Olympia Time

Book Review: Excluded (In Cascadia)

June 28, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See

By Richard D. Kahlenberg

“Exluded” is a much-needed addition to several excellent recent books on our horrific history of housing discrimination. Kahlenberg covers the space left open by other recent classics on housing, zoning and structural racism: “The Color of Law” (by Richard Rothstein) and “Race for Profit” (by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor).

“Excluded” also puts a sharp zoom on the recent history of our own region, placing a critical eye at housing policy from the 1970s to today in Seattle and surrounding communities that still impact how many of us talk about zoning, growth and fairness.

The main theme of “Excluded” is how our housing policy perpetuates racial and economic segregation, leading to inequality and limited opportunities for the working-class. Kahlenberg discusses the impact of exclusionary zoning on housing affordability, social mobility, and access to essential services, highlighting the subtlety of economic discrimination compared to traditional forms of prejudice.

What this book does well is chart the expansion of zoning rules in the years after the federal Fair Housing Act that, in large part, retained the impact of racially-motivated housing convenenants and race-based zoning.

From Chapter 4 (The Meritocratic Elitism Sustains the Walls):

Wealthy white people, for the most part, are not violent in their exclusionary tactics and don’t hurl stones or bottles. What they do hurl are obscure zoning ordinances that keep people out just the same. The exclusion doesn’t take place in widely televised violent confrontations on the streets; it happens in little-noticed confines of zoning or planning board meetings.

Development in zoning laws across western Washington, including Seattle, follows the same pattern that Kahlenberg describes. For decades, white Seattleites used tools like racially restrictive covenants to exclude people of color from their neighborhoods. In the mid-1960s, Seattle voters even voted down a fair housing ordinance that would have made housing discrimination based on race illegal. Not until fair housing became a central issue after the assassination of Martin Luther King did Seattle pass a fair housing ordinance (along with state and federal laws).

Then, Seattle did what many other American communities did, as Kahlenberg writes. If it weren’t possible to exclude people of color based on race, they would erect a structurally racist system based on single-family zoning to ensure economic segregation. The concept of “downzoning” neighborhoods that used to allow a variety of housing types expanded across the region. To illustrate this, the mentions of “downzoning” in the Seattle Times archive went from zero in the 1960s to over 500 mentions in the 1970s.

In Seattle, the end result of five decades of downzoning is white-majority neighborhoods expanding across the city.

The Leschi neighborhood is a good example of how downzoning throughout the 80s and 90s excluded black neighborhoods from Seattle. One collection of blocks in the Leschi neighborhood went from over 90 percent black in the 1970s to 11 percent black today. Leschi itself was downzoned along with wide stretches of Seattle north of the ship canal in the 1960s and 70s.

The black population of King County was pushed south and out of Seattle as the white residents in downzoned neighborhoods looked for housing further and further south.

Kahlenberg also points out how the concept of single-family zoning was a central theme in fair housing debates in the 70s. HUD Secretary George Romney (and former Michigan governor) went to Warren, Michigan in 1970 to attempt to force the Detroit suburb to strike single-family zoning and allow smaller, more affordable housing types. His effort failed, his political career ended, and the civil rights organizations retrenched and fought unheralded courtroom battles over single-family zoning in the Midwest, the South, and the East Coast.

According to the NAACP, in the early 70s: the suburbs were “the new civil rights battleground” and we should do battle out in the townships and villages to lower zoning barriers and thereby create opportunities for Negroes seeking housing closer to today’s jobs at prices they can afford and pay.”

National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing (also in the early 1970s): segregation won’t stop until “local governments have been deprived of the power… to manipulate zoning and other controls to screen out families on the basis of income and, implicitly, of race.”

What we can say for sure, that our decreasing densities through downzones had very real impacts on the racial makeup of our neighborhoods.

“Excluded” underlines one of the main girders of structural racism: Well-meaning white neighbors don’t have to be racist to benefit from racist outcomes and a racist system. It also underscores the need for the huge layer of people who will tell you they are not racist but participate in racist systems, before you get to people working to dismantle racist systems.

We know the current landscape of dominant, exclusionary single-family zoning in our region happened at the same time the last tools to legally and openly discriminate in housing were taken away. We also know the nation’s leading civil rights organizations actively worked against exclusionary single-family zoning.

“Excluded” shows that our region’s history is not at all unique. We should keep that broader context of our place in history in mind as cities work to implement the state legislature’s recently created a minimum zoning standard. Local control through zoning is the tool that low-density neighborhoods used for five decades to sustain racially discriminatory impacts of city-scale zoning.

The ghost in the machine of analyzing out-of-town corporate home-ownership

June 19, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 4 Comments

Tim Gruver wrote a fantastic explanation of the issue of out-of-state and corporate home-ownership in Washington State in the Washington Observer.

His piece reminded me of a national dataset that attempts to tackle this issue at scale, something I may have overlooked when examining the Thurston County landscape. Regrid recently broke down home-ownership by census tract across the country.

What jumped out was a massive red spot on Olympia’s westside, where Regrid’s data suggested a high concentration of out-of-state ownership. But this didn’t align with what I found when looking at the top corporate single-family home owners in the county.

In fact, I found zero such owners in the tract Regrid highlighted: 105.10 on Olympia’s westside. According to their data, 30 homes in the tract exist, 23 of which are owned by people or entities with out-of-zip-code addresses.

The blue spots are residential parcels, the tract is bound by Harrison on the north, Kaiser on the west, 101, and Black Lake Boulevard on the south and east.

But using the county’s publicly available parcel data, I couldn’t find anywhere near 30 single-family homes in that census tract. In fact, 105.10 is unusual for Olympia: it has almost no single-family homes but houses a significant population in apartments, multiplexes, and mobile homes. The tract is dominated by the Capitol Mall, its sprawling parking lots, and other commercial developments. The few remaining single-family homes are remnants from when the area was rural, and there certainly aren’t 30 of them, no matter how you count.

I’ve written before about this same census tract to illustrate how single-family zoning and Olympia’s “nodes” theory of density have racially exclusionary effects on how the city grows.

So where is Regrid’s data coming from?

It might be counting units in the large mobile home park at the center of the tract. That park is owned by an Oregon-based LLC, which fits the out-of-state ownership angle. But the number of units there would be far greater than 30, and Regrid doesn’t make clear whether or how they include mobile homes in their single-family counts. Their definitions of single-family homes versus duplexes or multiplexes are vague.
They might be including several apartment complexes in the area. But again, those contain far more than 30 units.

I’m not saying Regrid’s data is useless. In fact, they identified every other hotspot I found in my own research. But calling a single-family home desert on the Westside a hotspot of out-of-town single-family ownership is a big miss.

This raises a couple of important points for me.

First, we should rely on local data when exploring these issues. In every county I’ve looked at, parcel data is free and relatively easy to access. People better at data work than me can use it to analyze ownership trends more accurately. Regrid did a good high-level overview, but without local knowledge, these types of errors are easy to make—and they matter.

