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.
Once the actual census data is publically released in August, we’re all going to hear officially that Lacey has more residents that Olympia.
Lacey has been nipping on our heals for decades, and has significantly closed the gap in the last 10 years. In 2010, Lacey was within 5,000 of Olympia. This has narrowed to 2,000 two years ago as both cities grew.
What is already unofficial (but will become official in August) is that Lacey has 3,000 more residents within its city limits than Olympia. Mayor Andy Ryder posted the news in a comment thread late last week:
Judging the meaning of pride over the raw number of people living in your city notwithstanding, it is important to point out that Lacey should have reached this milestone years ago.
And that is because Lacey has a massive urban area in its urban growth area (UGA) that is has never been annexed. When you count up everyone who lives in Lacey or within its legally defined UGA, there are over 90,000 people. Olympia only has about 66,000 all told in our UGA and city proper.
So, the question remains, if Lacey has annexed much of its UGA earlier on, when would it have passed Olympia? My guess is that would have happened sometime in the early 1990s.
Back in 1990, Lacey has 19,000 people inside the city borders and Olympia had 33,000. So, from there I have to guess how many people lived in the portion of Thurston County that juts up next to Lacey along Martin Way on the way out to Hawks Prairie. Thankfully, most of that area is part of the census as the Tanglewilde/Thompson Pace Census Designated Area.
Currently, this area (two 1950s era developments that straddle Martin Way east of Carpenter and west of Hawks Prairie) is over 5,800. But in the 1990 census, it was slightly larger, at 6,061. So, when you pack together the other urban and suburban portions of the UGA that aren’t in Tanglewilde and Thompson Place (including the Meadows), it isn’t a stretch to assume you’d make up that 14,000 person gap with Olympia.
I didn’t pick 1990 as an arbitrary date. I might be off by a few thousand or so in my estimate. But 1990 is a particular time for Lacey and its decision in how it was going to grow.
Let me show you a few maps.
This is Lacey’s city borders in 1990:
This is the land that Lacey has annexed since 1990:
This is Lacey’s actual Urban Growth Area:
And this is the density inside both the city and the UGA:
Here is the story that these maps tell me. Looking east in 1990, Lacey had a choice in how it was going to grow:
It could slowly begin annexing the neighborhoods that were contemporaries of the original neighborhoods that had become Lacey in the 1960s, or
It could start annexing mostly empty land north of Interstate 5 to connect with a planned retail area at the intersection of the interstate, Martin and Marvin roads.
Obviously, the city fathers in Lacey chose the latter option. So it took until today for those square miles gobbled up after 1990 to fill up with enough people for Lacey to finally surpass Olympia.
But here is the coda about why this discussion really matters.
Here is the Justice Map image of the 2010 racial makeup of northern Thurston County broadly (the darker the colors, the more white):
Generally speaking, the further east you get, the less white the neighborhoods are. Until you get to the far edge (beyond Tanglewilde) there are places that are majority non-white. For a county that is 82 percent white, this is saying something. I don’t want to point out that Lacey is not a diverse city. Standing at 74 percent white, it is the most diverse city in Thurston County. But, in deciding to annex north of the already established neighborhoods east of the city, it decided not to reach out to even more diversity.
Just some social media that I hung onto. But it tells a consistent tale. Not only government can be trusted, big business can’t be either.
During the peak of the restaurant-centered protest wave during our COVID-19 winter, I started noticing a consistent talking point among speakers at protests and on social media posts. It was normally centered around a Costco on the Eastside of the state that had been able to stay open despite more than 150 employees testing positive with COVID-19. The logic was that the state government was favoring large corporations over small mom-and-pop stores.
The actual details of the debate notwithstanding (even chain restaurants were closed for sit down service and mom-and-pop retail was open), the consistent beating of this drum is a reminder falls into what looks like a new theme for conservatives in our region. The most telling of these examples is a post on former gubernatorial candidate Loren Culp’s website targeting Republican lawmakers that have taken money from “Big Pharma.”
While a Republican calling out corruption from big government may seem mind-bending, it really shouldn’t be. We have a long history of anti-big business, anti-corporate tradition across our regional political identity.
I can point to a few historic episodes that can illustrate the evolution of this anti-corporate attitude, and where it might lead us still.
