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Revisiting Magnet Theory, Migration, and the Myths We Tell Ourselves

July 26, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Over the last two weeks, I’ve written about overlapping ideas:

Two weeks ago, I looked at the demographics of Olympia, Thurston County, and Washington State, and the impact of new migrants on the size and shape of our communities.

Then last week, I explored a concept known as *magnet theory,” and how it shows up in local conversations. A key example was a local candidate who claimed to have found a smoking gun: proof that the City of Olympia was using magnet theory to pad its budget. That claim turned out to be false, but it got me thinking about how we talk about new residents in our community.

First off, magnet theory seems to be having a revival as we head deeper into this municipal election year.

The Spokane Business Association (SBA) released a survey claiming that over 50% of Spokane’s unhoused population moved there after becoming homeless.

City data and national research contradict the SBA’s findings. Spokane’s 2024 Point-in-Time Count and longitudinal studies show that about 80% of unhoused people are from Spokane County.

It turns out the SBA’s poll was the kind of study that finds exactly what it sets out to prove. Experts argue it was methodologically flawed, misleading, and politically motivated. Designed by former Trump homelessness adviser Robert Marbut, the survey used biased questions, a small sample size, and questionable methods, like having volunteers identify homeless people by sight.

Critics, including local service providers and city officials, say the report dehumanizes unhoused people and promotes a divisive “us vs. them” narrative. Even some who agree with Marbut’s policy preferences dispute the report’s central claim.

Here in Thurston County, we’ve seen similar rhetoric. Former County Commissioner Gary Edwards was well-known for opposing funding for homelessness services unless it was tied to where someone came from.

But the data tell a different story. In our most recent Point-in-Time Count, only 8% of unhoused people reported coming from out of state. Nearly 80% said they became homeless in Thurston County or a neighboring county.

That stands in stark contrast to the broader population. According to the most recent American Community Survey, 42% of Thurston County residents were born in another state.

And that doesn’t even capture the regular churn of migration. Over the past 10 years, Thurston County has seen a net gain of over 32,000 people from in-migration, compared to only about 4,700 added through births. This pattern has held for decades. In fact, in the mid-1970s (when my own family first arrived) nearly 30,000 people moved to Thurston County in just four years. Most of my family has since moved away, but I returned in 1997. I’m technically part of the natural increase in 1976 and a new migrant in 1997.

All of this underscores a key point: When it comes to “borrowing problems” from elsewhere, we borrow far more from our housed residents than our unhoused neighbors.

The underlying assumption of magnet theory is that our own decisions haven’t contributed to the housing crisis or visible homelessness. That by offering shelter, services, or even just food, Olympia (and other cities) attract people who would otherwise be somewhere else.

But if you’re reading this blog, you probably don’t need a reminder that homelessness is a housing problem. Issues like addiction, crime, andb violence are more often results of how we treat people once they’ve become homeless, not causes of homelessness. We’ve seen that something as simple as not having to sleep outside can significantly improve personal health outcomes.

If, despite all the evidence, you still subscribe to magnet theory, ask yourself this: Do you question why people with a down payment move to Olympia or Washington State? Chances are, you moved here from somewhere else too.

The problem isn’t just the hypocrisy of someone who recently relocated complaining about others “bringing problems.” That hypocrisy is real, but it also ignores our region’s long history of trying to exclude.

A newcomer might be forgiven for not knowing that history. But Washington State and Olympia have seen:

Black exclusion laws
The forced removal of Chinese families
Laws barring people of certain ethnicities from owning property

These were all deliberate efforts to keep people out. Using today’s broken housing market to justify exclusion is just a continuation of that same legacy.

In the 1940s, we burned “Little Hollywood” to make way for Capitol Lake. During the Great Depression, we beat Hunger Marchers who came to Olympia seeking help from the governor.

We don’t need a new narrative to justify rejecting people who come here for help. We already have a long and troubling one.

But it doesn’t have to continue.

People will keep coming here, housed or unhoused, because that’s the country we live in. But it’s time for the magnet theory narrative to fade. And it’s time for us to heal.

How we get to better understanding local misinformation

July 19, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

Earlier this year, the Olympia School District released an audit of its public communications. This document offers a fascinating look into not only the district’s recent history and public narratives but also the general flow of information within our community.

Typically, such audits seek to understand how people perceive what’s happening in their community. The Olympia audit, for example, asked, “How do you learn about the Olympia School District?” with options like “local media,” “word of mouth,” and “social media.”

Across the country, a clear trend has emerged: responses indicating “local media” are declining, while those pointing to “social media” are increasing.

However, the broad conclusion that more people are getting their local news from “social media” is problematic because the term itself is poorly defined. Few comprehensive surveys that include this question ask for specific examples. Is “social media” referring to posts from established news organizations? If so, shouldn’t that fall under the “local media” category? Or is it truly just individuals posting on various platforms? If so, which ones? The wild, woolly frontier of social media needs to be understood, not just broadly categorized.

To genuinely understand how information flows through our community, to do the real work of helping people grasp “the news,” we need to comprehend the entire ecosystem. Simply categorizing it as “social media” feels like shrugging and walking away. This isn’t an accusation but a call for a more precise framework for approaching the question.

Analyzing the Local News Landscape

Similar to the communications audit, there have been a couple of attempts to understand the changing shape and decline of local media.

I have significant concerns with the Washington State University (WSU) research. While their approach is sound, they make some simple categorization mistakes. For instance, Olympia, as the state capital, naturally has more news sources (like TVW and the Washington State Standard). However, the WSU study also includes two North America Talks platforms in our Olympia count that do not cover local Olympia news. Thurston Talk is their local brand here, but South Sound Talk covers Pierce County. While “South Sound Talk” might be vaguely interpreted, “Whatcom Talk” clearly covers Whatcom County, a detail they should have identified.

Another study, using Muckrack data, tracks the decline of local journalism over the past two decades. In Thurston County, it estimates approximately 6.3 “Local Journalist Equivalents” per 100,000 residents, which would mean nearly 20 local reporters. This number feels a bit high, but their methodology section is clear, so I plan to delve into their data further for a better understanding.