Second, this reflects a framing problem I’ve had with this conversation from the beginning: the focus is almost always on single-family home ownership, not ownership of apartments or mobile homes. Yet in a tract like 105.10, those more affordable housing types are far more prevalent—and more relevant. My earlier analysis of this tract pointed to how zoning drives these disparities.

Between 2010 and 2017, both Olympia census tracts 105.10 and 105.20 (formerly combined as tract 105) saw population growth but experienced sharply different demographic shifts. Tract 105.10, which added high-density housing, grew from 1,447 to 1,887 people and became more diverse, with its white population dropping from 94% to 81%. In contrast, 105.20, which preserved single-family zoning, grew from 5,853 to 6,547 people but became whiter, with its white population increasing from 80% to 86% and losing over 200 nonwhite residents. While both tracts grew, only the one that allowed denser development saw a meaningful increase in racial diversity.

We tend to worry more about out-of-state corporations owning single-family homes than apartment complexes, reflecting a bias that single-family homes should be owner-occupied while apartments are expected to be corporate-owned. This mindset overlooks the fact that most large apartment complexes in Thurston County are already owned by distant investors, yet draw little concern. The selective outrage suggests a deeper cultural attachment to the idea of home-ownership as a marker of community belonging and stability.

Even saying “corporate home-ownership” is coded language for single-family homes. We know we don’t mean apartments or mobile homes when we say it.

While corporate ownership does raise real concerns, like pricing out local workers, it’s worth questioning why we reserve our alarm for certain types of housing and not others.

Ending the Oregon Trail

June 14, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

One of my favorite aspects of Pacific Northwest history is the quiet debate about where the Oregon Trail “ended.” Like polite Cascadians, we tend to avoid direct confrontation on the issue, yet more than one city lays claim to the distinction.

Oregon City arguably has the strongest claim, if only because of its museum and the numerous related activities held there.

Olympia also presents a case, being further along the trail and boasting a monument. Over 100 years ago, the Daughters of the American Revolution placed markers along the trail in Washington State, ending in downtown Olymia. We even have a street that follows the old route from Tumwater north into the city, aptly named “Old Oregon Trail.”

Puyallup, home to the most prominent Oregon Trail marker promoter, offers a dark horse entry. Ezra Meeker did more than anyone else to promote the preservation of the trail’s memory. The marker outside his home in Puyallup signifies the starting point of his backward retracing of the Oregon Trail in 1906. Therefore, if he retraced his steps back east, his house could be considered the end.

However, this leads to a larger philosophical argument about trails and their true termination points. The Oregon Trail ended for each family and migrant who put down roots, often displacing the people who already lived here, and began reshaping the landscape to their will.

Technically speaking, the trail north of the Columbia River wasn’t the Oregon Trail, it was the Cowlitz Trail. The Daughters of the American Revolution probably knew this, but retained the “Oregon Trail” moniker to maintain attention on their project of placing markers from the Columbia River to Olympia. Who really needed to mark the end of the Cowlitz Trail when it was so much easier to make and place markers for the more famous Oregon Trail? Ultimately, the Oregon Trail ended wherever any family decided to end it for themselves.

This perspective considers only the dimensions of longitude and latitude.

In terms of time, the Oregon Trail effectively ended when railroads became the most economical way to colonize the Pacific Northwest. The first transcontinental railroad connection to the West Coast opened in 1869, making rail travel to California and then boat travel to the Columbia and Puget Sound much more efficient. In 1883, this line was finally extended, and the Northern Pacific also tied in.

The Oregon Trail primarily mattered to one particular type of Pacific Northwest resident: the displaced Appalachian. Descendants of Scots-Irish people, pushed out of Scotland, into Northern Ireland, and then into the mountain regions west of the east coast, were the biggest beneficiaries of the Oregon Trail. In contrast, railroads and ships brought New Englanders focused on resource extraction and commerce. This juxtaposition, farming versus logging, represents the defining political and cultural conflict within the colonial society on the ocean side of the mountains, stretching from Whatcom County down to some point near central California. (For a deeper dive into this, I recommend Colin Woodard’s American Nations.)

But this still doesn’t fully address our core question: What is the true end of the Oregon Trail?

It ends when we say it ends. Meeker’s journeys to mark the trail itself were an effort to keep the trail, or at least the memory of its mission, alive. History serves as a reminder of our mission, our culture. Marking the trail reminds us that our goal was to transplant our folkways from our previous homes and expand them into this new place.

Ending the Oregon Trail would mean acknowledging this history, but then moving forward toward justice. Our mission up to this point has not been fair, especially to the people who were here before we arrived. Neither the Appalachians nor the New Englanders who arrived by boat were interested, by and large, in justice for the society they displaced or the lives of the people of color they exploited while seeking prosperity.

So, in this way, we are very much still on the Oregon Trail. The Oregon Trail continues today, for everyone stepping out of SeaTac looking for a new mailing address. We are going to continue welcoming new residents; that isn’t in question. What is in question is the society they come into and our values.

Our history is not a static destination. It is a continuous journey shaped by human choices and evolving needs. Just as the trail concluded differently for each family seeking a new beginning, our understanding of our legacy must adapt. To acknowledge the end of the Oregon Trail, in all its varied forms, is not to diminish its historical significance but to recognize its complex and often challenging impact, particularly on the Indigenous communities whose lands were reshaped and lives uprooted by this influx of newcomers.

True historical understanding encourages us to embrace adaptation and growth, ensuring that our reverence for the past does not hinder our ability to address the pressing needs and challenges of today, fostering a society that reflects the values of inclusivity and justice for all who call the Pacific Northwest home.

Ultimately, the “end” of the Oregon Trail lies in how we choose to build our communities and welcome new residents today. It’s a question of whether we allow a rigid adherence to a past vision to limit our collective progress, or if we embrace an understanding of our heritage that prioritizes inclusivity, adaptability, and justice for all who live here now and in the future. The memory of the trail can serve as a powerful reminder of our capacity for change and our ongoing mission to forge a more equitable society, moving beyond simply marking a route to truly understanding its enduring consequences.

The Unsoeld of MGP’s Wendell Berry

May 31, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

I’m old enough and have been around long enough to remember when Rep. Brian Baird toured local Democratic organizations to personally explain his support for the surge in Iraq toward the end of the George W. Bush presidency. Baird had been one of the few Democrats to take a principled stand against much of the post-9/11 reaction. But after firsthand experience in Iraq, he changed his position and decided to support the surge in late summer 2007.

I remember a small afternoon meeting between Baird and the leadership of the Thurston County Democratic Party (of which I was a minor part). This was followed by a larger, heated gathering at Capital High School weeks later where he was grilled by attendees.

I bring up this bit of history because there’s been a lot of recent talk about Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and how she often cuts against the grain of national Democratic politics. But the Washington Third Congressional District has a history of electing Democratic representatives who do just that.