One of my favorite anecdotes about Cascadian history is the (lack) of effort by Willamette Valley farmers to successfully capitalize on the Gold Rush. While Puget Sound settlers spent zero time doing all they could to make as much money as they could by sending timber for the bustling Bay Area, Oregon farmers yawned.
Best told by David Alan Johnson in “Founding of the Far West,” the failure to capture more of the California trade was deeply engrained in the Valley’s ethos:
(The farmers’) response to the California market — their enterprise — was motivated as much by a modest desire to improve their landholdings, assure their household’s self-sufficiency, and enhance their families’ material comfort as by a drive to command greater market share or increase production as an end in itself.
Puget Sound settlers (that had a few years lost to production compared to the Willamette Valley) were more likely to be from capitalist New England. Oregon’s farmers on the other hand were more likely to be from areas of Appalachia and the South that did not have large slave populations. In fact, you can trace anti-black laws in Oregon to the settlers’ desire not to import the slave-based economy to Cascadia. But, not only slavery wasn’t welcome, but also apparently large-scale agriculture.
I’ve covered this ground before, but the discussion at the founding of Oregon was in fact about how corporations would integrate into the state:
Many of the delegates entered the convention with a strong mistrust of corporations. They had seen abuses in the Midwest and elsewhere in which unscrupulous corporate operators had left innocent stockholders deep in debt and workers unpaid… Some of the debate would revolve around stereotypes of corporations as large and uncaring machines of the economy that routinely chewed up farmers and workers.
This is years before the Wobblies and the more institutional development of strong labor unions in Cascadia. But the anti-corporate attitudes of the decedents of the small Willamette farmers was baked in to the batter. You can see it in Washington’s failed 1870s constitutional convention (“Some of the provisions adopted by the Walla Walla Convention reflected distrust of corporations and railroad”). And the proclamations of Senator Homer T. Bone against a nascent Boeing in the 1930s.
If we dig deeper, we can see the clear settlement patterns of where this anti-corporatism comes from, the Appalachian settlers that at first came to the Willamette Valley, but also were dotted by settlements of New Englanders. This thesis is most clearly laid out in Woodard’s “American Nations,” but that work draws from Johnson’s “Founding.” What we are seeing now is the Appalachian anti-corporatism having a moment inside the nationally-favorable to business Republican Party.
And the criticisms seem to be correct. Democrats in Washington seem to fit comfortably dealing with corporations. Former Governor Gregoire famously worked the backrooms in the run-up to the COVID-19 lockdown almost a year ago:
Seattle is home to some major international companies, and two of them, Microsoft and Starbucks, have major operations in China, where COVID-19 started. They also had access to some modeling from medical research that raised concerns about the possible spread.
They quickly came to the conclusion the region needed to start preparing for a significant outbreak, Gregoire said. The executives decided they had to communicate the seriousness to their employees, about 250,000 total, but based on science, data and facts.
They began reaching out to other businesses and the rest of the community, trying to help increase the blood supply and acquire personal protective equipment.
“We have created a unique public-private partnership that is not just for Seattle but literally for the whole state,” Gregoire said.
The daily noon conference calls continued, and have grown to about 250 people, including business leaders from Spokane and experts from Washington State University. They get briefings from public health experts and from state and local officials who are about to make a public announcement about government action and want feedback.
The reason I blockquoted a huge portion of that article is to emphasize that this coordination didn’t come from thin air. The hand-in-glove relationship between big businesses and Democratic Party led government was not in the least strange bedfellows. At least for right now, Democrats occupy the political space that was created by city-based New England settlers. Comfortable with capitalism and comfortable with government.
This isn’t to say that many of these businesses wouldn’t rather see regulation-wary Republicans in charge of the state. But that is a far cry from not being able to work with Democrats.
If the rhetoric from this last winter is just a convenient weapon to use against Democrats who happen to be in charge or less conservative Republicans who also happen to take Pharma money, that’s one thing. But if this is a return to anti-corporatism defining one of the regional political parties, that is something completely different. I would be interested in seeing where that goes, policy-wise.
One thing about Dan Leahy’s analysis of the multifamily housing tax exemption that bothers me almost two years later is that he stopped at the eight-year life span of the tax exemption.
He illustrated that over the life of the exemption, the tax-paying owners (for example) of the 123 4th would not pay the $2.2 million in taxes owed on the improvements they made to the three parcels they built on in downtown.
Dan’s analysis didn’t make obvious that they are still paying some taxes, but only on the value of the property as if it was still a parking lot. Which I think is pretty interesting, because now we can figure out the impact of taxes would be lost if the building stayed a parking lot instead.
