Category: lacey (Page 1 of 2)

Why I wasn’t born in the City of Lacey

December 23, 2022 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

I was raised in what had been, for like a couple of months, the City of Lacey.

And, by order of the Supreme Court of Washington, is inside the City of Olympia.

My childhood neighborhood, generally Wilson Street between 22nd and 18th, was part of a push and pull between Lacey and Olympia for a few months in the mid-1960s.

Since the end of World War II and the construction of car-centric neighborhoods, Olympia began pushing out from its original 1890 borders. The city had annexed the area around the State/Pacific split in 1930, but paused until after the war to start grabbing small blocks here and there. But, by the 1960s, the unincorporated neighborhoods that had been built further east (collectively “Lacey”) began getting nervous and planning for their own city.

And, what should constitute the future Lacey was pretty broad. In the early days of the planning for the city of Lacey, as early as 1963, the western border of the proposed City of Lacey was Boulevard Road itself, a full 3 miles away from the city’s current boundary.

It was in 1964 when the Olympia City Commission pushed east, annexing along Martin and Pacific Avenue, ending as far as Lilly Road on Martin Way. That effort started the official border war between Lacey and Olympia.

Pro-City residents in Lacey pushed for a vote in August 1964 to incorporate. That vote failed 505 to 857.

The part of Olympia that began Lacey

That same year, the residents of the Boulevard Road area also voted to reject annexation to the City of Olympia.

In 1966, when Lacey was on its way to successfully incorporating, the original fire station on Boulevard Road was actually a Lacey Fire District 3 station. So, it made sense that the “Olympia fringe area” was included in the new city.

When Lacey finally successfully incorporated in November 1966, Olympia quickly struck back. In December, the residents in the western portion of Lacey, stretching from near North Thurston High School down to the south end of Boulevard Road, submitted a petition for incorporation into Olympia.

Now, this is where it gets weird. The city commission received the petition in a closed-door meeting. Using what was later described by Lacey’s lawyers as an archaic law, the city commission scheduled an election that would allow not just the residents of the proposed annexation area to vote, but also the residents of the entire city. So, if the voters of the City of Olympia authorized the annexation of neighborhoods in another city, they were allowed to do so.

Lacey went ahead and scheduled a special election a few weeks later in February 1967 which would have allowed the area to de-annex from Lacey and return to the county. But, when Olympia voters passed their proposal for annexation in January, Lacey dropped their vote and sued to have the results of Olympia’s vote invalidated.

Ad that makes an excellent point about annexation rural areas.

The crux of the lawsuit apparently wasn’t where I grew up, but rather the north end of the annexation area along Martin Way.

The City of Lacey’s case was:

The two portions of the annexation area were not contiguous
The City of Olympia stacked the deck by not providing enough public notice

The courts, though, disagreed. It was true, the annexation law the City of Olympia was using hadn’t been touched since 1890, and it was still a law. And, they also disagreed on the definition of contiguous. Either way, they left Lacey packing and let stand the massive annexation, and Olympia stretched all the way to College Street.

The state legislature would also step up in 1969 and reform the 70+ year old annexation law that Olympia used to gobble up my family homestead and surrounding property. The new law would lengthen deadlines, to allow for better public notice, and actually make it easier for two small cities to join together.

Which is funny because, already occurring in 1969 was the most interesting part of this entire annexation drama.

In 1969, the cities of Olympia and Lacey would vote to consolidate.

Before we get too far, the vote failed in both cities. But that there was even a vote exposes just how frail the existence of Lacey was in those early years. The measure was close all over Olympia, failing in 11 of 19 precincts and by fewer than 30 votes overall.

Even though it failed by a 3 to 1 margin in Lacey, two precincts representing Panorama City voted in favor. So if those areas west of Chambers Lake and south of Pacific Avenue had their choice, Olympia’s annexations of 1964 and 1967 would have gone even further east more uniformly.

How did our housing practices shape Olympia’s racial makeup?

November 25, 2019 / Emmett O'Connell / 4 Comments

Amanda Smith, the former mayor of Olympia, sat in a suddenly silent city council meeting in the spring of 1968. She had been mayor in the 1950s and had come back to city hall to speak out in favor of an ordinance to prevent housing discrimination.

