Spokane temporarily waives downtown height restrictions for new development. Will the city’s towers get any taller?
2018 – Spokane’s skyline shows dozens of highrise buildings constructed over more than 140 years of settlement around the Spokane falls. But since 1981, the tallest building has been the Bank of America Financial Center, at 20 stories and 288 feet. (JESSE TINSLEY/The Spokesman-Review)
Spokane has eliminated height restrictions for buildings in downtown Spokane for at least the next six months, fulfilling a recent reform proposal from Mayor Lisa Brown and the City Council.
The waiver, approved unanimously by the Spokane City Council on Monday, will be in effect until Sept. 24, during which time the city will gauge whether there is interest to make the change permanent. If successful, the waiver could be extended or made permanent when the city updates its comprehensive plan, the guiding document for building across the city, in 2026.
There already were no height restrictions in the city’s downtown core, between Bernard and Monroe streets to the east and west and between Spokane Falls Boulevard and the railroad tracks to the north and south.
A unanimous vote Monday by the Spokane City Council expanded this lack of height restrictions significantly.
The new interim law also waives requirements for buildings to “set back” the floors above the seventh, meaning additional floors above that point previously had to be smaller than the ones below, and potentially drastically narrower.
There are around a dozen towers in downtown Spokane higher than 12 stories tall, with the largest being the 20-story, 288-feet-tall Bank of America Financial Center, according to city records.
Most of these are located inside the existing no-restriction zone.
But across most of the rest of the city’s downtown, new buildings could not be built higher than 12 stories under prior code.
City leaders hope that temporarily lifting these restrictions altogether could spur more development on relatively pricey land downtown.It’s unclear how much interest there will be, particularly for high-rise office space, given the current downtown office vacancy of 28%.
Officials, including Brown, couldn’t point to a specific project or developer who was champing at the bit to build a tower previously banned by the prior height restrictions, but said that developers have more broadly expressed interest in seeing relaxed requirements.
The city has broadly worked in recent years to reduce arbitrary restrictions to growth, including by ending single-family zoning in the city, reducing parking requirements for new development and other steps.
There are historic examples of developers who pushed back against the city’s height restrictions. In 2006, developer Ron Brewster proposed building “The Vox Tower,” which would have been the city’s tallest building at 32 stories. At the time, Brewster pointed to height restrictions as the biggest challenge to the development.
Just because developers can build higher, however, doesn’t mean those projects always pan out, for one reason or another.
Developer Vincent Dressel filed with the city in 2018 to build a 31-story tower on the southwest corner of Riverside and Division. Dressel died in 2020, and his obituary noted he had continuously worked to fulfill his dream of building the city’s tallest tower until his condition deteriorated.
Mick McDowell and his wife, Shelley, had planned in 2016 to build a 14-story tower on West Riverside Avenue, but that project was repeatedly held up by concerns from Peaceful Valley residents.
In 2014, Spokane Valley dentist Phillip Rudy unveiled plans for a $50 million, 35-story downtown tower on the southeast corner of Division and Spokane Falls Boulevard. Today, the site is still an old, shuttered muffler repair shop.
There are at least two 12-story downtown towers under construction or planned. Residents may have noticed in recent months a red crane north of the Spokane River, which is working on the Spokane Falls Tower project, a development from Larry Stone’s L.B. Stone Properties Group. The project was originally slated for two 13-story towers, but the scope changed several times since the development was first announced in 2017.
Developer Sheldon Jackson’s Selkirk Development also continues to seek investors to fund the planned 12-story Papillon North Tower, which was first announced in 2019.