So, this is an absolute back of the napkin analysis, but based on the most recent valuations, the subsidy would begin paying off in 2032, seven years after the exemption ends. It would take less time to “pay off” the exemption than its entire lifetime.
Over 40 years, the increased value of the property (again, back of the napkin) would net the city over $7 million in taxes.
The difference in the tax payments on a mixed-use apartment/commercial building and the tax payments of a parking lot would be about $200,000. So, over the 40-year time span, the taxes lost by not incurring the short term loss lost of $2.2 million that the tax exemption represents would be just under $8 million.
We’ll never know if the 123 4th would have been built without the 8-year tax exemption. Even the most thoughtful analysis of the statewide program could not figure out if it actually increased development. What we can point to was the trajectory of downtown Olympia up until the point the exemption was available in 2007. New housing had not been coming downtown for years.
We can also see that given the decades of full-rate taxes these buildings will be paying, the so-called subsidy will be paid off sooner than earlier analysis would imply (even given my possibly rosy assumptions). Big buildings pay way more taxes than parking lots. That’s my big takeaway.
In Washington state law, there is a section that is unenforceable and takes a clear shot at tribal treaty rights. In addition to telling congress that steelhead should be a nationwide gamefish, RCW 77.110 declares that treaties should not be taken into consideration when managing natural resources. And now HB 1172 looks like after more than 30 years, the unlawful and racist language will be finally removed from state law.
The section of law was added in 1984 after a successful citizen’s initiative campaign.
Looking at the history now, it is easy to look at Initiative 456 as a sort of temper tantrum on behalf of sports fishermen and allied anti-tribal groups. It was legally dead once it had passed, and it was opposed by the vast majority of Washington’s institutional powers. By the time it was even proposed, the treaty tribes and the state of Washington had already started up a cooperative process to equally and legally share salmon harvest.
Washington had just completed a decade of final conflict between the state, the federal government and treaty tribes. After a violent police riot in Tacoma in 1970, the federal government filed suit on behalf of the tribes. U.S. v. Washington was decided in 1974, reaffirming the tribes’ treaty rights to fish. After years of defiance by the state, the Supreme Court finally put the legal debate to bed in 1979. And in 1983, the tribes and the state decided to finally get out of court and hash negotiate fishing seasons each year.
This dawn of cooperation, where tribes and the state would treat each others as equals, was the setting where Initiative 456 found itself. It advocated for conflict over cooperation. It attempted to turn the state back into the antagonist that drew a comparison between Washington State and Texas fighting desegregation orders.
It wasn’t clear even on election night 1984 that no one knew if I-456 would ever have any impact, other than sending a message. And, it was a pretty clear message. All 39 counties in the state passed the initiative, but it wasn’t even clear then if they were fully endorsing the message or just missing the point. From the Seattle Times:
On its face, it hardly sounds like an earthshaking notion. And it is quite possible that many who go to the polls next week will not connect the initiative with the controversial Boldt Decision.
“It kind of reads like Mom and apple pie and that’s why we wrote it that way,” said Dale Ward, with Steelhead and Salmon Protection Action for Washington Now… sponsor of the initiative.
Not being aware of the intent of the initiative isn’t exactly an excuse. It just makes it more important to call out the racism behind it more important.
Looking back now, it seems like a shrug of the shoulders. Salmon co-management survived. It is easy to argue that treaty tribes gotten more politically relevant and economically stronger since 1984.
But it is still important to remove the unlawful laws from our books because the line of thinking that passed 456 in 1984 is still alive today.
1. The idea of 456 was well embedded in politics well after 1984
Both Bob Williams and Ken Eikenberry (the 1988 and 1992 Republican candidates for governor) insisted that they would enforce I-456. While Bob Williams drew less than 40 percent and was a state legislator when he ran, Eikenberry was already a statewide elected official, and he represented a completely different part of politics. He was the Republican chair before succeeding Slade Gorton as state attorney general. His endorsement of I-456 meant that anti-tribalism was still very much inside the conservative party.
2. I-456 was meant to be the start of a long play
Said anti-tribal organizer Barb Lindsay in 1985:
“I think the tide is turning our way,” she said. “The treaty situation had to get to the point where abuses are so rampant large numbers of people are affected.”