Since the 1980s, when national politics began to overtake regional identities, Washington’s 3rd District has elected three Democratic members of Congress, each with their own version of iconoclasm. Instead of being standard-bearers for a national party line, they’ve often resembled regional throwbacks, like a Yellow Dog Democrat from the South or a progressive Republican from the North.

Let’s go all the way back to Jolene Unsoeld, an Olympian who served in Congress after Don Bonker (a pro-logging, pro-labor, post-Nixon Democrat) and lost her seat in the 1994 Republican wave.

Unsoeld got her start in politics pushing for open government, leading the campaign for the initiative creating Washington’s campaign finance disclosure system. She entered office as an outsider and, in many ways, stayed that way, even while in Congress. Known for her deep convictions and distaste for spin and backroom deals, she routinely defied party expectations.

Her stance on guns was emblematic of this independence. In the state legislature, she supported moderate gun control, backing a bill that let police revoke concealed weapons permits from those convicted of carrying while intoxicated. But in Congress, her approach shifted. She opposed a blanket assault weapons ban, instead proposing a more targeted amendment to limit only imported assault weapons.

This frustrated progressives in her base, especially in Thurston County, who saw it as a betrayal. But her decision reflected a balance between her liberal values and a libertarian skepticism of federal overreach, one that aligned with many rural constituents.

Linda Smith, a hardline small-government conservative, defeated Unsoeld in 1994. When Smith ran for Senate in 1998, Brian Baird swept in and won the seat by ten points, after nearly unseating her two years earlier by fewer than 1,000 votes.

Baird’s own iconoclasm became clearest in his stance on the Iraq War. Like many Democrats, he initially opposed the 2003 invasion. But after visiting Iraq in 2007 and observing the U.S. military surge firsthand, he reversed his position, arguing that the strategy was working and that pulling out too early could lead to further chaos.

This change put him at odds with most of his party and with anti-war activists who had previously supported him. He defended the shift by saying it was grounded in evidence and experience, not ideology or political pressure. His support for the surge, he said, wasn’t about justifying the invasion but about honoring a moral obligation to reduce harm.

A year later, Baird’s independence cut the opposite way in foreign policy. After the 2008–2009 Gaza War, he was the first U.S. official in over three years to enter the Gaza Strip. Acting without the Obama administration’s approval, he publicly condemned the humanitarian devastation caused by Israeli military actions, calling the destruction “shocking and troubling beyond words.”

Baird even suggested that U.S. military aid to Israel should be used as leverage to change Israeli policy, a position almost unheard of in Congress. Few lawmakers were willing to even broach the idea of conditioning aid to Israel. But Baird did, again based on what he had seen for himself.

Which brings us to Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez.

There are two particularly thoughtful pieces of writing about her I recommend: one by Warren Neth and another in Lower Columbia Currents.

A couple of quotes I want to pull out. First, from Neth:

Gluesenkamp Perez didn’t win by mimicking Trump, nor by abandoning the core of left economic values. She won by being real. But there’s a cautionary tale here: even candidates with deep working-class resonance risk losing their edge if they’re folded too neatly into establishment politics.

If Perez is Trump’s kryptonite, it’s because she offers a materially grounded, culturally fluent alternative to the right-wing populism that dominates districts like hers. But kryptonite doesn’t work if it’s locked away in an iron box.

Then from Currents:

It’s true that MGP defies stereotypes. The daughter of a Texas preacher who attended liberal Reed College and who co-owns a Portland auto repair shop, she’s equally comfortable quoting scripture and dropping “F” bombs.

On one hand, she shares progressive views on abortion, LGBTQ+ rights and access to childcare. But she take conservative positions on gun rights and supports the timber industry. (A well-used 1950s chain saw hangs in her congressional office.)

But before we get too deep, it’s important to note that Olympia is no longer in the 3rd District. After the 2010 redistricting, WA-10 was created and carved Olympia into a Pierce County-centric district, leaving only a conservative southern slice of Thurston County in WA-3. That slice got even smaller in 2020.

This matters. Brian Baird used to win the district with over 60% of the vote. In the post-9/11 2002 election, his Republican opponent only got 38%. The district Gluesenkamp Perez represents today is much more conservative and significantly more rural.

And politics themselves have changed. Readers of this blog should remember that Rep. Albert Johnson once represented WA-3 in Congress. Johnson is a significant and dark figure in Washington and American history. His eugenics-driven immigration policies were a direct translation of Washington’s own racist legacy, one designed to exclude anyone but white people from the economy.

The worldview of Albert Johnson has found new life in the Stephen Miller wing of today’s Republican Party. Gluesenkamp Perez’s politics cut directly against this foundation, focusing instead on the root economic insecurities that fuel movements like those of Johnson and Miller.

It is worth taking time to pull back the zoom lens on the day-to-day, vote-to-vote politics around her and take a look at her broader beliefs. Congressional politics, by default, are built around the bricks made available by the votes she needs to take. But her actual politics are deeper and different. Her recent interview with Ezra Klein cuts deeper into her personal politics and includes several standout moments:

On the “dignity and indignity” of work: She challenges a cultural hierarchy that devalues manual labor and glorifies office work, calling this mindset “deeply toxic.” She argues that people want to be useful and self-realized without needing a college degree, and that multiple forms of intelligence deserve respect.
On tariffs and domestic production: She acknowledges that tariffs can be misused, but sees them as potentially productive tools to encourage local manufacturing. She points to Canadian lumber dumping as a factor in the loss of local mills. (While I didn’t cite Don Bonker as an iconoclast earlier, it’s worth noting that he launched his national political career fighting raw log exports, which he saw as harmful to local jobs.)
On small-scale localism: Her economic vision centers on local self-determination, durable production, and skilled trades over cheap consumption. She advocates for policies that help people own property, build long-lasting products, and reclaim practical stewardship of resources. Her environmentalism is rooted in local realities, not just consumer choices.

This isn’t the kind of rhetoric you usually hear from a seasoned politician. It’s more like someone who just discovered Wendell Berry. And while Unsoeld and Baird ran against the grain of national politics in their own ways, Gluesenkamp Perez does so even more starkly, and necessarily, given the changing realities of both her district and our broader political landscape.

But in a lot of ways, Gluesenkamp Perez is a throwback to a form of Democratic politics that once thrived in resource- and industry-dependent regions like Southwest Washington. The idea that the economy should serve the people is hardly a radical stance in that tradition. What’s striking, though, is how deeply rooted her views are in a broader rethinking of how the economy is organized. Her politics aren’t just about protecting jobs; they’re about recentering economic life around human dignity, local resilience, and self-determination. That kind of economic vision, grounded in the lived experiences of tradespeople and rural communities, is rare in today’s national political landscape, and maybe exactly what the national discourse needs.

Olyblog traffic dies when Facebook shows up.

When enshittification comes for your town

May 24, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

This started as a simple essay about why we shouldn’t be diving headfirst into the black hole of a “link tax” to fund journalism.

So let’s start there: link taxes are bad policy.

