Category: Uncategorized (Page 1 of 49)

This week, I testified on SB 5400, a bill that would create a new way to fund local journalism in Washington State. 

I emphasized the critical role of local journalism in combating election-related misinformation and ensuring the safety of election workers. 

I also suggested a few ways the bill could be improved:

I highlighted the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium as a model for ensuring independence and expertise in funding decisions, and stressed the importance of adhering to the Institute for Non-Profit News standards, which require journalists to be based in the communities they cover. Lastly, I advocated for long-term funding solutions, such as taxing digital advertising, to address the revenue crisis caused by platforms like Meta and Alphabet.

SB 5400 proposes expanding a surcharge on large tech firms to fund an account managed by the state Department of Commerce. While the criteria for distributing funds are broad, the requirement that organizations have at least three full-time staffers could exclude smaller, newer local news organizations that rely on freelancers. In today’s media landscape, three full-time reporters is a significant number, and this requirement risks leaving behind the very communities most in need of local journalism.

It’s long past time to question whether we should publicly fund journalism in Washington State. The state already supports two examples of publicly funded journalism: TVW and the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication’s fellowship program. TVW, a nonprofit organization, receives over 80% of its funding from the state and provides in-depth coverage of state government. This model demonstrates how public funding can support independent, high-quality journalism. The Murrow College fellowship program, launched in 2023, places early-career journalists in under-served communities across Washington to report on civic affairs for two years. It currently supports 16 fellows who report on issues such as government accountability, rural economics, and environmental policy. Fellows receive ongoing training, mentorship, and a strong cohort experience, with their work available via Creative Commons. Future fellow placements depend on continued legislative funding.

SB 5400 follows on the heels of efforts  in other states to tackle the local journalism problem. California reached a deal with Google to support local journalism, but it has been criticized for lacking meaningful, long-term solutions. The agreement allocates $55 million from Google and $70 million from the state over five years, but the legislative proposals surrounding it fall short. One stronger proposal called for a tax on digital advertising, while the other suggested a recycled idea for a link tax, which I will discuss below. The negotiated deal is a mess. It prioritized large corporate publishers over smaller, community-based media outlets and includes an AI accelerator program that journalists did not request. Big Tech’s influence in shaping the deal highlights the need for stronger, community-driven coalitions to counter corporate interests in future local-news policy efforts.

The New Jersey Civic Information Consortium (NJCI) is a nonprofit that receives state funding and distributes grants to local news organizations. Governed by a board with representatives from state universities, legislative caucuses, and the public, the NJCI ensures a fair and equitable distribution of funds. This model could serve as a blueprint for Washington, though adjustments would be needed to account for the state’s larger size and more rural communities.

Another proposal in Oregon under consideration this year (SB 686) is an example of the worst of all approaches. Similar to California’s original link tax proposal, it also attempts to prevent platforms from penalizing journalism organizations by outlawing algorithmic de-prioritization of news content. However, it fails to address First Amendment implications of this ban or provide a clear enforcement mechanism. This approach misunderstands the root problem: the decline of journalism is caused by the loss of advertising revenue to digital platforms, not the linking behavior of users.

How we should approach state-level journalism funding

For systems of state-level funding, I look for two key components:

1. A fair, equitable decision-making process grounded in local needs, exemplified by the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium’s statewide distribution of funding and emphasis on community-driven projects.
2. Funding derived from digital advertising taxes, not link taxes. Taxing digital advertising directly addresses the root cause of journalism’s revenue crisis, while link taxes harm the open web and fail to provide sustainable solutions.

We often forget how revolutionary hyperlinks were when they first appeared on the web. The Cluetrain Manifesto reminds us that hyperlinks are messy, decentralized, and inherently democratic. Taxing them undermines the open web and further entrenches the dominance of closed-garden social media platforms.

The real threat to journalism over the past twenty-five years has been the decline in advertising revenue, driven by the ad tech capture of Meta (Facebook, Instagram) and Alphabet (Google). 

