Olympia Time

This is the start of what I hope to be a long-term project. I want to track the history of parking lots in downtown Olympia. They’ve become a dominant land use type. I made a map that shows just how pervasive these empty spaces really are.

It hasn’t always been this way. A few examples remain, but our blocks were historically covered in buildings. This density was a social good. Mixed uses like housing, workshops, and shops were tightly packed together. Everything was walkable because we didn’t have a choice. We didn’t have cars.

There’s another side to this that we don’t talk about enough. These dense blocks are more economically productive. They generate more tax revenue than suburban lots or big box stores. It’s a bit of a hidden truth that cities end up paying for the services of suburban and rural residents. Parking lots just eat away at the economic health of our local government.

Think about what we lose to sea level rise. If we don’t act by 2095, downtown Olympia will lose about 370 acres. That’s over 600 million dollars in value based on 2018 data. The land in low-lying Olympia is worth about 1.6 million dollars per acre. Land outside the flood zone is worth less than a third of that. The land most likely to be lost is our older city. It’s the part built before cars. It’s ironic that we’ll probably keep the car-dependent parts of town while the rising tide, caused by car pollution, takes the most productive core.

And, in an era of nearly every local government dealing with structural deficits, it’s worth looking at the literal structures causing the problem.

Scandal and Padlocks at the Hotel Carlton

My first case study is the gravel lot at State and Columbia. If you look at old Sanborn maps, you see a vibrant mix of life. There was a metal shop, a second-hand clothing store, the Salvation Army, and several restaurants. The main anchor was the Carlton Hotel.

The building started as the Carlton House. It stayed that way for a couple of generations. In 1891, it was the center of a local scandal. A seventeen-year-old girl named Lizzie Jacobs was taken there for safety after a failed elopement. Her suitor, John Beggs, got into a fight with Lizzie’s mother and knocked her to the sidewalk. The couple fled in a horse-drawn carriage before an officer stopped them.

By 1902, the place was renamed the Hotel Carlton. The new manager wanted a first-class establishment to show off Olympia’s prosperity. By 1908, you could get breakfast or dinner there for 25 cents. But things took a turn during Prohibition. In 1931, a lawsuit claimed the hotel was bought specifically to be a liquor joint. A federal court issued a padlock order. The hotel was forced to close for an entire year as a penalty.

By 1933, the owners tried to move past the legal trouble with a new name. The final chapter came in 1947, when it was called the Hotel Hutson. That August, the city ordered the building to be torn down. It was seemingly the end of a structure that had been a part of the landscape for decades. And that is where the history of the building goes cold. But before we continue, I want to talk about something else.

Naturally Occurring Affordability

If you look at old crime reports and news snippets from before 1947, it’s clear the Carlton and the Hutson were housing people who were down on their luck. It had become what we now call naturally occurring affordable housing. Nobody set out to build low-income housing here. It just happened because the building was 50 years old and rundown enough to be cheap.

We saw the same thing a few years ago with the Angelus Hotel at 4th and Columbia. These places stay affordable because they are old and lack new investment. They are rare now because modern rules make them impossible to build. Features like shared bathrooms or tiny rooms were often prohibited by modern codes. When these buildings get sold, the cost of safety upgrades is so high that the owners have to raise the rent. That moves them out of reach for the folks below the working class.

Even when we build on top of old parking lots, using more liberalized rules that allow for building in a way that we could 100 years ago, we have to wait decades for that cycle to restart. This creates a conflict between fixing up the city and keeping it stable for residents. The city effectively subsidizes its own gentrification. We trade historical affordability for a modern landscape that is legally and financially inaccessible to the people who live there now.

The Housing Crisis and the City Fathers

Back in 1947, the city certainly didn’t care about low-end housing. They ordered the Carlton torn down despite a massive housing shortage. This was after service members from Fort Lewis and McChord Field started flooding Olympia. The crisis was so bad that people were renting out converted chicken coops.

Even with that level of desperation, Olympia’s leadership rejected federal housing funds. Local landlords actually celebrated the decision with New Year’s toasts in 1943 because they knew it meant they could keep the rents high. They were happy the city turned down the money. The mayor who rejected the money made a half-hearted public appeal for landlords to keep rents low, but it didn’t do much. At the same time, the city was moving to destroy Little Hollywood, the shantytown on the edges of the Deschutes Estuary. The city knew there was a shortage, but they still opted to tear down what little housing existed.