Especially when considering the alternative, a digital ad tax that funds journalism. I would write a straight-up op-ed about how link taxes are a disaster and digital ad taxes are a cleaner, smarter fix. But then, as I wrote it, this essay kind of veered off course.

We haven’t considered a link tax in Washington, but a lot of the rhetoric around our journalism funding has adopted link tax framing. Oregon is considering a link tax, though. And California just showed how the link tax debate can derail any hope of actually shifting money from digital platforms to journalism.

Link taxes prop up platforms. They accept the smug assumption that platforms benefit from real journalism, and therefore should be forced to pay for linking to it. In the era of Shrimp Jesus and AI-generated sludge, Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t need your 3,000-word explainer on the local government budget crisis. He just needs eyeballs, clicks, and outrage.

A digital ad tax, on the other hand, is like a sin tax. It exists whether or not Facebook will allow users to link to news reporting. If you’re a smart marketer, you’re buying ads from Meta, Google, or some massive programmatic ad exchange. These companies have systematically cut new publishers out of the ad revenue stream, building ad empires that strip-mine value from communities that once supported journalism.

They don’t need to link to journalism to pay, they pay because their business model is the problem. And with a tax, we can peel off a sliver of that revenue to buy pizza for reporters. Or, you know, pay their actual wages. Or, and here’s where it gets interesting, fund moderators of online forums.

This is where the essay went sideways. I started thinking about how we got here.

For years after about 2008 or so, people who made money writing things contorted themselves trying to perform well in the social newsfeed. We all did it, even the newspapers. We started chasing clicks from social platforms, hoping they would translate into eyeballs, and in the case of news publishers, ad revenue. All the while, the social platforms were building ad empires. So it’s pretty ironic now to hear that social platforms “stole” content, when the very same newsrooms were hiring social media engagement specialists to crack the newsfeed algorithm to go viral.

We messed up. We poured energy into platforms that contribute nothing to our communities. My particular sin? Facebook and the death of Olyblog.

In my case, the biggest victim of the Facebook newsfeed was Olyblog. It launched 20 years ago as a hyperlocal community blog, the kind of thing that would now exist as a Facebook group or maybe a subreddit. It thrived from 2005 to 2008, then imploded in a mix of interpersonal drama and everyone just migrating to Facebook. The traffic to Olyblog fell through the floor two years after Facebook opened to the broader public and revised the news feed to become most like what it is today.

These days, I’m basically off Facebook. I’ve iced both my Instagram and Facebook accounts, no new posts, only logging in when absolutely necessary. I was disappointed that more people didn’t bail when Facebook took its latest nosedive earlier this year.

Over the past four years, I’ve been in the trenches of a local fight against election disinformation. I’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about what I put into the world, and I chose to cut harmful, algorithmic media out of my life. That meant not engaging on Facebook, even when it was the easiest option. In balance, I’ve moved to Bluesky, Mastodon, and an RSS feed reader. But microblogging is not a replacement for community blogs or Facebook groups.

So the band plays on. I was disappointed when a new crop of Democratic Party organizers in Thurston County launched yet another Facebook group. But really, I’m not disappointed in them. I’m disappointed that this is still the only viable option for online organizing. I didn’t offer to do the hard work of building an alternative, so I can’t fault them. But I can recognize the gap between the world I want and the world we live in.

In Thurston County, Facebook is where the people are. But it’s a toxic place, one that encourages content that enrages rather than content that solves problems.

Cory Doctorow talks about this process as “enshittification,” how digital platforms gradually turn against every user group they once courted, until we’re all stuck. They ratchet up the costs of leaving until we feel like we can’t go because everyone else is still there.

That’s exactly what’s happened here. Traditional media has been gutted by market forces and corporate consolidation. What’s left is small, siloed audiences mostly hanging out on Facebook. KGY doesn’t really do news anymore, but I remember when Doug Adamson was standing on the back of a truck, mic in hand, giving live updates during a May Day protest. Now, the Olympian is down to a skeleton crew. Meanwhile, the Thurston County Scanner Facebook page pumps out crime updates to a captive Facebook-only audience and pulls better metrics than anyone else around. But because it lives entirely on Facebook, it’s at the mercy of the algorithm.

Anyway, hard pivot, let’s get back to the digital ad tax.

Washington State actually passed one this year. It might get challenged in court (like Maryland’s did), and it doesn’t have any earmarked spending. The money just drops into the general fund. But if it survives, and if we can steer that revenue toward something meaningful, we need to think beyond just giving grants to newsrooms.

Don’t get me wrong, local journalism absolutely deserves public support. But there’s also a growing need to support local online communities that aren’t traditional news outlets.

Think of these online spaces like we think of libraries.

Take Front Porch Forum in New England. Or New_Public’s Local Lab, which is building an open-source platform for healthier town-based online spaces, alternatives to the rage-fueled mess of Facebook Groups and Nextdoor. Their goal is to support and pay local “stewards” to manage these communities. Move beyond toxic algorithms. Highlight high-quality local content. Create sustainable, public-good platforms.

We share ourselves and our lives online for free. We absolutely need more professional journalists reporting on local issues. But we also need to reclaim the connective power of the internet from the corporations that have hijacked it.

A digital ad tax is like taxing cigarettes. Algorithmic ad tech is sucking money out of Olympia and funneling it into corporations that don’t care about our community. Just skimming a little off the top could fund reporters, build home-grown platforms, and pay community moderators.

Olympia ’57 and the Arts Walk we always needed

May 17, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Walking through downtown Olympia during Arts Walk this spring, I was struck by a realization:

Arts Walk has become what Lakefair was originally intended to be: a human-centered festival that brings people downtown and supports local businesses. What began in 1957 as a strategic effort by downtown retailers to draw shoppers back from the emerging suburban fringe has evolved, ironically, into something that now seems to conflict with its original purpose. Meanwhile, Arts Walk (especially the spring edition) has stepped into that role and done it better.

The first Lakefair took place just seven years after the Deschutes River was dammed to create Capitol Lake. Back then, Tumwater as a town stopped short of the Trosper and I-5 cloverleaf, Lacey barely extended beyond a few blocks around the St. Martin’s College campus, and Olympia’s downtown was the regional commercial hub. An aerial photo from 1957 shows a very different city. There’s no westside sprawl, no South Sound Center, no Capital Mall. Interstate 5 is only beginning to cut its path through the city. The southeast side is still a patchwork of empty fields. Downtown was everything.

Lakefair was born into that moment. The lake was new, a kind of novelty. We hadn’t built any parks around it, and people could still remember the squalor of the Depression era shanty town, Little Hollywood, the lake was meant to replace. Downtown retailers felt threatened by the spread of car-centric shopping centers to the south and west, and Lakefair was their answer: a family-friendly summer celebration rooted in Olympia’s historic center.

But the tide couldn’t be held back. By the 1980s, the construction of Capital Mall and South Sound Center pulled national retailers out of downtown. As rents dropped, local and niche businesses moved in. Downtown shrank in economic dominance, but it found something more interesting: being an actual human-scaled neighborhood. By going down, downtown Olympia grew up.

