The Friday after Election Day is a pretty big day for me. That’s when the first round of precinct-level data is released. Using that data, I dive into the maps to see if there are any lessons to be learned.
Until I get to a couple of Olympia School District (OSD) races, I colored the maps in this post all the same way: for any candidate, blue indicates where they did better, and red shows where they did worse.
Paul Berendt is probably fine.
I don’t expect his campaign to ease up, but the big risk he faced in how this election was set up didn’t materialize. Berendt definitely isn’t a right-leaning candidate in any broader sense beyond being an Olympian, but running against a DSA-endorsed progressive puts him on the right side of the scale here. Also, in my part of town, his signs have consistently been paired with candidates who would be classified as right-leaning, no matter how you slice it. The Maria Flores vs. Taluana Reed race shows how traditional left candidates, when paired against far-left candidates, can produce a map that highlights a base of support in more traditionally right-leaning areas of Olympia.
The risk is that the neighborhoods that show up in August don’t necessarily match those that turn out in November. A strong showing in August, generally in SE Olympia, can box a candidate in come November when other neighborhoods show up. So, what Berendt needed was support from a diverse range of neighborhoods, which, as we can see below, he achieved.
Winning maps look similar.
Robert Vanderpool had a winning map very similar to Berendt’s, though arguably he was running in the same lane as Berendt’s opponent, Caleb Geiger. Is this the advantage of being on the council right now? There’s a slight west-side shift in Vanderpool’s map, likely reflecting the different lanes, but I want to chalk this up to how people in Olympia vote, which isn’t always the laundry list of issues campaigns highlight.
Wendy Carlson’s long road to November.
The key to winning from the right or moderate side is to dominate the areas where you’ll be safe in November (SE Olympia and some far west-side precincts) and be competitive everywhere else. This was not the case for Carlson (or Justin Stang, for that matter). I’ve included Carlson’s map here to illustrate. While she did produce lighter reds throughout SE Olympia, these are places she would have wanted to lock down now so she could expand her support in November.
To be completely fair to Carlson, mapping the winning and losing precincts in a multi-candidate primary using this system isn’t super helpful if the candidate wasn’t in first. What I should do is just map where she got a plurality of the vote and go from there.
Winning maps look the same Part 2: Renee Fullerton dominated, only losing in Rhyan Smith’s SE Olympia stronghold.
What was actually surprising in these races was that Jeremy Ruse also failed to advance out of the primary, but the map doesn’t help clarify why. Fullerton’s map is a classic August winner, taking nearly everything except SE Olympia—ironically where her district is centered. For some, this could be an argument in favor of district elections in school boards.
The interesting race now shifts to the Olympia School District’s west-side contest, where Emily Leddige and Gil Lamont bested right-leaning candidate Ruse.
I did something different with their maps, shading for overall support instead of simply above or below 50 percent. The basic story is that Leddige seems to have a west-side shift compared to Lamont. I’m not sure what this means for electoral strategy, but Lamont is slightly ahead, so he might be better positioned to pick up whatever votes remain from Ruse.
Here is Leddige’s map:
And Lamont’s:
There are a few more things I want to do with this election’s precinct data. In addition to remapping Carlson’s race, I’m going to stretch out to Lacey and look at their Prop 1 parks vote that failed, and extrapolate the port data to see what I find there.
Earlier this year, the Olympia School District released an audit of its public communications. This document offers a fascinating look into not only the district’s recent history and public narratives but also the general flow of information within our community.
Typically, such audits seek to understand how people perceive what’s happening in their community. The Olympia audit, for example, asked, “How do you learn about the Olympia School District?” with options like “local media,” “word of mouth,” and “social media.”
Across the country, a clear trend has emerged: responses indicating “local media” are declining, while those pointing to “social media” are increasing.
However, the broad conclusion that more people are getting their local news from “social media” is problematic because the term itself is poorly defined. Few comprehensive surveys that include this question ask for specific examples. Is “social media” referring to posts from established news organizations? If so, shouldn’t that fall under the “local media” category? Or is it truly just individuals posting on various platforms? If so, which ones? The wild, woolly frontier of social media needs to be understood, not just broadly categorized.