However, these analyses often overlook the entire other section of where people report getting their local news: social media. When I conducted a back-of-the-napkin analysis for Thurston Community Media on the local media landscape, I generally found what others did: a decline in established, professional local media (e.g., the loss of the KGY newsroom, the decline of The Olympian), the rise of digital-only platforms that approach news differently, and the creation of several social media forums that seemingly replace traditional news. Specifically, I noted r/Olympia on Reddit, the Thurston Scanner Facebook page, and the now-private Olympia Looks like Shit Facebook group.

The Dangers of Misinformation in a Fragmented Ecosystem

An incident just yesterday highlighted how this evolving dynamic, particularly with newly established digital platforms, can spark misinformation and how quickly that misinformation can become political fuel. A recent article from The JOLT at best poorly described, at worst mischaracterized a key point in an Olympia City Council meeting. The JOLT’s practice is to outsource most of its reporting to overseas reporters, relying on video footage rather than on-the-ground context.

The topic was a state-funded program designed to move unhoused individuals off state highway rights-of-way within city limits into more stable housing, think of the Interstate 5 embankment next to Hobby Lobby on Sleater-Kinney, which is inside Olympia but on state-owned land. Councilmember Dani Madrone described the situation as one where the state essentially handed local governments money and said:

“…local governments are in this position of, you know, the state said, “Here’s some money to get the folks without housing off state lands, bring them into your jurisdiction, and then, you know, you better hope we continue to fund it.”

However, the reporter misunderstood and misquoted her, framing it as though Olympia was intentionally bringing in unhoused people from outside the city:

“Madrone pointed out that local governments were encouraged to bring unhoused individuals into their jurisdictions with the promise of continued state funding. “

The reporter heard Councilmember Madrone say something about the city “bringing people into the jurisdiction,” but misinterpreted it in a way that what they wrote meant to the reader Olympia was importing people from outside city. Had they been present in the room, they would have been able to follow up and understand she was referring to unhoused individuals already living on state rights-of-way within the city. A simple clarification could have prevented significant confusion.

This misquote quickly took on a life of its own. A city council candidate picked up the inaccurate paraphrase and incorporated it into a version of the “magnet theory,” the unfounded idea that Olympia is importing unhoused people to boost its budget.

In reality, the right-of-way program aims to help cities manage homelessness that already exists within their boundaries, but on state-owned land. As of the following day, the post had been shared 43 times on Facebook, and I could only see a handful of those shares, some of which might be in active Facebook groups I’m not part of. This only tracks the story’s spread via Facebook on its first day.

This situation highlights a dangerous chain reaction: poor paraphrasing by an out-of-area reporter led to a public misconception, which was then used to fuel a misleading political narrative. It serves as a stark reminder that local journalism requires both proximity and precision, especially when reporting on sensitive, politicized issues like homelessness.

This incident also underscores a larger problem: the way we talk about “social media” as if it were a single entity. It’s not. Local Facebook groups operate differently from Nextdoor or a subreddit. And for each community, these local online communities are different. Understanding how information and misinformation flow through these distinct channels, and how it is received and reframed by different audiences, is as crucial as getting the facts right in the first place. We cannot mend local news if we don’t understand how people perceive it, and that perception is increasingly shaped by a fragmented, algorithmic media landscape.

Despite the practices of one seemingly legitimate online news organization, local journalism matters. So does understanding the ecosystem that surrounds it. If we are serious about either, we need to be more precise in our reporting and in our analysis of how that reporting moves through our communities.

The Future of Local Information

We are in the midst of a transitional moment for local news and information ecosystems, and we need better tools and frameworks, not just to fix the supply of local journalism but to understand how people receive and reprocess that information in a fragmented digital world.

The mangled “right-of-way” quote was misunderstood, amplified by a local candidate, and reframed as part of a broader narrative about Olympia intentionally importing unhoused people. A single reporting error, left unchallenged, became political fodder across local social channels.

This isn’t just a failure of journalism; it’s a failure of how we understand the local information ecosystem. As traditional newsrooms shrink, digital-only platforms emerge, and community conversations shift to increasingly opaque or siloed online spaces, we need new approaches to track and support the health of our local discourse.

Pulling back from Olympia, we’re seeing this debate occur on a national scale as people reading the tea leaves of the last Presidential race implore Democrats not to depend so heavily on legacy media strategies but to engage in the influencer space more.

We’re also seeing the promise of closed, walled garden social media pay off as the broader media industry is facing a “web traffic apocalypse.” The usual sources of online readership like Google Search, Facebook, and Twitter, have either deprioritized news or made algorithmic changes that dramatically reduce referral traffic.

Hope

There are also options to not just bring more reporters to town, but to grow and heal local social media. Organizations like New_Public are exploring how to treat digital public spaces like parks or libraries, shared infrastructure that communities must tend to, not just scroll past.

If we want to strengthen local journalism and civic trust, we can’t just ask where people get their news; we have to understand how that news is distorted, reshaped, or ignored once it enters the digital bloodstream. The future of local news doesn’t just depend on reporters. It depends on recognizing the complexity of the ecosystem we’re already in.

2025 Population Trends: Coastal Decline, Rural Migration, and Growing Thurston Density

July 12, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

One of my favorite weeks of the year comes at the end of June, when the Washington State Office of Financial Management releases its annual population estimates. This data dives deep into how cities and counties across the state are changing, whether through natural growth (births minus deaths) or migration.

It’s a treasure trove of information that offers valuable insight into how our communities and regions are evolving. Here are a few takeaways I’ve gleaned from this year’s release:

1. The death churn continues.

Over the past few years, I’ve noticed a growing trend in county-level data: many areas are now experiencing negative natural growth. That is, more people are dying than being born. I visualized this by zooming out and color-coding the data, Clallam County stands out as a long red line, while King and Pierce counties show up as long blue lines.

As time goes on, more counties are trending red. This doesn’t necessarily mean these counties are shrinking in total population (in-migration often makes up the difference). Still, it does show the demographic impacts of an aging population, particularly as the boomer generation continues to age.

Interestingly, this shift in natural growth isn’t uniform across the state. When I mapped the past few years of data, a pattern emerged: rural coastal counties like Clallam are at the center of this trend, while areas like Puget Sound and parts of Central Washington show different dynamics.

2. Migration offsets the death churn.

I also plotted natural growth against net migration since 2020 and found a clear inverse relationship: the more deaths outpace births, the more in-migration tends to make up for the gap.