…
“I think within 10 years we’ll have from Congress a fairer, more equitable definition of treaty rights…
As soon as he could in 1985, Senator Slade Gorton took a shot at having congress answer the call of I-456. He introduced a bill to decommercialize steelhead in 1985. That effort didn’t get very far. It even created a split between anti-tribal conservatives and conservatives that were more will to just move on.
From the 1985 Seattle Times:
Sen. Slade Gorton’s bill to bar Northwest treaty Indians from fishing for steelhead commercially — a bill that isn’t expected to go anywhere in Congress — drew a formidable array of opponents at a Senate hearing here this morning
The other Republican senator from Washington, Dan Evans, joined an unlikely alliance of the Reagan administration, the timber industry, environmentalists and Northwest tribes in denouncing the proposal.
3. Anti-tribal sentiment is still there
We’re still dealing with anti-tribal racism, and it is still centered around the sentiment of I-456, that the tribe’s and the state negotiating as equals is not how it should work. This report draws on a lot of research to tell the story of what happened after a breakdown in negotiations in 2016. When negotiations shut down, both the state and the tribes were left off the water.
From the report:
In the wake of press coverage of the closures, anti-Indian bigotry reared its ugly head in comments posted in online news forums. Reminiscent of previous mobilizations against tribal members, comments ran the gamut from stereotypes, to advocating an end to tribal rights, to calls for violence against tribal members. Particularly troubling, a number of bigoted statements were made by people whose Facebook page “likes” indicate some level of support for far right paramilitary and racist causes. While the Coastal Conservation Association and Puget Sound Anglers have not expressed the kind of bigotry documented below, neither have they addressed or condemned the vicious nature of this response. By also distorting facts about treaty fishing, pushing for a greater share of tribally-allocated fish, and flirting with the language of the organized anti-Indian movement, the CCA’s actions can, in fact, promote such bigotry.
What happened next was an onslaught of violent rhetoric aimed at tribes. The report shows in stark detail how many of these online commenters were involved with far-right militaristic causes. Only five years later, we can see how the irresponsible behavior from organizations like CCA and Puget Sound Anglers could have easily spilled over into violence.
4. People are still suing to intervene in U.S. v. Washington
Just yesterday, Fish Northwest filed a 60-day intent to sue over the current cooperative state tribal fisheries negotiations. The lawsuit takes direct aim at the complicated relationship between the state and the tribes, the federal government and its trust responsibility, the Endangered Species Act and regional fisheries management. Bottom line of the lawsuit is, though, that when Fish Northwest disagrees with the results of the negotiations, it is the tribes’ fault for not playing fair. The refrain of “treaty abuse” in the 1980s has turned into a new line in this lawsuit: “The Current Season Setting Process Is Weaponized Against the Citizens of
Washington.”
Our negotiators managed to win us some token fisheries, but let’s face it, there are enemy tanks on the Champs-Élysées. And the rationale, the casus belli, is exactly what you’d expect from an aggressor who is holding all the cards. This is because of poor runs, right? Climate change? The blob? Not really. What the tribes are saying is essentially, we’re going to screw you because you’re pussies and because you’re pussies, we can, and because we can, we will.
So yeah, I-456 may itself be dead law. It never had any real legal impact and the effort to decommercialize steelhead never went anyway. But, the spirit of I-456 lives on. To this day, sport fishermen do not see tribes as partners in fisheries negotiations. Once there is a result they do not like, they try to end run around decades of negotiations and case law to get what they want.
And, by spreading misinformation, they put lives at risk. So, when we look at removing the laws that I-456 put into place, I’m super in support of that.
Or, how did a socialist candidate win the most conservative precinct in Thurston County?
There is a lot of talk about the just now starting civil war within the ranks or Republicans. My favorite example of this is the King County Republican chair demanding the Mainstream Republicans remove “Republican” from their name. But however this personality driven battle ends up, there is at least one actual policy dispute that I think could also cleave the Republican Party, at least here in Washington.
The policy question about how to expand broadband internet into underserved rural areas has been an open question for (at the very least) ten years. I’ve been following the debate for at least that long. And a government sponsored solution seems to finally be getting a serious hearing in the legislature this year. HB 1336 would allow locally-based Public Utility Districts to offer direct retail broadband to customers. This is a major step in Washington, where currently PUDs are limited to only wholesale service. Leaving the last step of direct tie in from individual customers to the private market.