Taxing digital advertising directly addresses this issue, using the profits of these platforms to fund the journalism they have undermined. This is akin to taxing cigarettes or sugary drinks to fund universal healthcare, it targets the source of the problem to create a better future.

We should work to break apart the ad tech monopoly (United States v. Google LLC 2023), but lawsuits take time.

In the meantime, taxing digital advertising provides a sustainable, immediate solution to fund local journalism and ensure a well-informed citizenry.

The sudden news at the Everett Herald is a reminder of the ongoing decline in working journalists in Washington State. Last month, 10 out of the 18 reporters on the ground and two editors were laid off at the daily newspaper in Snohomish County.

The story is sadly typical. Old chain ownership declares bankruptcy, new owners swoop in and pick up mastheads, circulation and advertising contacts at bargain-basement prices. The sale is made more palatable by cutting non-revenue positions at the get go. While the backlash may be loud, it’ll normally fade into the darkness as subscribers drift away and the rest of us accept the new normal.

While the percentage of reporters is itself startling, I was shocked by the gross number. Ten reporters is about twice the number of reporters that cover Olympia or Thurston County (from Olympia and Thurston County) any given day.

And while such a large cut at one time in one paper is a shock to the system, reporter layoffs in the Puget Sound, or nationwide have been going on in earnest for about two decades.

The odd thing about the state of newspapers and news is that relatively speaking, Washington is doing better than most states news desert wise. Only Asotin County is officially marked as a news desert on the notorious UNC Journalism map. But even that is belied by the existence of a newspaper in Lewiston across the border in Idaho that covers Asotin County news.

But the fact that many of our newspapers have so far survived, just shows that the Herald layoff are just a reminder that there is still pretty far for us to fall. If we assume that Washington State has lost newsroom jobs at somewhere near the national rate, we are saving mastheads by losing reporters. Which means at some point, the newspapers themselves will start disappearing.

I started my career as a reporter over two decades ago in small, rural papers. While I loved the work, it didn’t take me long to move over to better paying media relations jobs. As someone who tries to earn media for a living, I can see how the decline in places to earn it has had an impact on our communities and my work.

I remember the early days of social media and the promise of telling “our own stories” without an intermediary. That certainly didn’t work out the way we thought it would. At first, we were migrating our work and content to platforms that “our audience” were using anyway. We adapted our content strategies to follow the curve preferred by platforms, then we began paying to access the audience that had opted in to seeing our content in the first place.

Now, most of our content is buried in walled gardens that are increasingly moving away from promoting content with outside links.

I’m heartened to see the Everett community fill up the Letter to the Editor inbox at the Herald with their pain. These letters are making the righteous case for local journalism. They aren’t wrong that communities are being made better when reporters are working. But to work, reporters need to get paid. And the economic argument of a post bankruptcy purchase. Even the most civically minded owners, profit, non-profit, (whatever) need money.

But I’ll be honest with you. There is no money is local journalism. There are two reasons.

1. Reasonable expectation that content on the internet is accessible (free). It is just how the web works. I click here, I get that. So if I have to pay for it, that’s too much friction for me to care. Especially when it is less than scintillating news about local issues. People expected they’d pay to have a newspaper delivered to their house or out of the box, but to pay for something on the internet is just too much bother.
   
2. Meta and Alphabet and programmatic advertising houses hoover up all the online ad revenue. Even if local news companies decided to open up their doors and lean totally on ad revenue, they could never keep up. These advertising behemoths operate on a different level. Their profit margins are massive because they don’t support supplying content to go alongside the ads. They just spend their time on profit producing spy tech that captures users and delivers incredibly cheap ads to eyeballs. As someone that controls an incredibly modest digital ad budget, I would be wasting money if I didn’t use these platforms. It is definitely time to break them up, but that is the job of the federal government, to be honest.

So, that’s the setup. More and more legacy media organizations will drift onto the shoals as the online media ad platforms lower the tide by sucking the ocean dry. If these legacy companies don’t just die, they’ll stay alive as raiders come by and keep them alive to pump the last bit of economic value out of them.

