Timberland counties have changed a lot since the 1960s. Thurston County used to be about the same size as the other four counties. Now, all four combined are smaller than Thurston County. So far, the dominant narrative about the now shelved Timberland Library capital facility proposal has been about the possible closures and consolidations of…
Year: 2018
Reducing impact fees will be great, but we need to talk about how we built our city
Next week the Olympia City Council will talk about an ordinance that will lower impact fees for affordable housing. More specifically, the ordinance will lower impact fees for “housing with a monthly housing expense that is no greater than 30 percent of 80 percent of the median family income.” The idea is that since developers…
How crossover votes doomed Bud Blake (and more maps from the election weeks ago)
Something I started noticing the last few months is how the geography of Independent and Democratic crossover voters seemed to follow a certain logic. For example, if you took the precincts in Thurston County that voted for both Hilary Franz for lands commissioner and Gary Edwards for county commissioner, they seemed to generally fall into…
We used to tear down houses to build more houses. Until we didn’t
The most telling passage for me in this incredibly bad attempted takedown of sensible housing proposals in Olympia was this: If you live in one of the older, near-town Olympia neighborhoods, big changes are looming for your neighborhood. The way Jay Elder presents this is if to imply that this threat to older homes near…
Is the Independent era in Thurston County (and Washington) over?
Buried deep inside the results of the recent Crosscut/Elway poll was a surprising result, something that hasn’t happened in over four years, and not with any consistency since the Bush administration. For the first time since January 2014, more respondents in a state wide poll said that they were Democrats and not Independents. In the last…
5 things to take from this year’s Thurston County primary election, mostly in map form
1. Holmes got smoked. This doesn’t take much explaining, his overall percentage (32 percent) of the vote being what it is, seeing Stuart Holmes mapped out doesn’t give you much more insight. At the very least, he follows the same north to south, liberal to conservative pattern that we usually see in Thurston County. Conservatives…
State conservation commission: Johnson and Mankmeyer should be removed from Thurston Conservation District board
Eric Johnson and Richard Mankmeyer should be removed from the Thurston Conservation District Board, according to a recommendation by the state conservation commission staff. Their recommendation is outlined in the final report of a months-long investigation by the conservation commission into the last few years at the Thurston Conservation District. The report to state commission…
Housing affordability for first time home buyers is getting close to a record low in Thurston County
Thurston County is growing, but we aren’t building enough housing to keep up with the increase in population. So, housing affordability continues to fall and housing affordability for first time home buyers is approaching an all-time low. The Rustad Center at the UW recently posted up to date housing market data for the first quarter of…
What happened after we downzoned and the middle went missing in Olympia?
In the last post I showed how a series of zoning changes in the 1980s and 1990s But Olympia continued to grow. Where did all those people move? It seems obvious to point out, but they moved it mostly single-family zoned neighborhoods. More people came to Olympia, so if we weren’t getting denser, we sprawled….
When Olympia downzoned and gentrified
In the early 1960s and through the 1970s, most of Olympia’s residential neighborhoods allowed housing types that are now included in the city’s Missing Middle proposal. The most common of these zones was the RD (Duplex) zone that allowed for single-family homes and duplexes in the same neighborhood. In various generations of Olympia zoning codes,…