To genuinely understand how information flows through our community, to do the real work of helping people grasp “the news,” we need to comprehend the entire ecosystem. Simply categorizing it as “social media” feels like shrugging and walking away. This isn’t an accusation but a call for a more precise framework for approaching the question.
Analyzing the Local News Landscape
Similar to the communications audit, there have been a couple of attempts to understand the changing shape and decline of local media.
I have significant concerns with the Washington State University (WSU) research. While their approach is sound, they make some simple categorization mistakes. For instance, Olympia, as the state capital, naturally has more news sources (like TVW and the Washington State Standard). However, the WSU study also includes two North America Talks platforms in our Olympia count that do not cover local Olympia news. Thurston Talk is their local brand here, but South Sound Talk covers Pierce County. While “South Sound Talk” might be vaguely interpreted, “Whatcom Talk” clearly covers Whatcom County, a detail they should have identified.
Another study, using Muckrack data, tracks the decline of local journalism over the past two decades. In Thurston County, it estimates approximately 6.3 “Local Journalist Equivalents” per 100,000 residents, which would mean nearly 20 local reporters. This number feels a bit high, but their methodology section is clear, so I plan to delve into their data further for a better understanding.
However, these analyses often overlook the entire other section of where people report getting their local news: social media. When I conducted a back-of-the-napkin analysis for Thurston Community Media on the local media landscape, I generally found what others did: a decline in established, professional local media (e.g., the loss of the KGY newsroom, the decline of The Olympian), the rise of digital-only platforms that approach news differently, and the creation of several social media forums that seemingly replace traditional news. Specifically, I noted r/Olympia on Reddit, the Thurston Scanner Facebook page, and the now-private Olympia Looks like Shit Facebook group.
The Dangers of Misinformation in a Fragmented Ecosystem
An incident just yesterday highlighted how this evolving dynamic, particularly with newly established digital platforms, can spark misinformation and how quickly that misinformation can become political fuel. A recent article from The JOLT at best poorly described, at worst mischaracterized a key point in an Olympia City Council meeting. The JOLT’s practice is to outsource most of its reporting to overseas reporters, relying on video footage rather than on-the-ground context.
The topic was a state-funded program designed to move unhoused individuals off state highway rights-of-way within city limits into more stable housing, think of the Interstate 5 embankment next to Hobby Lobby on Sleater-Kinney, which is inside Olympia but on state-owned land. Councilmember Dani Madrone described the situation as one where the state essentially handed local governments money and said:
“…local governments are in this position of, you know, the state said, “Here’s some money to get the folks without housing off state lands, bring them into your jurisdiction, and then, you know, you better hope we continue to fund it.”
However, the reporter misunderstood and misquoted her, framing it as though Olympia was intentionally bringing in unhoused people from outside the city:
“Madrone pointed out that local governments were encouraged to bring unhoused individuals into their jurisdictions with the promise of continued state funding. “
The reporter heard Councilmember Madrone say something about the city “bringing people into the jurisdiction,” but misinterpreted it in a way that what they wrote meant to the reader Olympia was importing people from outside city. Had they been present in the room, they would have been able to follow up and understand she was referring to unhoused individuals already living on state rights-of-way within the city. A simple clarification could have prevented significant confusion.
This misquote quickly took on a life of its own. A city council candidate picked up the inaccurate paraphrase and incorporated it into a version of the “magnet theory,” the unfounded idea that Olympia is importing unhoused people to boost its budget.
In reality, the right-of-way program aims to help cities manage homelessness that already exists within their boundaries, but on state-owned land. As of the following day, the post had been shared 43 times on Facebook, and I could only see a handful of those shares, some of which might be in active Facebook groups I’m not part of. This only tracks the story’s spread via Facebook on its first day.
This situation highlights a dangerous chain reaction: poor paraphrasing by an out-of-area reporter led to a public misconception, which was then used to fuel a misleading political narrative. It serves as a stark reminder that local journalism requires both proximity and precision, especially when reporting on sensitive, politicized issues like homelessness.