Lakefair, however, didn’t adapt. It stayed focused on big crowds and spectacle. It became a regional summer draw, people come in from Tumwater, Lacey, and the westside not to experience downtown but to experience the event. Today, the foot traffic is enormous, but not helpful. If you talk to people who live and work near downtown, many will say they avoid Lakefair. Ironically, the further someone lives from downtown, the more likely they are to enjoy it, because for some, it’s the only time they come. For those who frequent downtown, Lakefair is an interruption.

Compare that to Arts Walk. It’s right-sized. Embedded in the streets. Both the Friday night Luminary Procession and the Saturday Procession of the Species invite people not just to gather, but to stroll, to explore, and to be downtown. These events don’t shut down the regular rhythm of the neighborhood; they highlight it. Arts Walk brings people face-to-face with small businesses, galleries, performers, and each other. It’s not a performance to be watched from the sidelines; it’s an experience shared from within.

The seasonal timing is meaningful. Lakefair is scheduled for the height of Cascadian summer, long days, hot sun, and school-free weeks. But Arts Walk arrives at the beginning and end of the softer season. Spring Arts Walk, in particular, feels like a true civic ritual: the reawakening of our community after a long winter and a downtown that’s still very much alive.

Lakefair has also changed in ways that move it further from its roots. Food booths once reserved for nonprofits are now open to commercial vendors. Local nonprofits increasingly struggle to justify the effort and expense of participating. And though the Twilight Parade still winds its way through the city, it mirrors the spirit of Arts Walk’s two processions, just with a different energy: one is lighthearted and grassroots; the other, more grand and nostalgic.

There’s a larger parallel here, too. Just as Lakefair took its name and identity from the artificial lake at the city’s core, it may now face a similar fate. Capitol Lake, long celebrated as a civic centerpiece, has been revealed as ecologically harmful—shallow, warm, and lifeless. The planned restoration of the Deschutes Estuary will undo that mid-century engineering mistake, trading a static reservoir for a living tidal system. Something more natural. More fitting.

In the same way, Arts Walk fits Olympia. It flows through the streets, not around them. It thrives not in designated festival zones but in the storefronts, sidewalks, and alleys that make downtown what it is. If Lakefair is to survive in a post-lake Olympia, it can return to its roots. Maybe even borrow a few pages from Arts Walk. Move into the streets. Shrink the footprint. Reconnect with the businesses and people downtown.

I’m not a Lakefair hater. I have fond memories, and I go down there for at least two nights a year for rides, food and fireworks. I know many in our community still love Lakefair, too. But festivals should serve the places they’re held. Arts Walk has become Olympia’s true local celebration, reflecting how we live now, not how we used to.

We are struggling as a city to recover from years of car-dependent development. Most of the square miles of today’s Olympia have no actual places to walk to, we need to get into our cars for everything. The single-family zoning that dominates the landscape removed the housing capacity that used to, more or less, assure everyone had something to call a home. We’re working now to create more density, more actual businesses in our neighborhoods. More sidewalks and more reasons to use them. Call it creating more “people-oriented places” or just human-scale, but looking at what Lakefair was born to fight is actually where our future should be taking us.

Facing the soft xenophobia of Emmett Watson

May 10, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

Governor Tom McCall of Oregon and Emmett Watson, the Seattle newspaper columnist I’m pretty sure my parents named me after, occupy a distinct corner of Pacific Northwest history. Both stood (figuratively and, at one point, literally) on the border of our region and asked people not to move here.

But in doing so, they provided air cover for a kind of xenophobic politics that helped cities across the region lower their density limits. Decades later, this became a fatal flaw in our politics and society.

Watson’s approach, from the 1960s through the 1990s, was often humorous and irreverent. He aimed to preserve Seattle’s unique, somewhat quirky character in the face of rapid growth and the perceived homogenization brought by newcomers and big development. He created the fictitious organization “Lesser Seattle” and its mock intelligence arm, “Keep the Bastards Out” (KBO), as playful rebukes to the ambitions of the real “Greater Seattle” boosters and Chamber of Commerce types.

McCall’s message, especially his famous “Visit but don’t stay,” was more direct and environmentally focused. Though charismatic and good with a soundbite, his core concern was growth management to protect Oregon’s environment. His message had broad implications for potential transplants, but his justification was rooted in ecological preservation more than the cultural anxiety that animated Watson.

Watson was definitely funny. And McCall, to Oregonians, was inspiring. But let’s focus on Watson, his impact on our culture, and most importantly, his jokes. He made sure to say that Lesser Seattle and KBO were fictitious, anyone could be the chair, and it was all just a joke.

But the joke was the power.

Jokes are gateways. Seemingly harmless humor targeting certain ideas can desensitize people and create a climate where more extreme rhetoric becomes acceptable. The humor acts as social lubricant, lowering defenses and making strong beliefs sound less shocking.

That’s exactly what happened in our Seattle-centric, Western Washington community. Watson would be cited again and again in letters to the editor as a humorous canary in the coal mine about growth.

Meanwhile, during the same period Watson was writing in earnest, city after city and neighborhood after neighborhood sought and received downzones: larger minimum lot sizes, bans on anything larger than single-family homes, all in the name of “preserving character” and controlling growth.

And again, we don’t need racist intent to have racist outcomes. These local zoning rules, implemented from the 1970s onward, pushed Black families out of whole neighborhoods in Seattle as white homeowners who benefited from post-World War economic growth looked for housing and drove up property values. In Olympia, we have whiter, less populated neighborhoods because we didn’t allow them to grow.

During the same period that Emmett Watson was playfully advocating for “Lesser Seattle” and the fictional “Keep the Bastards Out,” national media narratives were also shaping perceptions of Seattle in the context of racial tensions elsewhere. James Lyons points out in “Selling Seattle,” that following the Los Angeles riots in 1992, Seattle was increasingly portrayed as a desirable and safe haven for white middle-class professionals, a “white oasis” in contrast to the perceived urban decay and racial unrest of cities like Los Angeles. This media framing, while not explicitly espousing exclusionary policies, subtly reinforced an image of Seattle’s whiteness that was protected by exclusionary zoning, as a positive attribute, potentially providing an unconscious backdrop for the further arguments for downzoning that would later exacerbate our housing crisis.

Watson tried to turn serious when talking to author Jonathan Raban late in his career. He started with a joke about the unseriousness of the Lesser Seattle movement, but pivoted to argue for downzoning and neighborhood character, zoning as a tool for protection. Raban, who had moved to Seattle as an already well-known writer and quickly became one of its most insightful and loving critics, pushed back. His words ring even truer now as we try to reverse the policies that led to today’s housing crisis: “…I am very skeptical about zoning laws and many forms of planning. You see, cities have their own organic existence. They evolve naturally as the years go by.”

The fatal error in Watson’s and McCall’s thinking was that California (already experiencing population growth pressure from immigration and a booming economy in the 1960s and ’70s) started ratcheting down zoning density before Oregon and Washington did.