And despite King County’s reputation as a hub for newcomers, it’s not actually the most migration-heavy area on a per capita basis. That distinction goes to counties like Pend Oreille, Columbia, and Pacific, all of which are seeing negative natural growth.

It raises a deeper question: Are these new arrivals older, potentially exacerbating the natural growth decline? There’s more to explore in this data in future posts.

3. Thurston County: Lacey outpaces Olympia (again).

Shifting focus to Thurston County, the trend of Lacey growing faster than Olympia continues. Lacey remains the largest city in the county, with over 60,000 residents compared to Olympia’s 57,000.

Looking at data from the Thurston Regional Planning Council, the reason is clear: annexation.

Since 2020, Olympia hasn’t annexed any new land, while Lacey has added more than 1,100 acres.

This expansion impacts population density. Although Lacey is still slightly more dense than Olympia, its density fluctuates year to year. Meanwhile, Olympia’s density has increased steadily.

4. Tumwater and Yelm: Expanding outward.

Speaking of annexations, Tumwater and Yelm have also been aggressive in expanding their boundaries.

Since 1979, Tumwater has annexed over 7,000 acres, about the same as Lacey, and far more than Olympia’s 2,200 acres. Yelm, despite its smaller size, has annexed more than 3,000 acres.

This means that, physically, Tumwater and Yelm cover far more land than their populations might suggest. If Tumwater had the same population density as Olympia or Lacey, it would have between 55,000 and 57,000 residents. Yelm, too, would be much larger, north of 17,000 residents.

These shifting patterns of growth, migration, aging, and expansion paint a complex and fascinating picture of how Washington is changing, county by county, city by city. There’s a lot more to unpack, and I’ll keep digging into it in future posts.

Book Review: Excluded (In Cascadia)

June 28, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See

By Richard D. Kahlenberg

“Exluded” is a much-needed addition to several excellent recent books on our horrific history of housing discrimination. Kahlenberg covers the space left open by other recent classics on housing, zoning and structural racism: “The Color of Law” (by Richard Rothstein) and “Race for Profit” (by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor).

“Excluded” also puts a sharp zoom on the recent history of our own region, placing a critical eye at housing policy from the 1970s to today in Seattle and surrounding communities that still impact how many of us talk about zoning, growth and fairness.

The main theme of “Excluded” is how our housing policy perpetuates racial and economic segregation, leading to inequality and limited opportunities for the working-class. Kahlenberg discusses the impact of exclusionary zoning on housing affordability, social mobility, and access to essential services, highlighting the subtlety of economic discrimination compared to traditional forms of prejudice.

What this book does well is chart the expansion of zoning rules in the years after the federal Fair Housing Act that, in large part, retained the impact of racially-motivated housing convenenants and race-based zoning.

From Chapter 4 (The Meritocratic Elitism Sustains the Walls):

Wealthy white people, for the most part, are not violent in their exclusionary tactics and don’t hurl stones or bottles. What they do hurl are obscure zoning ordinances that keep people out just the same. The exclusion doesn’t take place in widely televised violent confrontations on the streets; it happens in little-noticed confines of zoning or planning board meetings.

Development in zoning laws across western Washington, including Seattle, follows the same pattern that Kahlenberg describes. For decades, white Seattleites used tools like racially restrictive covenants to exclude people of color from their neighborhoods. In the mid-1960s, Seattle voters even voted down a fair housing ordinance that would have made housing discrimination based on race illegal. Not until fair housing became a central issue after the assassination of Martin Luther King did Seattle pass a fair housing ordinance (along with state and federal laws).

Then, Seattle did what many other American communities did, as Kahlenberg writes. If it weren’t possible to exclude people of color based on race, they would erect a structurally racist system based on single-family zoning to ensure economic segregation. The concept of “downzoning” neighborhoods that used to allow a variety of housing types expanded across the region. To illustrate this, the mentions of “downzoning” in the Seattle Times archive went from zero in the 1960s to over 500 mentions in the 1970s.

In Seattle, the end result of five decades of downzoning is white-majority neighborhoods expanding across the city.

The Leschi neighborhood is a good example of how downzoning throughout the 80s and 90s excluded black neighborhoods from Seattle. One collection of blocks in the Leschi neighborhood went from over 90 percent black in the 1970s to 11 percent black today. Leschi itself was downzoned along with wide stretches of Seattle north of the ship canal in the 1960s and 70s.

The black population of King County was pushed south and out of Seattle as the white residents in downzoned neighborhoods looked for housing further and further south.

Kahlenberg also points out how the concept of single-family zoning was a central theme in fair housing debates in the 70s. HUD Secretary George Romney (and former Michigan governor) went to Warren, Michigan in 1970 to attempt to force the Detroit suburb to strike single-family zoning and allow smaller, more affordable housing types. His effort failed, his political career ended, and the civil rights organizations retrenched and fought unheralded courtroom battles over single-family zoning in the Midwest, the South, and the East Coast.

According to the NAACP, in the early 70s: the suburbs were “the new civil rights battleground” and we should do battle out in the townships and villages to lower zoning barriers and thereby create opportunities for Negroes seeking housing closer to today’s jobs at prices they can afford and pay.”

National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing (also in the early 1970s): segregation won’t stop until “local governments have been deprived of the power… to manipulate zoning and other controls to screen out families on the basis of income and, implicitly, of race.”

What we can say for sure, that our decreasing densities through downzones had very real impacts on the racial makeup of our neighborhoods.

“Excluded” underlines one of the main girders of structural racism: Well-meaning white neighbors don’t have to be racist to benefit from racist outcomes and a racist system. It also underscores the need for the huge layer of people who will tell you they are not racist but participate in racist systems, before you get to people working to dismantle racist systems.

We know the current landscape of dominant, exclusionary single-family zoning in our region happened at the same time the last tools to legally and openly discriminate in housing were taken away. We also know the nation’s leading civil rights organizations actively worked against exclusionary single-family zoning.

“Excluded” shows that our region’s history is not at all unique. We should keep that broader context of our place in history in mind as cities work to implement the state legislature’s recently created a minimum zoning standard. Local control through zoning is the tool that low-density neighborhoods used for five decades to sustain racially discriminatory impacts of city-scale zoning.