This has led to some situations like Grant County, where the PUD has a strong background network and a strong stable of mom-and-pop internet providers that aren’t Comcast or CenturyLink. But more of Washington is limited to the two major private and corporate providers.
But what does this have to do with politics and the Republican Party specifically?
I’ll answer than in three parts:
First: Andrew Saturn was a deeply flawed candidate who had one good idea that I agreed with. He wanted to turn the Thurston County PUD into a broadband provider. A bit of house-cleaning, I ran against Saturn for Democratic Party PCO and spoke out against his problematic behavior back a few years ago. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t like the idea of providing internet access through the PUD.
Anyway, as both active in the Democratic Party and Socialist organizations, Saturn fell to the far left of politics in Thurston County. But after all the votes were counted, a weird pattern emerged. Saturn won only one precinct in Olympia, lost the county’s most dependably left-leaning precinct (College), but he did win the opposite of College. The most dependably and extreme conservative precinct in Thurston County is Zenkner Valley, and Saturn won that precinct by an almost 2 to 1 vote.
A few things fell into place for this to happen:
1. The PUD race was non-partisan. So, normal branding effects of a partisan label didn’t apply. Saturn’s opponent didn’t run with a D next to her name and Saturn didn’t run with a Democratic label or Socialist, so voters were able to judge on other things.
2.Saturn’s opponent was an active member of the local Democratic Party and when his campaign did go sideways, it did in relation to how he worked with local Democrats (to put it lightly).
3. Lastly, I think people in the rural areas really did want the good internet. Zenkner Valley wasn’t the only rural precinct he won. In fact out of the 19 he did win, only two were inside Olympia or Lacey. And Zenkner Valley, the last precinct to the south before you hit Lewis County, is one of those remote places that likely isn’t going to get a corporation beating down its door to provide broadband.
Let’s move on to the next race. Just this last year, Bobby Jackson lost to Lindsey Pollock for one of the three Lewis County commissioner seats last November. On the surface, this race seemed to be about a forward thinking conservative that was concerned about good government and jobs (Pollock) vs. a conservative that thought God is the one pulling the strings on global warming (Jackson). But, Pollock also made broadband access part of her campaign.
In a letter to the editor before she was an official candidate, Pollock pointed directly at the PUD as local internet provider solution:
I recently attended a Baw Faw Grange meeting in Boistfort where the topic was lack of rural access to high speed Internet.
This is a subject close to my heart as I experience the problem frequently in my Winlock community.
One of the attendees, Mary Mallonee, asked two of the best questions: “Isn’t Internet service a utility? Why can’t we have service like we get from the PUD?”
A representative from the PUD was present and explained that state law prevents our PUD from providing us “last mile” service.
Other speakers said that they had spoken to legislators who advised them that the private communication companies would spend whatever it takes to lobby and litigate against having to serve underserved areas or allow public entities such as our PUD to provide such service.
That answer should not stand.
In fact, please click the link and read Pollock’s entire letter. It is a populist political masterpiece. It clearly points on the direct economic role that broadband internet access serves today:
In the nineteenth century prosperity required access to railroads. In the twentieth century paved roads became a necessity.
Today the need is communication. Those who have it prosper. Those who don’t, wither.
She also presents a clear-eyed and cool-headed political analysis of how and why a coalition of pro-broadband activists would come together:
All across the state there are counties and communities just like us who are not being served creating a “Have, Have Not” dynamic.
However, we are not without options. The “Have Not” counties have commissioners, Legislators, and Congressional representatives. The need for high speed Internet extends beyond jurisdictional and political party lines. If we work together with our fellow “Have Nots,” we should be able solve this problem.
The point is not to take “no” for an answer.
This is a cogent, populist and policy-based vision that was based on the actual every day lives of rural people. I often see these rural policy debates in the frame of paying a premium in terms of transportation costs or lower level of services. I also am sensitive to the lower efficiencies of rural areas being able to actually pay for their own roads and fire service.
Which leads us back to today and the “Public Broadband Act.” In the Republican intraparty debate, you have a sponsor from Grant County who sees the benefit of broadband in his rural community. Rep. Alex Ybarra is a Republican and an engineer and an advocate for bringing broadband to all of Washington:
We knew prior to (COVID) that most rural areas are in need of broadband. It’s just a matter of how you get it out there. For years and years, we’ve been hoping that the Comcasts of the world would get it out there, but it wasn’t feasible for them to do that.
