Olympia Time

History, politics, people of Oly WA

It could have been much, much worse

July 18, 2026 / / 0 Comments

A few weeks back I wrote about a version of Olympia and Thurston County that kept its streetcars, tied them into regional rail, and grew up into something closer to a Pacific Northwest urbanist’s dream. Fun as a distraction, that essay gave me a chance to chase some historical what-ifs toward the best possible outcome.

This one runs the tape the other way. What if development here had gone worse instead of better? What if the highway planners of the 1950s had gotten the route they actually wanted, straight through the heart of Olympia, instead of the one they eventually settled for through Tumwater?

Short answer, it would’ve been bad on its own. 

The longer answer, and the real point of this essay, is that a downtown freeway wouldn’t have stayed bad in just one place. Within a decade or two it would’ve run out of room, and the region would’ve ended up building a second, larger highway south of town to relieve it. Olympia would’ve gotten hit twice: once downtown, and once across what’s now protected rural land between the airport and Nisqually.

What Tumwater actually lost, and why it matters here

Local memory likes to say Interstate 5 killed downtown Tumwater. It’s a clean  story, and it’s mostly wrong. Tumwater’s old river-based downtown had been dying for decades before anyone even drew up an interstate. The shift started in the early 1900s as railroad routes changed, and the real blow came in 1938, when the new Capitol Way bypassed the historic downtown completely. By the time I-5 construction started in the 1950s, Tumwater’s businesses had already moved toward Trosper Road. The city council signed off on running the freeway through the old downtown canyon partly because there wasn’t much of a downtown left to save.

That doesn’t mean the highway’s arrival was gentle, though. The route needed a 200-foot-wide path cut straight through Tumwater’s historic heart, and people were furious at first. The city council came around once the engineering made sense. In exchange for going along with it, Tumwater got some real concessions: a sewer line tied into Olympia’s system, an upgraded water system near the freeway, and a new Custer Way Bridge to replace the dangerously narrow 1915 Boston Street Bridge. By the time the route opened in 1958, the Trosper Road interchange had taken over as the city’s commercial center for good, and about a hundred buildings had been torn down or moved to clear the way.

There’s an irony underneath all this. Tumwater had already given up something once before, for pretty similar reasons. Back in 1915, the state wanted to dam the Deschutes Estuary to create what became Capitol Lake. Tumwater fought the idea for decades. Leopold Schmidt’s Olympia Brewing Company depended on the estuary’s connection to the Puget Sound to barge goods down to Olympia’s deepwater port, and a freshwater dam threatened both that route and their water rights. The Olympia Power and Light Company also feared the lake would damage their operations. The opposition finally broke at a 1941 town meeting, by which point Tumwater’s commercial center had already started drifting away from the river anyway. The lake was finished in 1951. Seven years later, the same city gave up its downtown to the freeway too, for pretty much the same reason. The thing being protected had already stopped being worth protecting.

None of this had to fall on Tumwater at all. For a while, the actual plan was to run the freeway straight through Olympia instead.

After World War II, Highway 99 funneled all through-traffic straight into the Olympia-Tumwater city centers, and the intersection of Fourth Avenue and Capitol Way became a real bottleneck, with through-traffic and local drivers fighting over the same narrow streets. A 1948 traffic survey started the planning for a limited-access route, called at different points the “Olympia Freeway” or the “Olympia Bypass.” The early designs were ambitious in the worst way.

Around the same time, that same pressure to move traffic through downtown showed up in a real political push to convert Olympia’s downtown streets to one-way. It was a kind of duct-tape-and-bailing-wire freeway, improvised out of streets that were already there.

The proposed route would have run through, or along, the Percival Creek Canyon near where the auto mall sits today, past the area that’s now Marathon Park, and from there crossed Capitol Lake through an underground tunnel or viaduct, coming up at the intersection of Adams Street and Tenth Avenue, right in the city core.

As if a tunnel wasn’t bad enough, engineers also proposed an elevated highway above Seventh Street as a cheaper alternative. It would’ve been a real-life Robert Moses nightmare, splitting downtown Olympia in two. And this wasn’t just idle talk. In the early 1950s, the City of Olympia and the state Department of Highways actually signed an agreement to move forward with the downtown route.

It fell apart in 1954. Not because anyone changed their mind about what it would do to the city, but because a Department of Highways review found it too expensive. Tunneling under a lake, or building an elevated structure through dense downtown blocks, cost more than the state wanted to spend. So engineers shifted to the Tumwater Canyon route instead: solid bedrock, cheaper to grade, and already half-emptied of the businesses that would’ve fought it.

And it’s worth remembering the downtown route wasn’t just a few blocks downtown. Getting from Percival Canyon to the Capitol Campus by tunnel or elevated causeway would’ve meant cutting across a good chunk of what’s now southwest Olympia. The impact on the east side of that route would’ve been just as serious, not some afterthought tacked onto the downtown disruption.

Why that wouldn’t have been the end of it

Here’s the part that makes this counterfactual worse than it looks at first. Say the 1954 cost review had gone the other way, and Olympia got its tunnel or its elevated highway through downtown. What if there was a governor who really liked the idea of a downtown interchange and pushed for it? What if the federal government stepped in to cover extra costs? 

That alone would’ve gutted the city core about as badly as the real freeway gutted Tumwater’s canyon. But here’s the thing: a freeway squeezed onto an isthmus between a lake and a bay only has so much room to grow. Once traffic outgrew it, and it would have, there’d be nowhere left to add lanes.

So the same pressure that built the original bottleneck at Fourth and Capitol would’ve built up again, on a larger scale, probably within a generation. And the fix wouldn’t have been to widen the downtown route. It would’ve meant building an actual interstate-grade bypass south of the city, cutting between Olympia Airport and Nisqually to route traffic around the bottleneck entirely. Olympia would’ve ended up with the worst of both options: a freeway carved through downtown that still couldn’t handle the load, and a second, bigger highway carved through the rural south county to make up the difference.

That second highway is the part worth sitting with. Right now, the land between the airport and Nisqually stays mostly rural, and that’s partly thanks to the Growth Management Act’s boundaries. When an interstate bypasses a rural area, it often ends up protecting it. No exit ramp means no incentive for strip malls and drive-thrus, so farmsteads tend to stay whole instead of getting sliced up by rights-of-way. Towns near the freeway often trade their identity for convenience. Places the freeway skipped tend to keep something real, even if it looks like neglect from the road.

In this counterfactual, south Thurston County doesn’t get that protection. It becomes the freeway. The corridor between the airport and Nisqually, still pretty rural today, would’ve turned into the kind of stretch you see near any highway exit: gas stations, chain restaurants, parking lots. The thing that currently protects that land, sitting outside the highway grid, would never have had the chance to exist.

Chase this far enough and the whole regional map starts to shift. In our actual history, Lacey grew up because it was rejecting Olympia’s effort to annex eastwards, and the suburbs spread out along Pacific Avenue and Martin Way instead. Take that away, and the suburban growth pattern here would’ve followed the new southern route instead. Tumwater, already centered on its Trosper Road interchange, would’ve kept stretching east until it ran into Tanglewilde from the south, soaking up the space that Lacey actually grew to fill. Something like the South Sound Shopping Center would probably still exist, just not where it is now. It would sit at a Rich Road or Rainier Road interchange on the new southern interstate instead, anchoring the kind of sprawl that, in real life, never had a highway to grow around.

The lucky accident

None of this was planned as a mercy. The 1954 decision to abandon the downtown route was a budget call, made by engineers weighing tunnel costs against bedrock costs. Highway budget writers don’t think about the impact on the community, no one in the room was thinking about what it would spare. But that’s what it did. Tumwater absorbed one real wound: its historic canyon, cut open for a freeway, after it had already gave up on a similar fight once before over Capitol Lake. Downtown Olympia and rural south Thurston County absorbed nothing. The cheaper option just happened to also be the option that kept the damage contained to one place instead of two.

It’s a strange thing to be grateful for a highway department’s spreadsheet. But measured against the alternative, that’s roughly what happened.

Annexing the Future

July 11, 2026 / / 0 Comments

For the first time in over fifty years, more people in Thurston County live inside a city than outside one. It could be an urbanist success story, zoning reform finally winning out, transit investment tipping the scale toward density. It isn’t. The real story’s older, weirder, and a lot less democratic. Once you see how it happened, I think it’s still worth calling out the right outcome.

