Take a stand for Spokane

I lived in Seattle during the final throws of its transformation, 2009-14. I watched the culture get stripped, the grunge flare reduced to “dirty neighborhoods” waiting to be “refurbished,” and the locals forced out after the hostile takeover of their own real estate market.

Now, only around 40 percent of the people in the Greater Seattle area comes from the state of Washington.

We have a choice, Spokane. We still have some years before we reach a fever pitch anywhere remotely like that of the West Side. We need to pressure our industries with our pocketbooks and our city representatives with our voices to demand more unique home styles, community centers and parks that reflect our local style rather than something from a California catalog, and restrictions on this unchecked urban sprawl of strip malls and parking lots that’s swallowing our nature and offering us only higher housing living costs in return.

We can decide to take a stand for our culture and the positives of Spokane that entice people to move here in the first place, or we can wait to be the next falling domino and too become refugees of urban sprawl, fleeing to the next “quaint place”.

Nicholas Johnson

Spokane