The numbers, in one place.

The figures behind the article, in one place. Every number here is in the article or comes from the same sources; the source list is at the bottom. Where a number is our estimate, it says so.

The numbers the plan is built on

Room by zone

The city's September 15 workshop slides [12]:

The slides call the 890 a "2024-2044 target." The city's own plan appendix puts the need for 2024 to 2044 at 716, after the homes built since 2019 [14]. One sentence from the council would settle which is right.

Where the need sits

The state's test is by income. Net need, 2024 to 2044, on the city's consultant's analysis [4][15], with the federal 2026 limits for a household of three [5]:

Only zones allowing 20 or more homes an acre count toward the 0 to 80% need [15]. The neighborhood zones (R4 to R12) and accessory units count toward the two top bands, which need 10 homes and none.

Our estimate of the split the city has not published

The city publishes room by zone, not by income. Using the consultant's own method [15]:

Two unknowns set the range: how much of the commercial row counts (in December the commercial zone was 107 of 137; we carry that share forward), and whether projects already in the pipeline count as room. The city's workbook would settle both; we have asked for it.

The rent a restriction would allow

At 80% of median, a restricted two-bedroom may rent for about $2,625 with utilities, or $2,425 without [5]. What the valley's apartments already charge [9][27]:

And what follows from each ceiling, for a 30-home building with 6 restricted homes and a 12-year tax exemption [16]:

What the public can put behind one home

Per restricted apartment, the three things a city can give without raising a tax [16][43]:

Holding a rent at 30% of median for twelve years costs about $123,000. Fees and the exemption alone come to about $97,000. Public land closes the gap wherever it is worth about $760,000 an acre or more; Lot 409 is appraised at about twice that.

Two findings

Finding 1. Show the funder, or stop counting the seats

City staff described the exercise in their own words to the planning commission on August 26: "We just have to show the capacity is there ... even if it's not feasible for someone to actually build it because of land economics or demand or whatever it is." That is an honest account of what the law asks [A]. But 409 of the 675 homes the state wants shown are for households under 30% of median, and zoning cannot build those; only public money and an operator can. The city said as much before the appeal: "it would not be genuine to equate high-density housing with affordable housing" (the city's senior planner, in a letter to the state before the plan was adopted, as quoted by The Urbanist, October 2025) [B]. The capacity analysis then does exactly that: every zone at 20 homes an acre or more is booked as housing for households under 80% of median [15].

Show the funder, or stop counting the seats.

Finding 2. The ground sets the ceiling

In December 2025 the Snoqualmie reached Flood Phase 4; SR 203 closed north of town, Woodinville-Duvall Road closed (a downed tree), and on December 11 Duvall and Carnation were cut off [D]. Those are the town's two arteries. The capacity analysis carries no road or flood assumption [15]. The draft plan holds SR 203 to level of service D and says, in its own reassessment strategy, that where road improvements cannot be funded "the City may adjust land use assumptions" [14]. On September 15 staff said the traffic model is being updated to the new capacity, and "once that's done, we're going to look at levels of service" [13]. That result is not published.

Ask for the level-of-service result before adoption. If the roads do not fit, the plan says what to do.

Roads and parking: our sketch

A small model of the town's carrying capacity, run with public inputs and standard rates (our estimate; published with the rest of the model):

On an ordinary morning the entries have room. The constraint is parking and the river. The ask: publish the level-of-service analysis for Main Street under the new densities; publish the parking standard the rezones assume against the city's own on-street inventory; state the flood-egress plan for households without a second car; and phase the rezones to the road and parking work that is funded, as the draft plan's reassessment clause allows.

The drafts on the table

The county's land, with its caveat first

Parcel 0626079039 sits outside Duvall's city limits. It adds nothing to Duvall's housing numbers. It belongs here only because the county that assigns Duvall's target owns it.

King County bought the 75.8-acre farm on Duvall-Monroe Road in 2020 for $1,058,600, with Conservation Futures and Parks Levy money, for a trail extension still unfunded; its farming rights were sold to the county's Farmland Preservation Program in 1986 [34]. It was farmed until the sale and has been grass since. A county that asks a small town to make room for homes it cannot fund can be asked to put its own idle ground to work.

Any farm use of that ground turns on two things not yet settled: whether water and septic are feasible on the site, and whether the county determines the use compatible with the purpose it holds the land for. Nothing here asks for money before both are answered.