Why do they keep coming, is my first question, followed by, And when are they going to leave?
I know the answer is, Never, or, Only when they die.
But I keep thinking they might find another place to go — Butte, say, or France, or some other undiscovered paradise, where they can spread their money like manure in fields waiting to be made fertile, all these mid-career consultants, all these artisanal mayonnaise makers, rising up and away like a plague of locusts.
There didn't used to be traffic here — not really. There didn't used to be unremarkable three bedroom houses selling for $500,000, cash, either. Or so many newly arrived Californians and Texans and Coloradans. The exodus used to be toward Portland and Seattle, not away from them, toward Spokane.
It's surely because of the pandemic and the housing crisis and the even worse traffic and congestion and climate change and fear and earthquakes and plagues being left behind that all these people who are never going to leave keep coming.
And because of the pre-war housing stock and an intact downtown — all kinds of potential, what might feel like a blank canvas, and also the food and culture that are already here and the food and culture that are coming.
And because it's relatively affordable.
And kind of cool.
And because it's not Seattle or Portland or San Diego or San Bernardino. Maybe it is a little like Lisbon or London — of the Inland Northwest. But not really. It's just that nothing's been torn down here in so many years.
And it's never really been cool.
That's what's been so good about it.
But now I can't even afford my own neighborhood — which is to say I would not be able to buy a house here today. I'm lucky we bought seven years ago. All the people moving into our neighborhood now are from somewhere else.
My wife Kate and I met this dude last summer who people said we should meet — a jam maker, a cheese smoker. From Santa Barbara. Napa before that. The rich places. He'd been a private chef and a life coach and some kind of spiritual/food entrepreneur. Perhaps you've heard of the French Laundry? He practically invented it.
We were at a party outside, standing around with drinks in our hands. "I don't think we have any French laundries here," I said. "Do we, babe?"
Kate shook her head.
"It's a restaurant," the jam maker said.
"I think we only have regular laundries," I said, and Kate said, "No, I've heard of that place. It's in Fresno. Or Bakersfield. One of the dusty places with lots of country music."
Kate writes cookbooks and does other food stuff, so she couldn't play as dumb as I could. Plus it comes more naturally to me.
The jam maker nodded, looking off into the middle distance.
"Maybe I don't really know what a laundry is," I said, "though I do know what a laundromat is."
"This place isn't really a laundry or a laundromat," Kate said. "It's more like fine dining. But they do your laundry while you eat."
"That's cool," I said.
"Anyway," the jam maker said, and he named a few other people and places he knew that we had surely heard of, fabulous people and places.
I couldn't say anything stupid enough to make him stop.
And he never asked us a single question about ourselves, already as bored with us as Narcissa Whitman so quickly became with the people who would one day kill her and her missionary husband. We finally ditched him and hoped we'd never see him again.
But he might be everywhere.
And we might be him a little, too.
Maybe more than a little.
I like to believe it was different when I was the interloper, even though I know it wasn't. Like Tolstoy said, all happy colonists are the same. Still, there were fewer of us back then, discovering Spokane, and in some ways there was less to discover. But even in 2004 the gentrification had begun, though it was slower and harder to see — except for the recently restored Davenport Hotel, a building worth mentioning because it was kind of a castle and a great place to have a drink and the ceiling of the lobby looked like the ceiling of the Palmer House lobby in Chicago. When I visited Spokane for the first time, I talked to a guy in a bar after my interview. It was the Blue Spark and you could still smoke cigarettes inside and we all were. Nobody was staring into phone screens. This was when strangers sometimes talked to each other in bars and we did that, my stool neighbor determining that I was visiting and asking me what I thought of the town.
"It seems pretty cool," I said. "But it also seems to be dying."
I like to believe it was different when I was the interloper, even though I know it wasn't.
I'd seen the empty storefronts, the empty sidewalks, the mediocre corporate restaurants. The night before at the Ridpath the guy at the front desk had told me the best dinner in town was probably at Red Robin. Mizuna existed then, and so did Luna, but he didn't mention those. And because I didn't see the food and culture right away, I thought maybe there wasn't much, just like the recent colonists can't possibly know what's here. All I'd seen were empty storefronts and sidewalks.
