There is a common misconception about what "rural character" actually means — including, sometimes, among the people who live here and the elected officials who represent us. It is often treated as a lifestyle preference, or a desire to keep everything looking the same forever. That is not what the term means in law, and it is not how we think about it at Fall City Sustainable Growth.
Rural character is a protected element of the environment. The State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA) treats it that way, which means proposed developments are required to identify their impacts on rural character and to mitigate those impacts before approval. It is on the same footing as impacts to water, air, wildlife habitat, and traffic - not a matter of taste, but a matter of law.
The Growth Management Act (GMA) was written to make sure of this. The GMA was enacted because Washington recognized that uncontrolled growth (the kind of growth that begins as one new subdivision and ends as a continuous sprawl of identical lotsquickly consumes rural land in ways that cannot be undone. The harms are not superficial. They are environmental: pressure on aquifers and septic capacity, loss of tree canopy and wildlife habitat, altered drainage and stormwater patterns, and the erosion of the agricultural and forested land that surrounds and protects rural communities. The GMA directs that growth be channeled into Urban Growth Areas and that rural areas like Fall City be protected through deliberate, controlled development consistent with the character that already exists. Fall City sits outside the Urban Growth Area for exactly this reason.
What "rural character" actually looks like in Fall City
Fall City has grown at roughly a 1% annual rate over the past fifty years. That is what controlled growth looks like in practice - slow, varied, and additive. The town has every kind of housing: mobile homes, historic landmarks, small ramblers, large estates, and new construction. Some sit on lots of 2,500 square feet, others on multiple acres. The defining theme is that there is no theme. Each new home becomes part of the landscape rather than overwriting it.
Eleven successful R-4 subdivisions have been built in Fall City under this pattern. Despite the range of styles and sizes, they share three things in common:
Generous yards and setbacks, because each home has its own drainfield and is sized to its lot.
No two homes look alike, even within a single subdivision, because lot placement varies.
A sense of privacy and peacefulness, even when homes are relatively close together.
This is rural character: varied, well-spaced, environmentally compatible growth. It is the pattern the GMA was written to protect.
Why the new developments are different
The Fall City Assemblage developments represent a different model. They use Large On-Site Sewage Systems (LOSSs) to cluster homes on small lots with minimal setbacks, optimized for density and developer return rather than compatibility with the surrounding community. Lots run as small as a few thousand square feet, with impervious-surface allowances of up to 70%. Houses are repetitive, uniform, and crowded - the visual and environmental signature of suburban sprawl, dropped into a rural town that has spent fifty years deliberately avoiding it. This is the harm SEPA and the GMA require to be analyzed and mitigated. It is not a question of aesthetics; it is a question of law.
A win to report
We are happy to share that Fall City Sustainable Growth, working in partnership with King County, secured significant protections for rural character in the County's most recent Comprehensive Plan and code update. Going forward:
LOSSs are prohibited for new subdivision projects in the Fall City Rural Town.
Setback requirements have been increased, restoring the spacing between homes that has always defined Fall City.
These changes were enacted in direct response to the Fall City Assemblage and the harms it has inflicted on the community. They will not undo what has already been permitted, but they will prevent this development model from being repeated.
The fight on the existing Assemblage projects continues. The protections we have secured for the future are a reminder of why that fight matters — and why community advocacy, grounded in law and science, can change outcomes.
Fall City residents are unhappy with the new developments because they represent a style of development associated with suburban sprawl – a repetitive blur of generic tract homes, each indistinguishable from the next. The lots are small, setbacks minimal, and houses maximal. Taylor Development’s approach to plat design leverages clustering to optimize for density, reduce development costs and maximize profits. The business model depends on volume.