This is the post I’m writing about the 2026 release of population estimates by OFM. Every year, the agency releases estimates as a guide for state spending. These estimates also give a picture of the changing shape of our communities.

You can see the lines cross in the 1970s and in 2020. The blue bars are the population captured by annexation, and is on the right hand axis, not the left.

This year’s data shows that between 1976 and 2020, unincorporated Thurston County outnumbered the incorporated cities every single year, a run that held for four and a half decades before it broke in the space of six. The trend started in 1976 because the late 70s saw two record years (in both percentage and raw numbers) of massive in-migration, most of which apparently ended up outside the cities.

But, that trend has finally started to shift But, if this were really about people choosing city life, you’d expect a gradual climb, year over year. Folks being priced out of car dependence drifting toward Olympia, Lacey, and Tumwater one household at a time. That’s not what the numbers show. Instead you get a flat unincorporated population since 2008, a 5,000-person drop in one bizarre year, and then a string of specific years where the incorporated population jumps by two or three thousand people all at once. 2009. 2016. 2022.

Those aren’t migrations, they’re annexations.

Before 2009, annexation in Thurston County was small and constant. Cities picked up a parcel here and a parcel there, mostly empty land, occasionally a few dozen or a few hundred people riding along with it. Lacey, Olympia, Tumwater, and Yelm all added pieces most years, rarely anything anyone would call a headline. Lacey’s 1985 annexation brought in nearly 800 residents. Olympia added just over 180 in 1995. These were rounding errors against the county’s total population, just the ordinary housekeeping of city boundaries.

Then the housekeeping stopped and the big grabs started. Tumwater’s annexation, effective February 2008, brought in 2,553 residents in one motion. We’re going to focus on this particular annexation. In my memory, it felt like an existential change for Tumwater, we expected at the time a massive shift in population, that may have happened slower than we expected, given the housing crash a few years later.

Olympia added 562 people in June 2014, a smaller jump but still a departure for a city that usually moved in small numbers. Tumwater came back in January 2016 with the largest single annexation of the last fifteen years, 3,255 residents absorbed in one stroke. Lacey had its turn in 2021, running two separate annexations between May and September that added 1,535 and 978 residents, over 2,500 combined in a single year. Tumwater kept at it into 2022, a dozen smaller annexations in May plus a 332-resident addition in June, while Lacey added close to 100 more that spring. Lacey’s doing it again, with a March 2025 annexation projected to add 455 residents.

Cities were working through a handful of legal tools, deciding case by case and year by year when to catch up with development that had already happened around them. You see a pattern that has nothing to do with a slow cultural shift toward city living.

The old way: leverage, not consent

For most of Thurston County’s modern annexation history, the tool of choice was the Sixty Percent Petition Method. It let property owners representing 60 percent of a target area’s assessed value petition their way into a city on their own. Notice what’s doing the work in that sentence. Not 60 percent of residents. Sixty percent of assessed value. A handful of large landowners, sometimes just one or two big parcels, could decide the governmental future of everyone else living on that land, tenants included.

Where the petition method wasn’t quite enough on its own, cities reached for something even quieter: the “no-protest” utility agreement. Sign one of these to get city water or sewer, and you’d also signed away your right to fight annexation whenever the city decided to come collect.

This is coercive by design, and the state’s own Supreme Court flinched at it once. In 2002, Grant County Fire Protection District No. 5 v. City of Moses Lake found that bypassing a general vote of residents violated the state constitution. For a minute, it looked like the petition method might be finished. The court walked the ruling back not long after, and cities kept using the tool. Tumwater’s biggest annexation wave, the one that added 3,255 residents in a single stroke in 2016, happened well within this post-2002, still-contested legal window.

The fight nobody outside city hall saw

The clearest look at how contested this actually was comes from Tumwater’s 2007 annexation, 1,620 acres that went before the Thurston County Boundary Review Board on a narrow 3-2 vote. The board was one vote from saying no. What flipped it was a last-minute fire service agreement between Tumwater and the Black Lake Fire District, which stood to lose a third of its operating budget once the annexed area stopped paying into it. One dissenting board member called the deal a “shotgun marriage.” He wasn’t wrong. There are real political realities in swapping land between cities and the county, between special districts and city agencies. But, the decline of a rural special district and agreements based on you getting city water are not bad things.

Why the leverage was still the right call

Here’s where I land, and I think it’s a harder position than just cheering for density. The land inside that 1,620-acre annexation wasn’t all farmland waiting to be paved. It was already suburban, already built at a density and a distance from city boundaries  that made a rural fire district and a county road department a worse fit for it than a city government with sewer lines already running past the property. The petition method and the utility agreements were ugly tools, built to let city and landowners jump the line without asking anyone’s permission. But the outcome they produced, in this case, matched governance to a landscape that had already been built. That’s not nothing. A fire district’s claim to keep serving an area doesn’t automatically outrank the question of who can actually do the job better once that area looks and functions like a city. If a city can run water, sewer, fire protection, and roads to a piece of land more efficiently than the county patchwork that grew up around it by accident, the district losing its slice of that territory isn’t an injustice. It’s a service boundary catching up to reality a few decades late.

That’s a different claim than “annexation is democratic,” which it mostly wasn’t. It’s a claim that the state spent thirty years building an escape hatch, that city services should follow city-level density, and that the escape hatch got used, however roughly, to reach that outcome.

The state noticed too

The more interesting shift, and the one I think will matter more going forward, is that leverage isn’t the only tool anymore. After 2002, the state built the Alternative Petition Method, which requires signatures from a majority of both property owners and registered voters, a real check the old method never had. Then came the Interlocal Agreement pathways, letting cities negotiate directly with counties over revenue sharing and infrastructure before annexing anything. In 2023 the legislature revived a sales tax credit specifically to pay cities for absorbing unincorporated growth areas over 2,000 people. 

Boundary Review Boards are disappearing too. Spokane disbanded its board in 2012. Lewis County did the same as recently as 2026. The fights those boards used to referee are increasingly handled through negotiation instead of a contested vote.

Right around the time the old, coercive tools had already finished most of the job, the state built better ones.

What I can’t prove yet

I’d like to end this by telling you that all of this points toward a walkable, mixed-use future for Thurston County’s cities, third places and multimodal streets slowly replacing the cul-de-sacs that got annexed. 

I can’t actually back that up. 

Annexation moves a jurisdictional line, nothing else. It doesn’t retrofit a sidewalk or rezone a strip mall. Everything in this record shows governance catching up to sprawl, not sprawl getting undone. The most honest thing I can say is that Thurston County’s cities now have the tools, and increasingly the financial incentive, to govern the suburban land they’ve absorbed. What they choose to do with that authority, whether it produces the kind of denser, more human-scaled development that we  want, is still an open question. That part is hope, not history.

Freedom, Washington

July 4, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Washington spent thirty-six years as a territory before Congress finally granted statehood in 1889. This in-between space lasted longer than almost any other territory in the country, and that wasn’t an accident.

Robert Ficken makes the case in Washington Territory: for most of those thirty-six years, the place didn’t function as one territory at all. The Cascades split it into two economies, two identities that barely spoke to each other.

Western Washington ran on San Francisco capital and San Francisco trade.

Eastern Washington answered to Portland, making it effectively an arm of eastern Oregon. It moved its wheat through Portland, took whatever price Portland offered.

What the territory lacked wasn’t ambition. It was a spine, some internal run of track solid enough to bind two halves that had never had much reason to look at each other. Only when railroads finally punched through the mountains and bridged the Columbia in the mid-1880s, threading one economy into the other for the first time, did the territory start acting like a single place.

Before statehood, Washington was not free. Territorial residents had almost no say in their own government. The delegate they sent to Congress couldn’t vote, and they still paid federal taxes and lived under federal law anyway, the exact arrangement that had fueled a revolution a century before. Even their governor and judges came from Washington, D.C., appointed as political rewards to men who’d rarely set foot in the West, who knew little about the place they’d been sent to run. They often left the moment something better came along.

For decades, the only real route between eastern Washington and the coast ran down the Columbia River, and Portland controlled it. It set the rates. It picked the terminals. The Oregon Railway and Navigation Company charged whatever it wanted to move wheat and goods out of the Inland Empire, and that turned eastern Washington into less of a neighbor and more of a captive market. If you grew wheat near Walla Walla or Spokane, Portland decided what you’d earn for it.