The Ghost of the Carlton

Even with the demolition order, buildings didn’t vanish immediately. Aerial photos from the fifties still show a building at that spot, but not the angular-roof version that was the Carlton. There was also a newer flat-roof building used by the Olympia School District. It seems the old hotel address was absorbed into the school district offices.

In the 1970s, the location started hosting a senior center. A local nonprofit found a good deal in the abandoned school offices. Seniors would go there to pick up bus passes well into the 1980s. When the senior center finally moved across the street to the modern community center, the Carlton’s footprint was finally gone into a parking lot.

We decided after the 1940s that cars were more important than anything else we could do with the land. But it’s heartening that the Carlton survived long enough to be used for something good. It helped educate children and support seniors before it finally became a lot for cars.

Looking at this gravel lot today, we don’t necessarily see a place to leave a car. We can see the lost economic vitality that could be funding our services. We can see the naturally occurring affordable housing that we regulated out of existence for decades. We can see the choice we made to trade a vibrant, productive community for a flat surface that contributes nothing to our future, exempt the moral backing of climate change and sea level rise.

It took nearly a century for the wrecking ball to finally win at State and Columbia. Now, we are the ones living with the quiet, expensive consequences of that victory.

As soon as Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Olympia didn’t look at the news. It looked inward.

It’s an interesting phenomenon, and one that feels incredibly familiar to us now. It’s the same collective gut punch we felt when George Floyd was murdered. We hit the streets, we organized, and we finally started asking the hard questions about our own backyard. In the days following Dr. King’s death, the Olympian ran a series of articles based on interviews with the local Black population. These pieces laid bare truths that we deeply know now, but they were radical to see in print back then.

In early April 1968, Black residents and activists explicitly labeled Olympia a “racist town.” They pointed to the city’s consistent failure to enact any kind of open housing legislation as the primary evidence. An activist named Dickson was particularly outspoken. He criticized the local hypocrisy of excluding Black people from institutions like the Elks Club while using their tax dollars to provide that same club with fire and police protection. He emphasized that the avenues normally open to any promising individual were closed to him solely because of his race.

In her research for “Blacks in Thurston County, Washington, 1950–1975” Dr. Thelma Jackson documents how systemic real estate practices actively pushed Black families out of the city centers. We often hear the local story that Black residents settled in Lacey because it was close to the military bases at Fort Lewis. Dr. Jackson’s work reveals that the steering was actually driven by legal barriers.

Because Lacey was largely unincorporated and newly developing during the 1950s and 60s, it lacked the exclusionary property deeds that barred non-whites from other neighborhoods. Real estate agents and developers capitalized on this by funneling Black buyers toward the few areas where they were legally allowed to own property. It was segregated by design, and it created a geography that persists in our county’s demographics today. Dr. Jackson notes that these obstacles forced families to find creative workarounds, like using white allies to scout and purchase homes on their behalf just to bypass door-slamming discrimination.

This was true even though these racially restrictive covenants had been legally unenforceable since the late 1940s after the Supreme Court struck them down. That didn’t stop Thurston County developers. They continued to add them to deeds for at least another half-decade after the court decision. They were banking on the fact that social pressure and realtor cooperation would do the work the law no longer could.

The local real estate industry was a major point of criticism. Residents were disturbed by a trend toward “ghettos,” and they accused realtors of steering Black families into specific areas while simultaneously discouraging white buyers from those same spots. John Finley noted that despite high employment, the local racial situation remained as dire as in other states. Others warned that forcing Black families into decaying, older housing would inevitably lead to state-sanctioned neglect.

Workers like Ed Chatman faced such significant difficulty finding any housing at all that activists began considering marches around City Hall. They wanted to force action against the pervasive slights and slurs that defined the community’s daily life.

The path toward open housing in Thurston County in 1968 was a contentious journey. It wasn’t a smooth transition. It was marked by urgent activism and fierce, vocal opposition. The movement gained real momentum in April 1968, shortly after Dr. King’s assassination, when the Thurston-Olympia Open Housing Committee presented petitions with over 1,500 signatures to county commissioners.