So, here’s what we should do

We don’t need to support the old legacy organizations. In a lot of places, we should. Despite their chain and, oftentimes, hedge fund owners, the people left working there are highly trained professional journalists, and we may consider honoring their work by helping pay for it any way we can. But they don’t have to be the only game in town.

So let me say this: if Everett comes out of this emotional moment in their community with just a smaller Everett Herald, I’ll be disappointed. Gig Harbor Now, Range (in Spokane) show how green shoots of new growth can start showing up in our communities.

If Everett is as worked up as they seem to be from the letters to the editor, the community up there should start talking about launching a new effort, raising money and generally not giving up.

Other than starting a brand-new thing from the ground up, the Everett community should also consider simply raising money to increase journalism in any form in their community. This can literally start tomorrow (hint hint)

Other examples of local private funding are the Nebraska Journalism Trust and the Central Valley Journalism Cooperative in California. I’m part of a team trying to get this going in Olympia too.

Lastly, I don’t think it is too far to explore how government can help support journalism. I spelled this out last year pretty comprehensively. Basically, I think we should copy the New Jersey Civic Information Network. But there are a few new developments that I think are worth covering.

Let’s not copy the JPRA in any sense. It is a link tax that ignores the structure of the open internet. And like I said above, the platforms the JPRA supporters say are “stealing” links are either actually driving traffic to legacy organizations that are starting be ignored by platforms anyway. Jeff Jarvis has the best thoughts on this, so I’ll defer to him.

A tax on online advertising that would fund a civic information network would be an almost perfect policy solution, though. Online advertising monopolies create negative externalities for local journalism. Carving off a piece of their revenue gained in Washington State and paying reporters would be a tight little loop. Both California and Maryland have passed these taxes, Washington should join.

Break up the ad tech giants. Just that.

This isn’t normally what you come to this blog for. But I wanted to share an essay I have been working on for a few months on youth voting:

Implications of Brain Science on Youth Voting

There’s tons more context below, but my main point of posting this essay it to get input. So, read on, but also read the essay and let me know what you think. Comments are on in the essay itself.

My experiences during the 2020 election prompted me to re-examine two persistent themes:

1. The stubbornly low voter turnout among those under 40 and
2. The ongoing wonder of brain development, an aspect I’ve observed firsthand as I cruise through my 40s and my own children approach adulthood.

My social media often echoes during elections with despair over young voter apathy, with cries of “Why don’t they care?” practically handing the future over to “the old people.” However, my years immersed in local government and political discourse have led to a new question: are we asking the right questions about youth participation?

This is not an exhaustive academic study, though I do cite relevant scholarly evidence. Rather, it is an exploration informed by my own experience. I’ve been a local newspaper reporter, I’ve done a local politics blog as a hobbyist, I have co-hosted a local politics podcast and served as a library trustee, I’ve been deeply engaged in the civic sphere. Currently, I am in a communications role for a local office elections office. So, this essay is not a thorough academic study, but framed on years of accumulated wealth of firsthand observations.

The point is: what if brain development holds a key to understanding the youth voting conundrum? Between the ages of 20 and 40, crucial non-cognitive skills – resilience, self-control, and decision-making – essential for navigating the complexities of voting, undergo significant maturation. This might explain the existing age gap in voter participation and render traditional solutions, such as early civic education, somewhat inadequate.

This suggests we may need to consider alternative approaches. Could compulsory voting, a wider spectrum of political choices, or even non-voting forms of participation like town halls prove more effective in engaging younger citizens?

Like I said, this isn’t normally what I post on this blog. I took the time to do some research and frame my thoughts, but I’m mostly interested in feedback. You can drop a comment here, comment on the essay itself, or contact me some other way to let me know if you think I’m heading in the wrong direction or whatever.

During the same period of time we have seen the evaporation of local news, and along with it the actual printing and delivery of newspapers, we have also seen the increase of fear of another kind of traveler through our neighborhoods. Porch pirates follow delivery drivers from Amazon and other online platforms (but let’s be honest, it really is just Amazon). They quickly rush our porches, snatching up packages before we have a chance to retrieve them.