The ghost in the machine of analyzing out-of-town corporate home-ownership

June 19, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 4 Comments

Tim Gruver wrote a fantastic explanation of the issue of out-of-state and corporate home-ownership in Washington State in the Washington Observer.

His piece reminded me of a national dataset that attempts to tackle this issue at scale, something I may have overlooked when examining the Thurston County landscape. Regrid recently broke down home-ownership by census tract across the country.

What jumped out was a massive red spot on Olympia’s westside, where Regrid’s data suggested a high concentration of out-of-state ownership. But this didn’t align with what I found when looking at the top corporate single-family home owners in the county.

In fact, I found zero such owners in the tract Regrid highlighted: 105.10 on Olympia’s westside. According to their data, 30 homes in the tract exist, 23 of which are owned by people or entities with out-of-zip-code addresses.

The blue spots are residential parcels, the tract is bound by Harrison on the north, Kaiser on the west, 101, and Black Lake Boulevard on the south and east.

But using the county’s publicly available parcel data, I couldn’t find anywhere near 30 single-family homes in that census tract. In fact, 105.10 is unusual for Olympia: it has almost no single-family homes but houses a significant population in apartments, multiplexes, and mobile homes. The tract is dominated by the Capitol Mall, its sprawling parking lots, and other commercial developments. The few remaining single-family homes are remnants from when the area was rural, and there certainly aren’t 30 of them, no matter how you count.

I’ve written before about this same census tract to illustrate how single-family zoning and Olympia’s “nodes” theory of density have racially exclusionary effects on how the city grows.

So where is Regrid’s data coming from?

It might be counting units in the large mobile home park at the center of the tract. That park is owned by an Oregon-based LLC, which fits the out-of-state ownership angle. But the number of units there would be far greater than 30, and Regrid doesn’t make clear whether or how they include mobile homes in their single-family counts. Their definitions of single-family homes versus duplexes or multiplexes are vague.
They might be including several apartment complexes in the area. But again, those contain far more than 30 units.

I’m not saying Regrid’s data is useless. In fact, they identified every other hotspot I found in my own research. But calling a single-family home desert on the Westside a hotspot of out-of-town single-family ownership is a big miss.

This raises a couple of important points for me.

First, we should rely on local data when exploring these issues. In every county I’ve looked at, parcel data is free and relatively easy to access. People better at data work than me can use it to analyze ownership trends more accurately. Regrid did a good high-level overview, but without local knowledge, these types of errors are easy to make—and they matter.

Second, this reflects a framing problem I’ve had with this conversation from the beginning: the focus is almost always on single-family home ownership, not ownership of apartments or mobile homes. Yet in a tract like 105.10, those more affordable housing types are far more prevalent—and more relevant. My earlier analysis of this tract pointed to how zoning drives these disparities.

Between 2010 and 2017, both Olympia census tracts 105.10 and 105.20 (formerly combined as tract 105) saw population growth but experienced sharply different demographic shifts. Tract 105.10, which added high-density housing, grew from 1,447 to 1,887 people and became more diverse, with its white population dropping from 94% to 81%. In contrast, 105.20, which preserved single-family zoning, grew from 5,853 to 6,547 people but became whiter, with its white population increasing from 80% to 86% and losing over 200 nonwhite residents. While both tracts grew, only the one that allowed denser development saw a meaningful increase in racial diversity.

We tend to worry more about out-of-state corporations owning single-family homes than apartment complexes, reflecting a bias that single-family homes should be owner-occupied while apartments are expected to be corporate-owned. This mindset overlooks the fact that most large apartment complexes in Thurston County are already owned by distant investors, yet draw little concern. The selective outrage suggests a deeper cultural attachment to the idea of home-ownership as a marker of community belonging and stability.

Even saying “corporate home-ownership” is coded language for single-family homes. We know we don’t mean apartments or mobile homes when we say it.

While corporate ownership does raise real concerns, like pricing out local workers, it’s worth questioning why we reserve our alarm for certain types of housing and not others.

Ending the Oregon Trail

June 14, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

One of my favorite aspects of Pacific Northwest history is the quiet debate about where the Oregon Trail “ended.” Like polite Cascadians, we tend to avoid direct confrontation on the issue, yet more than one city lays claim to the distinction.

Oregon City arguably has the strongest claim, if only because of its museum and the numerous related activities held there.

Olympia also presents a case, being further along the trail and boasting a monument. Over 100 years ago, the Daughters of the American Revolution placed markers along the trail in Washington State, ending in downtown Olymia. We even have a street that follows the old route from Tumwater north into the city, aptly named “Old Oregon Trail.”

Puyallup, home to the most prominent Oregon Trail marker promoter, offers a dark horse entry. Ezra Meeker did more than anyone else to promote the preservation of the trail’s memory. The marker outside his home in Puyallup signifies the starting point of his backward retracing of the Oregon Trail in 1906. Therefore, if he retraced his steps back east, his house could be considered the end.

However, this leads to a larger philosophical argument about trails and their true termination points. The Oregon Trail ended for each family and migrant who put down roots, often displacing the people who already lived here, and began reshaping the landscape to their will.

Technically speaking, the trail north of the Columbia River wasn’t the Oregon Trail, it was the Cowlitz Trail. The Daughters of the American Revolution probably knew this, but retained the “Oregon Trail” moniker to maintain attention on their project of placing markers from the Columbia River to Olympia. Who really needed to mark the end of the Cowlitz Trail when it was so much easier to make and place markers for the more famous Oregon Trail? Ultimately, the Oregon Trail ended wherever any family decided to end it for themselves.

This perspective considers only the dimensions of longitude and latitude.

In terms of time, the Oregon Trail effectively ended when railroads became the most economical way to colonize the Pacific Northwest. The first transcontinental railroad connection to the West Coast opened in 1869, making rail travel to California and then boat travel to the Columbia and Puget Sound much more efficient. In 1883, this line was finally extended, and the Northern Pacific also tied in.

The Oregon Trail primarily mattered to one particular type of Pacific Northwest resident: the displaced Appalachian. Descendants of Scots-Irish people, pushed out of Scotland, into Northern Ireland, and then into the mountain regions west of the east coast, were the biggest beneficiaries of the Oregon Trail. In contrast, railroads and ships brought New Englanders focused on resource extraction and commerce. This juxtaposition, farming versus logging, represents the defining political and cultural conflict within the colonial society on the ocean side of the mountains, stretching from Whatcom County down to some point near central California. (For a deeper dive into this, I recommend Colin Woodard’s American Nations.)