Duke Stockton had just stopped speaking against the ordinance and had pieced together a speech that shocked the crowd to silence.

“A man should have the right to do what he wants with his own property.”

…

“We don’t want them living in Olympia, but if they do live here, let them stay in their own communities and leave us alone.”

…

“It leads to intermarriage…”

Mayor Smith was the first to break the silence: “I wonder if everyone’s heart was beating as hard as mine was as I sat and listened to that. I have never heard a more ignorant talk in my life!”

Given what we know about the world back then, I can hardly believe that to be literally true. But it is possible that the debate over open housing only brought such attitudes to the surface.

Olympia along with Thurston County, Lacey, and Tumwater, would end up passing Open Housing ordinances in 1968. The effort here was part of a longer effort nationally and statewide to break apart racist housing practices.

Back up a little first: It is fairly well known that as a local rule that currently Lacey is more racially diverse than Olympia. The vast majority of Olympia’s neighborhoods are still over 85 percent white, with only a few outlying neighborhoods below 80 percent at all. The most racially diverse neighborhood in Olympia is about 65 percent white and is the section between the Martin Pacific split and Interstate 5 where it crosses Pacific.

Lacey, on the other hand, has more racial diversity in general. Specifically, Lacey has more neighborhoods with higher concentrations of non-white residents.

When housing activists were lobbying our local governments for open housing rules, Lacey held back at first because the leaders of the new city (only founded in 1966) were under the impression that Lacey already was open to all races. They passed the open housing rules anyway.

The housing practices that Amanda Smith and other Olympians were trying to prevent by adopting Open Housing rules in the 1960s were in reaction to decades of racist practices. It seems that at least on the surface, we’re still seeing the impact of these practices decades later.

Here is a deeper dive into these practices and how they worked:

1. Olympia real estate agents as late as the 1960s actively steered African American home-buyers away from certain neighborhoods.

From the Olympian in 1968:

(African American residents) put the blame for the trend toward a (racially segregated) ghetto squarely onto the practices of some real estate businessmen…

What is happening, they say, is that real estate salesmen are trying to steer Negroes into certain areas while at the same time urging whites not to buy there “because Negroes are moving in.” A check with some whites who are hunting houses confirms this.

According to at least one Lacey city councilmember in the 1990s, Lacey was one of the places where real estate agents would steer minority customers.

2. There were certain neighborhoods in Olympia that as late as the 1940s were officially off-limits to anyone who was not white.

This is by no means a comprehensive list, but while it didn’t seem to be common practice, there were a few neighborhoods in Thurston County that has racial covenants. Two of these were in Olympia, and a third I found was Beachcrest, north of Lacey.

Stratford Place, one such neighborhood just north of Olympia High School, had these racial covenants baked in.

Another neighborhood just up from the end of West Bay Drive, also advertized homes based on racially exclusive covenants.

When you look at how widespread this practice was in King County, I was a little surprised I could easily find more examples in Thurston. There is a lot of history behind racial covenants, and this paper is a great long walk through their use and eventual rejection.

Moving on from the 1960s, we continued to have housing debates in Olympia. But as they continued, they had more to do with density and liveability than they had to do with (one the surface) race.

Less than 10 years after Olympia, Tumwater and Thurston County passed Open Housing ordinances, Olympia began a long debate about multi-family zoning throughout the city. While this debate mostly centered upon income (and sometimes crime), it certainly had the same structure that the debate around anti-discrimination fight had in the late 1960s.

The 1970s saw the largest influx of new residents in Thurston County’s history. It changed the nature of our communities and it drove a historic increase in higher density housing types in Olympia. The historic nature is true because after this influx we made most of these housing types (duplexes, quadplexes) illegal through most of the city.

One term that got thrown around during the housing debate in the 70s and 80s was also “ghetto.” While the term in the 1960s obviously meant a neighborhood with a large non-white population, what did it mean in the 1980s? Were our anti-density rules stemming from that era racially motivated? Obviously, on a certain level, they were motivated out of a fear of crime and nearby poverty. But how far did we grow in just over 10 years?

A map of Lacey that you can’t unsee

January 9, 2018 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Take a close look at this map:

What do you see?

