The area, developed as a suburban bedroom community in the late 20th century, was annexed into the nearby cities of Arlington and Marysville in the 1990s and 2000s.

[4][5] U.S. Route 99 was bypassed by Interstate 5 in the late 1960s, constructing an interchange at Smokey Point and creating the Gissberg Ponds (now Twin Lakes) out of a gravel excavation site.

[8] By 1977, the population of the unincorporated area between Arlington and Marysville, including Smokey Point, had increased to 16,000 people as the result of suburban development.

[13] After the opening of a new naval base in Everett in 1994, the U.S. Navy selected Smokey Point to house a support complex with a commissary, offices and a college.

[18][19] In September 2004, Marysville won a bid to build a 850-acre (340 ha) NASCAR racetrack (to be operated by the International Speedway Corporation) south of Smokey Point.

[20] The project was cancelled two months later after concerns about traffic impacts, environmental conditions, and $70 million in required transportation improvements arose.

[21] The NASCAR site was later pitched as a candidate for a new University of Washington satellite campus (known as UW North Sound) in the late 2000s,[22] competing with downtown Everett, before the project was put on hold in 2008 and cancelled in 2011.

[23][24][25] In the early 1990s, after a controversial land-use was proposed for the area, several property owners began an effort to petition the City of Arlington to annex a large portion of the Smokey Point community.

At that time, there was a single Arlington-Smokey Point-Marysville Urban Growth Boundary, causing confusion as to what city could potentially annex which area of Smokey Point.

After many meetings with Snohomish County officials, the two cities ended up with separate urban growth boundaries for future annexation.

Being that nearly all of the commercial area of Smokey Point was petitioned to be annexed into Arlington, the loss of such a tax base would have been devastating to the Lakewood School District.

[citation needed] Local residents in Smokey Point and Lakewood also circulated petitions to incorporate the area as a separate city to preserve the school district's taxing base.

The proposal was put on hold, however, since state law mandated that incorporations cannot occur while an annexation involving land in the same area is still pending.

A stretch of Smokey Point Boulevard was developed into an auto row in the late 2010s, with several car dealerships relocating from Marysville.