But this still doesn’t fully address our core question: What is the true end of the Oregon Trail?

It ends when we say it ends. Meeker’s journeys to mark the trail itself were an effort to keep the trail, or at least the memory of its mission, alive. History serves as a reminder of our mission, our culture. Marking the trail reminds us that our goal was to transplant our folkways from our previous homes and expand them into this new place.

Ending the Oregon Trail would mean acknowledging this history, but then moving forward toward justice. Our mission up to this point has not been fair, especially to the people who were here before we arrived. Neither the Appalachians nor the New Englanders who arrived by boat were interested, by and large, in justice for the society they displaced or the lives of the people of color they exploited while seeking prosperity.

So, in this way, we are very much still on the Oregon Trail. The Oregon Trail continues today, for everyone stepping out of SeaTac looking for a new mailing address. We are going to continue welcoming new residents; that isn’t in question. What is in question is the society they come into and our values.

Our history is not a static destination. It is a continuous journey shaped by human choices and evolving needs. Just as the trail concluded differently for each family seeking a new beginning, our understanding of our legacy must adapt. To acknowledge the end of the Oregon Trail, in all its varied forms, is not to diminish its historical significance but to recognize its complex and often challenging impact, particularly on the Indigenous communities whose lands were reshaped and lives uprooted by this influx of newcomers.

True historical understanding encourages us to embrace adaptation and growth, ensuring that our reverence for the past does not hinder our ability to address the pressing needs and challenges of today, fostering a society that reflects the values of inclusivity and justice for all who call the Pacific Northwest home.

Ultimately, the “end” of the Oregon Trail lies in how we choose to build our communities and welcome new residents today. It’s a question of whether we allow a rigid adherence to a past vision to limit our collective progress, or if we embrace an understanding of our heritage that prioritizes inclusivity, adaptability, and justice for all who live here now and in the future. The memory of the trail can serve as a powerful reminder of our capacity for change and our ongoing mission to forge a more equitable society, moving beyond simply marking a route to truly understanding its enduring consequences.

The Unsoeld of MGP’s Wendell Berry

May 31, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

I’m old enough and have been around long enough to remember when Rep. Brian Baird toured local Democratic organizations to personally explain his support for the surge in Iraq toward the end of the George W. Bush presidency. Baird had been one of the few Democrats to take a principled stand against much of the post-9/11 reaction. But after firsthand experience in Iraq, he changed his position and decided to support the surge in late summer 2007.

I remember a small afternoon meeting between Baird and the leadership of the Thurston County Democratic Party (of which I was a minor part). This was followed by a larger, heated gathering at Capital High School weeks later where he was grilled by attendees.

I bring up this bit of history because there’s been a lot of recent talk about Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and how she often cuts against the grain of national Democratic politics. But the Washington Third Congressional District has a history of electing Democratic representatives who do just that.

Since the 1980s, when national politics began to overtake regional identities, Washington’s 3rd District has elected three Democratic members of Congress, each with their own version of iconoclasm. Instead of being standard-bearers for a national party line, they’ve often resembled regional throwbacks, like a Yellow Dog Democrat from the South or a progressive Republican from the North.

Let’s go all the way back to Jolene Unsoeld, an Olympian who served in Congress after Don Bonker (a pro-logging, pro-labor, post-Nixon Democrat) and lost her seat in the 1994 Republican wave.

Unsoeld got her start in politics pushing for open government, leading the campaign for the initiative creating Washington’s campaign finance disclosure system. She entered office as an outsider and, in many ways, stayed that way, even while in Congress. Known for her deep convictions and distaste for spin and backroom deals, she routinely defied party expectations.

Her stance on guns was emblematic of this independence. In the state legislature, she supported moderate gun control, backing a bill that let police revoke concealed weapons permits from those convicted of carrying while intoxicated. But in Congress, her approach shifted. She opposed a blanket assault weapons ban, instead proposing a more targeted amendment to limit only imported assault weapons.

This frustrated progressives in her base, especially in Thurston County, who saw it as a betrayal. But her decision reflected a balance between her liberal values and a libertarian skepticism of federal overreach, one that aligned with many rural constituents.

Linda Smith, a hardline small-government conservative, defeated Unsoeld in 1994. When Smith ran for Senate in 1998, Brian Baird swept in and won the seat by ten points, after nearly unseating her two years earlier by fewer than 1,000 votes.

Baird’s own iconoclasm became clearest in his stance on the Iraq War. Like many Democrats, he initially opposed the 2003 invasion. But after visiting Iraq in 2007 and observing the U.S. military surge firsthand, he reversed his position, arguing that the strategy was working and that pulling out too early could lead to further chaos.

This change put him at odds with most of his party and with anti-war activists who had previously supported him. He defended the shift by saying it was grounded in evidence and experience, not ideology or political pressure. His support for the surge, he said, wasn’t about justifying the invasion but about honoring a moral obligation to reduce harm.

A year later, Baird’s independence cut the opposite way in foreign policy. After the 2008–2009 Gaza War, he was the first U.S. official in over three years to enter the Gaza Strip. Acting without the Obama administration’s approval, he publicly condemned the humanitarian devastation caused by Israeli military actions, calling the destruction “shocking and troubling beyond words.”

Baird even suggested that U.S. military aid to Israel should be used as leverage to change Israeli policy, a position almost unheard of in Congress. Few lawmakers were willing to even broach the idea of conditioning aid to Israel. But Baird did, again based on what he had seen for himself.

Which brings us to Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez.

There are two particularly thoughtful pieces of writing about her I recommend: one by Warren Neth and another in Lower Columbia Currents.

A couple of quotes I want to pull out. First, from Neth:

Gluesenkamp Perez didn’t win by mimicking Trump, nor by abandoning the core of left economic values. She won by being real. But there’s a cautionary tale here: even candidates with deep working-class resonance risk losing their edge if they’re folded too neatly into establishment politics.

If Perez is Trump’s kryptonite, it’s because she offers a materially grounded, culturally fluent alternative to the right-wing populism that dominates districts like hers. But kryptonite doesn’t work if it’s locked away in an iron box.