The phenomenon of online deliveries are a normal staple in our lives. There is an entire market of doorbell cameras and other accessories to protect or hide your deliveries. Videos from doorbell cameras are a consistent part of our media diet.

Online deliveries seem to have come out of the chaos of the early days of the pandemic, when we wondered out loud in mid-March 2020 if the police would use checkpoints to stop us from going to work.

Every option we had for going out into public suddenly had a separate option for no-touch delivery associated to it. Obviously, if you could afford it. All at once, between March and June 2020, blue trucks cruising our neighborhoods became normal. Along with the fear that those packages would be snatched off of our doorsteps before we were able to retrieve them. The package thief became the pilot fish of the basking shark of our home delivery economy.

Paired with the threat of catalytic converter thieves (the stronger, more violent, metallic cousins of porch pirates, crawling underneath cars, quickly cutting the valuable underbelly before skittering off into the night) we became newly aware of what was happening just outside our houses.

There became a sort of standard format to a post on Nextdoor.com or your neighborhood Facebook group. A homeowner would take a quick picture of someone walking through the neighborhood, wondering who this hooded person was. And if no one knew, and no one would ever seem to know who the blurry hooded person walking away from the photographer was, it was evidence that only increased suspicious was needed.

This is the context where anyone could mistake a newspaper delivery for a crime being committed.

When there were more newspapers being delivered, maybe a newspaper on the porch of near every house, the action of delivering newspapers was more recognizable. Subscribers decline, the newspaper owners cut days off printing, news coverage becomes patchy, you don’t recognize what you’re seeing at 2 a.m.

Yeah, in fact, I do think we should rename Thurston County. Or everything named after Samuel Thurston, including Thurston Avenue in Olympia.

Here’s a brief update on why Samuel Thurston is not a good namesake. He never lived here, never visited here. His only actual impact here is the worst thing about him. Yes, he did write the Black Exclusion law in the Oregon Territory (which Thurston County was part of back in the day) and he did other things. But the worst thing is that he set our course that we travelled on well after his early death.

The name itself had more to with the politics of the moment in the 1850s. Thurston was a ruthless political operator. Major pieces of our region’s racist heritage took root from the Black Exclusion Laws, including:

• Chinese police tax;
• Anti-Chinese riots in the 1880s; and
• 1920s anti-immigration laws were spawned in the Pacific Northwest

But, I don’t necessarily think we need to pick a new name. We can keep the Thurston moniker.

This was exactly what King County did when they changed who “King” honors from terrible Vice President Rufus King to really great Martin Luther King Jr. It is just a matter of finding a new Thurston.

The problem with “Thurston” that we didn’t have with “King” is that there aren’t any giants of politics and culture that we can point at immediately. There are a lot of good Thurstons, not single great one.

For example:

• Rev. David Thurston of Maine was a pre-Civil War abolitionist minister. He would travel from town to town, preaching against slavery until they kicked him out.
• Charles Brown Thurston, another New England abolitionist that served in the Civil War but also lived an otherwise quiet live. 
• Rev. John L. Thurston, of Chicago. He was a fellow traveler of Martin Luther King Jr. and was president of the Chicago chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
• Baratunde Thurston is a contemporary writer who has been very significant in the anti-racist movement. I mean, if you don’t know who this person is, I suggest you give him a look today. 
• And, why are we so worried about last names? Thurston Moore was lead guitar for Sonic Youth. That’s pretty awesome.
• Lastly, if you look back and deconstruct the name Thurston, you see some evidence that it is a construction of Thor (literally the god of thunder) and stone. As in Thor’s Stone. I mean Thor is pretty great, but not literally a Thurston. But, close enough to merit reference.

If you wanted to design someone who would be outraged at the prospect of renaming Priest Point Park, you could do much worse than me.

