By John Gear
Out for a stroll on a gorgeous evening, as I walked past LP Brown Elementary on Olympia’s west side, I was sad to see that our school district hasn’t learned something that every school official and city official must understand in their bones: the never-ending budget woes plaguing our schools and the City of Olympia stem in very large measure from our misguided anti-housing policies and practices, despite all the empty rhetoric heard about our “housing crisis.”
Worse, the school district seems to not get the difference between talking the talk and walking the walk on teaching environmental awareness. Talking the talk means taking a lot formerly used for a residence destroyed by fire, leveling it and planting some trees, and then calling the resulting ornamental emptiness an environmental learning center.
Walking the walk on the environmental awareness would mean using this beautifully sited plot, already well-provisioned with urban services like roads, power, water and sewer, as a home for three or four new family-sized units of energy-efficient, mid-market and affordable housing.
That is, instead of taking property formerly used for a private residence off the tax rolls and creating more empty greenspace next to a school — a school that is already having to bus children in from far away just to remain open — we should use it for housing again, only this time make full use of the parcel so that the houses can be much more affordable than the average west side home.
No doubt the backers of this project — Olympia School District, the LP Brown Parent-Teacher Organization (PTO), the West Olympia Rotary and the Olympia Education Foundation — have the best of intentions for this environmental learning place. But as all teachers know, you measure progress by results, not good intentions.
And the result of this project, if it proceeds on this plan, will be bad for the schools, the city and the overall environment, because every time we lose an opportunity to build housing in Olympia, we simply push housing outside to Lacey, to Tumwater and beyond, and into the rural areas that we need to be preserving as rural farm and forest land.
If we want to teach kids in Olympia schools to value the environment, we need to make our walk match our talk.
And that would mean a sustained effort to identify and seize on opportunities to build mid-market and affordable housing throughout our existing developed urban areas.
Not building more mini-parks that sabotage the tax base for our schools and other public budgets and force families further and further away just to find a place they can afford to live.
John Gear is a resident of Olympia.