Key organizers like Patricia Avery, Herb Legg, and Paul Whelan led the charge, and they were supported by students and faculty from St. Martin’s College. Olympia eventually led the way by passing an emergency open housing ordinance on April 29. Lacey followed in late May, but only after its City Hall was jammed by proponents. Lacey’s path had bumps along the road because councilmen like William C. Ryan and Thomas Huntamer questioned the need for such laws. They suggested that discrimination simply wasn’t a local issue.

Opposition was often out in the open. Duke Stockton, a former teacher and self-described segregationist, was a fixture at these hearings. He argued that these laws infringed upon individual property rights. He was a true believer in being an actual racist, was a local organizer for a racist political party, and regularly spoke on a literal soapbox to rail against integration.

The Greater Olympia Board of Realtors, led by president Lee Childers, endorsed the view that fair housing legislation deprived property owners of a basic individual freedom. Mrs. Maxine Padget, a spokesperson for the realtors, argued that civil rights advocates were attempting to dominate policies even when existing rules weren’t being violated.

One of the most specific fights was over the timeline for filing complaints. The proposed ordinance suggested a 50-day window for a citizen to file an unfair housing statement. The realtors pushed back hard. Mrs. Padget argued the limit should be 30 days, while Lee Childers suggested a 10-day limit. They reasoned that a long delay was unreasonable and unfair to brokers. In reality, a 10-day window would have made it nearly impossible for a victim of discrimination to gather evidence and file a claim.

Childers also argued that the real estate fraternity shouldn’t be the only group subject to these regulations. He felt that any non-discrimination requirements should fall equally upon private homeowners as they did on agents. While some realtors stated they would go along with an ordinance as businessmen, they remained firm that civil rights go both ways and that the protection of property must be maintained above all else.

Legal hurdles further complicated the process. County Prosecutor Harold Koch identified numerous legal loopholes in the proposed county-wide human rights commission. He criticized it as an unenforceable gesture and accused the committee of trying to grant vigilante investigative powers to a group that wasn’t part of law enforcement.

These disagreements led to a fractured system. While proponents wanted one uniform law, Tumwater eventually divorced itself from the area-wide effort by passing its own specific version. This version included blanket defenses for landowners and provisions for private hearings. Bruce Pym argued these additions subverted the entire spirit of the law. Because of these complexities, while the county adopted an ordinance in late May, they deferred action on a human rights commission for a long time.

Ten years later, this history should feel familiar. Where open housing ordinances existed, zoning and economic realities began to undercut the progress. Olympia’s modern housing landscape was forged in the late 1970s, which was a period marked by the largest influx of new residents in our history. Before this, the construction of small multi-family housing, like duplexes and quadplexes, generally tracked with population growth.

However, a series of contentious debates starting in 1976 fundamentally altered the city’s trajectory. This led to systematic downzoning that prioritized exclusive single-family neighborhoods. A pivotal moment occurred with the Nut Tree Loop proposal. A developer envisioned 21 quadplexes on what is now a neighborhood of expensive single-family homes. This project sparked fierce public opposition.

Residents expressed a fear of the urban and the potential for denser, poorer communities to enter their neighborhoods. Opponents used inflammatory rhetoric. They claimed that multi-family housing would turn Olympia into a ghetto and lead to increased crime. By 1980, despite some city leaders arguing for denser living to prevent sprawl, the city commission succumbed to pressure and began shelving plans for multi-family expansion.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Olympia implemented systematic downzones that outlawed anything other than single-family homes in many residential areas. This policy transformed hundreds of existing duplexes and small apartment buildings into non-conforming units. The stated goal was to encourage home ownership, but the practical result was gentrification.

The impact on our city’s racial makeup has been profound. While we passed Open Housing ordinances in 1968 to combat explicit discrimination, the subsequent zoning laws created a different form of segregation. In the Pacific Northwest, income serves as a proxy for race. Because single-family homes are the most expensive housing type, neighborhoods dominated by them have remained predominantly white.