Priest Point Park is probably (outside state-owned parks around the capitol) the jewel of Olympia’s park system. More than 300 acres, featuring everything (except athletic fields) you’d want in a park, built first in 1905, it is big, it is old and everyone has been there. Now, the city council is reconsidering renaming it Squaxin Park.

I was born in Olympia. I’ve lived other places, but this is the place I’ve always considered home. I have a deeper emotional attachment to this place and the things that are here than anywhere else. And, for people who know me, that is an understatement.

I am also a cradle Catholic. I was raised in Olympia’s Catholic community. I went to school at St. Michael’s and church there every week for a good portion of my life. I was also born at St. Peter’s, but I doubt very much in the 1970s that the Sisters of Providence was what brought my parents to that particular hospital. It was the only game in town. I should also mention that while I was raised Catholic, and I have a latent respect for the faith, I walked away from it in the winter of 2009. But even then, it isn’t as if I have a axe to grind against Catholics or Catholic things.

I am also tied to here because of the things that happened here. I am very interested in the history of our community. I’ve written about it here at this blog and at other places. 

But it is the interest in history, or rather, how my particular taste in history, that drives me to want to  change the name of Priest Point Park. Simply, my interest in history is so I can help our community no understand our past, so we can make our future better.

It is important for us to have an accurate view of what happened, and give honors (like park names and statues) to things that matter, not just whatever we chose back in the day. We are allowed to review our past choices and then move on in a different direction.

But, here are a few good reasons for us to move on.

1. The Oblate Priests of Mary Immaculate at Priest Point Park were only at Priest Point for 12 years. They showed up in 1848 and then moved on 1860. And, most importantly, they did not have any sort of direct connection to Catholic institutions that came later. St. Martin’s College, St. Peter’s Hospital, Sacred Heart and St. Michael’s were all founded decades later by non-Oblate members of the Church. To draw any connection between Oblate priests travelling west and other Catholic institutions is casual. 
2. There is already another Priest Point on Puget Sound. Not just in the world, but very nearby here just north of Everett. And the northern one is an actual populated place, which probably makes it more significant. Seems dumb to have two. And if we want to change ours first, then good.
3. The most important thing the Oblate priests did do is to act as a relay between the tribal communities in the South Sound and the white community during the Puget Sound War. The Puget Sound War was the conflict between the federal and territorial governments immediately following the Steven’s Treaties. The Oblate priests had spent a lot of effort trying to convert some of those Indians to Catholicism, so knew people on both sides of the conflict. But even this occurrence points us to the Squaxin Island Tribe, because we need to remember we were at war with them and we turned their namesake island into a prisoner camp. 
4. Worse, Priest Point Park was where we imprisoned the tribal members who lived around Olympia before we moved them to Squaxin Island. Not a prison camp per se, but on the way to one.
5. The entire logic behind sending missionaries to the west wasn’t to serve Catholics that had moved there, but to convert tribal members who had another religions already to Catholicism. Despite what Catholic historians will lay down later, an attempt at religious colonialism. Continuing to honor that portion of our history, especially given the rest of the context, is a weird decision. (I added this point a few hours after writing this initial post)
6. The Squaxin Island Tribe asked us to. Their history runs deeper here, and their history is the one we try hard to ignore. Their history is the history we should try to pay closer attention to. The Squaxin Island tribal council passed a resolution on December 10, 2021 requesting the change. 
7. Lastly, the priests never asked for the honor. They were long gone by the time the city ended up buying the property from the county over a century ago.

Renaming the park doesn’t take anything away from Olympia. Catholics still make up a significant portion of our community’s religious adherents. The priests didn’t front the money to the city in 1905 when the parcels became available from a failed housing development. That was George Mottman. Local lawyer P.M. Troy did the spade work, pulling together the title work to make sure the city got as much of the property as possible, since much of it was already split into lots. But we didn’t name the park after those two men. They just went with the inherited name that locals had always called the spot.

A week or so ago, Feliks Banel put out a challenge to find the origin of the name of Thanksgiving Island. Thanksgiving Island was a small piece of land that you can see on some old maps on the stretch of the Columbia River between the Gorge and where the Snake joins. The image of an “Island of Thanksgiving” stokes the imagination. But the actual history of the naming is pretty pedestrian.

