This Pandemic Boom Town Is Also A Surprisingly Wonderful Place To Retire - Sun and Planets Spirituality AYINRIN
Downtown Spokane encircled by mountain range at dusk. digidreamgrafix/getty images
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B
ruce Munholand spent 32 years
working for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, mostly in Alaska, where
he met his wife, 1969. His last posting was in St. Louis, managing the
cleanup of a suburban waste site contaminated with radioactive materials
from The Manhattan Project era. In early 2021, shortly after his
retirement from the Corps, Bruce, now 71, and Keri, now 55, hooked up
their side hustle—a cobalt blue 1969 Citroen van retrofitted in Europe
to serve gourmet coffee—to their truck and drove 1,870 miles Northwest,
over five days, to Spokane, Washington. They had picked the city for its
natural beauty, reasonable costs, proximity to two of their three adult
children (one in Seattle and one in Spokane) and coffee-consciousness.
"Knowing that coffee was already a big deal in the Northwest, it was a
business that we knew would travel,” says Keri.
Keri and Bruce Munholand in front of their Surge Coffee Co. van at Riverfront Park in Spokane.
Emily MasonThese
days, the Munholands position their Surge Coffee Co. van in downtown
Spokane, by the 100-acre Riverfront Park (the site of the 1974 World’s
Fair) and at sporting and other events. They dispense batch brews,
mochas and chai lattes at $6 to $8 a cup and do about $70,000 a year in
sales, donating all their tips to charities, including local and
international Christian relief agencies. “I’ve always used repurposed as
opposed to retired, because there’s always something to do,’’ says
Bruce. They’re planning to add a second van serving ice cream from a
local dairy and to eventually hire a professional manager so, as Keri
puts it, “we can finally go to Italy.”
In
recent years lots of folks have been hitting the trail to this eastern
Washington enclave, 20 miles west of Idaho, in search of an outdoorsy
and affordable lifestyle. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that between
2010 and July 2023, the population of Spokane County grew 17% to
551,455, while the city of Spokane, the county seat, saw an 11% increase
to 231,000.
It
hasn’t all gone smoothly. Spokane’s housing supply was already running
short when the Covid pandemic and work-from-home unleashed a new wave of
arrivals. A 2021 study
by the Spokane Association of Realtors found residential rental
vacancies had fallen to 1% and starter homes were getting as many as 30
offers, with young locals being priced out of the market. That year, the
mayor declared a housing emergency.
Between
the time the Munholands decided on Spokane in 2017 and were ready to
move in 2021, prices rose so fast and the housing supply got so tight,
that they moved into a condo in South Perry, a once run-down city
neighborhood that now boasts trendy restaurants and shops. (It’s a
temporary solution; they’ve also bought two wooded acres just 10 minutes
out of town, and are building a home using lots of Washington state
wood.)
Three
years after that emergency, Spokane is still grappling with the housing
shortage. Median home prices in the county have risen by two thirds
since 2019 and now hover around the national median of $394,000–but
that’s still less than half the $879,000 median in Seattle, a prime
source, along with pricey California, of migrant flow.
The fact that its housing prices are still comparatively reasonable, is one reason Spokane earned a spot on Forbes’ Best Places To Retire In 2024
list, which emphasizes quality living at an affordable price. Other
factors that helped it make the list include good air quality, a low
risk of natural hazards, plenty of primary care doctors, and no state
income tax, except on certain capital gains in excess of $250,000 in a
year. (Downsides include a higher-than-average crime rate, a state
estate tax, cold winters, and only a so-so economy.)
As
for lifestyle, the city is very bikeable and the area offers extensive
hiking trails and seven public golf courses. Ski slopes are an hour
away. Moreover, as the largest city in what’s known as the Inland
Northwest, which includes eastern Washington and Oregon and Northern
Idaho, Spokane tends to punch above its population weight when it comes
to concerts, restaurants and sporting events. Spokane hosted both men
and women’s college basketball games during March Madness and the men’s
team at Gonzaga, the biggest local private university, has made it to
the Sweet 16 of the NCAA tournament for nine years running. The Podium, a
$53 million indoor sports facility, opened in 2021 adjacent to
Riverfront Park. It’s designed to accommodate professional volleyball,
basketball, wrestling and track events.
As
for the housing shortage and meh economy, local leaders are working on
it. The city has adopted new regulations to allow more units and
eliminate parking requirements in residential areas. The idea is to
allow more housing to be built in existing neighborhoods.
“Our
goal is to dramatically ramp up our ability to build housing at all
income levels, a lot of that will be dense urban housing, so that the
quality of life can stay the same here,” says Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown,
who ousted the incumbent last November promising to address the housing
crisis, homelessness and a growing fentanyl drug problem. “It's a high
quality of life. I just don't want it to go away due to the in-migration
and the rising housing prices,” adds Brown, 67, a PhD economist whose
resume includes stints as the state Senate’s first female Democratic
majority leader and the first female chancellor of Washington State
University, Spokane.
B
efore U.S. soldiers marched in
during the 19th century, the Spokane River was a center of life for the
Spokane Tribe, who lived a semi-nomadic life, taking salmon and
steelhead from the river. Today, the tribe’s reservation is located
roughly an hour northwest of downtown Spokane and houses a resort and
two casinos.
The
city itself was incorporated as Spokane Falls back in 1881, just as the
railway was reaching town. It became a transportation hub for the gold
and silver mining, timber and grain industries. Even today, trains can
be seen and heard rattling on elevated tracks above downtown Spokane.