Frustrated by a decade of asking and getting nowhere, Washington’s non-voting congressional delegate asked Congress in 1877 for an “enabling act,” permission for the territory to write its own state constitution. Congress didn’t answer. So Washingtonians stopped waiting for permission. They elected delegates and sent them to Walla Walla in June of 1878, where the group spent forty days writing a constitution of their own, official blessing or not.

The choice of Walla Walla wasn’t random. It was the biggest city in the territory at the time, built on the wheat boom rolling across the Palouse, and picking it was a deliberate answer to the very split Ficken writes about, a way of telling eastern Washington it mattered just as much as the coast did. The delegates cared enough about healing that divide that they even invited northern Idaho to send a delegate, hoping to fold the Panhandle into the new state. Northern Idaho had more in common with Walla Walla and Spokane than with Boise. Its wheat and timber flowed toward the same captive Columbia River corridor as everyone else’s in eastern Washington.

You can almost imagine different state lines that would have produced states earlier. If western Washington had split and eastern Washington and northern Idaho joined, these states might have made it into the union faster.

What the delegates at Walla Walla proposed makes sense once you remember the timing. This was before the Northern Pacific had finished its transcontinental line, while the Portland monopoly still had its foot on eastern Washington’s neck, while outside corporate power was still, plain and simple, the enemy. The 1878 constitution came out swinging. It capped freight rates, blocked corporations from meddling in local politics, and went after the Columbia River monopolists’ grip on local farmers piece by piece.

Voters loved it. In November of 1878, they approved the constitution by better than two to one, 6,537 in favor against 3,236 opposed. Then they sent it off to Washington, D.C., and Congress just ignored it. Nobody in D.C. wanted to admit a territory that heavily Republican, especially not one trying to rewrite corporate law and redraw the borders of two other territories in the same document. The bill died quietly. The 1878 constitution never became law. It just sat there for eleven years, a preview of an argument Washington would have to have all over again.

What finally broke Portland and San Francisco’s grip was a bigger outside power. Congress had chartered the Northern Pacific Railroad back in 1864, but its headquarters was in New York, and its money came from Wall Street, first from Jay Cooke, later from Henry Villard and J.P. Morgan. When the NP finally built its line west, it wasn’t doing Washington Territory any favors. It was chasing profit, and Congress had handed it a massive incentive to do so, alternating sections of public land stretching forty miles deep on either side of the tracks, millions of acres of Washington timber and farmland, all of it controlled from New York. Because the NP owned the land and picked the route, it could make or break entire towns. Instead of routing its saltwater terminus through an established city like Olympia or Seattle, the railroad built its own town from scratch at New Tacoma, simply because it already owned every lot there.

By the time seventy-five delegates gathered in Olympia on July 4, 1889, they’d already watched the Northern Pacific spend a few years transforming the territory, laying track, pulling in settlers, building the very economic case that finally convinced Congress statehood made sense. The irony was hard to miss. The delegates weren’t grateful. They were nervous. They’d just watched one outside monopoly get smashed by an even bigger one, and now that bigger one owned a huge share of the state they were about to create.

That nervousness is the whole reason Article XII of the Washington Constitution, titled “Corporations Other Than Municipal,” turned into one of the most heavily fought sections in the entire document. It reads less like ordinary legal boilerplate and more like a list of grievances.

Section 1 barred the legislature from ever again handing a company like the Northern Pacific a custom charter loaded with special privileges, the way corrupt territorial legislatures once had, and it kept the legislature’s right to amend or revoke any charter whenever it wanted. Section 7 went after the “foreign corporation” problem directly, meaning any company headquartered outside Washington, and made it illegal for one of those companies to get better treatment in the state than a homegrown competitor. Sections 13 through 22 read like eastern Washington’s wheat farmers dictated them personally. Railroads became “public highways” under the new constitution, and railroad companies became “common carriers,” language that put them under strict state regulation. Discriminatory freight rates got banned outright, so a railroad couldn’t quietly charge a small farmer more per mile than a big shipper, or punish a town that had crossed it. Pooling, the practice of supposedly competing lines secretly agreeing to fix prices instead of actually competing, got prohibited too.

None of it was as radical as it could have been. Corporate lobbyists worked the halls of the old wooden capitol all that summer, and some of the sharper teeth from the 1878 draft, personal liability for corporate directors chief among them, got filed down before the final vote. Washington still needed East Coast capital to keep building, and the framers knew it.

Line the two constitutions up next to each other and they tell a single story in two acts. The 1878 constitution was written by people with nothing left to lose, before the Northern Pacific had finished a single mile of track, while Portland was still the only monopoly in the room and outside corporate power was simply the enemy, full stop. Congress killed it without a second thought. The 1889 constitution was written by people who’d already made the deal. They’d already watched the Northern Pacific break Portland’s grip, already build the towns, already decide who got a station and who didn’t. Statehood only became possible because Washington accepted that bargain. Article XII wasn’t an attempt to refuse the deal. It was an attempt to survive it, a leash written into the state’s founding document for a monster the state had already let across the threshold.

That’s the same trick the country pulled a century earlier, played out on a smaller stage. Franklin didn’t go to Paris because he loved the French monarchy. He went because Britain wasn’t going anywhere without a bigger power tipping the scales, and France had its own reasons to want London humbled. The alliance worked, and it also became something the young United States spent years trying to wriggle back out of. Within a decade, Washington’s own Farewell Address was warning the country against permanent foreign entanglements, and by the end of the 1790s the alliance with France had curdled into an undeclared war at sea. The country used France to win its independence, then spent a generation making sure France couldn’t collect on the debt. Washington Territory ran the same play on a faster clock. It used the Northern Pacific to win its independence from Portland and Washington DC, then wrote Article XII that same year, not a decade later, to make sure the Northern Pacific couldn’t collect either.

Self-governance, in both cases, was never a clean break. It was a deal cut by whoever held the leverage to cut it, followed almost immediately by a second deal meant to limit the first. Washington’s framers understood that as well as anyone in Philadelphia or Paris ever did. They just wrote their version into Article XII instead of a treaty. That’s worth remembering every Fourth of July in Washington.

We mark our statehood that got bought and paid for, same as the revolution they’re meant to echo. Both times, the generation that cut the deal spent its very next act making sure that deal couldn’t turn around and own them.

Le Morte d’Lacey

June 27, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Last week, when I wrote about the sale of the South Sound Center by Bob Blume’s family to a real estate developer quietly closed a chapter for a region whose very geography Blume had shaped through his mid-century ambitions. He’s often called the “Father of Lacey,” and the title fits: he was the son of a janitor who arrived in the South Sound as a soldier and stayed to sell real estate. His vision wasn’t just to build a shopping center. It was to create a new kind of “downtown” for a community that didn’t yet exist.

Before Blume, the land east of Olympia was a landscape of “ghost plats,” lots laid out in the 1890s as the “New State Addition,” a traditional grid that was an optimistic monument to a get-rich-quick fever that evaporated in the Panic of 1893. By the 1960s, those residential blocks were still mostly empty, ripe for consolidation. Blume sensed a shift coming. The era of car-based, off-the-cloverleaf retail had arrived, and he saw the newly built Interstate 5 as a “river of commerce,” where every off-ramp was a port for business.

That private vision, though, required public infrastructure that the unincorporated fields of Lacey couldn’t provide. Blume and other local leaders realized they couldn’t afford to build the necessary roads and sewers on their own, so they pushed for Lacey’s incorporation in 1966. The municipality was literally built to support a mall.

For decades, Lacey’s identity was being “whatever Olympia isn’t,” the big-box sibling defined entirely by what Blume started. But sixty years on, the regional “river of commerce” has left a complex and costly legacy that the city is only now starting to work through.

The optimism Blume felt looking at those I-5 off-ramps tracked with a national mood. The interstate highway system was, by the broad numbers, a genuine triumph: it accounted for roughly a quarter of total U.S. productivity growth between 1950 and 1989, and the system is now so woven into the economy that removing it would shrink real U.S. GDP by 3.9%, a loss of up to $619 billion. But the success of the “river” came at a localized net loss for many of the communities it actually ran through.

The hidden costs of car-centric development are staggering, and they reach into municipal budgets in ways that Blume’s generation never had to reckon with. Sprawl of the kind Blume championed has become a form of wealth extraction from the cities it creates, pushing up the cost of public infrastructure by up to 40% and locking those cities into a structural maintenance burden of roughly $1 trillion a year across the country. Lacey, born from the mall, is now hitting the age where the full bill is coming due.