This map is from a page buried deep in the city of Lacey’s 2017 State of the Streets report. I took a look at the report originally because I was looking for data on pedestrian accidents. Which, by the way, are collected by the federal government, but are also very hard to work with.

Anyway, I found this map and had an immediate head-smack moment. What I saw totally blew me away.

Can you see it yet?

Now take a closer look:

I zoomed into the area around where Martin Way crosses underneath I-5 between College and Carpenter Roads. City-owned roads on this map are black (residential), green (arterial) or red (collector). The gray roads are not city-owned.

According to this map, Lacey is essentially two cities.

In the Southwest corner of the map, you have the (mostly) original core of Lacey that existed near when the city became a city in the 1960s. This area is a collection of neighborhoods and commercial strips south of Interstate 5. This was essentially the bleeding edge of suburban development from Olympia that wanted to be on its own.

The Northeast Corner of the map is is everything that was annexed into the city beginning in 1985. This is generally what we call today Hawks Prairie. It was historically Hawks Prairie too, of course.

But, these two parts of Lacey are not connected by Lacey owned roads. The two roads that would connect Lacey together, Carpenter or 15th Ave SE/Draham, are owned and maintained by the county.

This makes total sense to me now, because the entire “loop around the north to annex around the older Tanglewild neighborhood” always seemed so blatant. So it made sense that you could easily drive from one part of Lacey to the other without traveling on city roads. Just go down Martin Way.

But, before I saw this map, there’s no way I thought you couldn’t, in fact, drive on city roads to get from one end to the other.

Why downtown Olympia is more productive than the growing edge of Olympia (or Lacey or Tumwater)

October 11, 2017 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Why would you want other parts of Thurston County (Lacey, westside Olympia and Tumwater) to become more like downtown Olympia? Because it is more valuable. Way more valuable.

Take two blocks, one nondescript block in downtown Olympia and another out in the westside.

Here’s what you have in downtown Olympia:

These are about as nondescript as you can get in downtown. One story blocks, about six or so businesses. I’m looking only at the north end of this block between Capitol Way and Columbia Street, bounded on the north by 5th Avenue.

Taken together, these businesses cover about 30,000 square feet and pay over $38,000 in property taxes each year.

So, now let’s move to the westside. This building is located at near the end of Harrison before it becomes Mud Bay:

In no way is this a new building. It was built in 1981 and the difference between it and the downtown half block is striking. The newest building in the downtown example dates to 1937. This westside building too is one story, but the lot it is one is dominated by road and parking. It was built in an era we’re still living through when how you’d drive somewhere was the most important aspect in development. The need for parking makes this much larger parcel (at almost 45,000 feet), much less profitable with only $17,000 in property taxes.

This is a difference between $1.27 in taxes per square foot and $.37 per square foot. The price of providing space for cars and making neighborhoods unwalkable is real.

Strong Towns writes about this phenomenon, the older “blighted” areas of a community subsidizing the newer, shinier and automobile-centric developments. In the Strong Towns example, a series of closely packed buildings were leveled for a single Taco Johns, which removed much and the economic development from the land and replaced it with parking.

In an area like downtown Olympia, with even more housing coming on top of commercial activity, the need for large empty parking lots becomes less necessary. These aren’t just people orientate places, but they’re more productive by the acre.

And, because even the dense part of downtown Olympia pays property taxes to both the city and the county, everyone benefits from the high density productivity of these blocks.

Property is in fact more valuable in Lacey. Go figure.

June 10, 2017 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Ken has a very Ken-esque post about how he’s totally okay with moving the county courthouse, but on as long as it lands in Lacey. Or, in fact, move the entire county seat.

Olympia is old hat at retaining titles like county seat, or say, state capital, so I’m not worried.

But, also with his post, he makes this bold statement: “Land is cheaper in Lacey.” Well, okay then, I can take a look at that.

First, let’s think about why he might say that. Sure, Olympia is a much older city with nice(r) neighborhoods and some pretty great shoreline properties. But, when you get up into the Hawks Prairie north end of things for Lacey, the neighborhoods tend to get much nicer and much newer.

So, maybe its a bit of Lacey “aw-shucks, look at us, we’re so cheap?”