Then from Currents:

It’s true that MGP defies stereotypes. The daughter of a Texas preacher who attended liberal Reed College and who co-owns a Portland auto repair shop, she’s equally comfortable quoting scripture and dropping “F” bombs.

On one hand, she shares progressive views on abortion, LGBTQ+ rights and access to childcare. But she take conservative positions on gun rights and supports the timber industry. (A well-used 1950s chain saw hangs in her congressional office.)

But before we get too deep, it’s important to note that Olympia is no longer in the 3rd District. After the 2010 redistricting, WA-10 was created and carved Olympia into a Pierce County-centric district, leaving only a conservative southern slice of Thurston County in WA-3. That slice got even smaller in 2020.

This matters. Brian Baird used to win the district with over 60% of the vote. In the post-9/11 2002 election, his Republican opponent only got 38%. The district Gluesenkamp Perez represents today is much more conservative and significantly more rural.

And politics themselves have changed. Readers of this blog should remember that Rep. Albert Johnson once represented WA-3 in Congress. Johnson is a significant and dark figure in Washington and American history. His eugenics-driven immigration policies were a direct translation of Washington’s own racist legacy, one designed to exclude anyone but white people from the economy.

The worldview of Albert Johnson has found new life in the Stephen Miller wing of today’s Republican Party. Gluesenkamp Perez’s politics cut directly against this foundation, focusing instead on the root economic insecurities that fuel movements like those of Johnson and Miller.

It is worth taking time to pull back the zoom lens on the day-to-day, vote-to-vote politics around her and take a look at her broader beliefs. Congressional politics, by default, are built around the bricks made available by the votes she needs to take. But her actual politics are deeper and different. Her recent interview with Ezra Klein cuts deeper into her personal politics and includes several standout moments:

On the “dignity and indignity” of work: She challenges a cultural hierarchy that devalues manual labor and glorifies office work, calling this mindset “deeply toxic.” She argues that people want to be useful and self-realized without needing a college degree, and that multiple forms of intelligence deserve respect.
On tariffs and domestic production: She acknowledges that tariffs can be misused, but sees them as potentially productive tools to encourage local manufacturing. She points to Canadian lumber dumping as a factor in the loss of local mills. (While I didn’t cite Don Bonker as an iconoclast earlier, it’s worth noting that he launched his national political career fighting raw log exports, which he saw as harmful to local jobs.)
On small-scale localism: Her economic vision centers on local self-determination, durable production, and skilled trades over cheap consumption. She advocates for policies that help people own property, build long-lasting products, and reclaim practical stewardship of resources. Her environmentalism is rooted in local realities, not just consumer choices.

This isn’t the kind of rhetoric you usually hear from a seasoned politician. It’s more like someone who just discovered Wendell Berry. And while Unsoeld and Baird ran against the grain of national politics in their own ways, Gluesenkamp Perez does so even more starkly, and necessarily, given the changing realities of both her district and our broader political landscape.

But in a lot of ways, Gluesenkamp Perez is a throwback to a form of Democratic politics that once thrived in resource- and industry-dependent regions like Southwest Washington. The idea that the economy should serve the people is hardly a radical stance in that tradition. What’s striking, though, is how deeply rooted her views are in a broader rethinking of how the economy is organized. Her politics aren’t just about protecting jobs; they’re about recentering economic life around human dignity, local resilience, and self-determination. That kind of economic vision, grounded in the lived experiences of tradespeople and rural communities, is rare in today’s national political landscape, and maybe exactly what the national discourse needs.

Olyblog traffic dies when Facebook shows up.

When enshittification comes for your town

May 24, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

This started as a simple essay about why we shouldn’t be diving headfirst into the black hole of a “link tax” to fund journalism.

So let’s start there: link taxes are bad policy.

Especially when considering the alternative, a digital ad tax that funds journalism. I would write a straight-up op-ed about how link taxes are a disaster and digital ad taxes are a cleaner, smarter fix. But then, as I wrote it, this essay kind of veered off course.

We haven’t considered a link tax in Washington, but a lot of the rhetoric around our journalism funding has adopted link tax framing. Oregon is considering a link tax, though. And California just showed how the link tax debate can derail any hope of actually shifting money from digital platforms to journalism.

Link taxes prop up platforms. They accept the smug assumption that platforms benefit from real journalism, and therefore should be forced to pay for linking to it. In the era of Shrimp Jesus and AI-generated sludge, Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t need your 3,000-word explainer on the local government budget crisis. He just needs eyeballs, clicks, and outrage.

A digital ad tax, on the other hand, is like a sin tax. It exists whether or not Facebook will allow users to link to news reporting. If you’re a smart marketer, you’re buying ads from Meta, Google, or some massive programmatic ad exchange. These companies have systematically cut new publishers out of the ad revenue stream, building ad empires that strip-mine value from communities that once supported journalism.

They don’t need to link to journalism to pay, they pay because their business model is the problem. And with a tax, we can peel off a sliver of that revenue to buy pizza for reporters. Or, you know, pay their actual wages. Or, and here’s where it gets interesting, fund moderators of online forums.

This is where the essay went sideways. I started thinking about how we got here.

For years after about 2008 or so, people who made money writing things contorted themselves trying to perform well in the social newsfeed. We all did it, even the newspapers. We started chasing clicks from social platforms, hoping they would translate into eyeballs, and in the case of news publishers, ad revenue. All the while, the social platforms were building ad empires. So it’s pretty ironic now to hear that social platforms “stole” content, when the very same newsrooms were hiring social media engagement specialists to crack the newsfeed algorithm to go viral.

We messed up. We poured energy into platforms that contribute nothing to our communities. My particular sin? Facebook and the death of Olyblog.

In my case, the biggest victim of the Facebook newsfeed was Olyblog. It launched 20 years ago as a hyperlocal community blog, the kind of thing that would now exist as a Facebook group or maybe a subreddit. It thrived from 2005 to 2008, then imploded in a mix of interpersonal drama and everyone just migrating to Facebook. The traffic to Olyblog fell through the floor two years after Facebook opened to the broader public and revised the news feed to become most like what it is today.

These days, I’m basically off Facebook. I’ve iced both my Instagram and Facebook accounts, no new posts, only logging in when absolutely necessary. I was disappointed that more people didn’t bail when Facebook took its latest nosedive earlier this year.