Lacey at 60: Status Report

Sixty years in, Lacey presents what you might call a Pavement Paradox. The 2025 State of the Streets report shows an average Pavement Condition Index of 84.6, with 96.8% of the city’s roads rated “good” or “very good.” Those numbers look like a success story. They’re not.

The high average is a mathematical illusion sustained by growth. New roads in newly annexed areas are propping up the network scores and hiding the deterioration happening in the city’s older core. That trick is running out of road. To clear the current maintenance backlog and hit an optimal network PCI of 90, the city is looking at a bill of $56.4 million, and if funding stays flat, the network PCI is projected to fall to 72 within a decade.

The city’s physical layout tells an equally uncomfortable story. Blume’s blueprint was built around moving cars quickly, not moving people, and the result is that 43% of Lacey’s street network has no sidewalks at all. In the older residential areas south of I-5, where the city was originally founded and where most of the affordable housing still is, sidewalks are often incomplete or just missing entirely. If you don’t drive, or can’t, the city is hostile territory.

Lacey’s planning documents use a Level of Traffic Stress scale, where LTS 1 is comfortable for all ages and LTS 4 is a real barrier to getting around.

Pedestrian conditions in the [Urban Growth Area] are predominantly LTS 4… Any roadway outside of neighborhoods without pedestrian facilities receives a PLTS of 4.

For sixty years, Lacey grew by building for cars. It’s now hit a point where it can’t widen its way out of congestion.

The city’s response has been to essentially reverse the Blume Blueprint. Lacey has moved away from a purely car-focused model toward a managed, multimodal approach, and a big part of that shift is the designation of “Strategy Corridors,” key segments like Sleater-Kinney Road and College Street where road widening is off the table. Instead of adding lanes, the city is going with road diets, roundabouts, and land-use changes to handle growth, trying to preserve community scale rather than giving more ground to the river of commerce. It’s a genuine break from the logic of the 1960s.

The city has also adopted a Multimodal Level of Service guideline that puts walking and biking first, with a new target of getting a low-stress bike route within about half a mile of every resident. That’s a direct response to the isolation that fragmented, mall-centered zoning created over the past sixty years. And by adopting a Safety Action Plan in 2025 focused on cutting serious injuries and fatalities, the city is finally acknowledging that moving cars fast can’t be the main goal anymore.

Lacey at 60 is a city going through a difficult but necessary maturation. It was born as a planning mistake, a municipality created to be the infrastructure arm of a private shopping mall. For decades it took the path of least resistance, building out a suburban auto-landscape that worked at the macroeconomic level but left residents with missing sidewalks, high traffic stress, and a $56 million maintenance backlog. Switching from a vehicle Level of Service standard to a Multimodal Level of Service is the city’s way of saying it’s finally trying to serve its residents instead of its commuters.

The “River of Commerce” built the city. It also cut it into isolated pieces that the current generation now has to stitch back together. Blume’s family sold the South Sound Center and moved on. The people of Lacey are the ones left living in the world he built. As the city looks toward 2045, the challenge is to become a place defined not by its proximity to an off-ramp, but by whether it actually works for the people who live there. The detour has lasted sixty years. The return trip has only just begun.

Bob Blume, Olympia and the New State

June 20, 2026 / / 3 Comments

When Bob Blume wanted to build a shopping center on rural land east of Olympia, he knew he’d have to give something away. The interstate had already cut through from Olympia up to Tacoma, and the era of car-based, off-the-cloverleaf retail was here. There was no city off the Sleater-Kinney exit to support a large-scale retail development, but Blume dreamed the mall could one day be the downtown of a new one.

We can forgive Blume for using “downtown” to mean any commercial development surrounded by houses, because Olympia’s actual downtown was being carved up with parking lots at the time.

This week, the old South Sound Center was sold by the family of Bob Blume to a San Diego real estate developer. Blume himself passed away almost 20 years ago, but his legacy transformed Olympia by pulling at the frayed strings of our historic development patterns, tugging us further and further east into an annexation war that would eventually mean the creation of the City of Lacey.

But let’s take a step back 70 years before Blume to the first time anyone thought of building here.

The Ghost Plats and the Railroad

Long before the first shovel struck ground for a department store, the land was known as the New State Addition to Olympia. This massive 34-block neighborhood was laid out in a traditional right-angle grid, with long rectangular blocks, an optimistic monument to the get-rich-quick fever that gripped Washington in the 1890s. These “paper plats” were often sold to distant investors who never realized their property was frequently nothing more than open land. Decades before cars changed how we think of land and distance, there was a dream of Olympia’s blocks stretching east into what is now Lacey.

But when the Panic of 1893 hit, the imaginary wealth and city evaporated, leaving behind ghost plats” streets that existed only in local government records.

Late 1950s, you can see edge of Olympia, the outlines of the old plat and where the South Sound Center was in yellow.

The grid was eventually interrupted in 1936 when Weyerhaeuser constructed the Chehalis Western Railroad, bisecting the New State plat and creating the industrial line that would eventually serve as the western border of the South Sound Center. By the 1960s, these residential blocks were slowly being developed but were still mostly empty, ripe for consolidation. Blume, sensing the shift toward a car-centric society, because we’d literally built an interstate through the northern half of the New State Addition, began buying up and consolidating the old parcels, requesting vacations of roads that would never be built, to construct what he envisioned as a modern downtown for a new community.

The “Father of Lacey” and the Risk of the Big Box

The history of the center is really the personal story of Blume, a man often called the “Father of Lacey.” Born the son of a janitor in 1928, he quit school after the 8th grade to help his family, working jobs that included shoveling coal into boilers. He arrived in the South Sound as a soldier stationed at Fort Lewis and decided to stay after his discharge in the 1950s to sell real estate.

Blume’s vision wasn’t unconventional for the time. Like all other mall developers, he viewed the newly constructed Interstate as a “river of commerce,” where every off-ramp acted as a port for business.

That observation, though, was oddly lost on local financing. When he approached Olympia bankers for a loan, they legendarily laughed at him, dismissing the idea that anyone would drive out to the unincorporated fields of Lacey to shop. Undeterred, Blume secured funding in New York City and set his sights on a major anchor tenant to make the mall viable: Sears, Roebuck & Co.

The corporation’s policy required developers to donate the land for their stores as a condition of building. To secure the anchor he needed, Blume was forced to donate a full third of his land to the company, a sacrifice that made the shopping center viable, drawing in major tenants like Peoples and F.W. Woolworth.

That donation, and the eventual sale of what would become Target, carved up the parcel so the piece sold this week looks more like a jigsaw puzzle.

It was also a direct strike on downtown Olympia. Sears’ move to Lacey was a loss for the city, a sign of the change that would keep transforming downtown as larger national retailers left for Lacey and the Westside, chasing modern buildings surrounded by parking. Downtown adapted, narrowing its focus to smaller local retailers. But the decades of downtown doomerism started with Sears taking free land from Blume.

A Mall as the Mother of a City

The South Sound Center was the final reason for Lacey’s creation, the economic center-of-gravity that physically and politically birthed the city. In the early 1960s, the area was unincorporated and lacked basic municipal infrastructure.

The 1960s were marked by a fierce border war between Olympia and Lacey, triggered by Olympia’s aggressive use of assessed value annexations that moved its boundary east to Lilly Road by 1964. Olympia wanted to protect its retail base after Sears left for Lacey and began eating up land to do it. Lacey leaders resisted, claiming it was because the annexation process often bypassed a popular vote of the affected residents.

Realizing they couldn’t afford to build infrastructure privately, Blume and other local leaders, including A.G. Homann, the South Sound Center’s general contractor, pushed for incorporation, looking to leverage a city’s power to issue bonds for the infrastructure the new mall required. After a failed attempt in 1964, the incorporation effort succeeded in 1966, by a narrow margin of only 240 votes. Homann was sworn in as the city’s first Mayor, the moment the mall’s needs were finally codified into a new municipality.

Lacey’s original successful incorporation actually stretched further west than the current city, pushing past Boulevard Road. Olympia struck back by utilizing an archaic 1890 law that allowed the entire City of Olympia to vote on annexing Lacey’s western neighborhoods. Olympia voters agreed, and lopped that land back into the city. Lacey challenged the move, but the Washington Supreme Court upheld it, permanently shifting Olympia’s border east to its current orientation. 