I don’t know, but either way, the numbers don’t seem to stand up his point. First, looking at recent home sales from Trulia data, there isn’t a very big difference between sales of house in Olympia and in Lacey.

Even when I clear away all the other data in the original Trulia map, the main three zip codes in central Thurston County are pretty much the same. Maybe Olympia is a bit higher, but since 98501 isn’t just Olympia, it’s hard to tell.

Also, this is home sales, which may not be a good guide for the type of land that a courthouse could be built on.

So, I tried to find a way to figure out total land value of each city. Good thing we have a county official whose job that is.

Before you give me the lecture about “assessed value not being actual market value,” find a way to figure out an actual market value city-wide. Also, even if assessed =/= actual, it is still likely a good estimate when you’re comparing values between two cities.

So, here you go:

–>

	Assessed value	Acreage	Assessed value per acre
Lacey	4,919,604,019	10,570	465,430.84
Olympia	5,785,389,448	12,590	459,522.59

Olympia as a city is more valuable, but only because it is larger. When you get down the actual value of the land by acres, Lacey is slightly more valuable. And, on a city-wide basis, who knows why? I don’t.

Maybe property with newer buildings are more valuable?

Lacey is less of a place than it would take to be useful to tourists

August 23, 2016 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Lacey is taking a lot of umbridge with the position of some folks in Olympia that Lacey serves very little purpose to possible visitors (Ken Balsley):

The Olympia, Lacey, Tumwater Visitor and Convention Bureau (VCB) is about to embark on a major promotion campaign to promote Thurston County as a destination for visitors and tourists. It’s entitled “Experience Olympia.”

A majority of the Lacey City Council – – as well as myself – – think this is the wrong way to promote the entire region, and that concentrating on “Olympia” demeans and denigrates the other two cities which kick in money for the VCB.

Just a quick note, please read to the bottom. This is not a Lacey sucks post.

Ken later makes a great point about the use of the Regional Athletic Center (funded by most of us, led by Lacey and located outside of Lacey), but I’ll take on his position more directly that Lacey is owed any respect as a “place” that people would visit.

For starters, consider this piece in Strong Towns about the irony of taking engagement photos in a suburban development. Which is most of what Lacey is really.

Engagement photos are either urban or rural. They are either a former factory or a leafy meadow, the brick wall of a forgotten factory or an empty beach. Never the subdivision. Never the cul-de-sac.

…

There is a reason no one takes engagement photos in the subdivision; they can be places not worth caring about. We wouldn’t have been criticized if it was.

And, just to apply this premise to here, this is a map of geotagged photos with the term “engagement” in our area.

Most of the photos are in the most placey place in all of Thurston County, downtown Olympia, the Capitol campus and Budd Inlet. Lacey does have churches, is has St. Martins and the Worthington Center, so I know people getting married in Lacey. But, when people are looking for a place to take photos in preparation for their wedding, they go to a place.

Similarly, when people travel, they also need a place to be. A series of only drivable neighborhoods connected by parking lots and big box stores similar to either the ones they came from or the ones in Lakewood 20 minute away is not place enough for tourists. The Regional Athletic Center, notwithstanding of course.

But, for Lacey, this isn’t some mistake of history. It didn’t come upon this state by accident. It has planned not to be a place.

These two maps in particular makes me think of Lacey less of a place and more of a convenient municipal organization.

This is a map of where the people are east of Olympia:

And, this is a map of where Lacey is, almost straining to get out of the way of a lot of the people who live east of Olympia:

This is not a natural community or a natural border around a place. This is a city that bends itself to become successful, but not serve people.

I remember being in a forum for candidates for county sheriff and asking if it would be easier to be sheriff if Lacey annexed the urban neighborhoods like Tanglewild and the Meadows. I don’t remember the candidates taking the question very seriously, but most assumed Lacey would never annex those older, dense almost urban areas.

Here is a short visual history of how Lacey grew north of those neighborhoods since the 1980s. It was more convenient for Lacey to annex places that didn’t have people (at the time of annexation) and stretch itself around places where there were people.

And, I know full well why Lacey hop-skipped over these older, in decline neighborhoods along Martin Way. Back to the engagement photos post:

These places were not cherry-picked. They are everywhere. The drive-in snout house is more common than all the brownstones in America by a factor of 20.