Over the past four years, I’ve been in the trenches of a local fight against election disinformation. I’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about what I put into the world, and I chose to cut harmful, algorithmic media out of my life. That meant not engaging on Facebook, even when it was the easiest option. In balance, I’ve moved to Bluesky, Mastodon, and an RSS feed reader. But microblogging is not a replacement for community blogs or Facebook groups.

So the band plays on. I was disappointed when a new crop of Democratic Party organizers in Thurston County launched yet another Facebook group. But really, I’m not disappointed in them. I’m disappointed that this is still the only viable option for online organizing. I didn’t offer to do the hard work of building an alternative, so I can’t fault them. But I can recognize the gap between the world I want and the world we live in.

In Thurston County, Facebook is where the people are. But it’s a toxic place, one that encourages content that enrages rather than content that solves problems.

Cory Doctorow talks about this process as “enshittification,” how digital platforms gradually turn against every user group they once courted, until we’re all stuck. They ratchet up the costs of leaving until we feel like we can’t go because everyone else is still there.

That’s exactly what’s happened here. Traditional media has been gutted by market forces and corporate consolidation. What’s left is small, siloed audiences mostly hanging out on Facebook. KGY doesn’t really do news anymore, but I remember when Doug Adamson was standing on the back of a truck, mic in hand, giving live updates during a May Day protest. Now, the Olympian is down to a skeleton crew. Meanwhile, the Thurston County Scanner Facebook page pumps out crime updates to a captive Facebook-only audience and pulls better metrics than anyone else around. But because it lives entirely on Facebook, it’s at the mercy of the algorithm.

Anyway, hard pivot, let’s get back to the digital ad tax.

Washington State actually passed one this year. It might get challenged in court (like Maryland’s did), and it doesn’t have any earmarked spending. The money just drops into the general fund. But if it survives, and if we can steer that revenue toward something meaningful, we need to think beyond just giving grants to newsrooms.

Don’t get me wrong, local journalism absolutely deserves public support. But there’s also a growing need to support local online communities that aren’t traditional news outlets.

Think of these online spaces like we think of libraries.

Take Front Porch Forum in New England. Or New_Public’s Local Lab, which is building an open-source platform for healthier town-based online spaces, alternatives to the rage-fueled mess of Facebook Groups and Nextdoor. Their goal is to support and pay local “stewards” to manage these communities. Move beyond toxic algorithms. Highlight high-quality local content. Create sustainable, public-good platforms.

We share ourselves and our lives online for free. We absolutely need more professional journalists reporting on local issues. But we also need to reclaim the connective power of the internet from the corporations that have hijacked it.

A digital ad tax is like taxing cigarettes. Algorithmic ad tech is sucking money out of Olympia and funneling it into corporations that don’t care about our community. Just skimming a little off the top could fund reporters, build home-grown platforms, and pay community moderators.

Olympia ’57 and the Arts Walk we always needed

May 17, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Walking through downtown Olympia during Arts Walk this spring, I was struck by a realization:

Arts Walk has become what Lakefair was originally intended to be: a human-centered festival that brings people downtown and supports local businesses. What began in 1957 as a strategic effort by downtown retailers to draw shoppers back from the emerging suburban fringe has evolved, ironically, into something that now seems to conflict with its original purpose. Meanwhile, Arts Walk (especially the spring edition) has stepped into that role and done it better.

The first Lakefair took place just seven years after the Deschutes River was dammed to create Capitol Lake. Back then, Tumwater as a town stopped short of the Trosper and I-5 cloverleaf, Lacey barely extended beyond a few blocks around the St. Martin’s College campus, and Olympia’s downtown was the regional commercial hub. An aerial photo from 1957 shows a very different city. There’s no westside sprawl, no South Sound Center, no Capital Mall. Interstate 5 is only beginning to cut its path through the city. The southeast side is still a patchwork of empty fields. Downtown was everything.

Lakefair was born into that moment. The lake was new, a kind of novelty. We hadn’t built any parks around it, and people could still remember the squalor of the Depression era shanty town, Little Hollywood, the lake was meant to replace. Downtown retailers felt threatened by the spread of car-centric shopping centers to the south and west, and Lakefair was their answer: a family-friendly summer celebration rooted in Olympia’s historic center.

But the tide couldn’t be held back. By the 1980s, the construction of Capital Mall and South Sound Center pulled national retailers out of downtown. As rents dropped, local and niche businesses moved in. Downtown shrank in economic dominance, but it found something more interesting: being an actual human-scaled neighborhood. By going down, downtown Olympia grew up.

Lakefair, however, didn’t adapt. It stayed focused on big crowds and spectacle. It became a regional summer draw, people come in from Tumwater, Lacey, and the westside not to experience downtown but to experience the event. Today, the foot traffic is enormous, but not helpful. If you talk to people who live and work near downtown, many will say they avoid Lakefair. Ironically, the further someone lives from downtown, the more likely they are to enjoy it, because for some, it’s the only time they come. For those who frequent downtown, Lakefair is an interruption.

Compare that to Arts Walk. It’s right-sized. Embedded in the streets. Both the Friday night Luminary Procession and the Saturday Procession of the Species invite people not just to gather, but to stroll, to explore, and to be downtown. These events don’t shut down the regular rhythm of the neighborhood; they highlight it. Arts Walk brings people face-to-face with small businesses, galleries, performers, and each other. It’s not a performance to be watched from the sidelines; it’s an experience shared from within.

The seasonal timing is meaningful. Lakefair is scheduled for the height of Cascadian summer, long days, hot sun, and school-free weeks. But Arts Walk arrives at the beginning and end of the softer season. Spring Arts Walk, in particular, feels like a true civic ritual: the reawakening of our community after a long winter and a downtown that’s still very much alive.

Lakefair has also changed in ways that move it further from its roots. Food booths once reserved for nonprofits are now open to commercial vendors. Local nonprofits increasingly struggle to justify the effort and expense of participating. And though the Twilight Parade still winds its way through the city, it mirrors the spirit of Arts Walk’s two processions, just with a different energy: one is lighthearted and grassroots; the other, more grand and nostalgic.

