Kirkland planners update housing dashboard, staff to expand permit-level tracking

Senior planner Scott Guder delivered an updated version of Kirkland’s housing dashboard to the Planning Commission, describing it as “a long overdue update to the housing dashboard.” The dashboard aggregates data from the Office of Financial Management population estimates, King County assessor records, Arch (for regulated affordable housing) and legacy Esri/census layers to show total housing stock, regulated affordable units and permit activity going back to 2017.

Guder told commissioners the dashboard highlights permit statuses for major developments, the city’s tracked regulated affordable housing (about 1,600 units currently reported), and permit volumes from April 2024 to April 2025. He said the dashboard now reports a mix of historical and more recent reporting periods and that some legacy items drawn from Esri/census products will need future updating.

Commissioners asked specific questions about the underlying counts. Commissioner Reiser asked whether the single-family and multifamily figures are existing or include projects; staff confirmed the numbers are existing inventory that roll up to the displayed total and that the 1,600 figure refers to regulated affordable units tracked by the city. Commissioner Bruniels and others raised the issue of demolition permits and whether net-new figures account for units removed through demolition; Guder said the totals presented are net new units and that demolition counts are tracked at a high level but can be extracted and reported by year with additional effort.

Commissioners also asked whether the dashboard can track lot splits, unit bedroom counts, residential versus commercial square footage and sales/rental price indicators. Guder said staff can tag permit-level records to capture typologies (attached/detached, middle housing, AMI levels), subdivisions and lot splits; he described plans to work with IT to move from quarterly manual updates toward more timely permit-level reporting. He also noted interest from King County and a potential partnership with the University of Washington to refine comparative and price/rental metrics.

Next steps: staff said they will refine the dashboard to provide more granular permit-level categories (including demolition counts and lot-split tracking), adjust legacy data sources, and consider neighborhood- and program-level breakdowns. Commissioners asked staff to return with a follow-up that shows demolition impacts on net-new housing and, where feasible, bedroom counts and residential square footage breakdowns.