Major shopping center, apartments opening soon in Smokey Point

MARYSVILLE — The same developers who built the Mill Creek Town Center and Snohomish Station are building a 1.6 million-square-foot project in the Smokey Point area that will bring a new wave of shops and apartments.

The project includes a 910,000-square-foot shopping center called The Marketplace and 723,000 square feet of mixed use space that will include multifamily apartments called The Lodge.

The development is expected to open this fall on the north side of 172nd Street NE. Bellevue developers Steve Malsam and Len Evans are teaming up on the project.

“We are very excited with our newest center, following our Mill Creek Town Center and Snohomish Station developments,” Malsam said. “With our high-end multi-family projects at Lakewood, we will be creating a unique mixed-use project that the Marysville community will be proud of. The city of Marysville has been very helpful in putting all of this together.”

Malsam declined to place a monetary value on the entire development.

Tenants for the The Marketplace include Dick’s Sporting Goods as a major anchor, along with Party City, Hop Jack’s restaurant, Outback Steakhouse and Bonefish, which will share the same grill in a single building, plus a Hobby Lobby, T-Mobile, Aveda Hair Salon and a Qdoba Mexican restaurant.

City inspectors are expected to give approval in September for the Dick’s Sporting Goods to open, but it will likely take a couple more months for staff to be hired and trained.

The Lodge includes 182 apartments that are leasing now; a second phase with another eight buildings and 160 apartments will undergo construction in the spring. Another developer, The Island Group in Spokane, is building The Vintage, 187 apartments adjacent to the shopping center. Those units are aimed at people 55 and older.

The Vintage will provide needed diversity in housing for north Snohomish County, said Sydney Parmalee, senior community director for the project.

“There’s no other independent senior living building in the area,” she said. “We’re already pre-leasing space ahead of the completed construction. The first units should be available in late September in both one- and two-bedroom styles.”

The Vintage will include common areas with a mini-mart, theater, social room library and other facilities. The development has four-story buildings.

The Lodge Apartments are due to be ready in late September. The development consists of one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments, with contemporary conveniences in a lodge environment, including a pool and a community center with a fireplace.

Marysville Mayor Jon Nehring said he welcomes the innovative major retail and housing development at Smokey Point.

“People want to shop locally so we continue to diversify to give them more commercial opportunities to shop in Marysville and keep spending in town,” Nehring said. “We have a vibrant community and the new housing here will serve seniors as well as families. ”

Nehring noted that the new development is across the street from the well-established Lakewood Crossing shopping center, anchored by Best Buy, Costco, Target and a variety of other stores.

“We’re very cognizant of the fact that this development will create more traffic and that has to be dealt with,” he said. “With the state, we’re planning an Interstate 5 interchange where an overpass was built a few years ago at 156th Street NE and we may eventually add a new road south of 172nd Street NE but these projects are years away yet.”

In the meantime, the city will be doing some traffic signal improvements at 27th Avenue and along the Highway 531 frontage road and the developer will be installing a roundabout on 172nd Street NE, Nehring said.

Marysville planning manager Chris Holland said plans call for re-routing 25th Avenue to move its intersection with 172nd St. NE farther from the congested entrance to Lakewood Crossing.

Malsam and Evans have a highly successful history in commercial and housing developments in the Puget Sound area as well as Snohomish County.

Malsam launched Malsam Development Corp. in 1991, developing multi-family housing projects in Redmond, Kirkland and Issaquah.

Evans is president of The Evans Co., which owns or manages 530,000 square feet of office space and more than 120,000 square feet of commercial space in Bellevue, Redmond and Woodinville.

He’s also involved in ownership of a variety of companies, including Bellevue Helicopters, Evans Films, Evans Energy and Evans Center, a 30,000-square-foot retail and industrial complex in Bellevue.

In 1996, the developers formed Wakefield, a real estate company that built the Mill Creek Town Center, Snohomish Station and 500 apartments in Marysville for the U.S. Navy.

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