One block in a building boom.

As limited early excavation gets under way at Onni 606, about ten projects are under construction across Downtown Bellevue at the same time — several clustered on the very same 106th Avenue NE corridor, including The Artise (788 106th), Four106 (320 106th) and Bellevue Plaza (117 106th).

Zoomed out, a 2022 inventory counted 17 downtown megaprojects — 67 buildings proposed or under construction — that, if all built, would add over 8,200 homes, more than 12 million square feet of commercial space, about 1,450 hotel rooms and nearly 30,000 parking stalls. Onni 606 is the largest single piece of that boom.

The closest megaproject is Amazon's Bellevue 600, one block west at 600 108th Ave NE. Its 43-story, 600-foot first tower topped out in September 2024, but the planned second tower remains paused with no firm timeline — in April 2026 Amazon opened “The Meadow,” a 1.75-acre public park, on the stalled parcel instead.

So as Onni 606 moves through early grading toward its deep excavation in mid-2026, the block immediately west is finishing one 600-footer and sitting on a paused second — a study in contrasting construction tempo within the same tower cluster.

Onni 606's homes are planned as rental apartments — consistent with Onni's build-to-hold model — running one- to three-bedrooms, with the larger units concentrated on the premium upper floors. That distinguishes it from for-sale condo towers like Avenue Bellevue and One88. The hotel is Onni's own “Level” brand of furnished suites for nightly and 30-plus-night stays — an aparthotel hybrid rather than a conventional flag.

The rental market is tight: Downtown Bellevue apartment vacancy ran around 3.8% with average rents near $3,100 and no new units delivered in the prior year. The office market is the opposite — Bellevue CBD office vacancy stood at about 25.4% in early 2026 — though it is tightening, with no new Eastside office buildings slated to deliver in 2026 and vacancy projected to fall back below 20% within a year, well before Onni's ~896,000 sf office would open.

The benchmark luxury comp, Avenue Bellevue, pairs 365 for-sale condos with a 208-room InterContinental charging from the $500s to $7,200 a night. The other for-sale benchmark, Bosa Development's One88, packed 21 stories with about 147 condos at 188 Bellevue Way NE and sold out in August 2021 — a measure of how thin the for-sale supply is against Onni's rental bet. On affordability, Bellevue's Multifamily Tax Exemption offers a 12-year property-tax break on a project's housing if at least 20% of units are set aside for income-eligible households (a baseline of 80% of area median income) — the chief mechanism that could apply to Onni's roughly 1,289 rental homes.

Onni 606's roughly 1,289 homes would arrive under one of the region's lighter affordability regimes. Bellevue ran an inclusionary-zoning program from 1991 that required 10% affordable units, but converted it to an incentive-based system in 1996. The transit-oriented inclusionary requirement adopted for Wilburton in the 2025–26 cycle is described as the city's first mandatory inclusionary requirement since 1996 — which underscores that Downtown towers like Onni 606 still face no such mandate and would participate only voluntarily. Under the Wilburton rule, a developer that sets aside 20% of a project for households earning up to 80% of King County area median income — reported as roughly $80,000 a year for a family of two — receives a 12-year property-tax exemption on the residential improvements.

Downtown has its own version: in early 2018 the Council simplified the Downtown Multifamily Tax Exemption (MFTE) to a single 20%-at-70%-of-median-income standard, paired with a floor-area bonus allowing about 2.5 square feet of market-rate housing for every 1.0 square foot of affordable housing provided at 80% AMI. The program has long been considered unattractive downtown and uptake has been thin — as of the city's outreach materials, just two Downtown apartment buildings were open and participating, together adding more than 60 moderately priced units — a small footprint against which Onni's ~1,289 rental homes would be measured if it opted in. (Income limits vary by year; the $80,000 figure is reported and approximate, and the outreach figures are undated point-in-time copy that may be stale.)

Adding close to 900,000 square feet of office into a market running around 25% vacancy is a long bet on Eastside demand. The anchor is Amazon, which set a 2020 goal of 25,000 Bellevue jobs and has been consolidating its Eastside footprint — though it has also reshuffled more than 3 million square feet of planned downtown space since its July 2022 shift to hybrid work, and trimmed roles in 2025–26, so the trajectory isn't linear.