The decade of tension culminated in 1969 with a failed proposal to consolidate the two cities into one, a measure defeated by only 30 votes in Olympia and rejected by a 3-to-1 margin in Lacey.

Surviving

The South Sound Center’s reign as the largest retail area in Thurston County lasted just over ten years. The 1978 opening of the Capital Mall on Olympia’s Westside kicked off what local observers called a “retailing Grand Prix,” and the competition with national shopping center owners who had deep pockets threatened the center’s dominance.

The South Sound Center survived through constant adaptation, including the sale of the middle portion of the parcel to Target and the closure of the mall’s central walkway.

One of the stranger running failures of the commercial community around the mall was the decades-long campaign to rename Sleater-Kinney Road to South Sound Boulevard. It was driven by local businessmen who believed the historic name was hard to spell, hard to pronounce, and irrelevant to the area’s commercial identity. As early as 1967, Blume himself requested the change, a move later backed by the South Sound National Bank and other merchants who wanted the stretch between Martin Way and Pacific Avenue renamed. Jack Lewis, president of the Panorama Corporation, simultaneously proposed renaming the portion south of Pacific Avenue to Panorama Boulevard, dismissing the pioneer name as a “drab” title with no connection to anything in Lacey. \

The proposal met fierce opposition from residents and descendants of the Sleater and Kinney families, who’d homesteaded the land in 1880 and helped clear the original road. The Lacey City Council voted unanimously in January 1981 to keep the original name, and the proponents eventually gave up.

The End of the Blume Era

Bob Blume died in 2007, leaving behind a legacy that had turned a ghost plat into a new kind of city. In a final note on the decline of big box retail, Sears, the anchor that had cost Blume a third of his land but made his vision viable, left the center in 2020, thirteen years after his death.

With the Blume family’s sale of the rest of the property this week, the land where the South Sound Center sits falls out of family ownership for the first time in over 60 years.

The border wars between Olympia and Lacey were fought over neighborhoods that hadn’t been built yet. Southeast Olympia was mostly rural then, Douglas fir stands and open fields. Lacey’s pull toward car-centric commercial space shaped how that land eventually developed, and when we did build houses out here, we built suburbs.

One of the most precise definitions of Lacey I’ve ever heard is that it’s “whatever Olympia isn’t,” and that rings true.

If Olympia is defined by its downtown, then Lacey is the big-box brother, defined by its birth by Blume. The gravity well of Lacey’s car-based commercial development warped the expansion east of Olympia, and what grew out of that is probably our biggest planning mistake.

Dead Space Problem (a poem)

June 13, 2026 / / 0 Comments

I had a busy week this week, so I am going to do something different. I am going to give you a poem I wrote that will be part of a collection I release at the end of the year. Speaking of which, you can buy my collection from last year for $5.

Dead Space Problem is inspired by a debate up in Seattle whether to subdivide unused portions (as in no graves) of a cemetery to build housing. I’m sure even the Yimby-est among us can see how that went sideways.

1. Character

They wanted to build housing on a cemetery parcel. Technically, subdividing the cemetery parcel in a neighborhood so a new parcel could be made on which housing will be built.

Don’t worry, this isn’t the start of a story about houses being built over dead bodies. They are sure this isn’t what’s going on.

But the neighbors are complaining. Not about the dead, but about the character of the place. About the sanctity of the land. The sanctity of the place to be dead in, instead of a place to be alive in.

2. Modest proposal

How making room for the living makes it harder to operate a cemetery. How does a cemetery even make money?

Cemeteries are financial devices. Living off 10 to 15 percent of the original fee to keep the grass mowed and the fences repaired. I’m not sure what the upkeep is, other than what you’d do for your typical lawn.

Eventually, though, the financial devices will fail as inflation and lack of space to expand will catch up with the annuity nature of the cemetery itself. So taxpayers will eventually take over the ancient ritual of warehousing in the dirt boxes of our dead relatives. 

We have a space for living bodies problem and a space for dead bodies problem.

Instead, let’s decide if people can live here and there are these places people can live. And there are places where people can’t live. Let’s put our dead bodies in the places where we know we don’t want people to live.

Flood plains, prairies for endangered butterflies, National Monuments and parks.

We already know how to make human bodies into compost.

We should deliver our bodies to the places where we can’t build homes because we want to respect creation. And, financially speaking, we should charge the same fees and 10 to 15 percent will be set aside as an annuity to fund protecting the environment. 

Imagine visiting Aunt Claire near the Ape Caves under St. Helens or in the Hoh Rain Forest.

3. Truth

Salmon already do it. 

They end their lives and feed the animals that will feed their offspring. 

Salmon know it is true.

If Olympia Had Rails

June 6, 2026 / / 1 Comment

There’s a version of Olympia where you step off the commuter train at 7th Avenue and walk up into daylight at what was an old Greyhound station. You’re already downtown. You wait four minutes for a streetcar, and then 20 minutes later, you’re home. That city was closer to real than you’d think. What killed it wasn’t destiny. It was a series of small, ordinary choices that added up. These are the same choices that killed streetcars and rail mass transit in a lot of places, but we can pull at the threads here and think about what might have been.

The First Hinge: Who Owns the Wire

By the 1920s, the Stevens family had built Olympia’s streetcar system. When they sold their stake to what would eventually become Puget Sound Energy, they handed the city’s transit future to a company that had no real reason to care about it.

A utility company runs streetcars as a side hustle of selling electricity, treating ridership as an afterthought, and when the automobile started pulling riders away in the early 1930s, non-local owners had no particular reason to fight. In September 1933, the company ended the system, and local government stepped in with a motor bus network. The tracks were pulled up or paved over.

Now imagine the Stevens family sells instead to the City of Olympia, or to a proto-PUD, more than a decade before the Thurston PUD was actually formed. A city-owned system doesn’t need to sell electricity. It needs to move people. When ridership falls, it looks to updgrade the noisy, slow and bumpy cars with something new.

With a few more years to hold on, the solution in our real history was the PCC car, introduced in 1936. A consortium of transit operators, facing the same threat from the automobile, had commissioned the most advanced streetcar yet built: rubber-cushioned wheels, streamlined body, a cellular construction that made the ride smoother than anything that had run on rails before. Cities that were still operating when the PCC arrived had a genuine fighting chance. In this version of Olympia, the city’s system is still running and it gets PCC cars.

Building Out: The 1930s Through the 1950s

The original Olympia streetcar network was T-shaped, running east to Central Street and west to Rogers. In the years after the system upgrades to PCC cars, the city keeps building it out.

Puget Street gets a spur north to San Francisco Street in 1939, a short southwest line runs down Decatur to 9th Avenue. Eastside Street also gets a spur, and Division is now the terminus of a westside extension.

This stable era, the 1940s and 1960s, is when the system becomes something people actually count on. But it also ends as the PCC cars age and car-driven growth starts pushing the edges of Olympia. Interstate 5 does come through, but we need something else to save our rail network.

The Second Hinge: Forward Thrust

In the 1960s, Seattle-area voters were asked to approve Forward Thrust, a package of transit bonds that would have funded a regional rail system running on its own dedicated tracks, built with federal matching funds covering roughly 75 cents of every dollar. In real history, voters said no. The money went to Atlanta, which built MARTA. The Pacific Northwest spent the next several decades building highways instead.

In this history, Forward Thrust passes, and the effects pile up.

A regional rail authority forms decades earlier than Sound Transit did in reality, pulling in federal funds at a scale that was simply gone by the time the real Sound Transit came along.

And Boeing-Vertol, which in real history made a troubled attempt at light rail vehicles for Boston and San Francisco, struggling with chronic problems that plagued the cars for years, now has a well-funded local partner involved from the start. The collaboration produces something that works: a vehicle with smooth propulsion, a lightweight aluminum alloy frame, and a modular design that’s actually easy to maintain. The “Seattle-Spec” LRV succeeds in the field tests by early adopters in Olympia and Seattle. By the mid-1970s, transit authorities in Boston, San Francisco, and eventually London and Melbourne are buying American, and the Pacific Northwest has become an unexpected exporter of rail technology.

For Olympia, the immediate consequence is more modest: the city now has access to modern vehicles and a regional system extending south.

