Factoria
South Bellevue's errand stop where I-90 meets I-405, and a city plan to turn its parking lots into a neighborhood.
The name is older than any of it: around 1900 promoters pictured a factory town here with more than twenty coal and manufacturing plants. It stayed logging country until the freeways brought the suburbs after the war. The mall opened in 1976 and 1977, Bellevue annexed the area in 1993, and the plan below would rebuild what that era left.
- Homes
- Median sale: condos $448,000; 3 houses sold in a year
- Schools
- Somerset, Newport Heights or Woodridge · Tyee · Newport
- Getting around
- Bus 240 every 15 minutes on weekdays; I-90 and I-405 at the corner.
- Next decision
- 10 Nov 2026: The City Council reviews the Factoria Neighborhood Area Plan.
Living here
Where to go
Most people come to Factoria by car, and it is built for them: the mall's stores sit in about 20 acres of parking on a 39-acre site.
12450 SE 38th StTop Gun Seafood
Dim sum from 10 a.m. at weekends. It draws people from well beyond Factoria.
Factoria MallDim Sum Factory
Dim sum inside the mall itself.
Factoria MallT&T Supermarket
In the space Walmart left, open since December 2024. On a Saturday the checkout lines run long.
12816 SE 38th StTian Fu
Here years before T&T. Regent Bakery shares its strip.
Factoria MallMonster Mini Golf
A glow-in-the-dark course with an arcade beside it.
Where people live
South of the shops the ground rises. Low-rise apartments and condominiums climb the hill above SE 38th Street, with two pockets of houses, Mockingbird Hill in the southwest corner and Monthaven on the east side. Richards Creek runs through the low ground, mostly out of sight.
What homes here sold for in the year to 14 October 2026, from the sales King County records.
Houses and townhouses3 sales, too few for a typical price
Condos$448,000 median 22 sales · Bellevue $615,000
A median describes the homes that happened to sell, not every home here. Only ordinary sales count: estate, family, foreclosure and multi-parcel sales are left out. A type with fewer than 10 sales shows no median. Rents are not public record.
Schools that serve it
Bellevue School District assigns schools by address. Each bar is the share of the 295 addresses here that a school serves.
- Somerset36%about 770 students
- Newport Heights33%about 600 students
- Woodridge31%about 550 students
- Tyee100%about 1,060 students
- Newport100%about 1,850 students
From the attendance areas the City of Bellevue maps for the district, read 25 August 2026. Boundaries change and an address near a line can differ: confirm with the district’s school locator. Choice and application schools have no attendance area and are not listed. Enrollment is each whole school’s, all grades, from the OSPI Report Card for 2025-26 (data as of 1 June 2026), rounded to the nearest ten; it counts every student, not only those from here.
Getting around
More about this map
Geometry simplified to about 12 metres. Station point is the platform centre. The frame is the area plus a few hundred metres; only routes with a stop in the area or at its edge are drawn, each direction, variant and carriageway as one line; routes within 60 metres of each other share a road and are drawn side by side.
- Metro GTFS: 20260928 to 20270326 (FAL26-161.2); retrieved 2026-10-27.
- Sound Transit GTFS: 20261001 to 20270326 (SC-Fall-2026.5); retrieved 2026-10-27.
- OpenStreetMap snapshot: 2026-10-24T20:20:51Z; retrieved 2026-10-27.
- By bus, Metro route 240 runs every 15 minutes on weekdays from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m., north to South Bellevue Station and Bellevue Transit Center and south to Renton.
- Route 203 links Factoria with Issaquah along Newport Way and also stops at South Bellevue Station.
- By light rail, no line stops in Factoria. The nearest station is South Bellevue, on the 2 Line along Bellevue Way: one ride on the 240 or 203, with a large park-and-ride garage.
- On foot or by bike, the Mountains to Sound Greenway Trail follows I-90 with gaps, and the city calls the sidewalks and crossings around the mall incomplete.
- By shared scooter or e-bike, check Lime's app for devices near Factoria and the permitted parking areas. Bellevue's shared program launched on 10 August 2026.
- By car, I-90 and I-405 meet at the north-west corner. Factoria Boulevard and Coal Creek Parkway carry most local traffic, and both back up at rush hour.