This incident also underscores a larger problem: the way we talk about “social media” as if it were a single entity. It’s not. Local Facebook groups operate differently from Nextdoor or a subreddit. And for each community, these local online communities are different. Understanding how information and misinformation flow through these distinct channels, and how it is received and reframed by different audiences, is as crucial as getting the facts right in the first place. We cannot mend local news if we don’t understand how people perceive it, and that perception is increasingly shaped by a fragmented, algorithmic media landscape.
Despite the practices of one seemingly legitimate online news organization, local journalism matters. So does understanding the ecosystem that surrounds it. If we are serious about either, we need to be more precise in our reporting and in our analysis of how that reporting moves through our communities.
The Future of Local Information
We are in the midst of a transitional moment for local news and information ecosystems, and we need better tools and frameworks, not just to fix the supply of local journalism but to understand how people receive and reprocess that information in a fragmented digital world.
The mangled “right-of-way” quote was misunderstood, amplified by a local candidate, and reframed as part of a broader narrative about Olympia intentionally importing unhoused people. A single reporting error, left unchallenged, became political fodder across local social channels.
This isn’t just a failure of journalism; it’s a failure of how we understand the local information ecosystem. As traditional newsrooms shrink, digital-only platforms emerge, and community conversations shift to increasingly opaque or siloed online spaces, we need new approaches to track and support the health of our local discourse.
Pulling back from Olympia, we’re seeing this debate occur on a national scale as people reading the tea leaves of the last Presidential race implore Democrats not to depend so heavily on legacy media strategies but to engage in the influencer space more.
We’re also seeing the promise of closed, walled garden social media pay off as the broader media industry is facing a “web traffic apocalypse.” The usual sources of online readership like Google Search, Facebook, and Twitter, have either deprioritized news or made algorithmic changes that dramatically reduce referral traffic.
Hope
There are also options to not just bring more reporters to town, but to grow and heal local social media. Organizations like New_Public are exploring how to treat digital public spaces like parks or libraries, shared infrastructure that communities must tend to, not just scroll past.
If we want to strengthen local journalism and civic trust, we can’t just ask where people get their news; we have to understand how that news is distorted, reshaped, or ignored once it enters the digital bloodstream. The future of local news doesn’t just depend on reporters. It depends on recognizing the complexity of the ecosystem we’re already in.
Yesterday, the detailed precinct-by-precinct data for the recent April 25 election was released, and a certain trend became evident when I mapped out the results. This exercise serves as an essential reminder that even so-called “blowout” elections can have nuances that are crucial to comprehend if we aim to understand our community.
Here are the straightforward results by precinct (and the data I used):
What I see here is fairly straightforward. Downtown Olympia, the apartment complexes on the west and far east sides of Olympia, and likely Tumwater’s most densely populated neighborhoods along Tumwater Hill, all voted in favor of the Regional Fire Authority. On the other hand, the nearby westside and southeast Olympia led the vote against the RFA.
When comparing the approval rates for the public art election last April to the RFA this spring on a map of Olympia (excluding downtown), the same pattern emerges. The far eastside and westside apartment precincts were the only areas in town where the RFA received more votes than the public art proposition.
The turnout maps for the April 2023 vote present a somewhat mixed bag at first glance. On this map, I noticed the high-density neighborhoods that voted for the RFA are represented on both sides of the turnout scale. However, the less dense neighborhoods tend to appear on the higher turnout side.
The pattern becomes even more apparent when focusing solely on the Olympia precincts that took part in the art proposition. In the map below, precincts that turned out more for art last year are depicted in blue, while those that turned out more for fire are in red.
These maps reveal an interesting pattern. In general, precincts that turned out more in favor of the RFA (versus art) tended to vote more in favor of the RFA. This conclusion is supported by the chart below, which demonstrates this trend quite clearly:
Essentially, the precincts that voted against the RFA likely did so because of a general lack of turnout. In those precincts, people may have returned a ballot for the arts, but chose to hold onto their ballots for the fire vote.