The Great Expansion: 1960s Through the 1980s

The 1960s and 1970s are when the system finally grows to match where the city has spread, the eastside line pushing out past Boulevard Road to St. Martin’s University, a new line dropping south down Capitol Way into Tumwater, and two loops filling in what the old spurs couldn’t reach: one connecting Boulevard Road with North Street on the outer eastside, another using 22nd Avenue on the interior southeast side. The Division Street line reaches Evergreen State College. South Puget Sound Community College gets connected via the old Black Lake Road grade.

The most consequential development isn’t a new route, though. It’s political. Lacey, which in real history incorporated as its own city in 1966, instead holds an election to re-annex into Olympia. The streetcar is the promise, and service to Lacey is the condition. Lacey becomes a neighborhood rather than a separate city, and because it never fully separates, it never builds up the political pressure for the kind of sprawl that real-history Lacey ended up with. Growth does occur east of Carpenter Road, clustering around Tanglewilde and Thompson Place, but it stays modest

The 1990s Regional Connection

Just as the regional rail system reaches Fort Lewis, extending south from the original Forward Thrust network through Tacoma and Lakewood, Burlington Northern announces plans to abandon the Fones Road line, nine miles of track cutting through what is now Lacey. In real history, that corridor becomes the Woodland Trail. Here, Thurston County holds a public vote to join the regional transit system and grabs the corridor for rail before it’s gone.

The new commuter line is built similar to regional rail around Chicago or Philadelphia. The new expansion connects to the regional system at Dupont and runs into downtown Olympia, with a station in Lacey placed at roughly where Depot Park sits today. The St. Martin’s streetcar line is extended south to meet the regional line. Downtown, the old 7th Avenue subway tunnel gets converted into an underground station, and you rise from it into daylight at the old Greyhound terminal.

The City

The story is about choices: the Stevens family selling to a utility, Seattle voters rejecting Forward Thrust, Burlington Northern abandoning the line, each one narrowing what the next choice could be.

The Olympia in this history isn’t utopian. I-5 still runs where it runs. Where the streetcar system meets the freeway, expensive bridging projects span the road. The car is still present. But the city has a different shape, denser along the lines, more walkable around the stations, more continuous across what in real history became the Olympia-Lacey seam. You can get from Evergreen to downtown without a car. You can get from downtown to Tacoma without one either.

That city was close. History hinges on small choices that expand with time. That’s what makes it worth imagining, not to mourn a future that didn’t happen, but to understand exactly what was given up, and when, and why.

Democratic Party Dominance in Washington State, Ireland 100 Years Ago and Mark Reed

May 30, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Democratic Party identification in Washington State has hit 50 percent. That’s the highest number I’ve found in over thirty years of polling data.

Because voter registration in Washington carries no partisan label, party identification floats. The only way to track it is through the demographic crosstabs buried in statewide polls, which I’ve been compiling in a spreadsheet. The numbers tell a consistent story: each spike of national tension pulls voters off the independent shelf and drops them, at least temporarily, into one of the two major parties.

Since the start of the current Trump era, Republican identification has ticked up roughly 1.5 percent on average across available polls. Democratic identification has surged approximately 7.5 percent, drawn almost entirely from independents, whose share has contracted by a corresponding 7 points.

We’ve seen this before. At the end of the first Trump administration, Democratic ID jumped 8.25 percent, Republican ID fell 1.2 percent, and independent ID collapsed 14 points. The Biden era ran the current in the other direction, lifting Republican ID by 3.3 percent and Democratic ID by nearly 2, while independents dipped modestly. Independent identification surged during the late Obama years and again after the 2022 midterms, but under conditions of sharp national polarization, that middle ground gets absorbed.

The data itself is thinning out. The Northwest Progressive Institute and Future 42 both release topline results without demographic breakdowns, which limits how useful they are. The Elway Poll, for decades the most reliable regular tracker of Washington opinion, has ended. SurveyUSA drifted out of the market when KING TV stopped paying for polling. DHM Research now appears to be the last pollster doing regular statewide surveys in Washington.

Two things explain what the numbers show. One is the outsized pull of national politics on a state that might otherwise develop its own distinct political character. The other is the internal fracturing that tends to hit any party dominant enough to have no serious external opposition.

How Ireland Explains the Gravitational Pull of the Center

To understand the first one, it helps to zoom out, well out, to late 19th-century and early 20th-century Ireland. I know that sounds like a stretch. Stay with me.

Think of Washington not simply as a blue state but as a distinct political ecosystem caught in the gravitational field of a distant center. When the Conservative Party held power in London, Irish nationalist identity hardened, drawing together urban constitutionalists and rural agrarians, moderate Home Rulers and more radical nationalists, bound by shared resistance to a government they couldn’t control.

Washington Democrats work the same way. The coalition’s internal disagreements over housing density, tax structure, and the pace of reform are real. But under a right-leaning federal administration, those disagreements get pushed aside by a more urgent question: who controls the shield? The state’s 50 percent Democratic identification is a defensive posture built by voters who see state government as their primary buffer against what’s coming out of Washington, D.C.

The British Tories understood this consolidation well enough to try to dissolve it. Their strategy of Constructive Unionism poured infrastructure investment into Ireland and passed local land reforms, betting that solving material problems would defuse nationalist sentiment. It failed completely, because in a highly charged political environment, the practical argument gets swallowed by the symbolic one.

Washington Republicans face the same trap. Campaigns built on local material issues, highway funding, gas taxes, public safety, struggle to gain traction because a vote for a local Republican reads to most voters as an endorsement of the national party. The local argument can’t escape the national frame.

The deeper warning in this parallel is what happened when the moderate Irish Parliamentary Party ran out of credibility. The IPP spent decades telling voters it was their only realistic shield against London, while failing to deliver structural change at home. After 1916, a frustrated electorate abandoned it for the more radical Sinn Féin. Washington Democrats holding a supermajority built on oppositional energy face a structurally similar problem. If the resistance framing outlasts its usefulness without being replaced by durable accomplishment, the coalition fractures from the left.

Mark Reed and the Dominant 1920s Washington Republicans

That fracturing brings us to a closer historical analogue, not Ireland but Washington State itself, a century ago, when Republicans held the dominant position in Olympia and the contradictions of one-party rule were playing out across the legislature.

The parallels are uncomfortable. Then, as now, the fault line ran between institutional consolidators and ideological insurgents. Speaker Mark Reed built his power on a pragmatic economic vision, state-funded infrastructure and modest worker safety nets, that reflected the timber industry’s long-term interest in a stable, functional state. Governor Roland Hartley represented the Old Guard’s hardline fiscal reaction, contemptuous of what he saw as creeping progressivism in Reed’s program. They weren’t fighting over whether Republicans should govern. That was settled. They were fighting over what governing in a one-party state actually required them to do.

Today Jinkins plays the Reed role. Under her speakership the Democratic majority has grown from 57 to 59 seats, and her argument for keeping the gavel is essentially electoral: protect the coalition, don’t hand swing-district members a vote they can’t defend in November. Berg is doing something different. She’s using her position as House Finance Chair as an ideological launching point, championing House Bill 2100’s millionaire’s tax, posting caucus-facing FAQs about it directly on the caucus website, signaling to the party’s progressive base that there’s a leadership path willing to push the supermajority’s power to its limits, whatever the institutional cost.

The geographic echo is hard to miss. Hartley’s factional base was rooted in Snohomish County, where he’d been Mayor of Everett and where the county’s GOP delegation served as the center of insurgent resistance to the Seattle and timber-coast establishment. Berg represents the 44th Legislative District, anchored in Mill Creek and Snohomish. A century later, a challenge to the incumbent legislative leadership is rising out of Snohomish County again.

The immediate timeline mirrors the old primary dynamics. Both Jinkins and Berg are deferring the real fight until after November, each needing first to survive and, if possible, expand in the August primaries. If progressive challengers unseat moderate Democrats this summer, Berg’s path widens. If moderates hold, Jinkins retains the leverage.

The Dominant Party’s Dilemma

What the polling data, the Irish parallel, and the Jinkins-Berg contest all point to is a single underlying condition. In Washington State in 2026, the most consequential political battles aren’t happening between the two parties on the ballot. They’re happening inside one of them.

The Democratic Party’s 50 percent identification reflects real voter consolidation against a hostile federal administration. But consolidation built on opposition is temporary. It depends on the threat remaining vivid, the alternative remaining unacceptable, and the dominant party delivering enough at home that its internal factions have more to lose from breaking ranks than from holding together. None of those conditions is guaranteed.