We know the story of these places. We know what is next: decline. And, to use a happy couple as the backdrop probably does feel like a slap in the face. While I never intended to make a moral statement (certainly not about individuals living here), the photos do make a judgement on our culture. We build places that cost us lots of money, don’t work very well, and people ignore them when they’re looking for nice place to take a photo.

By the 1980s and 90s, the older neighborhoods that didn’t become part of Lacey when it first came to being in the late 60s were too far gone, too below standards, too expensive to maintain for Lacey to want to bring them in. In the pessimist’s view, they were what the rest of Lacey was possibly going to become.

I’ll acknowledge one more point from the pro-Lacey name folks. There are a lot of hotels not in Olympia that carry most of the freight for the visitor and convention bureau that want to go Olympia only. It would make sense to acknowledge their places and their contributions because. at least the hotels outside Olympia use their own cities as label right?

Not really. It’s a mixed bag overall, but the Olympia name carries pretty far. In the Hawks Prairie section of Lacey:

This is a little bit misleading, some of these hotels are actually in Olympia, but the other ones in Lacey still use Olympia:

And, also the Tumwater hotels also use the Olympia name:

I hope everyone reading this gets down this far, because I’d like to say this as well: this is not a 1997-esque Lacey Sucks sort of post. Because I don’t think Lacey sucks. I’m not a huge fan of unwalkable, unbikeable, retail sales tax centered city development. But if I wanted to spill word tilting against that wildmill I’d be pretty unoriginal. To that end, I think Lacey has been doing some good work to correct the sins of the past.

And, since I’ve lived in the most Lacey-like part of Olympia (SE side) for the past 14 years, it would be supremely ironic for me to take too hard a swipe at Lacey.

So, let me sum up this way. I can see why people live in Lacey. Tens of thousands of people live there. Lovely neighborhoods, convenient to drive to the store. Drive anywhere really. Other than youth sports tournaments, I don’t see why anyone would visit there. I wouldn’t suggest anyone visit my neighborhood as a tourist either.

The best reason they should change the name of the North Thurston School District

April 14, 2016 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Mayor of Lacey Andy Ryder (and North Thurston grad):

“It would be a great sort of present from the school district that to acknowledge that they are our school district,” Ryder said.

Mr. Lacey Ken Balsley:

The school district must become part of the community. Sometimes it takes a great deal of effort. Some times its as simple as taking on the name of the community it represents.

I think in a lot of ways, Balsley and Ryder and right, even though more people live in the not-Lacey unincorporated parts of the school district.

Lacey population (2014): 45,446
North Thurston population (2014): 97,942
Non-Lacey, NTSD: 53,496

But, beyond numbers, there is a better reason to drop Thurston all together. The original Thurston was a racist liar and the moniker itself was forced on us by Oregonians.

You can read much much more about Samuel Thurston, the 1850s Oregon representative who our county is named after here: Why do we still call it Thurston County?

But, here is the too-long-didn’t-read on Thurston:

Despite an agreement in treaty, Thurston worked to screw British citizens out of property in the newly American territory in the 1850s.
Thurston was the primary force behind racial exclusion laws that outlawed racial minorities to moving to the Oregon Territory (which Washington was once part of).
And, when Washington Territory was separated from the Oregon Territory, it was Oregon delegates that chose to honor Sam Thurston (who had recently died), not people from what was then becoming Washington.

Two examples of trying to merge Olympia, Lacey and Tumwater (sort of)

October 4, 2013 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Over direct message on twitter a few days ago, someone asked me if anyone had ever tried to get all three nothern Thurston County cities to join together. Off the top of my head, I could come up with two examples, sort of. As far as I know there’s been no wholesale effort to join the cities together, but I found two partial ones:

1. Fire service in 2009. As far as I know, folks just lost interest and this effort just died off.

2. Merging city and county planning in 1990. This idea went down in flames. It was part of the home rule effort that year, and with the rest of the charter, it was voted down.

This entire idea of why the cities should merge is one that comes up every once in awhile. It isn’t a bad one on its face, just one I know will never happen, mostly because there are bigger evils that three cities bordering each others.

