Coupeville Considers Allowing ADUs, Duplexes on 33-Acre Property

Coupeville's Town Council has directed staff to keep developing a proposal that would amend a longstanding memorandum of agreement governing a 33-acre property north of Highway 20, between Main Street and Broadway Street, to permit accessory dwelling units and a limited number of duplexes where neither is currently allowed.

The proposed amendment would grant the property capacity for a maximum of 49 housing units, including duplexes, beyond the 30 units the memorandum already allows to be developed. Under the same proposal, all parcels on the site, whether developed or undeveloped, could add an ADU. Staff believes the amendment "balances housing needs and the preservation of neighborhood character by providing equitable opportunities for ADUs throughout the property and encouraging the controlled development of middle housing."

Council chose to pursue this approach after weighing six options presented at a recent Tuesday meeting. Previously, the Council had agreed to seek an amendment that could implement more nuanced zoning regulations on the property, and the latest direction keeps that effort moving forward.

The proposal is shaped in part by Washington state's housing obligations. State law requires Coupeville to "ensure development regulations provide realistic opportunities for housing across income levels." Pitts' report, cited by town staff, puts the scale of that challenge in stark terms: more than 1 million new homes are needed statewide over the next two decades, with 650,000 of those needing to be affordable for low-income households earning below the area median income. Coupeville itself is expected to plan for 351 new households over that same span.

The town is not required to build those homes itself, but its zoning rules must make room for them to be built.

The memorandum amendment is moving alongside a broader set of town-wide code changes. On April 1, the Coupeville Planning Commission voted to recommend that the Town Council adopt a package of amendments to the town's development code to implement recent state middle-housing laws and revise local rules for ADUs, unit-lot subdivisions, and zoning tables. Those wider changes would allow duplexes across several residential zones and triplexes in medium- and high-density zones, remove single-family residential as the principal use in the high-density zone, and codify ADU standards including the 1,000-square-foot cap retained from state guidance. The commission also recommended creating a new chapter in the town code, section 16.19, to govern unit-lot subdivisions, and updating definitions throughout the code, including replacing the term "family" with "household."

Specific technical edits included in the commission's recommendation cover striking a provision that tied ADU size to the principal building footprint, rewording rules so that unit-lot subdivisions occur after final plat recordation, and adding a column to the zoning table that shows the total number of dwellings allowed on a parcel.

The broader code revision project began with a Department of Commerce grant focused on middle housing. The town added roughly $5,000 from its own budget to hire technical consultants for code drafting. The Town Council will ultimately decide whether to adopt both the memorandum amendment and the commission's recommended code changes.