History is pretty consistent on this point. The Irish Parliamentary Party learned it after 1916. Washington Republicans learned it in the Depression. The question for Washington Democrats is whether the current leadership, whichever faction wins in November, understands that while Democratic Party ID has been growing consistently, 50 percent is the highest it has ever been, not an average. And things are bound to change in unpredictable ways.

The Knox Hotel and the Fading of Distance

May 23, 2026 / / 0 Comments

This is the latest post in a series tracking how downtown Olympia’s pervasive parking lots replaced historically dense, walkable blocks. These older, pre-car structures are actually the city’s economic engine, generating far more tax revenue per acre than suburban sprawl. Ironically, as car-driven climate change threatens to submerge 370 acres of low-lying downtown by 2095, costing over $600 million in our most productive land, we risk preserving car-dependent zones while losing the very core that funds our local government. To solve our structural deficits, we must look at our physical structures.

It is strange for an essay about a parking lot to start with a boy rowing a boat.

But imagine the sound of an oar in oarlocks, clunking up Eld Inlet and then down Budd. Now imagine what it took for a kid to get a snack: row five miles, store the boat, grab the dog, walk through downtown Olympia to wherever they sold licorice, buy the licorice, and row back home. Maybe stop by his grandmother’s hotel on the way.

That’s not how we live now.

Jerry Knox’s childhood was shaped by a slow, physically demanding relationship with Olympia’s landscape, long before he became one of the people negotiating the region’s freeway system into existence. The same system that remade Olympia, and eventually tore down his family’s legacy.

Jerry spent his early boyhood in a rowboat on Eld Inlet. His most famous family story is the five-mile row into downtown Olympia for a ten-cent piece of licorice, his dog Gyp sitting in the bow the whole way.

Throughout his life, Jerry owned various vessels: outboards, inboards, a double-ender called the Hunky Dory. At 18, his connection to the water reached a lot further than Eld Inlet. He worked as an engine room boiler tender on a voyage through the Panama Canal.

Jerry’s grandmother, Frances Knox, went by Aunty Frank. She built the Knox Hotel and ran it for decades, sitting at the lobby desk, hosting community events, making the building a center of civic life in downtown Olympia for almost fifty years. It’s now a small parking lot behind the State Theatre. While the Knox was one of many community gravity wells in downtown Olympia, today the spot holds no one in orbit.

Brian Hovis produced amazing overlays of Sanborn (historic fire insurance maps) available at OlympiaHistory.org

Before Olympia, the Knox family farmed in Kansas. When their farm burned down, they loaded everything onto a chartered train car, family and belongings alike, horses included, and headed for Washington State.

In Hoquiam, Frances Knox’s brother-in-law, N.T. Loomis, met them and helped move their possessions from the train to a boat.

Then it all went wrong. Their boat capsized in the Hoquiam River before they could reach the end of tidewater. A whole season’s worth of supplies went into the current, leaving them nearly destitute, discouraged, at the edge of the wilderness they’d come so far to reach.

They survived on whatever they could salvage from the woods and streams. The image that stuck in the family’s memory is Frances at the table, serving her children dried carrots when nothing else was available. She had a fortitude that fit the frontier exactly.

The early years in Washington brought further tragedy. John Knox died in 1885, only a few years after their arrival, leaving Frances to raise six children on her own. She moved the family to Olympia. By the time she was looking for backing to build a hotel, her reputation for surviving hardship was so well established that she never had trouble getting it.

Before it became an apartment building, the hotel was a hotel first, obviously. It hosted travelers, and their comings and goings got noted in the paper.

When soldiers of the 91st Division stayed at the Knox before shipping off to the Great War, Aunty Frank took them for rides in her car. When they came back from the mud of Europe, they brought her a bronze statue.

It also had a kitchen. And in the first half of the 20th century, the Knox Hotel made space for all kinds of community events.

Thirty members of the Thurston County Women’s Educational Club gathered here at one point. You could hear them talking about things that matter. They’re talking about wealth. They’re debating whether it’s found in the bank or in the heart.

Mrs. Theodore Young spoke about school teachers who give themselves for the betterment of the community.

There were discussions on the necessity of legitimate rural gossip. They believe that women need to get together and talk just as much as men do. They believe in the helpfulness of social intercourse.

There was a violin solo by Miss Florence Holbrook. There was a song.

The residents had a tradition of placing joke gifts under the branches of the lobby Christmas tree.

The Knox was what we’d now call a Third Place.

Jerry’s grandmother and his aunt ran the Knox. Jerry was involved in a different branch of the family business.

Jerry’s aunt Charlotte, Frances’s daughter, took over the burden of management and held it for half a century. She was helped for a time by her niece Gertrude, Jerry’s sister.

Jerry’s father Clinton had built a garage beyond the hotel. After college, Jerry joined the family business, working in the garage, not the hotel. The family had been early adopters of the automobile, and that’s where the work was.

Jerry eventually left the family business and took his experience into a long career with the Department of Highways. He spent those years as a right-of-way purchaser for the I-5 freeway, the project that would contribute to the decline of downtown hotels like the one his grandmother had built.

The same boy who once measured distance by the pull of oars grew up to purchase the right-of-way for the interstate.

His job was to acquire the land for the new freeway, clearing the path for the infrastructure that will bypass the downtown core, buying the property that will become pavement. He was a diplomat of the very speed that makes the slow hospitality of his grandmother’s hotel unnecessary. The rowboat is gone. The physical connection to the inlet was replaced by the high-speed interstate.

This is the same highway that let Lacey grow, that some say destroyed Tumwater’s historic downtown, and that changed our community forever. It made the human scale of a boy rowing into town impossible to imagine in everyday life.

It’s a shift you can trace in Olympia’s own history: from a city where five miles was a significant physical journey by water, where people could walk or bike to a community gathering at the Knox, to one where that same distance is a few minutes on a concrete artery.

Before Interstate 5, the Knox Hotel was sold in April 1945 to W. M. Tompkins of Tacoma.

The Knox family had already made the transition to a full-time apartment building. Charlotte Knox had stepped away. Aunty Franky passed in 1943. The buyers, the Tompkins, were themselves a signal of what was coming. Before buying the downtown hotel, they’d spent three years running Auto Courts, the roadside lodging that would eventually replace the traditional urban hotel.

In its last twenty years, the newspaper mentions of the hotel shift from clubs holding meetings and Christmas parties to untimely deaths of elderly residents and crimes. Like the Carlton a couple of blocks over, the Knox had become naturally occurring affordable housing.

A place like the Knox gets affordable when the original family that treated it like a community institution is gone, and the building just gets older and cheaper. People need a place to live, and some can’t afford much. Places stay affordable because they’re old and nobody’s investing in them. They’re rare now because modern codes outlawed the features that made them work: shared bathrooms, tiny rooms. When these buildings sell, the cost of bringing them up to code forces rents up and out of reach for the people who need them most.

Then comes January of 1966. It’s a time of stormy protests at City Hall. Residents won a fight against the widening of Carlyon Avenue. They’re worried about their property. They’re worried about losing their neighborhood. And they’re able to defend it, or what they think it is. But the momentum of the car is too strong for the Knox. City engineers are focused on arterial improvements and right-of-way problems.

In the middle of all this, the Knox Hotel is razed. The sturdy three-story concrete structure meets the machinery of Franz Schlottman. The building that stood for over half a century is reduced to rubble. The Daily Olympian calls it being “mauled with kindness.”

There’s no kindness in a wrecking ball. There’s only the need for more space.

The site is prepared. It’s cleared of its history. It’s flattened. It becomes a parking lot.

Howard Schultz and the Demons of Ambition

May 16, 2026 / / 2 Comments

When Howard Schultz criticized Seattle this week, he wasn’t inventing a grievance. He was re-enacting one.

He was the latest in a long line of people who’ve stood up in Washington State and said that Seattle has turned against the people who built it. That line goes back at least to the shopkeepers and labor organizers who faced off over Chinese exclusion in 1886, who believed roughly the same thing, and who were right and wrong in roughly equal measure. The players change. The tension underneath doesn’t.

To understand what’s actually happening in Washington State in 2026, the warnings about businesses leaving, the fights over taxes, the feeling that something has broken, you have to start not with Schultz but with a couple of historians who’ve spent their careers trying to explain why this place is the way it is.