The increased housing costs cited by Cascadian slow-growthers as proof of California’s “insanity” were not a symptom of too much growth, but of housing scarcity. And in response, we put the same shackles on ourselves: cutting housing production, driving up home prices and rents, and contributing to a coast-wide homelessness crisis.

One of the most hilarious twists in this story? McCall and Watson weren’t even revolutionary. They were just the latest copy of a long Cascadian tradition: the impulse to shut the door behind you.

We don’t even need to go back to overtly racist policy to see the pattern. Take an early political race. Michael T. Simmons, arguably the first American to settle in what’s now Western Washington, co-founded Tumwater and led an overland party that arrived when the only competition was Indigenous tribes and the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Just a decade after his 1845 arrival, Simmons ran for congressional delegate as an independent. His main issue? That too many “newcomers” were taking over local political parties and that the “old settlers” needed a voice to preserve their history.

He’d been here ten years. And already, Simmons was the “old settler.”

After SB 5400’s first run and the future of the debate over public media in Washington State

May 3, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

SB 5400 was a significant piece of proposed legislation. It envisioned a state-funded grant program that could have provided crucial support to journalism organizations.

However, the bill didn’t make it past the Senate Fiscal Committee, preventing it from reaching the Rules Committee and subsequently the Senate floor. As a fiscal bill, there was always a possibility of its sudden reappearance, but that didn’t happen.

One of the most encouraging aspects of any bill, including this one, is the community of support that rallies around it. In this case, the wide range of individuals and groups who testified in favor of SB 5400 presents a valuable opportunity to organize and advocate for more profound reform of public media in Washington State, especially as federal support diminishes.

Surprisingly, the most impactful development regarding public media in Washington State was the unexpected creation of a digital ad tax, an idea I suggested in my original testimony supporting SB 5400.

This development apparently stemmed from Governor Ferguson’s resistance to a general wealth tax, which led the legislature to seek alternative revenue sources.

Digital Ad Tax

Washington lawmakers passed SB 5814, a bill that imposes state and local sales taxes on a broad spectrum of advertising services. This includes digital ad creation, campaign planning, performance analytics, and online ad placement.

The tax aims to generate revenue by treating advertising services similarly to other taxable professional services. The bill defines “advertising services” broadly but specifically exempts those offered to newspapers, broadcasters, and billboard advertisers.

I’ve encountered criticism suggesting that our tax will “suffer the same fate” as Maryland’s pioneering digital ad tax. However, this seems like unwarranted pessimism, as Maryland’s ad tax appears to be faring well in its legal challenges.

It’s worth noting that Maryland’s digital ad tax has performed favorably in the courts so far, winning its only decision to date.

Last summer, a federal judge in Baltimore dismissed a First Amendment challenge to Maryland’s Digital Advertising Tax Act (DATA), which taxes digital advertising revenue. U.S. District Judge Lydia Kay Griggsby ruled that the plaintiffs, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and major tech trade groups, failed to demonstrate that the law’s prohibition on passing the tax on to customers through line-item fees or surcharges was broadly unconstitutional. She emphasized that the law had numerous constitutional applications and therefore did not violate the First Amendment on its face.

This decision followed earlier dismissals of other legal claims against the law, including those based on the Internet Tax Freedom Act and the Commerce Clause. Despite the court’s repeated upholding of the tax, tech companies continue to challenge it in Maryland’s Tax Court, hoping for a favorable ruling by fall.

Fundamentally, a digital ad tax addresses the core of the journalism crisis. Legacy publishers, particularly local newspapers, have overwhelmingly lost the advertising battle against online ad technology. Giants like Google and Meta, in particular, have used monopolistic tactics to dominate the entire advertising ecosystem, making it difficult for marketers to make sound business decisions while also supporting journalism.

Aside from dismantling the ad tech monopolies (which I will discuss later), taxing their perceived ill-gotten gains for the public good is the next most logical step for a state government lacking monopoly enforcement power. While the revenue from this tax isn’t currently earmarked for supporting public media, that’s a focus we can pursue in the future.

Change in Rhetoric

The most disappointing aspect of SB 5400’s journey was the noticeable shift in rhetoric among its supporters during the second public hearing and afterward. I began to see proponents argue that users posting links to news stories on social media platforms somehow constituted theft by these companies. The League of Women Voters’ summary of the second SB 5400 hearing stated: “(Tech giants are)..taking content the outlets produce without providing compensation and by siphoning off critical ad revenue from them.”

While the second part of this statement is true (they are indeed harming journalism by capturing ad revenue), the narrative surrounding “taking content” significantly misses the mark and establishes a policy objective I find deeply problematic.

This is the same rhetoric I’ve seen used to justify a link tax, similar to the California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA).

Jeff Jarvis offered an excellent critique of the failed California link tax. He argues that the premise behind the CJPA and similar legislation is the false notion that linking to and quoting news constitutes theft. In reality, links benefit publishers by driving audience to their content, acting as free promotion. These laws fail to acknowledge the value that platforms’ links provide to publishers.

If platforms benefit from links to journalism, why did Meta reduce links to hard news in 2023?

Jarvis also emphasizes that links are fundamental to the internet’s architecture, enabling conversation, community, commerce, and collaboration. He agrees with Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, who testified that charging for links undermines the principle of free linking and could render the web unworkable. Vint Cerf, another internet pioneer, also stated that requiring payment for links undermines the internet’s fundamental principles. He concludes that making links a bargaining chip ill-serves users and citizens and that a link tax could fragment the web, isolating California’s internet from the rest of the world.

When the link tax was debated in California, it created a division among supporters of public media, pitting for-profit legacy media, especially newspapers, against largely digital non-profit upstarts.

Without a united front, we are likely to see corporate interests prevail, as they did in California, where they essentially created a donation scheme instead of meaningful public media support.

Here are two other takes on links taxes that are worth your time:

Why Link Taxes Like Canada’s C-18 Represent An End To An Open Web

Why Google and Facebook Don’t Owe Publishers $14 Billion a Year

Google Ad Case

I want to briefly acknowledge that the once-distant possibility of the federal government breaking up ad tech monopolies may be drawing closer. Amidst all of this legislative action, a federal court ruled that Google is indeed a monopolistic actor in digital advertising.

A federal judge determined that Google unlawfully monopolized key digital advertising markets, specifically the Publisher Ad Server and Ad Exchange sectors, violating Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act. The Department of Justice and 17 states alleged that Google employed exclusionary practices to stifle competition and maintain its dominance. The court agreed, finding that Google harmed rivals and limited publisher choice, but rejected a claim related to advertiser ad networks due to a lack of market definition.

The court will consider remedies next fall, with the DOJ likely seeking structural separation and behavioral restrictions, such as prohibiting self-preferencing. Judicial oversight is also anticipated.

Back to the Link Tax

A link tax system implicitly assumes that the ad tech monopoly held by Meta, Google, and other large programmatic systems will persist and that news organizations will be content with receiving a small portion of the revenue to keep journalists employed.

