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The Ford oval that stood over 18th Avenue Northwest for 38 years is coming down. In its place, Rivian will open its sixth Puget Sound showroom on the same asphalt where Issaquah residents have bought Explorers and F-150s since the late 1980s — the latest sign that the city’s old auto row is finishing its slow conversion into something else entirely.
Rivian has signed a lease for the 32,034-square-foot building at 1500 18th Ave NW, the former home of Evergreen Ford, according to a Sept. 14 announcement reported by Bisnow and confirmed four days later by Issaquah Spotlight. The lease begins Jan. 1, 2027, with a customer opening targeted for early spring. The plan calls for 13 service bays and 21 EV charging stations, and Rivian says the facility will create about 35 jobs.
Evergreen Ford didn’t close. It relocated within Issaquah, to a new Ford/Lincoln site at 6721 230th Ave SE, according to city development records tied to the dealership’s site plan. But the departure from 18th Avenue closes out nearly four decades on a property that has effectively become a bellwether for how Issaquah’s valley floor gets redeveloped.
The land underneath the announcement
The Rivian deal isn’t happening in a vacuum. The site sits inside Hyla Crossing, developer Rowley Properties’ roughly 78-to-80-acre project on Issaquah’s valley floor, governed by a development agreement the city entered with Rowley back in 2011 and 2012. That agreement laid out a 20-year vision for converting what was once a strip of car lots, big-box retail and light industrial parcels into a walkable, mixed-use district with housing, offices and open space threaded between them.
Measured against that blueprint, a Rivian showroom is a modest, incremental step rather than the finish line. Rowley has already delivered pieces of the urban-village vision elsewhere in Hyla Crossing — the Homewood Suites hotel, the 2005 Poplar office building, new streets built to a more pedestrian-friendly standard. An EV dealership with service bays is still car-dependent retail, just a newer, more electrified version of what was there before. Issaquah’s own planning documents, including its Central Issaquah long-range work, have for years pointed toward higher-density, less auto-oriented uses for this corridor as light rail extends toward the Eastside. A dealership lease, even a splashy one, doesn’t resolve that tension — it just deposits it a few more years down the road.
What the announcement doesn’t say
Neither Rivian’s announcement nor the coverage of it addressed a few basic civic questions that matter more to Issaquah taxpayers than the showroom’s charging-station count. There’s no public figure yet for the property or lease value, no confirmation of what sales-tax revenue the city expects to gain or lose relative to Evergreen Ford’s decades of receipts, and no city council review on the record — because, unlike a rezone or a comprehensive-plan amendment, a private commercial lease between a landlord and a new tenant doesn’t require one. The 35-job estimate comes from Rivian’s own announcement, not from an independent city or state labor count, and it isn’t yet clear how many of those jobs are new hires versus transfers from Rivian’s other five Puget Sound locations in places like Bellevue and Seattle.
Rowley Properties, the landlord, did not appear as a quoted source in the reporting reviewed for this story, nor did anyone from Evergreen Ford about the decision to leave a location it had occupied since the 1980s. Both would have direct knowledge of deal terms and timeline that remain undisclosed.
Why it matters beyond one lease
Issaquah has spent 15 years trying to turn its light-industrial and auto-row acreage into tax base that doesn’t depend on car sales — a strategy shared by plenty of Eastside cities watching sales-tax revenue get squeezed by online retail. A national EV maker choosing to double down on a service-and-showroom format on exactly that land is a data point worth sitting with: it suggests dealership real estate, even electrified, still pencils out on the valley floor even as the city’s planning documents point residents and developers toward denser, transit-oriented uses nearby.
For residents along 18th Avenue NW, the practical questions are more immediate. Rivian’s service bays mean commercial truck and courier traffic on a stretch of road already carrying spillover from I-90 and SR-900 congestion — the same corridor where a semi-truck rollover snarled traffic as recently as Sept. 24. Whether the site’s traffic study, if one exists for a straight tenant lease rather than a new development permit, accounted for a 13-bay service operation is a question the city has not yet answered publicly.
The opening is still roughly six months out. Between now and early spring, Issaquah residents will get more clarity on construction timing and hiring, but the deal itself — a private lease between Rowley Properties and Rivian — is done. The public comment period Issaquah residents are more likely to notice is the one already underway over the city’s 2027-2028 budget, not anything tied to this lease.
Sources: Bisnow, Issaquah Spotlight, City of Issaquah, City of Issaquah project records