Additionally, I want to revisit the topic of how apartment dwellers voted, as it relates to the messaging of the “Save our Fire Departments” (or No on Prop 1) campaign. The opponents of the RFA highlighted the higher costs that apartment dwellers would pay under the proposed formula to finance the RFA. However, this argument seems to have fallen on deaf ears, possibly due to where the No campaign focused its outreach. It’s worth noting that this argument didn’t resonate with its intended audience, as evidenced by the approval and turnout maps.
Okay, but really, why?
I’ve seen general observations that apartment dwellers fear fire more than people who live in single family homes. And that makes inherent sense, I suppose. But I haven’t found any polling or research that backs this assumption up.
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.
This is a map of election results in Thurston County. It shows a fairly typical result by precinct. More liberal candidates (in this case Joel Hanson in last year’s port race) doing well in the urban core and more conservative candidates (Amy Evans) doing well in rural areas.
This is a map of property taxes by acre on the parcel level in Thurston County:
Generally speaking, these are the same patterns. The same places that tend to vote for more conservative candidates also pay less property taxes per acre. This isn’t exactly a new concept. Strong Towns, for example, pays a lot of attention to this concept of density paying off for local government finances. Their analysis goes even further and connects a simple tax by acre analysis (which I am doing) and brings in the cost of supplying services to low density rural and suburban areas, which is higher than urban, high density neighborhoods.
Here are a few closer looks, to see how the basic property tax by acre phenomena works.
Here is downtown Olympia:
Not only are the vast majority of the parcels blue (relatively high value), there are a lot of dark blue lots (the highest value category). The red areas in downtown Olympia are un-taxed public places like the Port of Olympia, the Capitol Campus and other government owned parcels. They aren’t a good counter-example against the phenomena we’re exploring here, they are just an illustration of the financial impact of being a state capitol.
Zooming out to Olympia overall now:
Lots of lighter blue, and most of the deeper blue is either newer developments or nodes of density around lower density, single-family neighborhoods.
Now Lacey:
The thing that stands out here to me is the older core of Lacey is mostly lighter blue.
Now the big map for me, the Rochester/Grand Mound area:
Even though this portion of Thurston County contains a large swath of suburban development on the way to Lewis County, most of the parcels are fairly low value by acre. According to the analyses I linked to above, these areas are more expensive to maintain, but produce less property taxes.
We’re familiar with this concept on a macro scale (donor states and counties), but it is interesting to see how this phenomenon exists on even the micro-neighborhood level.
And how does this take us back downtown? This is just another example of how the multifamily tax exception is not that bad of an idea, policywise. A little while back, I did a back of the napkin analysis of how in a very short amount of time, the multifamily tax exemption would start paying dividends financially. The logic is that once the exemption is over, the increased value of the taxed parcel would be vastly more than the previously undeveloped version. By my figuring, it would only take seven years for the improved parcel to pay off the money lost in the exemption. And in the long run, it would a massive financial benefit. Allowing the parcel to stay a parking lot would be the actual drain.
What the tax-by-acre parcel map shows is that the talking point of “existing taxpayer subsidizing downtown high-rises” is a falsehood. On any scale, less dense neighborhoods are “paid for” by denser, more productive ones. The majority of existing Olympians (especially the ones that show up to city council to complain about density) live in unproductive single-family neighborhoods. The subsidy goes the other way around.
1. Did Talauna Reed’s strategy of encouraging voting in high density apartment complexes work?
2. Why did Reed get a post-primary bounce in SE Olympia?
And, it is more than the bottom line result that she did not win. When I look at the maps, she didn’t move the needle in the neighborhoods with large apartment buildings. I had seen this approach being promoted on social media, and I was incredibly interested to see if it would work (in a winning result) or move the needle (by improving her returns in neighborhoods with more large apartment buildings).
First off, here is the map for her overall vote percentage:
Her best precincts were basically on the Eastside north of the highway and on the near-in Westside. Only one of these precincts (the blue one furthest west) has a collection of larger apartment buildings.
Since I heard about the approach to focus on larger apartment buildings after the primary, I think looking at the change in raw votes and percentage change would be important. This is especially true since the primary finished very close between Lisa Parshley, Reed and Wendy Carlson. This meant that Carlson’s large number of voters (for someone who didn’t advance) were up for grabs.