The reasons the cities won’t merge are numerous.

Separate school districts for each city mean people grow up not necessarily crossing city borders socially.

Cities have different histories, interests and trajectories. Tumwater was founded at the base of the Deschutes River before Olympia (on the shores of Budd Inlet), but didn’t become a city until much later. Lacey on the other hand, came along almost 100 years later. And, if you look at how far down Martin Way Olympia stretches, you could almost assume Olympia tried to kill Lace at birth.

In the blocks north of North Street, you can see this kind of municipal racing laid out in the checkerboard border between Olympia and Tumwater.

These histories, interests and trajectories have created three different local cultures (political and otherwise). From Matthew Green in OP&L:

This result is no shock. Olympia voters have supported tax levies for
a new fire station, the library system, and schools by similar or
larger margins. However, it presents a contrast with Tumwater, which
approved a public safety levy by just eight votes (50.11%-49.89%), and
Lacey, which rejected a fire district levy 47%-53%, both in 2011.

This result is yet another reason (approximately reason #12,000,003) why Olympia, Tumwater, and Lacey should not merge.
A few local political leaders pop up once a year or so, like
groundhogs, to suggest that the municipalities merge into one city
government. They imply that city governance is about just managing a few
departments. They pretend that city lines are mere arbitrary
administrative boundaries.

In fact, the three cities contain electorates with distinct and often
irreconcilable political views. They fundamentally disagree about what
is important to their community – in this case, about what public safety
measures are important enough to justify raising taxes. None of them is
right… well, okay, Olympia is right, but the other cities are entitled
to decide for themselves. Rather than stuff three different electorates
into one mass, in the name of false efficiency, let each community make
its own democratic decisions.

So, for the time being, any merging will happen under the surface. We already have our sewers all merged and transit. Other things like fire might come along, but we’ll likely always have our own cops. And, we’ll always have our borders and separate civic identifies.

Hoquiam and Aberdeen should merge. No reason why not.

Lacey’s new fiasco fishing pier

September 23, 2012 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Way back last spring, people were spitting mad that the new Carpenter Road along Lake Lois had walls to it, blocking the view of the lake. From Ken:

Put me in the camp of those who think the City of Lacey made a mistake when it built the new Carpenter Road and put a wall between the drivers and Lake Lois.

Those driving on the new Carpenter Road can no longer see Lake Lois because the wall separating the roadbed from the lake is too high.

That’s what happens when engineers design a bridge and leave out the public in the review process, although I’m not certain a novice would even have understood the wall design even if they had seen the plans.

I drive that part of Carpenter almost every weekday, and since the construction finished, I’ve noticed a lot more people taking advantage of the new wall (as you can see above) as a defacto fishing pier.

Why don’t we worry about the South Sound Mall as much as we do downtown (and I want a soccer stadium!)

July 3, 2012 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

This is a post born out of this question at Mark’s Notes on the State of Olympia blog on what places in Olympia (and I assume broader urban North Thurston) are too empty for my tastes.

The almost empty parking lot in the north west corner of the mall is a forgotten little pocket of Lacey. It used be to where the Woolworth’s backed up into that side of the mall. I also remember Olympic Comics starting on that side.

Anyway, its empty now, except for maybe people learning to ride motorcycles on Sunday, the parking lot is a waste of impervious surface, reflecting the dead commercial nature of that part of Lacey.

It is also now left without its only lasting civic contribution, as the host of Lacey’s July 3rd Fireworks.

The owners of the mall seems to realize the lost potential back there. Coincidentally, they also own a few properties in the residential neighborhood right next door in Olympia. And, in 2008 CDC proposed to the city to redevelop that neighborhood into a south Tumwater-like collection of state office buildings.

The proposal didn’t get picked up by the city, but I’m sure the need is still there. It wasn’t that solid of a proposal, not even a project. Just a request for a designation that could mean state office buildings would be built there at some point.

But, for me, obviously, the best and highest use of the space would be a soccer stadium. Nothing fancy, 2,000 seats would make me more than happy.

But, what gets me about the empty back corner of west Lacey, is that while it remains very paved and very empty, no one seems to care. We wring our hands over anything relating to downtown, but this part of Lacey is all but ignored.