Yeah, in fact, I do think we should rename Thurston County. Or everything named after Samuel Thurston, including Thurston Avenue in Olympia. Here’s a brief update on why Samuel Thurston is not a good namesake. He never lived here, never visited here. His only actual impact here is the worst thing about him. Yes, he…
We should be able to rename Priest Point Park if we feel like it. And Squaxin Park makes perfect sense.
If you wanted to design someone who would be outraged at the prospect of renaming Priest Point Park, you could do much worse than me. Priest Point Park is probably (outside state-owned parks around the capitol) the jewel of Olympia’s park system. More than 300 acres, featuring everything (except athletic fields) you’d want in a…
Four questions from the last election in map form (Fall 2021 edition)
1. Did Talauna Reed’s strategy of encouraging voting in high density apartment complexes work? 2. Why did Reed get a post-primary bounce in SE Olympia? And, it is more than the bottom line result that she did not win. When I look at the maps, she didn’t move the needle in the neighborhoods with large…
Where Olympia has become less black in the past 10 years
Last month I put up a couple of posts featuring maps that explore population growth in Olympia over the last decade. The first map showed the uneven distribution of population growth across the city. The second map took a look at the change in the percentage of white people in the last ten years on the…
More growth means more diversity for Olympia neighborhoods (more maps with census data!)
Every single block group in Olympia declined in the percentage of “white only” respondents. This isn’t saying a great deal. Olympia’s most diverse neighborhood is 62 percent white, it’s least diverse is 90 percent white. Taking Thurston County’s rate of diversification (going from over 80 percent white to just over 70 percent) as a measuring…
Where Olympia didn’t grow (and even lost population) in the last 10 years (this time with census data!)
Olympia’s neighborhoods saw varying patterns of population growth and contraction over the past 10 years. Olympia grew by almost 10,000 residents and Thurston County as a whole grew by over 40,000 in the 2010s. Obviously population growth is not evenly spread across the county. But it is amazing to see that while the population of…
How proposed legislative and congressional redistricting maps impact Olympia and Thurston County
Starting last week, redistricting commissioners in Washington State have been releasing proposed maps for legislative and congressional districts. Democratic appointees April Sims and Brady Piñero Walkinshaw and Republican appointees Paul Graves and Jo Fain have taken different approaches to moving borders in Thurston County and around Olympia. In this post I’ll take a look at…
What the network graph of campaign contributions tells us about the Olympia City Council races
Over the last few days, I’ve been pulling down Public Disclosure Commission data and putting together a network graph of financial contributions among city council candidates. This illustrates the flow of individual contributions to campaigns and between candidates. This shows, in a broad sense, of how candidates are connected by who is contributing to them….
A few lessons from the 2021 Olympia City Council primary election results
1. Huynh and Payne (obviously) have the upper hand going into the general election. From the top line results, with both Huynh and Payne both breaking 50 percent, this seems obvious. But, when you look deeper at the map, you can really see how both Robbi Kesler and Corey Gauny are boxed in. From an…