First, here is the percentage change:
And here is the raw number of votes change:
And here you might start seeing a pattern with higher turnout with apartment dwellers. On the far Eastside by the hospital and down South of Ken Lake there might be some movement.
But what is also consistent in these two maps in the handful of SE Olympia precincts where overall Reed did not do well. They also had large movements toward her during the primary to general shift. These are places where Carlson had a lot of votes to give up after she didn’t make it through the primary. And despite not doing well, Reed picked up a fair amount of votes.
3. What is the meaning of the weirdest countywide map I have ever seen?
Eight years ago, I thought I’d seen the weirdest map ever when Sue Gunn won both extremely rural and conservative precincts and urban and liberal precincts.
For a reference of how a Thurston County results map should look like, look at the Amy Evans/Joel Hanson for Port Commission map. Hanson is in blue, Evans in red.
Here you see the traditional urban to rural way these maps are organized. Hanson does better in the urban center of Olympia, while Evans does better in the rural areas and builds in towards Olympia. The battleground are the suburban belts around Olympia, including Lacey, Tumwater and a bit further out. From this map, you can see Evans won this by limiting Hanson’s precincts to largely inside Olympia.
But, would someone please explain to me this? This is the Bob Iyall (blue) and Jesse Simmons (red) race for Olympia Port Commission:
As normal, Iyall did do pretty well in the middle of the map. And, if you told me that Iyall did really well in Olympia, but Simmons bossed all of Lacey, I would have said this map was a lot closer than what it was. Here, it seems like it is the rest of the county vs. Lacey. I have never seen a map in Thurston County where a candidate does really well in Lacey and isn’t able to translate that into better results elsewhere in the suburban belt or either in the urban core of Olympia or out in the rural areas.
4. Why did the right lane candidates have such varied success across the map?
I didn’t want to do election results maps for the other city of Olympia races, because they all seemed to follow the same pattern of conservative candidates doing well on the far Westside and SE Olympia and the eventual winners doing well everywhere else. I did do Reed’s race because as the only one left in the progressive lane, she was unique.
Well, what I did do was map the precincts won by any or all of the candidates in the right-hand lane. Candi Mercer didn’t win any precincts, so she’s not on this map.
The three remaining (Weigand, Kesler and Gauny) won several precincts in SE Olympia together. Weigand and Kesler then combined to win a couple more on the SE side and on the far Westside (both traditional conservative-for-Olympia territory). Kesler then won two on her own, both on the edges of town. Weigand in blue then picked up the rest of SE Olympia and the far Westside. He also won an inside precinct that includes the East Bay Harbor condominiums.
Over the last few days, I’ve been pulling down Public Disclosure Commission data and putting together a network graph of financial contributions among city council candidates. This illustrates the flow of individual contributions to campaigns and between candidates. This shows, in a broad sense, of how candidates are connected by who is contributing to them. I took some care to clean up the data (so contributors aren’t showing up more than once) but there might be some small errors.
1. There definitely are three primary lanes in the races. Or at least there was before the winnowing of candidates in the August Primary. I’d been using a shorthand to think about candidates running for city council. They were either in the right-hand side, mainline/incumbent or left-hand side lane.
Turns out the contributors thought the same thing. Contributions for all the right-hand side candidates (Mercer, Gauny, Kesler, Weigand and Carlson), mainline (Cooper, Gilman, Huynh, Parshley and Payne ) and left-hand (Wilkinson, Destasio, Reed and Brown) are generally distinct from each other. When there are connections, they are connected through the mainline group. There were a lot of contributors that gave to multiple candidates, but mainly to either the left or right and the mainline. Out of more than 1,200 individual contributors, there was only one that gave to both left and right.
2. The mainline group is much more cohesive than either the left or the right. This makes sense that the middle would be cohesive, most of them serve on the city council now. They’re also contributing to each others’ campaigns. But, the lack of cohesion between the other lanes, when there policy positions seem so well in sync, seems weird.
This would also explain the mismatched results in the primary. No mainline candidates failed to advance, but only one from the left lane advanced and one from the right failed to advance.