Those are some of the potential challenges with supply and demand if there’s only one provider, the supplier, they have the control over what the price is. So I recognize that. My other challenge though is subsidizing everything through the government, which is socialism. I’m not interested in that within an American economy. Our economy should be subsidized by all the taxpayers, and that is what we’re seeing in a very large way right now.
…
This is probably back to your point about the terminology. It’s socialism. Subsidizing health care and broadband, or anything, the more you do it, even if it’s a good cause. That’s what socialism is; it’s when more taxpayer money goes to offset true supply and demand.
There is part of me that is quietly cheering Rep. Kraft’s obstinacy. That is she wants to eschew good government that provides needed services to her taxpayers, then fine. That’s what you get for moving out to the sticks. Feel free to eschew other things like libraries, schools, roads and public hospitals. It is pretty obvious, the more they stand in the way of reasonable policy to expand broadband into rural areas, the more they’re dooming those rural areas economically.
But, obviously I’m actually rooting for Rep. Ybarra and I hope he wins. There is an interesting discussion at the end of this podcast episode about political polarization and how density and economic health tends to determine politics in general. The nut of it is that counties that have voted Democratic for president are getting more dense in recent elections, but are also representing more of the economy. Conversely, Republican presidential counties are becoming more numerous, emptier and represent continually poorer communities.
This has created, the theory goes, a much deeper divide in American politics than in the past. This is the divide that we’ve all been feeling in our social media feeds, but also the divide that I assume is being created in the Republican Party.
One solution mentioned in the podcast is investment in rural areas. Instead of assuming the richer/denser trend is determinative, doing small things to expand the economic base in rural areas. Things like making sure broadband access is available to everyone.
The following discussion is about community colleges and branch campuses from the above linked podcast:
…the most important thing along these lines is just getting people to have more proximity, is one, making it easier for people in small towns to get post-secondary education. So I think there ought to be more community colleges. There ought to be a lot of them that are close to people. There ought to be more universities, more state universities, more branch campuses, right? Getting people to school.
…
And so if you make education a lot easier for rural, small town people, just the process of becoming educated opens you up a little bit to the world. It tends to make you a little bit more curious about the things you’ve learned about. “Maybe I do want to go on a trip to Chicago,” because it’s amazing how many people in, say, rural Illinois have never been to Chicago, and it’s two hours away, right? And that kind of thing is really, really, really important. And it’s not you’re trying to propagandize them into becoming critical race theorists at the big liberal university. It really is just the basic stuff. You’re teaching people about the world. You’re broadening their horizons a little bit.
And while they’re talking about community and state college branch campuses, they might as well be talking about equitable school funding, libraries and broadband internet. Each are vital for an equitable economy. And if Republicans are interested in expanding the economy for the people they represent, broadband seems like a good place to start.
We’ve already seen that rural conservative voters will choose a closeted socialist over a mainstream Democrat if he talks about government-funded broadband. Rural county voters will also choose one Republican over an incumbent Republican if she says the same thing. Republican voters have already told use what they want. Now it is worth seeing now if Republicans can united behind one of their own to see if they can make a modest step to allow a small unit of government make a big different in their communities.
Last point here on the nature of the policy solution Ybarra (and the socialist Saturn) is proposing: PUDs are small, local governments, no larger than a county. They sometimes provide electricity, but sometimes they provide a smattering of water services. Ybarra’s solution is not a statewide broadband agency to act as a public option Comcast. It is for every community to choose to see if they want their PUD to act as a public option Comcast. If small government Republicans were to choose one solution, the closest to the people would seem like a good idea.
1. I got into a discussion this afternoon with a local, talking about the state of the Olympian and whether it would be worthy of support if it changed its corporate structure to a non-profit. Here’s the original argument:
I don’t disagree about local news being produced by non-profits. Great idea.
The Olympian is the only professional organization covering the news in the city I love. Let’s just not call them names while they’re doing it is all I’m saying.
Also, I think we’re missing a lot of nuance on the current state of the Olympian’s corporate owners, the McClatchy company. I’ve been reading a lot about them lately, so I wanted to write down what I’ve learned.
2. I’m not sure how many of us realize how quickly the fate of the Olympian could turn. And turn so quickly and quietly that we’d have no reason to notice. Right now, the paper’s parent company is in the process of trying to negotiate a deal on $124 million in pensions it is due to pay. After spending the better part of the last decade paying down $4 billion in debt it took on to buy up Knight Ridder (of which the Olympian was part), McClatchy seems to face this one additional hurdle to start making forward progress.
