Category: Olympia (Page 5 of 13)

No one lives there:

Seriously, downtown Olympia is in the same category as my neighborhood, and I live in an unbuilt wasteland where people wish there were taller buildings. 

 WastBut, of course, when someone talks about building a seven story building in our empty-of-people downtown, people speak up, because this is some sort of horrible thing. Like we should be protecting parking lots from the evil expansion of multistory housing.

I can’t speak to his stats, but David Scherer Water, makes a striking point about how downtown has changed as Olympia has expanded:

Less than four percent of Olympia’s population lives downtown. This is
the lowest this ratio has been in the City’s history. A hundred years
ago more than half the population of Olympia lived downtown. Fifty years
ago it was about ten percent. Today 96% of our population comes
downtown to visit, to shop, to party and they leave. I believe this is
the source of most if not all of the complaints commonly made about
downtown. We need more people to live downtown.

 Density is good. People living downtown is good. More people living in a dense neighborhood means fewer cars, more people walking and more services and good things downtown.

I suppose the best I can say is that it seems to take the edge off.

What I wanted to find out was what kind of impact the legislative session (hundreds of lawmakers, staffers and policy wonks coming to Olympia and Thurston County for at least two months every year) has on our economy. You could easily assume that it has some.

When people are in town for session, they have to eat, pay rent, entertain themselves and (I suppose) shop. Even just the work of lobbying, taking lawmakers out to eat, has to produce some economic benefit.

So, the best indicator I could find for economic activity by date was retail sales tax paid in each quarter. You can find the data I used here. Here are the spreadsheets I used.

First, I took all retail sales tax paid in the four quarters between 2005 and 2012 averaged out. I compared Olympia, Lacey and Tumwater with Bellingham. I used Bellingham as a stand in for a similar community to Olympia that doesn’t have a seasonal political population.

You can see a similar curve across both communities. Economic activity rises through the year, dropping back down each first quarter.

The curve from low activity first quarter to higher activity through the fourth seems to indicate that in terms of the broader economy, the legislative session doesn’t have much impact in Olympia. Despite the people visiting and temporarily living here for a few months, the economy here (which is still supported by the broader government) is too large to really for use to really see the impact of session.

But, if you take a closer look at just one aspect of the economy here, say food and lodging, you start to see some sort of impact. The chart below shows just the sales taxable activity in places like restaurants and hotels.

Again, you see a similar curve in both urban Thurston and Whatcom counties. But, the Olympia, Lacey and Tumwater curve is less pronounced, especially in terms of the first quarter. You could almost say the session (which would increase spending in the first quarter) takes the edge off lower first quarter spending on food and overnight rooms in Olympia.

Still though, even this kind of spending in the average first quarter isn’t as high as the third quarter. So, while there’s some benefit, it still seems smaller than what people often imply it to be.

Black houses of Olympia by Jeremy Quist (via flickr)

People are trying to create a mythology around the Olympia Black Houses that simply doesn’t exist. There’s no evidence that Duane Stephen Moore is anything but a typical small business owner (in this case a dentist and a rental owner) who has unique atheistic tastes.

So, that’s my conclusion. Yesterday I put up a map I’d been working on of all the rental houses that Moore owns throughout town. Olympia’s biggest urban legend in recent years has been that there’s something sinister about the houses, that if you mapped them, they’d make a pentagram.

I don’t know what you can see, but there’s no pentagram there for me.

Take away the black paint that seems to touch almost everything (short of the Reef Bar downtown) he owns, Moore seems like a pretty typical entrepreneur. He owns over a dozen rental houses, at least three commercial properties, owns a construction company (to hire sub-contractors to take care of the rentals?) and is an active dentist in Shelton. If the color were blue or yellow (or blue and yellow), I wouldn’t be writing this post.

Also, there’s nothing in the Olympia code to prevent anyone from painting their house black. So, if the city is fining him for having black houses, I’m not sure why.

I didn’t talk directly to Duane (or indirectly) when I was putting this post together. Neither has anyone else that’s written about the black houses either. He’s been referenced a few times in the local paper, but never directly quoted. That gave me the impression that he’s someone that values his privacy.

Also, if I stand by my “regular guy, interesting tastes” position, then I wouldn’t call him, because there’d be nothing really to discuss.

Nik Neburn made the movie I linked to above about the Black Houses. He also made an interesting documentary about the Paul Ingram case. Nik quotes Norman Cohn to make a point about the Ingram case that I think applies to the black houses too:

To understand why the stereotype of Devil-worshiping
sects emerged at all, one must look not at the beliefs or behavior of
heretics […] but into the minds of the orthodox themselves.

While Olympia hipsters are hardly religious fundamentalists, the stories surrounding the black houses do more to cast Olympia overall as a weird and interesting place than to explain anything about Duane Moore or the houses themselves. Because we want Olympia to be a certain way, we make the houses seems weirder than they actually are. And, if it wasn’t the black houses, we’d find something else out there to make up stories about.