The true objective should be to dismantle the ad tech monopolists and enable publishers of all kinds to sell their own advertisements without any single organization controlling the entire ad tech stack. Failing this, taxing revenue from online ads and distributing it to support journalism is a much more direct policy approach.

Why are legacy media outlets more inclined to support a system that allows monopolies to endure? Why are newspapers specifically seemingly okay with monopolistic behavior, as long as it provides financial support?

Because they have been in the past.

Consider the Joint Operating Agreements (JOAs) of the 1970s, which supported journalism by creating local monopolies.

Joint Operating Agreements (JOAs) were effectively exceptions to U.S. anti-monopoly (antitrust) law, established through the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970. These agreements allowed two competing newspapers in the same city to merge their business operations while maintaining independent editorial control. Typically, such collaboration between competitors (on printing, distribution, advertising sales, and other business functions) would violate antitrust laws designed to prevent collusion and preserve market competition.

Here’s how JOAs functioned as legal exceptions to monopoly laws:

Under traditional antitrust law, direct competitors cannot legally combine business operations (like ad sales or production) because it reduces competition, risks price-fixing, and often leads to monopolies. Such behavior would typically be considered anti-competitive under the Sherman Act or Clayton Act.

The Newspaper Preservation Act (NPA) specifically exempted newspapers from antitrust enforcement in certain cases. Lawmakers argued that the decline of newspaper circulation, especially in evening editions, meant that in many cities, only one paper would survive unless cost-cutting measures were allowed. The Act permitted competing newspapers to enter a JOA that pooled their business functions but maintained distinct editorial voices.

As documented in “The Chain Gang,” the era of JOAs was also marked by the decline of smaller newspapers that tried to operate alongside growing national chains, often aided by JOAs. During that time, local newspaper giants used predatory pricing, exclusive advertising deals, and the spread of false rumors to eliminate smaller rivals.

While the Act was intended to protect small or struggling papers from closure, critics argue that large media chains benefited the most, often absorbing or outlasting local competitors within JOAs. Over time, many JOAs dissolved as readership declined, digital media grew, and chain consolidation continued. In several cases, the supposedly “competing” papers ended up under shared ownership or folded entirely.

The Act created a rare legal space where business collaboration between competitors was explicitly allowed—a direct exception to the norm of antitrust enforcement. However, instead of safeguarding editorial diversity in the long run, the result was often further media consolidation and the eventual disappearance of the very newspapers the law aimed to protect.

If we continue down the path of proposing a link tax, the likely outcome is a deal that no one on the pro-journalism side desires and that primarily benefits the tech giants.

After journalism advocates disagreed over approaches (dividing their efforts between a link tax and a digital extraction tax), tech giants found a backdoor. A closed-door agreement between California lawmakers and Google to support local journalism fell short of expectations, benefiting Google by shelving more impactful legislation in exchange for a comparatively small financial commitment. This agreement has been widely condemned by journalists, community publishers, and advocates who argue that the funding is insufficient, lacks focus on localism and diversity (especially for ethnic media), and includes unrelated initiatives like an AI accelerator.

By prioritizing a less burdensome solution for the tech giant over the significant needs of a struggling local news ecosystem, the deal leaves many supporters of journalism feeling disappointed and under-served. The outcome underscores the power imbalance between Big Tech and community voices in shaping policies related to the future of news.

Therefore, when we revisit the idea of public media in Washington next year, the focus should be on unifying the potential division developing between the different approaches.

Who could own what and who owned what

April 26, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Sometimes I have an idea (like a few weeks ago) to figure something out, put together a research plan, execute it, and still come up seriously short. That’s exactly what happened the last couple of weeks as I tried to dig into the Alien Land Law and how it worked in Olympia.

One piece of our particular brand of Pacific Northwest racism that I left out of my post a few weeks back was, of course, the Alien Land Law. It existed for nearly our entire history, lasting until 1966, and undergirded much of how we treated racial minorities in the Pacific Northwest.

Long Background on Alien Land Laws

The Alien Land Law in Washington State, rooted in the state 1889 constitution and subsequent legislation, prohibited land ownership by residents ineligible for citizenship. Though seemingly race-neutral in its language, its primary aim was to disenfranchise non-white immigrants, particularly Chinese and Japanese individuals.

Initially, territorial law encouraged non-citizen land ownership to attract white settlers and foreign investment. However, economic anxieties among white laborers and farmers, combined with a rising tide of anti-Chinese sentiment, soon led to laws restricting land ownership for those deemed “ineligible to citizenship,” effectively targeting Asian immigrants who were barred from naturalization under federal law. Later iterations of the law focused even more directly on Japanese immigrants, further restricting their ability to lease or even hold land through their American-born children.

The question I had was: if the laws in Washington forbade Chinese and Japanese families from owning land, how did they operate businesses in Olympia during this era? The Olympia Historical Society points out that dozens of businesses across Olympia were operated by Asian families, though apparently not controlling the land underneath the businesses.

One method involved leveraging their U.S.-born children, which leads us into a reflection on today’s debates about the 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship.

Washington State’s Alien Land Laws initially targeted non-citizen land ownership, focusing primarily on Chinese and later Japanese immigrants. While the original laws didn’t explicitly address land ownership by the U.S.-born children of these immigrants—who were birthright citizens under the 14th Amendment, a loophole soon emerged. Families began purchasing land in their children’s names, allowing parents barred from owning property to indirectly control it through their citizen offspring.

In response, the legislature passed additional laws, notably in 1923, specifically stating that land held in the name of a child of an ineligible alien would be considered held in trust for the parent, effectively closing the loophole. In 1925, the Washington State Supreme Court case State v. Hirabayashi reinforced this interpretation, ruling against the transfer of land-holding stock to second-generation Japanese American children when their parents retained control, deeming it an evasion of the Alien Land Law.

This situation created a direct conflict with the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause. While the 14th Amendment unequivocally granted citizenship to those born within the United States, the Alien Land Laws limited the practical benefits of that citizenship, especially the right to own and control property. It highlighted the tension between the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship and state-level efforts to maintain racial discrimination.

This history dovetails with contemporary legal battles surrounding birthright citizenship, particularly efforts by the Trump administration to reinterpret the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause. Just as past lawmakers sought to create exceptions to citizenship rights based on parental status, current arguments attempt to carve out similar exceptions, revealing a recurring tension between constitutional principles and efforts to impose discriminatory limitations.

So Where Does That Leave Us in Olympia?

Who did own the land underneath those businesses?

What I was trying to find out was who the non-Asian families were who supported Asian-owned businesses by leasing or renting land to them. The real research (narrowing it down through property records on microfilm) will take some time. I’ll get to that eventually. For now, I’m content just sketching out the context.

Leasing or renting to Asian families did not escape the notice or ire of Olympia’s more racist white residents. From an Olympia Tribune editorial in the 1890s, we see a call for the expulsion of Chinese residents by legal means, especially by encouraging property owners to refuse to rent to them. The editorial reflects widespread fears among white laborers about job competition and portrays the Chinese community as an unwanted and growing threat. It even calls for the creation of a citizens’ association to coordinate exclusion efforts, promoting the motto: “Olympia for Olympians.”