While this is happening, the stock price of the company tanked, going now for only pennies per share. That gives the managers of the company very little room to move as they try to chart a path forward. The immediate risk from my point of view had been just that McClatchy would declare bankruptcy. Maybe, I thought, they would just shut the Olympian down, maybe just fold it directly into the Tacoma News Tribune.
But there is a fate worse than death. And a fate that because McClatchy almost killed itself buying our paper (along with dozens other) we’ve avoided as the company tries to get itself back on its feet. Hedge funds, like the one described here, are ripping through the carcasses of struggling newspapers, feeding investments with the goodwill of subscribers:
It is no secret that the newspaper business is in decline. So it’s hardly surprising that Freeman would feel the need to shrink the head count at his newspapers, just as almost every other newspaper owner has had to do for years.
But what sets Freeman apart is that he seems to have a rather unique view of a newspaper’s purpose. In this view, his papers are intended not so much to inform the public or hold officialdom to account, but to supply cash for Freeman to use elsewhere. His layoffs aren’t just painful. They are savage.
…
Last year, Digital First Media’s chief executive, Steve Rossi, sent a company-wide email saying that the company was “solidly profitable,” and that “advertising revenue has been significantly better” than competitors. Yet the layoffs have not let up. Just last week, Alden Global imposed another round of layoffs, including a third of the staff at the Denver Post. As recently as 2009, Denver had two competing newspapers; it is now down to 66 journalists in one demoralized newsroom.
And, this is a fate we’re avoiding in Olympia because our newspaper was luckily bought by a company that is still interested in being a newspaper company.
Meanwhile, in August, the New Media Investment Group announced that it was buying Gannett Co. and combining it with its GateHouse Media subsidiary, which instantly created the largest newspaper chain in the country. New Media is controlled by Fortress Investment Group, and its approach is not terribly different from Alden Global’s. People are starting to call papers owned by hedge funds “ghost papers” — defined by the New York Times as “thin versions of once robust publications put out by bare-bones staffs.”
Although they’ve had their share of layoffs, McClatchy’s 30 media properties… are not ghost papers. A little more than a year ago, Julie K. Brown, a journalist at the Miami Herald, published an extraordinary expose of the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein; that series sparked an outcry that led to Epstein’s arrest in July. In October, the well-regarded McClatchy Washington bureau documented a disturbing rise in the rate of cancer treatments at Veterans Affairs hospitals. And just a few weeks ago, the Kansas City Star published a powerful examination of Missouri’s public defender system
I’ve pulled a lot of quotes from Bloomberg’s coverage of McClatchy, but Joe Norcero’s “McClatchy Goes Digital to Ward Off ‘Ghost Papers’” article is a good discussion as any of McClatchy’s current situation. The most telling part of the article to me is where I learned that the actual McClatchy family hasn’t taken a dividend in a decade. This is not a company that is trying to squeeze blood from a stone.
3. The Sacramento News and Review is an alt-weekly that does a great job skewering the Sacramento Bee, the McClatchy mother paper. But even they point to the Bee as an irreplaceable local asset. Whenever I feel sad about the state of local papers, I remind myself that people of goodwill exist by reading Eric Johnson’s “Support the Bee Anyway” and “Save the Bee.”
For the record, I’m all for the non-profit, locally controlled Olympian. I’m all for the web-based non-profit locally owned web-based, podcast heavy local news organization. I’m all for all of that.
But this is a bus stop, not UberX. I need to pay the fare for the bus that gets me closest to my destination. So I support the Olympian anyway.
It wasn’t a member of the Thurston County commission, but there was a county commissioner at a recent hearing on exempt well bills last month. One of our commissioners was there too, but the Mason County commissioner said (and I’m paraphrasing) that the county’s economy needed a boost.
What she was talking about was that building houses, more people living in the rural parts of Mason County would give their county a boost.
Despite evidence to the contrary that rural residential development is good for the government bottom line or anyone’s economicwell-being (I mean other than homebuilders and realtors) it did get me thinking about the rural landscape and how it’s either being put to work (with farms or logging) or put to rest (by building houses).
Here’s an interesting chart I’ve been toying with for the last few weeks. It plots the acres of land in Thurston County in farms and logging against the population in the non-city parts of the county:
What I see are a couple interesting things.