"Oh, no," he'd said. "No, no, no. Spokane died years ago. It's actually coming back."
And he was right — it was coming back. Though I didn't know what it was coming back from or where it was going. I didn't know anything about Spokane before 2004, though I've heard lots of stories since then — about Expo '74 and Evel Knievel selling coke in bars and the neo-Nazis over in Hayden Lake and the thrill rides at Nat Park and Vachel Lindsay hosting orgies at the Davenport and Elvis playing Memorial Stadium before it was Joe Albi Stadium and the great Ali/Frazier fights at the Arena, launching Fistfest, the precursor to Hoopfest, when hundreds of boxing rings crowded downtown streets for weeks in June and we all punched each other senseless. And all those times Bing Crosby got wasted and demanded the city change its name to Bingtown. Those were the glory years. If they ever really happened. And while the comeback might not involve those things exactly, it does involve growth and vitality and not dying.
***
Most of my friends here are like me and the newest wave of colonists, in that we're all from somewhere else. But some of my friends are from here, born and raised, the offspring of earlier colonists. Yes, their parents or grandparents came from somewhere else, but this is where they're from. They remember when Tom Foley was Speaker of the House and Kaiser employed thousands of aluminum workers. They don't complain about the new colonists as much as I do. And before the new colonists came, as the city was becoming vital, my friends and I were happy when interesting restaurants opened, when Perry Street gentrified and then Main and Monroe. We thought new blood would be good for our city, new people opening new businesses. And it was good. Mostly. Back then, more than five years ago, you could still buy a house here for $200,000. You could still rent an apartment for $400 a month. And the food kept getting better and more people were on the streets at night.
Of course there were still plenty of tweakers. And 79 cents in change was stolen from your car every half year or so, along with a pair of old prescription glasses for night driving. And there was homelessness, like there was all over the West — though not nearly as much as today. None of that was part of any kind of charm, but it was part of the town.
And then somehow, everything changed, gradually and then suddenly, the way Mike Campbell went bankrupt in The Sun Also Rises. Except Spokane isn't bankrupt — not fiscally or spiritually or emotionally. It's just that a bunch of rich people from somewhere else all showed up here at once. And a lot of them might only be house-rich, the way some of us would be if we sold our suddenly expensive-as-hell houses and moved to Butte. With a whole lot of cash.
My mom has always complained about Californians, particularly Californians moving into Oregon, even though her sister lived in San Jose for 50 years and my mom lived east of the Rockies for most of her life. But they grew up in Oregon, in the Superintendent's House at the Multnomah County Poor Farm, now a "destination resort" 15 miles east of Portland. What happened to the Davenport happened to the Poor Farm, too, though the Davenport wasn't repurposed — it remains a luxury hotel. And, now, so too is the Multnomah County Poor Farm, beautifully restored, rehabilitated, and renamed Edgefield, a resort you can visit to drink wine or whiskey or beer made onsite, where you can listen to music and look at a weird statue of Jerry Garcia and cool paintings in the hallways of the poor people who used to live there. If you don't spend quite enough money on your accommodations, you'll have to share a bathroom down the hall, almost as if you were a little poor yourself. You can also "consider the extensive artwork that tells the story of this magical place and pick up a souvenir in the beautifully curated gift shop."
I remember going there as a kid, by which time the Poor Farm had become a county nursing home, with an external building repurposed as the Edgefield Lodge for Emotionally Disturbed Children. It was still full of poor people and smelled like disinfectant and hospital soup. I don't remember any Californians there, but I was pretty young. And even though I'd been raised on the idea that Californians were colonists, I never really believed it, though that sentiment still exists all over the West. It comes from people with money moving into places with less money and making those places unaffordable. When Wayne Richey ran for mayor of Boise in 2019, his entire platform was to "stop the California invasion."
Wayne lost that election in a landslide.
I don't think you can stop the invasion, the colonizing, the gentrification, any more than the Cayuse could stop the wave of Americans on the Oregon Trail. The region's Native population has known all about displacement since shortly after the arrival of the Whitmans in 1836 and all the other missionaries and fur traders and gold diggers who came before and after them, the wave apparently unstoppable, promise after promise broken behind it.
