Renton Comprehensive Plan Update Approved
February 4, 2025
At its final meeting of 2024, the Renton City Council approved the state-mandated update of its comprehensive plan to guide and facilitate the city’s growth over the next 20 years.
The changes are intended to accommodate 17,000 new housing units and almost 32,000 jobs in Renton over the next 20 years, together with parks and transportation to serve the growth. The next such update will not be required until December 2034.
Seattle King County REALTORS® have been active in supporting not only opportunities for middle housing and accessory dwelling units (as required by laws passed in 2023), but also regulatory stability related to Transit Oriented Development (TOD). Renton Mayor Armando Pavone told the REALTORS®, “If we can just get the state to quit changing the rules so often, we could get Transit Oriented Development built in Renton, even though we don’t have a transit station.”
Working through the South Sound Chambers Legislative Coalition, REALTORS® successfully advocated for the stability Renton needs, and for an incentive-based approach to TOD, an issue that remains unresolved in the legislature.
One of the aspects of planning for growth involves infrastructure, which is especially important for current and future residents and businesses. Infrastructure provides the basic building blocks required to accommodate new housing and employment opportunities that are foundational for a household’s quality of life: light and heat, safe and reliable water at the faucet and the fire hydrant, minimizing flooding, protecting the environment, and facilitating mobility of goods, services, residents, visitors, and businesses.
Renton has done a good job in this regard, and REALTORS® made a point to draw on-the-record public attention to the Envision "Verified Rating" for Sustainable Infrastructure Award the city received from the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure. Renton’s Public Works Director Martin Pastucha acknowledged the REALTORS®, writing, “It was kind of your Association to recognize these efforts…to facilitate the construction of affordable housing in Renton.”
But the biggest, most impactful changes REALTORS® supported in the update of Renton’s comprehensive plan involved advancing a sub-area plan the city hopes will result in the creation of a “vibrant new commercial and residential district” called the Rainier/Grady Junction. It will be an historic TOD-focused project in the vicinity of Rainier Avenue and Grady Way, adjacent to Interstate 405.
The core of the project involves 26 acres, but the city envisions a larger footprint for the ultimate build-out, which it hopes would be able to accommodate 25,000 new residents. As a point of comparison, The Landing in Renton (at the Southend of Lake Washington) has just over 6,000 residents, and a total of 14,000 residents within a mile of The Landing.
The city hopes to create a vibrant, livable, distinct, cohesive neighborhood with a multi-modal center that has strong pedestrian connections that gracefully integrate with neighboring areas—one that is different from, yet aligns with, the City Center Subarea and Downtown. Residential densities are anticipated to be 20 to 60 units per acre, with one parking space per dwelling unit.
The mixed-use zones are expected to include commercial arterial, commercial office, industrial medium, and a center downtown zone, which will offer multi-family tax exemptions for eight years in mixed-use structures that have a minimum of 30 dwelling units—either apartments or condominiums. If affordability targets are met, the exemptions may be extended to 12 years.
Significant fee waivers are also likely to be available for up to 100 units of affordable rental housing, as well as for ownership units which meet affordability targets.
According to the Urban Land Institute (ULI),
“A major choice that Renton planners faced in setting the ground rules for what’s essentially a brand new neighborhood was whether developers should be required to include affordable units in their buildings, or pay a fee to fund the creation of those units elsewhere.
Cities like Seattle, Redmond, and Shoreline have all implemented inclusionary zoning policies in recent years that mandate a certain number of subsidized units or equivalent in lieu fee.
But Renton decided to take another path, instead offering a baseline level of density by-right, with additional zoning incentives for developers who want to go taller by adding affordable housing and open space amenities.”
Currently, the Rainier/Grady Junction area is a sea of parking lots, historic, expansive, deteriorating car lots, and big box stores.
After approving a sub-area plan for the Rainier/Grady Junction in 2021, the city was awarded a competitive state grant to complete a planned action Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) that will allow for a more streamlined and predictable environmental review process for project proposals within the project area.
The strategy is to facilitate mixed-use development, maximize multimodal transportation options, improve pedestrian connectivity, and integrate the subarea with adjacent areas, with a new transit center and bus-rapid-transit service scheduled to open and be operational in 2026.
Sound Transit says the “Stride S1 Line” planned for the area is part of the new highway-running bus-rapid-transit system that will ultimately connect Burien to Lynnwood, via the Eastside. Though the Stride system has been plagued by delays, the S1 is set to open by 2028. Once it is running, it will provide a quick connection to light rail at Tukwila-International Boulevard, and in Downtown Bellevue.