Sammamish Planned Its Growth for Town Center. Now the Map Points to Pine Lake, Inglewood and Klahanie.

"When the Town Center was originally adopted, it was envisioned in part as a place to put the growth. However, the opposite, you could argue, actually happened, and instead of growth happening in the town center, the growth continued to happen as infill in the neighborhoods in the form of single-family residential subdivisions." That's Sammamish Community Development Director David Pyle, quoted this summer by The Urbanist.

On the plateau, housing gets built wherever the rules make building easiest. This fall the City Council changed two of those rules within a month. In August it lowered the affordable-housing fee on large new single-family homes. In September it voted to send future apartment capacity toward three grocery-anchored shopping centers. If you're choosing between parts of Sammamish, or pricing a lot for a custom build, both votes affect what you're buying.

The fee a custom-home buyer meets first

Since January 1, 2025, Sammamish has run an inclusionary affordable housing program under Chapter 21.10 of its development code. The council adopted that chapter on December 10, 2024. The program covers new housing built where none exists, which includes a new home on a vacant lot and new subdivisions. Under it, 10% of new units must be affordable to households earning up to 80% of Area Median Income. When that math produces a fraction, as it does for a single house, the builder can either pay a fee-in-lieu or build a complete affordable unit on site. The City's program page currently lists the fee at $34.45 per square foot of applicable living space.

On Aug. 18, 2026, the council approved amendments that change who pays that fee and how much:

• Homes of 1,750 square feet or less are now exempt. The old cutoff was 1,500.
• On larger homes, the fee applies only to the square footage above 1,750. Previously, once a home crossed the threshold, the fee applied to its entire floor area.
• Additions and expansions to existing homes are exempt, and so are homes rebuilt or enlarged involuntarily, for example after storm damage.
• Projects with several new units can base the exemption on their average square footage.

The ordinance is O2026-597, effective August 29, 2026. The changes apply retroactively to Jan. 1, 2025, and the City says applicants who paid under the old rules may be eligible for a refund. The $34.45 rate itself isn't permanent. A City agenda bill describes it as set by council resolution, based on modeling by the regional housing coalition ARCH, and intended to be updated periodically as housing-market conditions change.

For a land buyer, the fee belongs in the budget alongside site prep and design. It's a cost set by the city, and it changed in the middle of a permitting year. How it applies to a particular parcel, a voluntary teardown, or a multi-lot project depends on details in the code itself. This post is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice, so confirm how the program applies to your project with the City's planning staff and your own land-use attorney or builder.

Why the subdivisions kept winning

The fee change makes more sense once you see how Sammamish's growth has actually happened. The city incorporated in 1999. In 2008 it adopted a Town Center plan that capped development at 2,000 housing units across 240 acres, according to The Urbanist. The same report says the density limits were so low that the builders of the Village at Sammamish Town Center, home to Metropolitan Market, packed their project onto part of their lot in order to build up.

The results have been slow. The City's 2025 Town Center environmental review counted 1,056 units built and proposed as of April 2025. That total mixes finished projects such as Sky Sammamish's 159 apartments and SAMM's 92 with projects still in review or permitting, including 344 units in STC Phase II. Council discussion this fall used a smaller figure, the units actually built. "It's been all this time, and we have not quite 400 units that have been built, so I think it's time we moved on and found another way to do this," Councilmember Roisin O'Farrell said, as reported by the Sammamish Independent.

Meanwhile the state requirement hasn't changed. Under countywide planning, Sammamish has a growth target of 2,100 housing units by 2044, all affordable to households at or below 80% of Area Median Income. The 2024 Comprehensive Plan assigned 1,102 of those units to Town Center. In 2025 the council voted to study raising Town Center's cap to 4,000 units. Then the November election shifted the council's balance, and the new majority opposed that idea, The Urbanist reported. Doing nothing wasn't an option either. Without added capacity, the city can't show the state it has room for the housing House Bill 1220 requires it to plan for.

The 2,100-unit obligation still needs a home somewhere, and the council chose where in September.

Where the capacity is headed

On Sept. 15, the council voted unanimously to spread a more modest density increase across four centers instead of concentrating it in Town Center or applying one uniform density to all four. The City said the approach fits areas that already have roads, utilities and transit, and reduces the risk of putting high-density development right next to single-family neighborhoods.

City staff estimate that Inglewood, Pine Lake and Klahanie together have room for 1,523 more units. Each of the three is built around an existing shopping center:

The three centers won't necessarily get equal shares. "I don't think applying the density evenly across all the centers is the right way to go because I think there are more centers that can take more traffic capacity than others," Mayor Josh Amato said, according to the Sammamish Independent, and the council asked staff to match zoning changes to each center's traffic capacity. The same report quotes Councilmember Amy Lam on the 228th corridor: "There are already four high schools, and this is all up along 228: I don't know how this could not impact traffic."

Because traffic capacity is the measure, Klahanie looks different from the other two. When the Planning Commission was first weighing the distributed approach this summer, vice chair Seyed Safavian said Klahanie has "perfect access" to the freeway and future transit, plus "very good roads, road capacity, intersections," as reported by The Urbanist. Klahanie is the only one of the three not on 228th.

Town Center still gets some added capacity under the chosen approach. The City's Town Center housing page puts the height limit in the most intensive areas at 70 feet, roughly six stories, with a 15-foot incentive that allows about eight. For now, that's the only center with published height figures.

What hasn't been drawn yet

Most of what a buyer near Pine Lake Village or Klahanie would want to know hasn't been written yet. The City hasn't published boundaries for the three neighborhood centers, a unit count for each, or heights for the distributed approach. Staff will now draft edits to the Comprehensive Plan, the Town Center Plan and zoning for each center. Those drafts go to the Washington State Department of Commerce and the Puget Sound Regional Council before the council can formally adopt them, with the full process expected to finish by next summer. The Planning Commission's project timeline targets final adoption in June 2027, after Planning Commission hearings, environmental review, and Commerce and council review.

Councilmember Pam Stuart voted for the approach while questioning it. "We are going to have to increase the amount of housing we allow to be built to get the amount of affordable housing, much more if we spread it out than if we did it just in the Town Center," she said, as reported by the Sammamish Independent. If she's right, the total capacity spread across the four centers could end up larger than the Town Center-only plan would have needed.

If you're weighing a home near one of these three shopping centers between now and mid-2027, these are the documents to watch:

1. The draft center boundaries, once staff publish them, to see whether a street sits inside a center or next to one.
2. Zoning options for each center, which will show heights and density as the council matches them to traffic capacity.
3. Planning Commission and council hearing notices on the City's meeting portal, where public input continues throughout the process.
4. The fee schedule, since the $34.45 rate is set by resolution and meant to be updated periodically.

A few direct questions

Does the September vote rezone anything today? No. It directs staff to draft changes, which go through state and regional review before adoption, targeted for June 2027.

Does the fee apply if I add on to my current home? The City lists additions and expansions to existing homes as exempt under O2026-597.

Is Town Center out of the plan? No. Under the approach the council chose, Town Center still gets some added density alongside the other three centers.

Whether you're weighing a lot where a new fee threshold changes the building budget, or a home a few blocks from Pine Lake Village while the center maps are still being drafted, Margo Allan can walk you through what the City has published so far, and help you line up the right planning and legal experts before you make an offer. Contact Us to talk it through.