City Council Jan 7 Meeting Recap: Turning Hotels & Offices into Housing (and Funding Arts!)

Here are a couple of my takeaways from last week’s City Council meeting on January 7, 2025 (watch it on YouTube).

• Bellevue is making it easier to repurpose office buildings and hotels into new apartments, including minor expansions, to help create more housing. The discussion starts at around 53:58 on YouTube.
• It seems like this is only a small step though, as the council discussion that starts at 1:11 points out, there likely won’t be many buildings converted to residential this way. They expect less than five in the next seven years. Staff heard from some interest to convert senior housing into higher density residential, some hotel to residential. It’s too bad that this code amendment wouldn’t lead to more conversions…housing is a tricky problem!
• Council approved $350K in arts grants for 2025, funding a total of 61 individuals and organizations (66 applied). Grantees ranged from organizations like KidsQuest Museum to individuals like Anita Yan Wong’s seriously impressive “coffee portraits” who received $3,000 to make pretty awesome paintings using a single cup of coffee (https://www.anitayanwong.com/coffee.html). More details: 2025 Arts Grants Allocations.

If you want to learn more about housing related code amendments check this Housing Related Code Amendments explainer from City of Bellevue. Also more supporting documents on the housing stuff if you really want to dig in. I’m curious to hear what people think Bellevue could do to improve housing affordability in the area.

Some of the cool “coffee art” the city is supporting

Details on the areas eligible to add apartments to hotels, offices, other commercial buildings.

About this post: I live in Bellevue and I like to learn about local news. I figured I’d try to share some of the stuff I learn this year, let me know what you think and if it’s useful to continue. I used Google AI Studio to help me watch this long and at times boring meeting and help me find the interesting stuff, which I’m hoping to share with our community. Another useful and very helpful starting point is the city’s “Council Roundup” press release which covers a lot of the important takeaways.