Data shows a clear correlation: the more single-family homes a neighborhood has, the higher its percentage of white residents. In recent decades, the city adopted a nodes approach to density. They concentrated apartments in commercial areas like Capital Mall while protecting single-family neighborhoods. This strategy has led to a stark racial divide. Between 2010 and 2017, the high-density node in Tract 105.1 on the westside became significantly more diverse, while the adjacent single-family neighborhood in Tract 105.2 actually grew whiter.

This isn’t a unique local failing. You can see similar examples across the country of communities using downzoning as a tool to implicitly preserve racial divisions when other methods became illegal. In Arlington, Massachusetts, they once zoned for plenty of apartments. But as integration became a real prospect in the 1960s, their attitude toward development shifted. Activists used both explicit and coded anti-integration language to rally opposition to apartments and push for downzoning.

Unlike earlier efforts, our local downzoning efforts are largely absent of on the surface racial animus. I’m not saying these neighborhood activists weren’t trying to keep their neighborhoods white. I think you can draw a pretty clear conclusion there. I’m just saying there isn’t much smoking gun evidence in the historical record.

However, you don’t have to look far to see downzoning tied directly to the broader civil rights struggle. When you pull back from these small-scale efforts to a nationwide view, you see single-family zoning being discussed in a much different way. When we were downzoning, the NAACP was struggling to find inroads in the courtrooms to fight against exclusionary zoning.

HUD Secretary George Romney tried to force the Detroit suburb of Warren, Michigan, to strike single-family zoning and allow affordable housing in 1970. His effort failed, and his political career ended because of it. Civil rights organizations then retrenched to fight unheralded courtroom battles over zoning in the Midwest and the East Coast.

According to the NAACP in the early 70s, the suburbs were the new civil rights battleground. They argued we should do battle in the townships and villages to lower zoning barriers and create opportunities for Black families seeking housing closer to jobs. The National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing said segregation won’t stop until local governments are deprived of the power to manipulate zoning to screen out families on the basis of income and, implicitly, of race.

In Seattle, the end result of five decades of downzoning is white-majority neighborhoods expanding across the city. One collection of blocks in the Leschi neighborhood went from over 90 percent Black in the 1970s to 11 percent today. The Black population of King County was pushed south and out of Seattle.

In Olympia, neighborhoods that downzoned saw a smaller increase in racial diversity over the last 10 years. Not only did these neighborhoods stay whiter, but in the middle of a historic housing crisis, these neighborhoods actually had fewer people living in them in 2020 than they did in 2010.

I’ve said this before. But it is well worth repeating: There are few open racists left. Duke Stockton’s don’t stalk city council meetings anymore. That is obviously an advancement in my lifetime. But you don’t have to be racist to benefit from racist outcomes and a racist system. There is a huge layer of people who will tell you they are not racist but participate in racist systems before you ever get to the people working to dismantle them.

We know the current landscape of dominant, exclusionary single-family zoning 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 have actively worked against this kind of zoning for half a century.

I’ve been writing these essays specifically this month because it’s February. I’ve tried to get out of my own way during Black History Month and give space to stories that highlight where we’ve been.

We sure do live in interesting times. It is hard for us to slow down and take a look at our context when we seem to be hurtling downhill. Every day, some new outrages and crises draw our attention away from the ground at our feet. What I am reminded of is that there is always so much to fight for here and now.

Martin Luther King was killed in Tennessee, the country caught on fire, and the right thing to do for Olympians was to finally force the passage of open housing ordinances. They were weak. They didn’t address the underlying zoning. For decades, we lost the plot.

But this slow boring of hard boards in local politics is always there for you if you have passion and perspective.

It is something you can impact. You have more control here than you think.

We are tending a garden in a storm. We can’t stop the wind from blowing. But we can choose which stakes to reinforce and which seeds to protect. It is easy to get overwhelmed by massive, national debates that feel completely out of our hands, but that energy can be better spent on the hard boards right in front of us. By focusing our effort on things we can actually influence, we trade anxious, unattached frustration for tangible progress. We accept that we can’t control the entire city’s direction, but we have agency over how we show up.

The layout of downtown Olympia is burned into my brain. It just seems inherent to the space that coming down from the Upper East Side, both State and 4th are one-way. Especially coming from my neighborhood, this doesn’t always make 4th and State the fastest way across town. But it does feel like it’s always been this way, that when we created this part of town, the original layout was two paired one-way streets.

