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

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.

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?

1. 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.
   
2. 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.