I think I ended up winning the challenge by finding a 1968 Oregonian article that covered geographic features that would disappear after the inundation by the John Day Dam reservoir. According to the article, Thanksgiving Island was named after an event. A steamboat landed on the island on Thanksgiving. That is a pretty normal sounding explanation, especially when you cross-reference the steamboat era of the Columbia River with when Thanksgiving as a national holiday was first coming into focus.

Thanksgiving Island disappeared under thousands of cubic feet of water of the John Day reservoir in 1971. Because even when it did exist, it was an island in a river, its existence was always temporary. These kinds of islands are formed and destroyed by erosion and sedimentation caused by the river moving back and forth across its flood plain, cutting new channels. 

Starting last week, redistricting commissioners in Washington State have been releasing proposed maps for legislative and congressional districts. 

Democratic appointees April Sims and Brady Piñero Walkinshaw and Republican appointees Paul Graves and Jo Fain have taken different approaches to moving borders in Thurston County and around Olympia. In this post I’ll take a look at the legislative and congressional proposals, taking a zoomed in look at what they could mean for our community

The need for all of these legislative maps is to shrink the 22nd District, it is about 7,000 people too large by its current boarders. Alternatively, the districts that the 22nd traditionally borders (the 35th and 20th) are both underpopulated by a few thousand. Each of the proposed maps approaches this task in different ways. 

The Graves and Walkinshaw maps approach by taking similar routes. First Graves:

Both of these move various rural districts into different combinations of southern Thurston County and let the 35th district in Mason County take up more of mid-suburban Thurston County and Cooper Point. The 22nd District is going to become more compact, and its interesting that most of the mapmakers are taking off the west side and leaving urban Lacey largely inside the district. 

In addition to Lacey/Olympia balance, taking the Cooper Point peninsula out of the 22nd would leave Evergreen State College out of the 22nd for the first time in history.

This includes the College precinct, which is the most dependably Democratic district in the county. While one precinct hardly a legislative district makes, it is interesting to see it on the other side of the line.

Another note about Walkinshaw’s legislative map. In it, the 35th takes up so much of Thurston County, I would be super curious what the population split between Mason and Thurston County is. The 35th has traditionally been a Mason County district, but in this map, I think Thurston County might make up the majority of the population.

Sims’ map for the 22nd is the most outlandish, in my opinion:

Take a closer look:

The map takes away so much of the Westside that is literally splits the City of Olympia in two! There isn’t a lot I can really say about this map other than to say that I don’t think that’s a great idea.

Compared to that, Fain’s map isn’t very fun at all. Of all four, it maintains the current 22nd district the most:

Nothing much to see here.

Speaking of nothing much to see here, and moving on to the Congressional District maps, here is Sims’ proposal for the 10th in Thurston County:

This is a fairly status quo map, which pretty much keeps the congressional district lines in Thurston County the same while carving Mason County out of the 10th, making it a strictly Thurston/Pierce county district. Like the 22nd, the 10th is also slightly overpopulated and needs to shrink to maintain proportionality. 

Walkinshaw’s map for the 10th is downright fascinating:

It would remove the 10th congressional district from Thurston County altogether and move it into Pierce and King counties. Then, Thurston County would be carved up between three more competitive districts. Oddly, while this 6th district would stretch from Olympia out and around the Olympic Peninsula, including the entire Kitsap Peninsula, it would still be a fairly safe Democratic district. This surprises me, but that’s according to commissioner Graves. 

The 10th still makes it all the way south to Olympia, but the 6th and the 8th still split up the rest of the county.

Fain:

What I can say about this technique is that it is a small example in our county for Republican mapmakers to stretch rural districts as far into suburban precincts, without breaking up Lacey.

