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Fall City is a historic and cultural hub in the Snoqualmie Valley. Perched alongside the shorelines of the Snoqualmie river and adjacent to protected agricultural lands, Fall City represents a unique way of life that has been paved over or incorporated throughout the rest of King County. Along with Vashon Island and Snoqualmie Pass, Fall City is the last of the “Rural Townships”.
For the past 30 years members of the community have worked closely with the county and state to establish suitable development guidelines for rural towns through land use designations in the Comprehensive Code and the Fall City Sub-Area plan. This includes placing the town in a special designation as a “Rural Town”.
Within the historic rural town boundary, there are ~520 homes, two schools, a business district, fire station and a few churches, representing a rural community hub. The population is around 1800 within the town boundary. There are a concentrated number of state and county historic landmarks, including heritage roads and archeological sites of significance. In all of unincorporated King County Fall City is home to around 10% of it's landmarks - a truly unreplaceable community.
In more recent times the town serves as a rural safe haven for urbanites on the weekend: floating the river, picking a pumpkin, or grabbing a burger at Small Fryes. While the town is small, it does a lot of heavy lifting for the County in terms of recreation and PNW pride.
Fall City is culturally, environmentally, and historically significant. The spirit of this significance has been lost in the bureaucratic process of permitting. Every county planner, council member and project manager says the same thing: “This doesn’t make any sense, I wish we could stop it.”
Hopefully, someone can.
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Summary of growth inside the rural town boundary:
1. Fall City is currently 527 residential lots totaling 244 acres, with around 520 homes.
2. There are 12 lots over 3 acres in size. 8 are now owned by Taylor Developments.
3. Purchased parcels slated for development total around 35 acres (15% of the land in Fall City)
4. The lots are being converted into 135+ new homes, a 24% increase in the total population and households.
5. In a two-year period, Fall City will grow by (at a minimum) 30% in the population, traffic, and water use.These numbers were difficult to obtain because many of the purchases and permits have been conducted under trusts and opaque LLC’s. New sales and plans are discovered almost monthly, but in almost all cases can be traced back to Taylor Developments through the permit applications. Prior to permit applications, the community does not have a way to know which properties are vulnerable.
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For a town that has averaged less than 1% growth over the past 30 years, these changes are unprecedented at both a local and regional level. The developments work against the county’s growth goals of concentrating development in urban areas where infrastructure and resources are available.
In general, Fall City residents are not opposed to new homes or increasing the population at a sustainable rate. The sentiment of residents is to bring these developments into more manageable growth patterns in terms of both density and pace by partnering with County planners and land use experts.
The ideal outcome would be for King County to take responsibility for the gaps in their zoning and land use code and pause permitting in Rural Towns. As our sub-area and comprehensive plans are in the process of being updated, developers can resume their applications after adoption of the new regulation or update their current plans to align with design guidelines.