Newer demand is coming from AI. In early 2026 OpenAI leased about 296,000 square feet at City Center Plaza — much of it former Microsoft space, with room for 1,000-plus staff — and Elon Musk's xAI took space at Lincoln Square. That late-cycle leasing is part of why Bellevue's office vacancy is projected to tighten back below 20% before Onni's office tower opens.

The employment base still moves both ways, though: in late June 2026 game studio Bungie — a marquee downtown Bellevue tech employer on 106th Ave NE — filed a WARN notice to cut 292 jobs, with separations beginning that July, a reminder that the tenant demand underwriting nearly 900,000 square feet of new office remains cyclical.

Bellevue's prior downtown megaproject offers a benchmark for disruption. The $1B-plus Avenue Bellevue saw its InterContinental hotel slip through several announced opening dates — October 2023, then January, April and June 2024 — before finally opening July 18, 2024, roughly two years past its original target. Onni 606's program runs close to five years.

For a four-acre excavation running close to five years, Bellevue's rules set the ground conditions. Bellevue's current Noise Control Code allows construction noise 7 a.m.–8 p.m. on weekdays and 8 a.m.–6 p.m. on Saturdays, with none on Sundays or legal holidays unless the city grants an expanded-hours exemption; noise complaints go to the Bellevue Police non-emergency line, (425) 577-5656.

Closing any sidewalk or lane requires a city Right-of-Way Use permit, and its conditions keep the block usable: access to neighboring businesses and residents must stay available, and the sidewalks on both sides of a block can't be closed at once unless a legal crossing is provided. Active closures are posted on Bellevue's traffic-advisories page.

Onni 606's 30-foot dedicated walkway is one block-scale piece of a much larger civic project. The Grand Connection is a roughly 1.5-mile pedestrian-and-bicycle corridor running from Meydenbauer Bay Park on Lake Washington, through Old Bellevue and Downtown Park, across Interstate 405, and on to the regional Eastrail trail in Wilburton. Its spine is fixed in Bellevue's Land Use Code (LUC 20.25A.020) “generally for exclusive pedestrian use,” running along NE 6th Street — the leg the Onni 606 superblock fronts, which is why the project's contribution sits on this stretch.

The corridor's keystone is a vehicle-free Grand Connection Crossing over I-405, linking City Hall Plaza near the Downtown Bellevue light-rail station to the Eastrail through Wilburton. In March 2025 the City Council unanimously approved a budget of $150–200 million and a refined design (up from 30% design); early funding included $2.5 million from Amazon for design, $3.6 million from the city's Capital Investment Program and $15 million in the 2025–26 budget. In early February 2026, Senator Maria Cantwell's office announced a $2 million federal grant for community engagement, with reporting putting the total project cost around $200 million — a stack that includes a $46.7 million city contribution, $2.5 million from Friends of the Grand Connection, expected state funding and bond financing. The crossing also won a 25-year King County tax-increment-financing deal on May 5, 2026.

It runs a minimum of 30 feet wide, widening to about 40 feet over the freeway, with a 2030 opening as the working target — described as “by no means guaranteed.” A longer-term “Lid Park” vision would add roughly 200,000 square feet of green space between NE 4th and NE 6th.

To manage the corridor end to end, Bellevue launched an Office of the Grand Connection on July 16, 2025, consolidating land-use coordination, public-private partnerships, engineering and delivery, program management and fiscal strategy under one roof. It is led by Nathan Torgelson, formerly the nine-year director of the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections — the city-side counterpart to the privately built segments like the 30-foot walkway Onni 606 must dedicate.

Onni 606's ~1,289 homes (plus ~896,000 sf of office) land inside a deliberate rebalancing: Downtown Bellevue's resident population is projected to grow from about 16,000 in 2022 toward roughly 37,000, shifting the pipeline's ratio from about 3.25 jobs per resident to around 2.2 — a downtown pivoting from offices toward housing.