At first blush, I was confused by the election results for the Olympia city council. Across the two contest races, I assumed there would be some difference between the four candidates that ranged across the city’s political spectrum. In one race, we had a fairly right candidate (Mike Volz) against a neighborhood based centrist (Julie Hankins). And, in the other, we had downtown business centrist (Cheryl Selby) against downtown business further left (Darren Mills).

Both Selby and Hankins won their races by health margins, showing an overall preference for centrist, I suppose. Even if you look at the precinct level results, both Selby and Hankins both had nearly clean sweeps across the entire city. Mills only won a handful of precincts and Volz didn’t win a single one.

What was shocking to me, was that even on the precinct levels, the margins of defeat for Mills and Volz were similar. Meaning, it is possible (though unlikely) that the same voters who chose further right Volz also chose further left Mills. I think this phenomena is more a trick of the numbers. While voters overall went for the centrists, I don’t’ think there’s much cross over between Mills voters and Volz voters.

Here’s why.

Take a look at the precincts each did well in across the city. There is a distinct geographic pattern. Mills won precincts (in green) in the upper eastside. While Volz (in light red) didn’t win any precincts, he did better than 40 percent in ones along the outer edge of the city. Even in the eastside precincts where he made a point of emphasizing his opposition to a homeless shelter, he did no better than 35 percent.

Here’s another way to look at the base of both candidates. I compared how well each one did in each precinct and charted it. Volz beating Mills in on the left, Mills beating Volz on the right.

 

From my Facebook news feed recently:

Sort of funny how, now that you have to pay for access to The Olympian, and they require folks to comment using real FB identities, that there are no almost no comments on the articles whatsoever.

Whatever will the trolls do amuse themselves?

The Olympian put up a bit of a paywall and moved to Facebook comments awhile back. Since then, the comment threads over there went from troll heaven to ghost town. So, where did all the online conversation (and all the trolls) go?

1. Craigslist Rants and Raves

This is the most epically troll heavy place in the world and Olympia. Not sure why anyone ever really posts here, other than self gratification. But, there even seems to be some back and forth.

2. Thurston Blog

Back when the Olympian was trying to make comment threads work on their own, several comment thread regulars broke off to start Thurston Blog. Comments seem to have pretty much dried up there, but its worth pointing out that the exodus from the Olympian comment threads has a bit of a history.

3. Olympia Memes

While engagement over at the Olympian has waned, it has waxed at Olympia Memes. This isn’t just a simple local memes site, the admin of the page has raised money for charity and taken on local debates like feeding homeless downtown. Also, making fun of Shelton.

4. Olympia subreddits (r/olympia)

Reddit has a reputation (earned) for being a sort of troll heavy site wide. But, our small corner of reddit here in Olympia is “pretty chill.” There are also several other specific local subreddits for Evergreen and jobs in Olympia.

5. Olympian reporters on twitter

Back when I was a young reporter and first thinking about publishing on the web, I thought of comment threads as a way to update stories and engage with reporters. What newspaper comment threads eventually became couldn’t be further from that. But, reporters on twitter seem to be bringing that vision to reality. Meg Wochnick and Matt Batcheldor are doing a great job engaging on twitter.

Don’t like shopping at Safeway or Fred Meyer? Ralphs and Bayview got you down? Tired of shopping at the co-op and the farmers market is never open?

Recently, one local email group I’m part of had a long conversation about the food co-op, whether it really serving the community and if expanding to a larger store downtown (rather than two smaller neighborhood stores) would improve things. That got me thinking about where are the other places that you can buy food around here that don’t fall in either the big store or co-cop/farmers market categories.

So, here are three local Olympia food shopping options that you might like.

1. Olympia Seafood. This is my favorite, which is why I put it on top of the list.

When I want to buy something seafoody, his is where I go. All the time. I also tend to buy gift certificates here for other locals as a go to gift. While Olympia Seafood was established less than 20 years ago, it vividly reminds me of another seafood market that I used to go to as a kid. Walking in there, it literally feels like a seafood place. Cold, wet and smells wonderful. The seafood is good too.

@olympiaseafood
411 Columbia St.

2. Spuds Produce Market.

Spud’s has only been open for a year? Feels like way longer than that. Anyway, unlike the other two listings here, Spud’s has an awesome community feel. Kids from the local school take field trips there, its in a neat old building, and I know for a fact, the food is great.

2828 Capitol Boulevard

3. Farm Fresh Market (Olympia Local Foods)

This is the place I was most fascinated with, because I didn’t even realize they had a retail store until I started poking around during the co-op email discussion. I had heard about a few local food delivery services, but Olympia Local Foods recently opened a brick and mortar retail location, sort of out of the way on the westside. But, beyond that, they seem to have a well rounded selection, plus their delivery service is still online.


2010 Black Lake Boulevard
Olympia Local Foods