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…
Month: May 2018
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,…