Colin Woodard’s argument, in his book American Nations, is that the Pacific Northwest was built by two groups of settlers who had almost nothing in common. The first he calls the Yankee impulse. These were New Englanders who came west with a plan: build a better society, governed by rules and institutions, by people who believed government could actually improve human life. They founded the universities and the civic organizations and the reform movements. They also believed in the power of commerce and capitalism. For them, business was the building block of community and it wasn’t just a nice idea. It was a moral obligation.

The second group, what Woodard calls the Appalachian surge, came for the opposite reason. They weren’t building anything. They were getting out. They brought a deep suspicion of authority, a commitment to being left alone, and what Seattle critic Fred Moody would later call in Seattle and the Demons of Ambition, an “ethos of anti-ambition.” A pride in opting out. In refusing the terms the powerful had written. Seattle became a city that welcomed dropouts and rebels, a place with what Moody affectionately called “slob appeal.”

Put these two groups together and you get a region that’s been arguing with itself ever since. It wants good government and hates being governed. It builds large corporations and then turns on them as symbols of the conformity it was trying to escape. Woodard calls this a “fecund hybrid.” It can produce both Microsoft and the WTO riots in the same decade.

Moody’s account of the WTO riots, which he called “Apocalypso,” is still the best explanation of what happens when these two traditions crash into each other with nothing in between. Mayor Paul Schell, a classic Yankee “vision guy,” genuinely believed Seattle’s niceness would make it a model for the world. Instead, the streets blew up. The bicycle cops, the friendly symbol of the city’s relaxed self-image, were replaced overnight by what Moody called “Darth Vaders,” riot police in black gear. Beneath the utopian surface there’s always what Moody calls a “truncheoneer” waiting. Starbucks, which had been a scrappy local success story, had transitioned to the New England ideal of the Pacific Northwest corporation, along with Boeing and Microsoft and became a window to smash.

The pandemic, two decades later, showed what the synthesis looks like when it works. Christine Gregoire’s “Challenge Seattle” coalition pulled the private sector together fast. Boeing made PPE. Starbucks helped streamline vaccination logistics. It was the New England tradition at its most functional: disciplined, science-first, with business and government pulling in the same direction. The curve bent.

That spirit is gone now, or at least that’s what Schultz and Gregoire both say. And the question of why is where the standard take on this story goes off the rails.

Most of the coverage frames this as Seattle versus business, progressivism versus capitalism, taxes versus growth. It’s not a useless frame. But it misses the most important political fact about Washington State right now: the Republican Party hasn’t produced a statewide elected official or protected a statewide incumbent in a generation. So, this is a civil war inside the Democratic Party. And once you see that, Schultz’s op-ed looks completely different.

As a sidenote, this isn’t the first time Washington State politics have been defined by the internal politics of one party. In the 1920s, Republicans had been so dominant for so long, that only a handful of Democrats were elected to the state legislature. All the important political debates happened between various kind of Republicans.

But Schultz isn’t writing to Republicans. There are no Republicans to write to, not at the statewide level. He’s writing to the centrist, business-aligned Democrats who used to run Washington State, the people Christine Gregoire represented, that Gary Locke represented when he crafted a policy package to keep Boeing here. These are the ones who thought you could keep labor and the Chamber of Commerce in the same coalition. That coalition is losing ground inside the party, and Schultz knows it. His column isn’t really an economic argument. It’s a distress signal from a faction that’s being outmaneuvered within its own party.

Once you see it that way, everything shifts. The new taxes, the “socialist rhetoric” Schultz attributes to Mayor Katie Wilson aren’t accidents or failures of economic understanding. They’re the deliberate choices of a coalition that’s decided it doesn’t need the Schultz wing to win elections in Washington State. Lately, they’ve been right

But here’s where Woodard’s framework, useful as it is for understanding the past, might actually lead us astray.

He’s right about the history. The Yankee and Appalachian traditions really did shape this place, and the tension between them really does explain a lot, from the WTO riots to the pandemic response to what’s happening now. But those traditions aren’t frozen. They’re being recombined.

What’s happening isn’t the old synthesis falling apart. It’s two new versions of it forming, competing for the same ground.

The first version mixes the communitarian side of New England with the live-and-let-live ethic from the Appalachian tradition. The result is a politics that’s comfortable using collective power on social questions, pro-trans, pro-DEI, anti-racist, committed to equity as something the community actively builds, while also holding to the Appalachian idea that the government has no business regulating who you are or how you live. This coalition is fine with progressive taxes because it doesn’t read taxation of the rich as government overreach. It reads it as investment. It’s not anti-business, exactly. It’s indifferent to business as a civic priority. The economy, in this view, is plumbing. It needs to work, but it’s not the point.

The second version mixes the rules-based, institutionalist side of New England with the pro-business instinct from the Appalachian tradition. This is the Schultz coalition. It believes in civic partnership, in the kind of collaboration between business and government that made the pandemic response work. It also believes that growth comes first, that you can’t redistribute your way to prosperity, and that treating your biggest employers as adversaries is a serious mistake. It’s not against government. It’s against incompetent government. Those are different things.

These two coalitions have more in common than either would like to admit. They both trace back to the same regional mix Woodard describes. They both say they believe in good government. They both say they’re fighting for the soul of the Pacific Northwest. Meanwhile, the Republican Party has spent a generation mostly absent from statewide politics, occasionally trying to woo the Schultz coalition with pro-business appeals, but unable to get past what the national party has become.

So Democrats fight each other. In primaries. In city council races. In the pages of the Wall Street Journal. The party is big enough to hold both coalitions right now. But probably not forever.

Fred Moody has this image he uses for the history of the Northwest. He calls it a “bucking-bronco sine wave”: boom, bust, purge, renewal. He’s always liked tech collapses as what he calls “cleansing opportunities,” moments when the phantom wealth burns off and the region gets back to its actual self. There’s something glossy about that view. It suggests that what’s happening now is just another dip, and that the region will find its way back, as it always has.

But this time feels different. The automation rolling through Amazon and Microsoft isn’t a market correction. It’s structural.

Moody actually wrote about an earlier version of this. When he was covering the 1990s tech boom, he would recognize the Microsoft and Amazon generation as a new mutation of Woodard’s Yankee New Englanders: same utopian conviction, same faith that the right tools could perfect the world, just expressed through software instead of civic institutions. The people building Encarta thought they were democratizing knowledge. The VR evangelists thought they were reinventing human experience. Moody wasn’t unsympathetic, but he wasn’t fooled either. These were the “vision guys” in updated form, with the same blind spot the original ones always had: their utopia tends to arrive on the backs of people who don’t get to share in it. The Encarta team got laid off when the internet made their product obsolete. The VR evangelists mostly got absorbed or let go when the hype ran out. Now the engineers who built the AI tools are being displaced by the AI tools. It’s the same pattern, one cycle later, except this time the technology actually worked.

When Weyerhaeuser replaced loggers with machines through the 1980s, the region eventually settled on a story about spotted owls and environmental regulation that let everyone off the hook. The real story was that automation had been eating jobs for years before the spotted owl became a symbol. We’re probably going to be tempted to do the same thing now, to make this a story about taxes and progressive overreach, and miss what’s actually happening to workers as AI takes over more of what software engineers and middle managers used to do.

The Schultz coalition wants to restore what made the old tech economy work, without quite admitting that the new one is walking away from workers.

Which is why the debate Schultz is asking us to have might be the wrong one. Whether Jeff Bezos stays in Washington or moves to Miami, whether Starbucks shifts five hundred corporate jobs to Tennessee, those aren’t the numbers that will define this region’s future. The numbers that matter are the software engineers, the middle managers, the logistics coordinators whose jobs are being automated away by the same companies that spent decades making this one of the most prosperous places in the country.

Both political traditions, in their remixed forms, actually have something to offer here if they’re willing to use it. Progressive taxation applied to the profits of automation isn’t just redistribution for its own sake. It’s a way to make sure that when an algorithm replaces a team of engineers, the gains don’t just flow to shareholders while the engineers figure out what to do next. That instinct, using collective power to push back when technology rewrites the terms of work, is older than either coalition. It’s what the Yankee communitarians and the Appalachian labor organizers were both doing, in different ways, from the beginning.

Schultz ends his column calling for a “new compact,” and he’s right that one is needed. But the compact he’s describing is between government and business. The one that’s actually needed is between the economy that’s coming and the workers who built the one we have. That’s been the argument in this region from the start. The actors keep changing. The stakes don’t.

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