Signs
of Spokane’s past—and its ongoing revitalization–abound. An old flour
mill is now a boutique shopping center on the river that powered it. A
defunct Wonder Bread factory (it produced Hostess cupcakes until 2000)
has been turned into a food hall with regional chefs and coffee
roasters. An abandoned rail yard across the Spokane River from downtown
has been developed over the last 18 years into Kendall Yards, a mixed
use urban district with apartments, homes, restaurants, a weekly
open-air market in the warmer months and access to a 37-mile paved
nature trail.
“There's
so much opportunity here for real estate development and taking
advantage of the landscape,” Steve MacDonald, director of community and
economic development for the city says over the sound of Spokane
Falls—natural falls that were damned to produce power a century ago. He
points to a parking lot for Canopy Credit Union occupying a prime piece
of waterfront land. “That's the old idea, ‘put the parking lot or put
the factory next to the river,’ that will go away.”
The
city has also been shaking off its long-time, distinctly Wild West
reputation when it comes to fraud. The Spokane Stock Exchange, founded
in 1897, was shuttered in 1991 under pressure from the SEC. (At the time
of the closing, it was the country’s last regional exchange devoted to
questionable penny stocks.) As recently as 2009, Forbes labeled Spokane the “Scam Capital of America.”
S
outh of the river,
in a Washington State University building, a handful of local
entrepreneurs are practicing their investor pitches at an event hosted
by the university’s incubator and LaunchPad INW, a local organization
mentoring startups. They’re prepping to pitch investors like the Spokane
Angel Alliance, a 19-year-old group of investors who have pumped $76
million into 75 tech and other startups. That’s small potatoes compared
to the real venture capital money in Seattle, but it’s part of a
continuing effort to move the local economy into the 21st century.
The
locals are also pushing for a slice of the medical and healthcare
industry; the Spokane County Health Sciences & Services Authority is
offering to match up to $500,000 in federal grant funding for biotech
and health sciences startups.
Not
long ago, the University of Washington in Seattle had a near monopoly
on medical education in the state. But in 2015, Washington State
University won the state legislature’s backing to create a medical
school in Spokane. It’s now fully accredited and named after Elson S.
Floyd, the late Washington State president who pushed for it, with the
idea of producing practitioners for underserved rural areas. Meanwhile,
the University of Washington has set up a program with Gonzaga which
allows 60 medical students to take the first 18 months of their training
in Spokane, again with the idea of encouraging them to return to the
Eastern part of the state.
Despite such efforts, Spokane County’s largest employer
remains the Fairchild Air Force Base, which was first set up as an Army
Depot during World War II and is now a medium-sized refueling base just
west of Spokane International Airport. It’s been a source of young
retirees as service members take a liking to the area and return (or
stay) for their post-military years.
Kevin
Williams was stationed at 11 different bases around the world during
his 25 years as an administrative officer. He'd been at Fairchild for
four years when he started thinking about his next assignment. “My son
was a sophomore in high school and when it came time to think about if I
was going to go on a little further (in the Air Force), he said, ‘Come
on dad, we have to move again?’ which was perfectly understandable,”
Williams recalls. “He really liked Spokane. I quickly recognized that I
liked Spokane an awful lot, too.” Williams, now 54, was speaking as he
bounced between booths at a job fair he helped organize as a vice
president for Spokane Workforce Council, a non-profit which helps match
employers and workers. Today, Williams’ son is 23 and recently graduated
from Eastern Washington University with a major in finance. He plans to
stay in Spokane.
A
business organization that opened its first office in Spokane’s
University District in April, gives a hint of how the area is
evolving–slowly. In a county where 88% of residents are white, the
office belongs to the multi-ethnic business association known as
AHANA—an acronym for Asian, Hispanic, African, Native American. The
organization was created back in 1998, but really grew during the
pandemic with support from now Mayor Lisa Brown, who was then director
of the Washington State Department of Commerce. She enlisted AHANA to
make sure that business owners of color were getting their share of
federal forgivable Paycheck Protection Program loans and other Covid
relief efforts.
“The
grants just started rolling in, continuing to be renewed and built
during the pandemic,” marvels Marvo Reguindin, 67, executive director of
AHANA since 2020. He was born in Seattle after his parents immigrated
to the U.S. from the Philippines and lived in Hawaii, California and
around the Pacific Northwest before landing in Spokane in 1991 and
starting his own advertising and graphic design agency. (AHANA became a
client.) Today, Reguindin lives in an up-and-coming Spokane neighborhood
with his partner and two yorkies. He feels relatively safe in Spokane
and has built a community there through his involvement with AHANA, the
Inland Northwest Business Alliance and on LGBTQ issues.
But
Reguindin raises an uncomfortable issue for outsiders thinking of
moving to the area. In April, members of the University of Utah women’s
basketball team, in Spokane to play in the NCAA tournament, were reportedly
subjected to racial slurs when they went to a restaurant and their
hotel in nearby Coeur D’Alene, Idaho. That popular resort town is in
Kootenai County, where Richard Butler’s infamous white supremacist
group, Aryan Nations, was founded in the 1970s and headquartered. (In
2000, a Coeur D’Alene jury returned a $6.3 million verdict that bankrupted Butler. His compound was sold and he died in 2004.)
“When
I first got here, I wasn't aware of the Aryan Nations issue in North
Idaho and then quickly found out about it, and I'm like, ‘okay, I don't
go to Idaho unless I need to,’’ Reguindin says. “It's changing and yet
still the same.”
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