1. Huynh and Payne (obviously) have the upper hand going into the general election.

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A candidate for Olympia City Council recently released a list of ideas to prevent out-of-towners and corporations from buying homes in Olympia. The end would be to make housing was more affordable by making it harder for people who don’t live here to bid up houses. This is an interesting line of thinking, but first I wanted to dive deeper into the phenomena he describes. His post leans to heavily on anecdotal evidence of distant corporations snapping up single-family homes.

Thankfully, Thurston County GeoData allows you to download the entire parcel database. This can tell you who bought any piece of property, when, and for what price. Here is what I found:

1. More rentals, more out-of-state buyers. But within the normal range.

Both the number of out-of-town buyers and homes simply bought for rentals has gone up in the last year. That said, they’ve gone up to a point well within the range of what you would expect in any given year since 1995.

For rentals, I looked at single-family home parcels where the owner’s address did not match the address of the parcel:From the above chart, about half the percent of single-family homes in a given year are purchased as rentals. I assume there is a skew towards homes purchased further back to be listed as rentals since many homes would have been bought and sold several times since 1995. So, if a house today has a sale date in the 1990s, it is likely a long-term rental held by the same person. But you can even see in recent years (say since the economic recovery in the mid-teens) there was a slow decline in the number of single-family homes bought for rentals, with a slight uptick this year.

For out of state owners, I just looked at the owner’s state:

Again, there was year-by-year data available back until the 1990s, and houses with sale dates that far back are long-term purchases, probably making them more than likely to be long-term rentals. But even these have owner addresses more likely to be in Washington. And again, there is an uptick this year in out of state purchases. That said, the vast vast vast majority of single-family home purchases are made by residents of Washington. The uptick this year when from two percent to only five percent of all purchases.

2. Two major out of state corporate buyers, but in context not a big deal for Olympia or the county

Lastly, I was able to take a look at who the buyers had been in the last year with out-of-state addresses. The GeoData spreadsheet does not include names, only addresses. But with a bit of sleuthing, I was able to find two  corporate buyers that are currently active in the Thurston County Market. Home Partners and Invitation Homes (as of early June) own 71 parcels with single-family homes across Thurston County purchased since the beginning of the pandemic.

Again, that is definitely a number, but when compared across all purchases since March 2010 (arbitrary date I picked to put a pin in the current pandemic-fueled housing market), their total purchases only count towards 1.1 percent (71 out of more than 6,400 transactions) of the market. 

Also, the map of their purchases are telling:

Most of the homes purchased by these two corporations are outside of Olympia. In fact, they are mostly in newer neighborhoods on the fringes of the advancing wall of sprawl of our community. The actual parcel-by-parcel impact, at the very least, is being felt in Lacey, Tumwater and the unincorporated county, but not Olympia.

Yes, some single-family homes are being bought by institutional buyers. And in the grand scheme of the entire single-family housing market in Thurston, it is a tiny amount. 

But why should this worry us? Is it because we think all homes should be owner occupied?

I think we (or at least the linked-to candidate above and their supporters) have a bias in how they thing about apartments and single-family homes.

Most of the large apartment complexes being built in Thurston County are built, funded, and operated by massive out-of-state corporations. When I lived in a fairly new apartment complex in SE Olympia, I sent my money to a corporation in Texas with a regional office in Seattle. While there had been some neighborhood-level hand wringing about that fairly modest complex being built because of traffic and unsavory renters, none of the concern was about whether the apartments would be owned by an out-of-state corporation. 

But there is concern about out of state corporations owning single-family homes, because there is a mindset that these should be owner-occupied. This is the natural order of things.

There is little to no benefit for our city to be bought and owned by outside investors and incredible negatives. It creates a dynamic where people such as teachers are being outbid and forced to rent rather than building equity in a home they own and deepening their roots in the community or being forced to live far outside of town and commute great distances. That is a burden on the environment and our infrastructure as well as a cost on the teacher.

“… forced to rent rather than building equity in a home they own and deepening their roots…”

I’m not saying institutional corporate ownership of homes (single-family or apartment or in between) is a thing we need to encourage more of, I’m just saying we should examine where we decide to wring our hands.