There’s a larger parallel here, too. Just as Lakefair took its name and identity from the artificial lake at the city’s core, it may now face a similar fate. Capitol Lake, long celebrated as a civic centerpiece, has been revealed as ecologically harmful—shallow, warm, and lifeless. The planned restoration of the Deschutes Estuary will undo that mid-century engineering mistake, trading a static reservoir for a living tidal system. Something more natural. More fitting.

In the same way, Arts Walk fits Olympia. It flows through the streets, not around them. It thrives not in designated festival zones but in the storefronts, sidewalks, and alleys that make downtown what it is. If Lakefair is to survive in a post-lake Olympia, it can return to its roots. Maybe even borrow a few pages from Arts Walk. Move into the streets. Shrink the footprint. Reconnect with the businesses and people downtown.

I’m not a Lakefair hater. I have fond memories, and I go down there for at least two nights a year for rides, food and fireworks. I know many in our community still love Lakefair, too. But festivals should serve the places they’re held. Arts Walk has become Olympia’s true local celebration, reflecting how we live now, not how we used to.

We are struggling as a city to recover from years of car-dependent development. Most of the square miles of today’s Olympia have no actual places to walk to, we need to get into our cars for everything. The single-family zoning that dominates the landscape removed the housing capacity that used to, more or less, assure everyone had something to call a home. We’re working now to create more density, more actual businesses in our neighborhoods. More sidewalks and more reasons to use them. Call it creating more “people-oriented places” or just human-scale, but looking at what Lakefair was born to fight is actually where our future should be taking us.

Facing the soft xenophobia of Emmett Watson

May 10, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

Governor Tom McCall of Oregon and Emmett Watson, the Seattle newspaper columnist I’m pretty sure my parents named me after, occupy a distinct corner of Pacific Northwest history. Both stood (figuratively and, at one point, literally) on the border of our region and asked people not to move here.

But in doing so, they provided air cover for a kind of xenophobic politics that helped cities across the region lower their density limits. Decades later, this became a fatal flaw in our politics and society.

Watson’s approach, from the 1960s through the 1990s, was often humorous and irreverent. He aimed to preserve Seattle’s unique, somewhat quirky character in the face of rapid growth and the perceived homogenization brought by newcomers and big development. He created the fictitious organization “Lesser Seattle” and its mock intelligence arm, “Keep the Bastards Out” (KBO), as playful rebukes to the ambitions of the real “Greater Seattle” boosters and Chamber of Commerce types.

McCall’s message, especially his famous “Visit but don’t stay,” was more direct and environmentally focused. Though charismatic and good with a soundbite, his core concern was growth management to protect Oregon’s environment. His message had broad implications for potential transplants, but his justification was rooted in ecological preservation more than the cultural anxiety that animated Watson.

Watson was definitely funny. And McCall, to Oregonians, was inspiring. But let’s focus on Watson, his impact on our culture, and most importantly, his jokes. He made sure to say that Lesser Seattle and KBO were fictitious, anyone could be the chair, and it was all just a joke.

But the joke was the power.

Jokes are gateways. Seemingly harmless humor targeting certain ideas can desensitize people and create a climate where more extreme rhetoric becomes acceptable. The humor acts as social lubricant, lowering defenses and making strong beliefs sound less shocking.

That’s exactly what happened in our Seattle-centric, Western Washington community. Watson would be cited again and again in letters to the editor as a humorous canary in the coal mine about growth.

Meanwhile, during the same period Watson was writing in earnest, city after city and neighborhood after neighborhood sought and received downzones: larger minimum lot sizes, bans on anything larger than single-family homes, all in the name of “preserving character” and controlling growth.

And again, we don’t need racist intent to have racist outcomes. These local zoning rules, implemented from the 1970s onward, pushed Black families out of whole neighborhoods in Seattle as white homeowners who benefited from post-World War economic growth looked for housing and drove up property values. In Olympia, we have whiter, less populated neighborhoods because we didn’t allow them to grow.

During the same period that Emmett Watson was playfully advocating for “Lesser Seattle” and the fictional “Keep the Bastards Out,” national media narratives were also shaping perceptions of Seattle in the context of racial tensions elsewhere. James Lyons points out in “Selling Seattle,” that following the Los Angeles riots in 1992, Seattle was increasingly portrayed as a desirable and safe haven for white middle-class professionals, a “white oasis” in contrast to the perceived urban decay and racial unrest of cities like Los Angeles. This media framing, while not explicitly espousing exclusionary policies, subtly reinforced an image of Seattle’s whiteness that was protected by exclusionary zoning, as a positive attribute, potentially providing an unconscious backdrop for the further arguments for downzoning that would later exacerbate our housing crisis.

Watson tried to turn serious when talking to author Jonathan Raban late in his career. He started with a joke about the unseriousness of the Lesser Seattle movement, but pivoted to argue for downzoning and neighborhood character, zoning as a tool for protection. Raban, who had moved to Seattle as an already well-known writer and quickly became one of its most insightful and loving critics, pushed back. His words ring even truer now as we try to reverse the policies that led to today’s housing crisis: “…I am very skeptical about zoning laws and many forms of planning. You see, cities have their own organic existence. They evolve naturally as the years go by.”

The fatal error in Watson’s and McCall’s thinking was that California (already experiencing population growth pressure from immigration and a booming economy in the 1960s and ’70s) started ratcheting down zoning density before Oregon and Washington did.

The increased housing costs cited by Cascadian slow-growthers as proof of California’s “insanity” were not a symptom of too much growth, but of housing scarcity. And in response, we put the same shackles on ourselves: cutting housing production, driving up home prices and rents, and contributing to a coast-wide homelessness crisis.

One of the most hilarious twists in this story? McCall and Watson weren’t even revolutionary. They were just the latest copy of a long Cascadian tradition: the impulse to shut the door behind you.

We don’t even need to go back to overtly racist policy to see the pattern. Take an early political race. Michael T. Simmons, arguably the first American to settle in what’s now Western Washington, co-founded Tumwater and led an overland party that arrived when the only competition was Indigenous tribes and the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Just a decade after his 1845 arrival, Simmons ran for congressional delegate as an independent. His main issue? That too many “newcomers” were taking over local political parties and that the “old settlers” needed a voice to preserve their history.

He’d been here ten years. And already, Simmons was the “old settler.”

Olympia Time