional transit authority Sound Transit. “We’re talking about a system that is going to be about 116 miles in total.”

In three separate ballot initiatives, voters have expanded light-rail service from an initial segment connecting Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, downtown Seattle and the University of Washington to a larger system designed to link major population centers. This year, Sound Transit is slated to finish the 2 Line extension to downtown Redmond and also connect it from Bellevue to Mercer Island, downtown Seattle and the University of Washington. Other voter-approved projects include a southern extension of the 1 Line to Kent and Federal Way with three new infill light-rail stations. Planning is underway for the final 62-mile push, which centers on extensions to Everett, Tacoma, Ballard, West Seattle, Issaquah and Kirkland.

Regional Growth

High-paying tech jobs, along with Seattle’s quality of life and natural beauty, continue to spur development across the region, observers say. Focused on managing that growth and alleviating the housing shortage, some municipalities have raised caps on building heights, upzoned for higher-density residential and granted transit-oriented development status to projects near rail stations.

Retail and mixed-use development patterns are being shaped by the new stations and lines. “We’ve seen a tremendous amount of development activity as they come online,” Wayne said. “Going north up into the University District and into Roosevelt and all the way up into Northgate, there are major projects that have really transformed some of those markets already.”

Sound Transit community development director Thatcher Imboden pointed to Simon’s ongoing redevelopment of the former Northgate Mall, now called Northgate Station, next to a light-rail station that opened in 2021. “They have been slowly knocking down different sections of the mall and building new,” he said. “Several hundred housing units are under construction.” The project includes a just-opened, 167-room Residence Inn by Marriott, as well as the Kraken Community Iceplex, a multirink training facility for the NHL’s Seattle Kraken that also serves as a regional hub for ice sports. The 22 tenants at Northgate Station include 32 Bar & Grill, Barnes & Noble, KeyBank, AT&T, Starbucks, Nordstrom Rack, Chipotle and the Virginia Mason Franciscan Health Medical Pavilion.

Other submarkets north of downtown Seattle — such as Shoreline and Lynnwood, both of which saw new light-rail stations open this past August — “are on the precipice of major transformation,” Wayne said. In his view, the still-under-construction East Link extension also has contributed to “major redevelopment and massive demand for development sites in downtown Bellevue and the BelRed corridor, all the way into downtown Redmond.”

Watery Barriers

Connectivity is important to the region in part because Seattle’s sizable waterways can make it harder to get around. “Lake Washington is a geographic barrier between Seattle and what we call the Eastside: Bellevue, Redmond, Kirkland, Issaquah and Mercer Island,” said Kidder Mathews executive vice president and retail broker Monica Wallace. “Historically, with only two bridges over Lake Washington, you never knew what the traffic was going to be if you were to go east to west or west to east.”

But excitement has been growing on the Eastside since last April when a stretch of the East Link connected the South Bellevue station to the Redmond Technology station near Microsoft’s headquarters, Wallace said. The 14-mile East Link will boast 10 stations between Seattle and the Eastside when its remaining stretch opens next year. “I’ll be able to get on a light-rail at my office in downtown Bellevue and get into downtown Seattle for meetings without having to search for parking or contribute to traffic,” Wallace said. “I can already get from downtown Bellevue to the BelRed light-rail station, where one of my projects is, in 10 minutes.”

That project, a mixed-use development called Copal, adds 288 residential units to the submarket. Wallace has started marketing its five ground-floor retail spaces, which range from 900 to 2,200 square feet. “Copal will be accessible to downtown Redmond once the light-rail opens there in May, as well,” she added.

The transit expansion gives retailers access to thousands of highly paid employees from the likes of Meta, Microsoft and Amazon. “If I’m an employee in downtown Bellevue, I can go to the lobby of my office building, walk across the street to the light-rail and be at a yoga class in BelRed in five minutes,” Wallace said. “We’re seeing retailers have great success in locating near these new light-rail stations.”

The broker cites retail demand at Legacy Partners’ Eastline mixed-use project in Redmond. The second of its two six-story buildings, which together total 792,309 square feet, just opened adjacent to the downtown Redmond station. In addition to 623 residential units, the project brings 30,151 square feet of retail to the market. Signed tenants include TruDental, Mendocino Farms, Due’ Cucina, Bstrong, Sip Thai, and HeyTea.

Momiji, which has locations on the west side of Lake Washington at Seattle’s South Lake Union and Capitol Hill, is opening a 4,500-square-foot sushi restaurant and cocktail bar at Eastline. “Historically, bringing restaurants and other users over from Seattle to the Eastside has been a challenge,” Wallace said, “but now with this connectivity and other factors, we’re starting to see them.”

Retailers and restaurants have leased nine of the 19 available ground-floor spaces at Eastline, and four others are in lease negotiations, Wallace noted, adding: “The small spaces are the only spaces we have left.” The broker, who has worked on retail and mixed-use projects in downtown Redmond for 20 years, said the area around the downtown Redmond station “has always kind of been on the outskirts” but that “it has absolutely become the hub in the two-and-a-half years while this station has been under construction.”

Density Boost

Proximity to mass transit can be a major factor in the office site-selection decisions of tech firms scouting the market, said Seattle-based Cushman & Wakefield managing director Trevor Youngren. “We work with a lot of big tech companies from out of state,” he said. “One of the first questions they ask us is: ‘Can you explain the public transit situation?’”

The broker said construction of a light-rail station in Bellevue’s BelRed corridor helped attract office occupiers like Meta and artificial intelligence data-storage company Snowflake to the Spring District, a 36-acre mixed-use project by Wright Runstad & Co. and Shorenstein. Formerly a Safeway distribution center, the project covers 16 blocks, and plans call for more than 3.3 million square feet of office, residential, retail and hospitality, according to a project website.

Per a regional compact on growth management, Bellevue also rezoned the area to allow for higher density as part of a master plan for transit-oriented development, Imboden said. “They really got ahead of it,” he noted. “They said: ‘This is what we really want. Let’s build the stations here.’” The former industrial area is turning into a lively neighborhood, he said, and “you’re going to continue to see that community become more of an 18-hour city.” Many locals now just refer to the whole neighborhood as the “Spring District,” Imboden noted.

In much the same way, a Redmond rezoning last year likely will catalyze development by allowing high rises of up to 30 stories in Overlake, said architect and MG2 principal Jooyeol Oh. “The city is envisioning that area to be a much-denser residential community, mixed with retail.” An MG2-designed mixed-use project in that neighborhood sits near the Overlake light-rail stop, which will connect to new stations at Marymoor Village and downtown Redmond. Construction will start this year, and the project will add 574 residential units and more than 5,000 square feet of ground-floor retail. As Oh sees it, growth of such residential projects should spur more demand for walkable retail in the neighborhood.

Conferral of transit-oriented development status benefitted another MG2-designed mixed-use project called Mountlake Village, set for construction near Sound Transit’s new Mountlake Terrace light-rail station. “If a project is designated as TOD, then you can reduce the number of parking spaces … required from something like a 1-to-1 or 1.5-to-1 ratio, to a 0.5,” Oh explained. “Structured parking in Seattle is extremely expensive, so it has a huge impact on the eventual pro-forma numbers for the developer.”

To be sure, cost overruns have spurred criticism of the transit push, which by some estimates will cost Seattle taxpayers about $46 billion over the next 20 years. But Oh, for one, is optimistic that the infrastructure improvements will make metro Seattle more vibrant. “This really is one of the most extensive and connecting [light-rail transit expansions] in the nation,” the architect said. “It will activate the streets and make them more pedestrian friendly. Ultimately, it will reduce the number of cars on the street, as well.”