239 Affordable Homes, Early Learning Campus Coming to Mount Baker

Ceremonial shovels will hit the dirt Oct. 15 at the site of the former University of Washington laundry, directly across from Mount Baker Station, to mark the start of construction on a project that's been in the works since 2018. What's going up won't be just another apartment building. The project will include affordable housing, an early learning school, and a UW facility, right at the doorstep of the light rail.

Phase One, known to the city as Site C, will include two eight-story buildings with 239 units, fully funded through $206.5 million in state and city funding, loans and deferred developer fees, with partners including Amazon. Of the total units, 72 will be reserved for residents who earn 0% to 30% of area median income. The development is on city land leased for $1 a year under a 99-year ground lease.

"We're excited about it," said Estela Ortega, executive director of El Centro de la Raza, which is developing the project in a near-even split with Mercy Housing.

Phase Two, which will also have two buildings, is still unfunded but would add roughly 190 more units. The buildings in this phase, numbered three and four, will sit on either side of a resident courtyard. A park will unite buildings from the two phases.

There is no estimated completion date for Phase Two.

Tucked into the first Phase One building will be a facility the UW couldn't build on its main campus. The university donated the land in Mount Baker on the condition that a school of early learning and a separate child development center be built there, with UW footing the bill while El Centro's contractors handle construction.

Nick Terrones, the College of Education's director of community relations, calls the Rainier Rising Early Learning Campus a "place-based partnership" rooted in the "strengths, history, leadership, and identity" of Mount Baker and greater Rainier Valley. Rather than a lab school, it will be a "studio school," where educators "study, observe, practice, reflect" through live observation booths, watching real teaching downstairs while studying theory upstairs.

Cultivate Learning, which works to support early childhood learning, will anchor the second floor with professional development, alongside a production studio for free educational media. The campus is expected to serve around 160 children and families a year. Launch, a King County nonprofit, was recently named its operating partner.

Nona Raybern, communications manager for the city's Office of Housing, frames the campus in similar terms: "a hub for teaching, research, and early learning careers that serves the whole valley." Terrones traces it back to listening sessions dating to 2018, where organizers asked residents to "dream big." He says that input "directly informed the campus's design and mission." The second building in Phase One will include community-serving commercial space.

Right next door, a smaller and much slower-moving story is playing out on two adjacent Sound Transit parcels, Site A and Site B, split between affordable homeownership and market-rate housing, largely because of Site B's steep slope and environmentally sensitive southern edge. Groundbreaking there isn't expected before 2028, pending a land transfer that's expected to clear City Council in late 2027.

Parking will be limited. Phase One has just 67 parking stalls for more than 200 units, with developers betting that residents will rely on light rail instead of cars. That's by design: The city "generally does not require off-street parking for new commercial or multifamily development in urban villages or in Station Area Overlays," Raybern said.

Ortega sees opportunity for local business, pointing to 1,200 to 1,500 new residents as new customers, much as her earlier Plaza Roberto Maestas project did. Raybern pointed to the city's Community Preference policy, which "gives priority to residents at risk of being pushed out of their neighborhood, as well as those who want to return to communities they have ties to," and a unit mix in which 60% of apartments will have two bedrooms or more, "so larger families have real options."

The wait has a long paper trail. The laundry building closed in 2009, and the land was transferred to the city in 2020. Community engagement ran through 2021, and a developer selection process began in 2023 and landed on El Centro and Mercy Housing in 2024. Demolition began this summer.

Phase One's interest list is open and its funding is secured. Phase Two and the parcels next door are still years out.