From a separate, sympathetic article about the populist “People’s Party,” also from the 1890s: “We believe that those who patronize the Chinese are enemies of their white brethren, and we favor strict exclusion and entire letting alone of all Chinese and their sympathizers.”

When I poked around the same newspaper archives looking for records of who owned the land underneath Asian-owned businesses, I came up short. I can only assume that while business relationships were practical and necessary, they were considered perilous enough that few people talked about them openly.

The land owned by Sam Fun Locke’s family at the corner of Columbia and 5th is a good example of this land record puzzle. Locke was one of Olympia’s most successful Chinese businessmen, often called “The Mayor of Chinatown.” After his death, the property was passed along to his descendants. I can pick up the property transfers starting in the 1940s but can’t trace anything definitive before that.

I can, however, track the locations of his businesses through phone directory records, which makes it possible to compare them with land ownership records. That way, I could eventually find out when exactly Locke’s family came into possession of the land, and whether the same family owned it while Locke operated his business there.

So, there’s still more work to do. But this week, at least, I was able to lay out the policy and legal landscape before diving deeper.

Don’t think of an Olympia

April 12, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

One of my longtime hobby horses on this blog has been the use of “Olympia” as a metonym, for reporters, politicians, and activists, when what they really mean is “the state legislature” or, more broadly, “state government.” I usually approach the issue from two angles.

First: this is my town. Keep our name out of your mouth. Almost no one uses “Olympia” in a flattering way (and I’ll get to that) but seriously, stop. I know you don’t literally mean us, but you’re still saying our name. I especially object when people shorten it to “Oly.” Please don’t.

Second: words really do matter. We should be intentional with them.

Like I said, this gripe has been with me a long time, but it’s been years since I wrote about it. In fact, this is the 10th anniversary of my last post on the subject. Maybe my attention waned. Maybe the use of “Olympia” as a metonym declined. But I’ll tell you what: this year it feels like it’s surged. Again, maybe it’s just me noticing it more, but I can’t go half a day without hearing “Olympia” blamed for some godawful statewide thing.

And sure, I’ve been guilty of writing about state government and the legislature more than usual on what’s supposed to be an Olympia-centric blog. I could argue that local journalism and the state flag are close to my heart, so it’s excusable. But really, the only excuse is: it’s my blog and I do what I want.

Language matters

The title of this blog is a nod to the Bush-era Democratic messaging handbook Don’t Think of an Elephant. It’s about the importance of language, how words shape thought and frame our understanding.

Since I last tackled this topic, I’ve changed. I’ve developed a regular mindfulness practice and read a lot more philosophy. One quote from Marcus Aurelius recently was the core idea that brought me back to this issue:

“Your mind will take the shape of what you frequently hold in thought, for the human spirit is colored by such impressions.”

When we constantly refer to state government simply as “Olympia,” we shape public perception into something vague, distant, and impersonal, just as Marcus warned. If the image we hold is a faceless force, we begin to believe that’s all government is. Words frame reality, and careless ones distort our sense of agency and accountability.

Using “Olympia” as a stand-in for the state government isn’t just lazy writing; it’s a framing choice that affects how we think about power. It turns government into something abstract and remote. When “Olympia” becomes the bad guy, we allow ourselves to see government as something that happens over there, not something we are connected to or responsible for.

But that’s not how government works. I hate to explain all of middle school civics to you, but only three of Washington’s 147 state legislators actually represent Olympia. The rest are elected from equally-sized districts all across the state. They are not from Olympia.

A special warning for leftist folks and other pro-democracy types: this kind of rhetorical distancing undermines the idea of collective responsibility. If “Olympia” is just a bunch of detached politicians, then it’s not our fault what they do.

For conservatives, it can reinforce long-held suspicions that government is an adversary. Either way, the result is the same: a less functional democracy. The decisions made in that supposedly faraway place are made by people we elected, and they affect all of us. So it’s worth staying connected.

How we can actually change this

Now, I’d be dishonest if I didn’t acknowledge the impact a place can have. Legislators do come to Olympia for months at a time, and it’s probably true that they’re shaped by the professional and social ecosystem that forms around them here. So yes, for a portion of the year, they’re part of Olympia. A little.

But that doesn’t have to be the case.

Recently, in the other Washington, there’s been a debate about proxy voting. A bipartisan push in the U.S. House sparked by a Republican congresswoman who experienced postpartum complications is seeking to allow new parents to designate a proxy for voting. This is a half step to full remote voting. The proposal gathered enough signatures to force a floor vote but was blocked by Speaker Mike Johnson and conservatives who saw it as unconstitutional and too reminiscent of pandemic-era practices.

Washington State actually operated as a mostly remote legislature longer than many others. We had full remote voting, and still do in some cases. And while reviews were mixed, some of the accessibility improvements for both lawmakers and testifiers have stuck around.

If you are a legislator voting remotely, you’re voting away from Olympia, in the community that represents. That can be a good thing.

All of this connects to a bigger question: can legislative bodies still represent the people effectively, given how much populations have grown? The U.S. House has been capped at 435 members for over a century, even as the population has more than tripled. That means each representative now serves far more people than originally intended, making real connection harder and weakening democracy.

The same is true in Washington State. Our legislature has been the same size since the 1960s, when the state had 2.8 million people. Now we’re over 8 million. We’ve almost tripled in population but not in representation.

We could double the size of the legislature. And if there isn’t enough room for everyone to work in Olympia, they could do what so many other state employees do: work remotely from their hometowns.

Tips for Journalists Covering Washington State Government: How to Use “Olympia” Thoughtfully

Do you need to write about the state legislature or state government? Otherwise compelled? Here are some tips.

1. Be specific whenever possible.

“Olympia” often obscures more than it reveals. Instead of Olympia passed a law, say the state legislature passed a law. Or better yet, House Democrats passed a bill or Governor Inslee signed the legislation. Precision helps your audience understand who actually did what.

2. Recognize the diversity within state government.

“Olympia” is not a single voice. It includes legislators, the governor, dozens of agencies, lobbyists, staffers, reporters, and more. One label can flatten the complexity of real debates and decision-making.

3. Don’t use “Olympia” as a scapegoat.

When something goes wrong, it’s easy to blame “Olympia.” But vague blame makes it harder for the public to know who’s responsible or who they should contact to make change.

4. Consider how the word lands.

To people outside the capital, “Olympia” may sound like an abstract bureaucracy. To people in Olympia, it’s home. Using the name as shorthand for dysfunction alienates a whole community.

5. Geography? Fine.

You can always cop out and say “in Olympia” rather than just “Olympia.” This would be “Democrats in Olympia” rather than “Olympia Democrats.”

Used with care, language connects people to their government.

Used lazily, it can push them away. “Olympia” might be convenient, but a functioning democracy deserves better than convenience.