Lynnwood City Center has nearly 3,000 homes in development, but most wait on two megaprojects to finalize plans and break ground.
Sound Transit just launched Lynnwood Link service on Friday, with four new stations now directly serving three more cities in the Puget Sound. The terminus of this extension is now in Lynnwood at Snohomish County’s most connected transit center, which added Community Transit’s brand new Swift Orange Line earlier this year. Seeking to take advantage of the county’s biggest transit node, Lynnwood has been working to transform its City Center neighborhood.
Lynnwood’s station area stands out among the other stations on the extension, which we already reviewed: Shoreline South, Shoreline North, and Mountlake Terrace Station. The City of Lynnwood isn’t working with a single family neighborhood like the other cities have had to grapple with. Instead, light rail arrives at the edge of an older multifamily and suburban retail district. This means that there will be many large parcels for developers to reimagine and existing retail and services for new residents to enjoy.
The prevalence of strip mall parcels ripe for redevelopment and the existing commercial nucleus could smooth the path for an urban retrofit of suburbia, but obstacles remain as well. The large lots make for exciting master planned projects, but also take a big investment of capital to realize. In the meantime, Lynnwood City Center is a hodgepodge of parking craters and the strip malls, drive-thrus, and office parks attached to them.
Huge blocks and supersized roads intermixed with half-hearted sidewalk networks make walking around the City Center hardly a pleasurable affair — many sometimes dangerous, especially for those not ensconced in big metal boxes. Lynnwood opted to widen 196th Street SW to seven lanes ahead of the light rail opening, worsening the pedestrian environment and enlarging the obstacle between the northern section of the City Center and the light rail station. Sound Transit’s 1,670-stall parking garage next to its station attracts car traffic to the area.
Nothing says pedestrian access like a giant integration with 4 minute signal lengths surrounded by gas stations pic.twitter.com/ULsQSnNShw
— Anna Zivarts (@AnnaZivarts) August 30, 2024
Eventually, Lynnwood’s urban transformation will gain momentum. New projects will add sidewalk improvements, and, with luck, mid-block pedestrian paths and crossings to break up the megablocks. Redevelopment will replace drive-thrus with sidewalk cafes and upgrade landscaping and tree canopy. But in its infant stage, the car-first suburban character of the area still often rears its head.
Let’s check in on the conversion of this old commercial district into a vibrant and dense mixed-use community.
Northline Village and The District Waiting Room
City Center’s transformation will be supercharged by two projects, Northline Village and The District. Together these two projects could add over a million square feet in commercial/hotel space and roughly 1,700 housing units. However, both projects are in a sort of limbo, with Northline Village delayed and The District still very early in their planning.
Northline Village was first covered in The Urbanist in our last check in on the city center and not much has changed since our coverage in 2021. Developers Merlone Geier Partners have yet to break ground on the project, clearly waiting for improving economic conditions and lower interest rates. One reason for the delay could be the half a million square feet of office space initially planned in the project. With office buildings still reeling from work-from-home’s slackening of office demand, we’ve seen plans for new office space freeze and even convert to residential.
Other elements of the 19-acre project include over a quarter million square feet of retail space and around 1,369 residential units. Preliminary site plans for the project imagine a series of midrise buildings with parks and other green space interspersed.
The District, formerly known as the Lynnwood Public Facilities District, operates the Lynnwood Events Center and surrounding properties that take the form of parking lots and older strip malls. In February 2023, The District unveiled its mixed-use vision for its 13 acres. This includes nearly tripling the size of the Lynnwood Events Center from its current 64,000 square feet to 182,800 square feet by expanding north and adding a 3rd floor.
The vision also imagines a 300-room hotel and two five-story apartment buildings. Previous iterations of the plan called for a total of 300 apartment homes, but that number may be revised as plans are refined. Local retail space and a parking garage is also featured strongly in the plan. The popular Olympus Spa, a women-only spa and coed Korean restaurant, calls this parcel home, hopefully The District’s commitment to legacy tenants and local businesses keeps them around.
Neither of these projects are set in stone; their housing unit totals could change. Merlone Geier has yet to break ground on the Northline phased development, so they could rethink their plans. Meanwhile, The District is still on the first step of master planning. It’s still early days for that project, and numbers are bound to shift.
What’s been done and left
In the meantime, two projects have already opened in Lynnwood City Center and another two are under construction. In 2021, the seven-story Kinect @ Lynnwood (4200 Alderwood Mall Blvd) completed its 239 units and 286 parking stalls. Then in 2023, the seven-story Ember Apartments (19888 40th Ave W) completed its 361 units, nearly 9,000 square feet of commercial space, and 286 parking stalls.
Under construction are the seven-story KOZ on Alderwood at 4301 Alderwood Mall Blvd and seven-story Kinect II at 4001 198th St SW. Those two projects will feature 199 units and 318 units, respectively. Kinect II will also include around 4,000 square feet of commercial space.
Outside of the two master plans, two other developments are planned for the station area. Sound Transit is working with Housing Hope on 167 affordable housing units directly north of the station. The project would also restore and daylight Thornton Creek, and include a childcare facility, public cafe, job training center, and public walking trails. One last commercial project is being proposed at 4820 196th St SW with 14,430 square feet for office and retail uses.
A large pipeline for Lynnwood’s future
The Lynnwood City Center station area has the biggest pipeline of projects among the four new stations. 1,836 units are being planned in the station area, while only 600 units have completed since 2019 and 517 are under construction. The vast majority of those planned units are between Northline Village and The District. Those two projects are also proposing the vast majority of the over 900,000 square feet of commercial space and 300 hotel rooms being planned for the Lynnwood station area.
The dynamic being weighted toward future development rather than active construction makes the Lynnwood City Center station area comparatively barren. Of the four new stations, it has the least number of units built and under construction. Additionally, instead of single family homes taking up space, vast gray parking lots and low-rise strip malls greet passengers. A few older apartment complexes also dot the landscape, along with the recent midrise additions farther in the distance.
Perhaps, one cause of this slow development is a more attractive market just to the northeast of City Center. The Alderwood Mall area has added over 1,200 housing units since 2019, more than twice as many housing units delivered compared to City Center. Thankfully, the neighborhood is just one Swift bus stop away from the City Center Station. We’re still over a decade away from Alderwood getting its own light rail station with Sound Transit’s next northern expansion.
City Center and Alderwood make up the Lynnwood Regional Growth Center, a designation that obligates Lynnwood to channel much of its growth there and in return better qualifies them for federal transportation dollars. Theoretically, Lynnwood’s 2024 Comprehensive Plan update and following zoning updates will further bolster growth in the City Center Station. Lynnwood was given a growth target by Snohomish County of 14,051 housing units by 2044 in 2021, which would nearly double its existing housing stock. That’s a lot of growth and we’ll see how Lynnwood realizes it.
Adding up the housing numbers for Lynnwood Link
With all the development around the stations area of Lynnwood Link Extension covered, we arrive at a tally of over 9,600 units built since 2019 or somewhere along the pipeline for the whole extension’s station areas. Additionally, we clear over a million square feet of commercial space built since 2019 or planned around the stations. That’s mostly Northline Village’s initial plans, but large commercial development has also happened in Mountlake Terrace.
As a recap, the housing pipeline for the four station areas is as follows:
- 3,087 homes in the works near Shoreline South
- 1,700+ homes near Shoreline North
- 1,800+ homes near Mountlake Station
- Nearly 3,000 homes in Lynnwood City Center
The Urbanist staff occasionally teams up to cover breaking news or tackle large projects. See more about our team on the staff page.