3. Just poke around, see what you find. There are a lot of random things to see in the chart.
Port of Olympia candidates are spreading their money to candidates on the right and the mainline lanes.
There is a contributor that gave to both Payne and Weigand.
The “bridging” candidates that hold the most contributors that span lanes are Kesler (right to center) and Gilman (left to right). This shouldn’t surprise me, but it is fun to see it illustrated.
I was not able to make it to the Housing Options hearing with the Planning Commission tonight. But here is what I sent them (and what I planned on saying).
I am asking for you to consider relegalizing housing types that have traditionally been allowed in Olympia.
Up until 1980, housing patterns in Olympia followed a fairly predictable path. For every 1,000 new residents, we would build an average of six 2 to 4 unit buildings. In the early 1980s, that changed.
Egged on by a multi-year debate over the spread of so-called ghettos in Olympia, the City Council downzoned large portions of the city at several points since 1980.
Since the downzones, the ratio of duplexes, triplexes, and quadplexes dropped from 6 per 1,000 to only 1 per 1,000 new residents.
These downzones included neighborhoods where duplexes and quadplexes had already been built. This set up the ironic situation of it being illegal to replace affordable housing in a downzoned neighborhood but needing to replace it with more expensive single-family housing.
We are now reaping the harvest of these forty-year-old decisions.
The neighborhoods we have built since the 1980s are car-dependent and not walkable. Instead of allowing the neighborhoods we already built to absorb growth, we have cut down trees, built new roads, and sprawled growth to the edges of our city.
The city we have become since 1980 is not equitable. Olympia is a largely segregated community. According to census data, the more single-family homes there are in a neighborhood, the whiter that neighborhood is. By only allowing more affordable housing types in specific parts of our city, we will continue this segregation.
Allowing low density, multifamily housing is the traditional way we have always grown as a city. We moved away from it because in an era after racial discrimination in housing became illegal, fears of crime and ghettos drove our zoning choices. We used to write racially restrictive covenants, but today we segregate our city with single-family zoning.
The downzones are a textbook example of institutional racism. While the downzones in the 1980s may have been born in a context of racism, I don’t think people who are trying to protect them are racists. But we can clearly see how they have terrible impacts.
We can see clearly that the experiment in exclusive single-family housing has failed. Allowing more housing options in all parts of Olympia is the right thing to do.
…Dan Leahy was right to “follow the money” regarding tax breaks for developers – including Ron Rants. Olympia would do well to display greater transparency in its decision making if it wishes to build the credibility of Missing Middle initiatives.
For the sake of historical honesty, it would also be helpful to know if Ron Rants is now being subsidized to undo the very problems he helped to create – both as an elected official and a development industry leader.
On the first go around on this post, I actually noticed a few places where Ron Rants, in fact, sounded like a 2010s era urbanist.
Fellow commissioner Ron Rants said the existing policy didn’t mesh with his personal view. The city should be encouraging mixed housing, he remarked. Mix housing includes having duplexes in single-family neighborhoods.
Rants said the city, in fact, should encourage denser living patterns within city limits, to put an end to what he called rapid leap-frog growth to the county.
I will say that Steve’s point that the city commission, which was on its way out in the early 80s, was certainly the body that laid the groundwork for a series of downzoning in the 80s and 90s, they didn’t seem to be enthusiastic about putting on the density brakes. In fact, to me, it seems like the same populist dynamics that put in the city council form of government where the same dynamics that were also arguing for exclusive single-family zoning throughout the city.
2. In the past few months, the opponents of denser and less expensive housing in Olympia have started using Sam Stein’s “Capital City” like a cudgel. Without really explaining how Stein’s arguments about how the modern real estate industry works in regards to single-family zoning, they simply state that more options for buildings (for-profit, non-profit or government) would just allow for more building and builders are bad.
While this behavior does fall into the broader “why NIMBYs just hate developers” thing, it doesn’t really center Stein’s arguments in Olympia’s history of downzoning. I poked around Stein’s book for discussion on downzoning on a broader scale, like what happened in Olympia or Los Angeles in the last 50 years.