One, no one seems to keep track of land in active forestry by county, which is really weird since it is literally taxed differently in Washington and county assessors should really care about that. I was able to find two data points, so it’s just sitting on the chart as something I’d like to add in if I can find it.
Also, I also wasn’t able to find was any sort of description of residential zoning by acreage, so I used general non-incorporated population as a stand-in. This might be slightly unfair since most of this population is concentrated up in Tanglewild. But, as you can see in the gif at the top of this post, even Grand Mound has seen some significant changes since then.
Two, the 1960s seem to be a big turning point in the change of how Thurston County’s rural areas were in terms of a shift from farming to rural growth.
If you zoom in on the 60s, you see the drop off of farm acreage happening just as non-city residential growth picks up.
What is also interesting is that even as no it seems like farm acreage has stabilized, the non-city population continues to increase, which means the rural areas are either getting denser or they’re overtaking acreage that isn’t in active farming.
Lastly, and this is more of a fun fact than anything. I wrote years back about the unincorporated area east of Lacey was Thurston County’s invisible city.
I used to talk about this when I was on the Timberland Library board of trustees about how we should expand library service between Rochester and Grand Mound (which is currently served by a kiosk). But, that if you took the two census tracts that surround Highway 12 between I-5 and the county line, you’d have the fourth largest city in Thurston County at almost 13,000 people.
Rob Richards has a lot of reforms he’d like to see in Olympia, city government structure wise.
Some of his ideas are pretty interesting (like hard wiring advisory boards into city decision making), but one of them seriously caught my interest. Rob said that we should elect city council-members by district, rather than at-large.
He doesn’t really get into saying exactly why, but I’m reading into it that its likely because city councilmembers now are concentrated in one or two parts of town. I’m not sure this is true. Last year I tried to go back as far as I could to see what neighborhoods city councilmembers came from, but I got bored looking through the city guidebooks at the library after a few elections.
Either way, council districts Rob laid out are pretty simplistic. Basically, he draws one down the middle (downtown and South Capital) and then Northeast and Southeast and Northwest and Southwest on each side.
At first glance I thought Rob’s districts would be way out of balance, especially the middle one. Hardly anyone actually lives downtown right now and South Capital wouldn’t be big enough to bring that district into balance.
Here’s the map I came up with as an alternative:
I used Dave’s Redistricting Tool (which is pretty cool) to draw five districts around 9,300 voters each. I didn’t land any of the districts on the nose, but I got as close as I could. To really get close, we’d need much smaller voting precincts. Districts this small can’t be very precise.
Generally speaking, this is the same map as Rob’s, one district downtown and then two on each “side” of downtown. The difference here is that the downtown district also includes much of the older Eastside.
Also, I split the westside to inner and outer districts. It worked balance wise, but I also think it worked culturally. If the point of districts is to give each different part of town a voice, the real split on the west side is the older neighborhoods and the new ones west of Division.
The history goes that if not for another community down on the Columbia River, Lacey would be called Woodland, which was the original name Lacey-folks put down on an application for a post office.
This was decades before Lacey actually became a city, but post office names usually reflected some sort of area identity.
But, the application came back as rejected because the other Woodland had gotten there first. So, Lacey (after a developer O.C. Lacey) replaced Woodland.
Called Chester Lacey in one newspaper article, this shadowy person was usually identified in newspapers and legal records of the time as O. C. Lacey. Contrary to some later historical accounts, he was never called O.C de Lacy or de Lacey. In the early 1890s, the enterprising individual worked variously as an Olympia-based real estate speculator, lawyer, and Justice of the Peace. Apparently hard hit by the economic depression of the later 1890s, he cut ties to the area and left for first Seattle, then Spokane, and finally parts unknown.
But why was Lacey proposed as the name for the post office in the second application to the federal government? This is a real mystery since the reason for the choice remains unknown. Surviving records do not indicate any particularly strong ties between O.C. Lacey and the people seeking a post office.
And, if anyone would know anything about Lacey, Drew Crooks would know.
Lacey didn’t have deep roots here. And, other than lending his name to a post office that grew into a civic identity, he didn’t leave a mark.
So, if we’re talking about changing the name of North Thurston School District, we should consider changing the name of Lacey. At least we know who North Thurston is named after, even if it is a racist liar.
There have got to be loads of better names for the general community east of Olympia.
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.