But that’s not actually true. Before the late 40s, downtown was just a normal grid. You could go both ways on every street.

The switch to one-way streets wasn’t some long-planned city project either. It was an accident caused by a massive earthquake in 1949. What started as a quick fix to get around piles of fallen bricks turned into a permanent setup. Then the state highway department saw an opening to turn our local streets into a highway for commuters, and they took it. It’s a classic case of prioritizing fast cars over a walkable neighborhood.

Before 1949, Olympia’s downtown felt a lot tighter and more connected. We didn’t have all these massive parking lots everywhere. Instead, it was just row after row of actual buildings. This was also when the residential neighborhoods surrounding downtown were interconnected using similar grid patterns, before growth had grown beyond Division on the west and Boulevard on the east.

When a street goes both ways, twice as many people see a storefront. You aren’t “eclipsed” by the direction of traffic. But after WWII, engineers became obsessed with “throughput.” They stopped thinking about downtown as a place to be and started seeing it as a hurdle to drive through. They wanted to move the tides of cars as fast as possible. The old two-way grid was standing in their way, but it took a disaster to finally break it.

The real turning point happened on April 13, 1949. It was just before noon when a 7.1 magnitude earthquake hit. It was the biggest one the region had seen all century. Two people died, and the damage was immense. Eleven buildings were so damaged that they had to be boarded up immediately.

4th Avenue and State Street were a mess. To keep things moving while crews cleaned up the rubble, the city made a quick call: make them one-way. It was supposed to be a temporary fix to manage the chaos. But the streets never went back to the way they were. The earthquake gave engineers the perfect excuse to push a one-way vision that had been bubbling under the surface for years.

By late October, downtown business owners were joining forces to ask for a return to the pre-April alignment downtown. “Promises were made to return to two-way traffic as soon as the emergency was relieved,” said a downtown druggist and head of a business committee.

This is where the State Highway Department really left its mark. As the city debated whether to keep the temporary measure through the fall of 1949, the state didn’t just suggest keeping the one-way streets; they basically mandated it. They decided to fold 4th and State into the state highway system. 4th Avenue became the southbound lanes for the Pacific Highway, and State Avenue took the northbound traffic.

The legislature had passed a law the year before, allowing the Highway Department to take a heavier hand in ensuring state highways efficiently passed traffic. To that end, the highway department studied the issue of now one-way streets in Olympia and gave the city government two options: stay with one-way or lose all the parking along 4th and State. 

By doing this, the state prioritized regional travel over the people actually living in Olympia. The main goal was throughput, moving people from the suburbs to their jobs or across the state as fast as possible. Our downtown streets weren’t local roads anymore. They were effectively a highway split in half. Once that highway designation was set in stone, there was no going back. The state had its high-speed corridor, and the city was stuck with the noise and the speed.

Business leaders talked about suing, saying the state was taking too heavy a hand. But no lawsuit followed, and downtown settled into its current pattern. Just less than 10 years later, Interstate 5 bypassed downtown Olympia, but one-way streets stayed. 

We’re still paying for that 1949 decision today. On paper, one-way streets move cars fast, but they make life harder for everyone else. Research shows that child pedestrians are 2.5 times more likely to get hurt on one-way streets. It makes sense if you think about it. Drivers get into a highway mindset and stop looking for people. 

Looking back, the 1949 earthquake broke the way Olympia functions. We traded a walkable, easy-to-navigate downtown for a system that treats downtown like a bypass. This isn’t even getting into the number of buildings that were torn down in the last 75 years to make way for parking.

I focus a lot of attention on downtown Olympia in this discussion. But it is worth pointing out that most of the mileage for the one-way streets in Olympia goes through formally residential neighborhoods. The city has slowly changed how the blocks are treated around the one-way paired throughfairs, but to me, even if we build denser, mixed-use neighborhoods up the Eastside hill, slower, more people-oriented traffic orientation makes sense as well. 

Today, plenty of cities are realizing this was a mistake. They’re converting one-way streets back to two-way streets to lower crime, help local businesses, and stop the constant speeding. It makes you wonder what Olympia would look like if we had just cleared the 1949 debris and stayed the course with our original grid. We might have had a downtown that feels more like a community and less like a race track.