A historic district, a contextual rezoning––which means changing the zoning rules to match what’s there right now––or a downzoning, which means in the future people will only be able to build smaller than what’s here right now. So it wasn’t even, I said neighborhood before, but it’s really block by block, block by block by race, so white blocks––predominantly white blocks––got protected, predominantly African American, Latino, and Asian blocks were subject to big, new development. And so, the result of that ends up looking like integration. If you look at those prior, mostly Black, Latino, and Asian blocks, and you see there was this luxury development that was built and suddenly all these white people moved in, now something else is happening. But at the same time, they cut off the ability to build out low-income and mixed-race development on those white blocks. And so, they were channeling integration in one way and cutting it off in the other. It’s like a one-way street that’s going––there’s a one way street and you’re moving in the wrong direction. If we want to do integration, we need to unsegregate those white spaces. The problem is not the concentration of people of color in neighborhoods that they built up over a long period of segregation and disinvestment. So that in many cities the integration that’s happening is the exact wrong way to do it.
In context to Olympia and the Northwest, this brings up a few things for me.
One, we’ve seen how the debate over changing single-family neighborhoods into “ghettos” has affected the course of Olympia housing policy. Calling people racists in historic terms is not fun, but I’m just going to leave that there.
Two, people who trot out Stein are also unironically talking about “nodes” of high-density growth in Olympia. There are places where added density that could take place in single-family neighborhoods should more appropriately go. And, unsurprisingly, when you poke around a block group map of white distribution around Olympia, places with a lot of apartments (existing “nodes”) also have the fewest white people.
So, to my question: how is Stein’s discussion of protecting white neighborhoods not like what happened and is happening in Olympia?
If you go up Eastside Street from downtown, it will eventually curve to the east and become 22nd Avenue. As 22nd Avenue approaches Boulevard, there is a small neighborhood on the left-hand side of the road called Nut Tree Loop.
This area around 22nd, Cain Road and Boulevard was the neighborhood I grew up in. I was born in 1976, so in my mind’s eye, I kind of remember Nut Tree Loop being built in the late 70s. And, I’ve always thought about it as a much nicer neighborhood surrounded by blocks of split-level ranch homes and older craftsmen. I think if you take a walk through Nut Tree now, that impression by Kid Emmett still holds true. Two homes recently sold in there for over $700,000 (in 2017) and $800,000 (last May).
So then, I was startled to find out when Dan Beuhler first envisioned Nut Tree Loop in 1976, he sketched out a neighborhood of 21 fourplexes “across one section of landscaped grounds.” Beuhler had already built a smaller development of apartments around the corner from Nut Tree. At the time called Eidleweiss, they are currently known at the Chateau Townhomes.
Where 40 or so nicer single-family homes now sit, 84 multi-family units would have been built, if Beuhler got his way. But instead, the Nut Tree fourplexes kicked off several years of debate in Olympia around multi-family housing, the results of which are still felt today.
And the nature of those conversations tells us a lot about why Olympia shut down the development of smaller multi-family housing since the 1980s.
I’ve written about this period of history in Olympia before. First I tracked the sharp decline in small multifamily housing in Olympia since an explosion in the mid-70s. Second, I took a look at zoning maps since the 1960s to the current day and found a declining area that allowed anything but single-family homes. Lastly, I charted the sprawl of single-family homes that resulted since Olympia downzoned.
In this look, I want to explore how we were talking about the change in the city that at one point allowed duplexes and small apartments and then outlawed them.
Beuhler’s proposal set off a series of contentious public meetings where the city planning commission (on which Beuhler inexplicably sat) decided the fate of the Nut Tree quadplexes. Over 500 individual Olympian’s testified to the city planning commission and the city commission itself (Olympia was not yet governed by a city council).
Times were tense when the city commission finally took up the Nut Tree fourplexes. When one city commissioner pointed out that in the late 70s incomes were not increasing at the same rate as the price of a single-family home and therefore it made sense to allow for denser, more affordable options in new construction, an audience member shouted: “Why don’t you move to New York?”
New York in the 1970s not necessarily being an example of a humming urban community. This fear of the urban, the denser and poorer community coming into newer single-family neighborhoods underlined the public debate around Nut Tree. While most of the top-line conversation was simply about the power of zoning and the expectations of homeowners that their newer neighbors would have the same zoning, when you dug down, you go the fear of the urban.
