Redmond could be a national model for reinventing suburban downtowns

In downtown Redmond, a set of crossing signals and a stretch of exposed railroad track are preserved as a public art piece, “Signals.” It’s the only reminder that BNSF Railway once ran here; the former freight right of way is now a multiuse trail frequented by cyclists. In the next year or two, a new train — Link light rail — will land in downtown Redmond, which has quickly transformed into a dense, walkable city center well-served by mass transit.

As Redmond has grown to 76,000 residents, a proper downtown has sprouted up around the city center’s handful of pre-World War II buildings. This kind of reinvention is happening around Puget Sound and across the country, a phenomenon called “retrofitting suburbia” in a 2008 book of the same name. Some argue multimodal Redmond is a national model for the trend.

Planners like the city of Redmond’s Jeff Churchill are tasked with a tricky job: figuring out how to revamp an outdated, car-dependent suburban template into a place that’s easier to get around on foot, bike or transit. 

Yet Redmond has avoided legal fights over light-rail and backlashes to growth that have vexed nearby towns. The city has largely embraced its downtown dreams and the arrival of a rail line that will allow residents to more easily travel around the region — and for the rest of the region to discover Redmond.

Redmond’s secret is mundane, but it’s one that often stymies elected officials: make a plan and stick with it.

“The vision for this area becoming what it’s becoming has transcended multiple mayors and city council members,” Churchill said. “It’s been a very durable vision with a fair amount of buy-in.”

Multimodal downtown dreams

Growing up, Churchill could hear the whistle of freight trains rumbling through Redmond’s city center from his childhood bedroom. Churchill, 42, is now the city’s long range planning manager. He thinks about the ever-growing city’s future while riding his bike where the tracks used to be.

The former railroad is now Redmond Central Connector Trail, a 3.9-mile segment that provides off-road routes from downtown Redmond to a growing trail network. The trail’s final phase is underway, with construction slated to start next year. When complete, it will connect to the Eastside’s extensive, expanding network of hiking and biking trails, the 42-mile Eastrail project. 

For decades, Redmond’s government has prioritized multimodal transportation. The city purchased the land for the Redmond Central Connector in 2010 and the accompanying park opened three years later, winning a national trail and art award when only 1 mile had been completed.

The trail passes what will be the final stop on the Link’s Eastside extension, due to open in 2025. (An Eastside-only starter line is planned for next year.)

Some of the estimated 43,000 to 52,000 daily riders on Eastlink will board or alight at the downtown Redmond station. They can hop on the trail and pass by the warm glow of “Erratic,” an art piece clad in salvaged steel plates from the railroad, then meander over to Downtown Park, a grassy expanse framed by new apartment buildings populated with shops, cafes and restaurants. The park opened in 2018 where a squat strip mall once stood.

The apartments didn’t spring up by accident. 

Washington’s Growth Management Act of 1990 requires local governments to absorb so-called “growth targets.” That is: Cities have to allow more housing. As Microsoft and Nintendo took off in the 1990s, turning Redmond from a bedroom community into a job center, city leaders funneled Redmond’s newcomers into the city center.

“We’re going to put all our growth into downtown,” Churchill said. “That’s been the plan since the 1990s.” 

On a tour of downtown Redmond with Redmond Parks planning manager Caroline Chapman, who was also born and raised in the city, the pair reminisced about the old tenants of the horseshoe-shaped strip mall that once stood where 2-acre Downtown Park is today. 

“Much of the downtown looked like that,” Chapman said. The city bought the strip mall in order to create something “like a living room for downtown,” in Churchill’s words.

These days, where cars once parked, salsa dancers twirl on Friday nights in good weather. Last month, a 15-foot statue of the Hindu god Ganesh stood in the park, a reflection of the large South Asian community in a city that’s now over 40% foreign-born. Performers take the stage in an art-piece-cum-pavilion called “Buoyant,” where a water wall displays commissioned light shows. The design won a national landscape architecture award in 2019.

Churchill remembers the park’s grand opening in September 2018, when crowds came out despite pouring rain. While light-rail’s grand opening is still a ways away, Churchill plans to brew the coffee extra early and get in line at 5 a.m. to be on the inaugural train.

“It’s exciting to see a plan put into place 20 to 30 years ago come to life,” Churchill said.

Suburb or city?

Downtown Redmond’s remarkable reinvention has gone relatively smoothly. 

Over the last decade and a half, both civic groups and private interests in neighboring Bellevue filed lawsuits to halt Sound Transit’s Eastside expansion. Mercer Island secured a $10 million settlement after threatening a lawsuit, and later enacted successive building moratoriums that have delayed town center redevelopment near the city’s new station.

Meanwhile, there has not been an organized campaign or successful political platform to stop the major changes happening in downtown Redmond. Churchill insisted that, to the contrary, residents have been clamoring for better transit for years. Chapman attributed the city’s attitude in part to what she called “a sustainably minded community.” 

And downtown Redmond’s suburban past has meant minimal disruption. 

“There were very few people living in downtown, so there was very little residential displacement,” Churchill said. “Now people are coming because they want to live in this kind of community. There’s a lot of demand for this kind of community and this way of living.”

Civic interest in Redmond’s future remains high. On a September weeknight, several dozen people — local residents, civil servants and elected officials — joined advocacy group Move Redmond to see highlights and lowlights of navigating downtown Redmond on foot. 

The existing transit center, where express buses whisk residents to Microsoft’s Overlake campus or further along Highway 520 to Bellevue or Seattle, generally won praise. A curbless shared street between two apartment buildings, also known as a woonerf, elicited interest. A block lacking sidewalks near the new light-rail earned a “thumbs down.”

For 23-year-old Isaiah Stevens, a video game tester who works in Overlake for BrickRed Systems, downtown Redmond offered cheaper rent than Seattle and a chance to live closer to work. Stevens prefers walking and taking transit, which made downtown appealing, although a short distance away from Downtown Park, you’ll encounter more sprawling land-use patterns, they said. 

“Redmond is a suburb but downtown is trying to be a city,” Stevens said. “But it could be so much more.”

For example, Redmond touts itself as the bicycle capital of the Northwest, with its annual Derby Days races and its cycling velodrome at Marymoor Park, but on-street bike infrastructure is lacking. 

“I’m comfortable riding in the street, but I want the kids I see riding on the sidewalk to feel comfortable being out on the street, especially because that’s something cool about Redmond: families are living downtown,” Stevens said.

These were the kinds of insights that Move Redmond Executive Director Kelli Refer hoped to hear. Folks are eager to see what’s next, provided downtown Redmond keeps sticking with the plan.

That kind of steady hand offers lessons for retrofitting suburbs everywhere.

“Redmond is setting itself up to be a national model,” Refer said.