At its City Council meeting yesterday, the City of Bellevue moved forward a pivotal affordable housing and growth tool: an updated Multifamily Tax Exemption (MFTE) program. This ordinance signals Bellevue’s strong commitment to meeting the housing needs of its growing workforce and residents and meeting regional affordable housing goals with strategic local action. HDC recognizes and celebrates the City of Bellevue for their dedication to balance incentives for robust housing growth with the community need for deeper housing affordability.  

The Council’s passage of the new MFTE ordinance represents a huge step forward for the program, which has been one of Bellevue’s most successful affordable housing tools since the program’s last update in 2021. MFTE is authorized by the State to achieve the dual goal of encouraging residential development and supporting affordable housing. This ordinance expands the program to include a 20-year homeownership option, commercial to residential conversions, and administrative improvements and consistency.

The update also introduces a 12-year and 8-year “Wilburton supercharger” program exclusively in the Wilburton subarea, to advance mixed-income housing under challenging market conditions and to support the unique neighborhood goal of creating a new, vibrant transit-oriented neighborhood adjacent to Downtown Bellevue. Critically, MFTE is now being used in Bellevue to support a landmark inclusionary affordable housing requirement in Wilburton that is the first of its kind in the city since 1996. This is a major policy evolution in the city. The code update also includes a new citywide 8-year MFTE program that will trigger automatically in other neighborhoods when a mandatory affordable housing requirement is passed in rezones. 

These outcomes are the result of a significant effort by city staff and Council to ground the work in rigorous economic analysis and stakeholder engagement. Bellevue worked extensively with the Eastside Housing Roundtable (EHR), a broad coalition of affordable housing developers and private development voices, chi-chaired by HDC’s executive director, Patience Malaba, and Bellevue Chamber of Commerce CEO Joe Fain. This collaboration, and the hard work of the Eastside’s affordable housing community, had led to new policy innovations—including a commitment by the city to update MFTE in other neighborhoods simultaneously with future land use code updates, such as the forthcoming mixed-use areas and BelRed code updates. Jointly updating MFTE and land use codes will ensure that MFTE is used responsibly to balance affordable housing benefit for the community with the incentive to developers based on neighborhood-specific goals and economic conditions, avoids delays in program pairing and guarantees that MFTE is available as a complement to an expanded affordable housing requirement on day one after code updates are finalized.  

We celebrate the passage of an updated MFTE program in Bellevue. As a key economic and cultural hub of King County’s Eastside, Bellevue has demonstrated again that it is committed to supporting meaningful affordability alongside residential growth and economic vitality.