Facing that level of fire over one development was not something the city commission had experienced before, and they quickly put the Nut Tree quadplexes on the shelf.
After Nut Tree Loop, the city took a step back and began to examine multifamily housing across the city. The Citizen’s Multi-Family Housing Taskforce began meeting in January 1978 and worked throughout the spring and summer to deliver a zoning package to the city council.
But, like Nut Tree along 22nd, this proposal met with fierce opposition across the city.
As the city considered a plan that would expand multifamily housing throughout the city (even further than the citizen’s taskforce had intended), an unsigned editorial in the Olympian captured the mood of those opposed to denser housing: It isn’t our job to look after anyone but families and experts that disagree with us are bad.
Those who participated in seven months of hearings by the task force evidently want nothing of the philosophy that holds a community responsible for providing the kinds mixed housing needed by today’s mixed lifestyles — the singles, the elderly and the divorced for instance.
The planners are coming at the problem as theoreticians, as we see it, and they’re not handling the grassroots thinking very well at all… The latest effort to insert recommendations into a citizens report had too much of the smell of “we know what’s best for you” thinking about it.
The commission approved plans that would, on the one hand, allow multi-family housing, but, on the other, only after it was approved on a case-by-case basis. Even then, the economic class of the folks sitting on the Task Force was brought up.
From the city commission minutes in August 1978:
Paul Sparks said his concern is that we would be isolating the lower income families to certain areas away from services and from the city center. The people who are most affected by (the multi-family plan) were not involved on the Task Force.
Two unidentified women then entered into a heated discussion about the makeup of the Task Force, one asking how come low income people had not been considered and involved; the other replying the Planning Commission has asked for volunteers to serve on the Task Force and all this was in the papers and the radio.
The city commission passed a version of the Task Force recommendations, but they failed to turn on the spigot of multi-family housing.
By 1980, the planning commission had again passed a package that would expand multi-family housing across the city. The idea would have been in the early 80s to allow multifamily housing in all areas of Olympia, essentially banning single-family zoning.
And, again the residents of single-family neighborhoods stood up.
Multi-family housing in otherwise single-family neighborhoods will foster “the diverse kind of community that makes this community interesting and makes it rich,” (Raven Lidman) said.
She said when it comes to the good points of living in single-family neighborhoods, “tenants have those same desires.”
But Virginia Baxter, speaking after Lidman, said “The existing inviting neighborhoods will be destroyed, and there will be an exodus of homeowners” if multi-family housing comes to neighborhoods.
…
But Susan Hirst, protesting the proposal, said that multi-family renters will not gain much by being located inside single-family neighborhoods.
They will still be living in apartments, she said, and “you will simply be placing them into a neighborhood where other people have” the style of life the renters want.
But you have to look no further than Bill Grout to find the dark corner of the urbanism discussion in 1980 Olympia. In one article on the 1980 multi-family plan:
“You have increased police activity, increased crime, increased vandalism,” with multi-family housing, said Bill Grout.
Later that summer, as the city commission itself considered the plan, Grout crossed swords with a county leader in a discussion that might as well come out of our current conversation about Missing Middle housing:
Bill Grout, who said he represents Olympia’s homeowners, labeled the proposal one which “would turn Olympia into a ghetto.”
…
(County Commissioner George Barner) said the measure would build up the dwindling rental housing market and would enable low income and young persons to afford a place to live.
He said such housing should be encouraged in the urban areas because most conveniences are located there. He added it would also prevent urban housing sprawl.
Grout contradicted Barner, saying out that multi-family housing would drive down property values in single-family residential areas because renters generally do not take care of their property.
And, so the city turned the proposal down. Not actually turned it down, but rather just put it back on the shelf. A year later the city would approve a townhome ordinance that would allow a certain kind of multifamily housing throughout the city, though one that seemingly favored homeowners.
But, the time of multi-family housing tracking with population increase was over. Olympia would go through several incremental downzones to tighten up single-family zoning areas through the 80s and 90s