Clearly, though, gentrification is not genocide.
And I don't even know that stopping it would be good. Would we prefer decay? Inertia? Is stasis even possible? We would certainly prefer that people could afford housing again, something that would involve, at least in part, building a whole lot of houses and apartments and driving property values down, something we don't seem willing or able to do. Maybe such a strategy would only attract more colonists. Maybe such a strategy is easier proposed than executed, like stopping a virus, though doing nothing, as we seem to be doing, seems worse.
I didn't understand gentrification until it came to Spokane in full force. My house in suburban New York appreciated 200 percent in value in seven years, just like my house in Spokane. I spent most of that money writing for two years in Wisconsin, an incredible opportunity, an incredible windfall, a thousand miles from the New York gentrification, and smack in the middle of the Madison version. I knew gentrification involved relatively rich people moving in, bringing rich people stores and food and "culture," and not really realizing what they were papering over. But until it came to Spokane, I didn't understand how disruptive it could be, even knowing how it always displaces people and culture, how it always breeds some degree of resentment and pain. And while it's not the only driver of homelessness in Spokane, it's a significant factor.
All places change, becoming better or worse or just different. They grow, they flow, they stagnate, they decay. Sometimes, they come back.
All places change, becoming better or worse or just different. They grow, they flow, they stagnate, they decay. Sometimes, they come back. Some of my ancestors were colonists in Virginia, arriving early in the 17th century. So you can blame me for pretty much everything. But once a colonist has been somewhere for 10 or 400 years, displacing people wittingly or not along the way, do they start to belong to the place?
Maybe six years ago, I got into a ridiculous conflict with another driver, both of us aiming for the same parking spot downtown. I thought I was there first. So did he. His car was trashed; he might have lived in it. He was more aggressive than I was and got the spot. I flipped him off and he jumped out of his car and yelled at me to go back to Seattle.
Maybe he saw the colonist in me.
Or maybe it was just a lucky guess, even though I'm not from Seattle. In fact, I think of myself as from Spokane, though I'm not really from anywhere. But this place does feel like home to me — as it will to more recent colonists someday. As it probably already does.
The displacement and transformation we're seeing in Spokane isn't unique. Down the road and over the border, Christ Church is colonizing Moscow like seven Mayflowers full of drunken Englishmen. They even have a slogan: "All of Christ, for All of Life, for All of Moscow." Kate and I were down there a few months ago, and let me tell you: they do mean all of Moscow. The groomed young students of Christ Church's higher education arm, New Saint Andrews College ("Graduating leaders who shape culture living faithfully under the Lordship of Jesus Christ") in their Sunday dresses and ties had colonized blocks of downtown, politely studying at outdoor tables on Main Street in front of the New Saint Andrews bookstore/coffee shop, which used to house a good restaurant. Nothing wrong with that, except that the good restaurant is gone. And home prices have gone through the roof, as they have in so many places. And the church seems more than a little aggressive, preaching that "wives need to be led with a firm hand," that "men conquer and women surrender," and that "we are not yet in a hot civil war, with shooting and all, but we are in a cold civil war." At least our colonists aren't trying to establish a theocracy, even if they are opening French Laundries everywhere.
So, yes, things could be worse. The glass might be three-quarters empty, and as Mao said, it's always darkest just before it's totally black — but at least Zillow's saying my house has lost 10 percent of its value in the last six months, meaning I might be able to afford my neighborhood again someday. In the meantime, Butte's over there just waiting. Everyone says it's going to be the next big Bozeman, where an unremarkable starter home goes for $800,000. We might have missed our chances in Jackson Hole and Aspen and Bozeman and Seattle and Boise and now, for some of us, even in Spokane (which is a lot like Jackson Hole and Aspen, though also somewhat different). But that doesn't mean we have to miss out on Butte, where the housing is cheap and the living is easy and the whole darn place is just lying there, waiting for colonists like us to come along and make the fallow fields fertile again. ♦
Samuel Ligon's most recent novel, Miller Cane: A True & Exact History, appeared in 50 consecutive issues of the Inlander in 2018-19. He's the author of two other novels, two books of stories, and is co-editor, with Kate Lebo, of Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter and Booze. He teaches at Eastern Washington University.
