Michael Luis

No state has grown faster than Idaho in the past five years. The Mountain West, overall, has had strong growth since 2015, with Nevada, Utah and Arizona right behind Idaho in the growth rankings.

Retail sales of goods are higher than they were a year ago, thanks in part to online retail, but services remain stubbornly down and won’t recover until customers feel comfortable patronizing high-touch businesses. No amount of stimulus money can change that reality.

Among the larger metro area markets in the country, San Francisco has had the largest area-wide one-year rent drop and Seattle has had the second largest drop. The December one-bedroom median rent was $2,700 for San Francisco and $1,540 for Seattle.

With increasing technology business ties between Seattle and the San Francisco Bay Area, the longstanding sisterhood is getting closer. So, we might ask how much of what seems to be ailing San Francisco these days has migrated up the coast.

Not only are people reluctant to spend hours in an enclosed space with strangers, they are not too keen on doing the things that happen on the other end of the trip: business meetings, conventions, theme parks, tourism. So even if air travel itself has been shown to be a relatively low risk activity, it is not likely to recover until these other activities recover.

Is the entering kindergartener operating at the level of a 2-year old, a 3-year old, a 4-year old or at the level of a typical kindergartener or above? Not surprisingly, preparedness varies by school district.

The network has been expanding, and the city has signaled its strong support for bike commuting, so we might expect to see growth over time as more origins and destinations get connected.

Since passage of the Growth Management Act (GMA) in 1990 the state and region have been in the forefront of what came to be know as the Smart Growth movement that sought to shift growth patterns away from the dominant post-World War II model. If we have been leaders, do we have any followers?

Nationally, economists have been predicting that the recovery from the pandemic recession would hit a wall, and we have hit that wall in Washington.

The average number of inmates housed in Washington’s traditional state prisons in 2020 is just slightly higher than in 2009, while the state’s population grew 15 percent during that time.