What’s changing
The city’s plan for Factoria
A neighborhood area plan is the city's guide to one part of Bellevue. The draft for Factoria, the first rewrite since 2014, goes to the City Council on 10 November. It pays for nothing by itself: each change below would come through later decisions and private building.
The mall and its lots
NowOne-story shops behind wide surface parking.
The plan wouldGrow into a center of homes, jobs and shops, with plazas and paths cut through the big blocks (policies S-F-N8 and S-F-N11). A separate rezone would allow about 60 homes an acre around the mall. The mall owner's own rebuilding plan is in our story.
Factoria Boulevard
NowWide and built for cars. The plan says people find it uninviting to walk.
The plan wouldLandscaping, lighting and better sidewalks, and safer crossings at intersections and mid-block (S-F-N20, S-F-N23).
Parks
NowNone inside Factoria.
The plan wouldBuy land for neighborhood parks or build them into the redevelopment (S-F-N15), and in the meantime improve the routes to Coal Creek Natural Area and Sunset Ravine.
Buses
NowRoute 240 every 15 minutes on weekdays; the light rail is a bus ride away at South Bellevue.
The plan wouldFrequent connections to Eastgate Park & Ride and South Bellevue Station (S-F-N28).
Signs and services
NowCity Hall is downtown.
The plan wouldSigns in several languages pointing to shops, buses and the Mountains to Sound Greenway trail (S-F-N27), and a look at a Mini City Hall in South Bellevue (S-F-N9).
These are policies the Council adopted, not funded projects: none comes with a budget or a date unless its card states one.
Where it stands
The City Council passed rules allowing housing in mixed-use areas. A city planner has written that Factoria's larger upzones come through them.
The Council started a rezone of the land around the mall to a new high-density residential district. Hearing and adoption dates are not yet set.
The Planning Commission held its public hearing on the Factoria Neighborhood Area Plan.
The City Council reviews the Factoria Neighborhood Area Plan.
What’s coming
Fitting outKPOT
Korean barbecue and hot pot, in the former Ricardo's building. Its interior permit was issued in February 2026; its facade permit was still pending on 20 October.
Approved, not startedPhase 1 apartments
265 apartments in one five-story building on the mall's northwest corner. The design was approved in April 2024; no building permit has been applied for since.
Being refittedThe former Rite Aid
Interior demolition and a new roof are permitted and a new facade is under review. No tenant has been named.
Our stories set here
How this was checked
Boundary: the City of Bellevue’s Neighborhood Areas layer, the Comprehensive Plan’s planning areas. Place information was checked against the sources and dates under Sources.
Schools: every addressed parcel the city publishes, placed in the district’s attendance areas and, outside them, in the city’s school-district layer. A school serving under 5% of an area’s addresses is left out. Enrollment: OSPI’s Report Card enrollment on data.wa.gov, the all-students count for each school, read by scripts/neighborhood_enrollment.py.
Home prices: the King County Assessor’s Real Property Sales extract, ordinary sales of houses and condos by warranty deed with no non-market flag, placed by parcel number in the city’s parcel layer (a condo by its building).
Sources (8)
Sources
- Shared scooters and e-bikes: City of Bellevue, Shared E-Bikes and E-Scooters, read 26 October 2026; the city names Lime as its operator. Availability and parking vary by location in the app.
- Boundary, character, history, parks and the plan: City of Bellevue, Draft Factoria Neighborhood Area Plan, 12 June 2026, and the Existing Conditions report, 30 January 2026, both read 26 October 2026.
- Plan schedule: Great Neighborhoods, read 26 October 2026.
- Route 240: King County Metro, service change of 28 March 2026. Route 203: Metro's August 2025 service change, a secondary source.
- Rezone: High Density Residential code amendment; housing in mixed-use areas: Council roundup, 17 March 2026.
- Trail: Washington Trails Association.
- Plan policies (S-F-N8 to S-F-N28) and what the plan says exists today: the draft plan above, pages 9 to 16.
- Restaurants and T&T: seen open on our walks of 16, 17 and 24 October 2026, and in the Factoria story.
