A page that grades a region owes you an account of who is doing the grading, what they want, and what might be skewing their judgment. Here is all of it except the name.
A private citizen and homeowner in central Spokane. Self-employed. Kids in this city. Not a journalist and not an economist. Not running for office. Not tied to any advocacy group, campaign, party, developer, business group, or economic development agency.
Contact runs through a form rather than a published inbox, for the reason in the next section. One person maintains this by hand, once a quarter. That is a real limitation and it is stated plainly in the methodology. It also means there is nobody to hide behind when a number here is wrong.
Because I am self-employed in the city I am grading, and my household depends on that work.
Everything on this page is public record. Every figure links to the agency that published it, the rubric is written down in advance, and the change log records every revision. None of that gets more or less true depending on who typed it. What could change is whether disagreeing with a number here quietly became a reason not to work with me.
I would rather you argue with the grades than with my livelihood. If withholding a name costs this page some credibility, the sources, the rubric, the frozen archive and the corrections log are there to earn it back another way.
This is a real tradeoff and I am not pretending otherwise. Anonymous criticism deserves more scrutiny, not less. So scrutinize it: the whole point of linking every number is that you never have to take my word for anything.
Because of how the next fifteen years go for my kids.
I want them to reach the age where they pick a city and have Spokane be a real option, not the place they left because the work was somewhere else. That is the entire motive. Everything on the scorecard is an attempt to measure whether that is becoming more likely or less.
I have lived in cities that grew too fast and cities that grew too slowly. I have lived somewhere with full storefronts and restaurants that fit the street they sat on, and somewhere that had the buildings but not the life. The difference between those places is not weather or luck. A lot of it comes down to whether the region attracts employers that pay well. Most of that difference is already sitting in public data, scattered across a dozen agency websites where nobody reads it.
Spokane has the ingredients. There is real creativity here, real entrepreneurship, and a builder’s streak that runs back through how this place got made in the first place. My honest read is that we underinvest in the people who are already here and already trying.
What we do not have enough of yet is the habit of building things that get sold past our own city limits. That difference is the whole argument. When a company here sells to Seattle, Boise or Boston, it pulls outside money into Spokane. That money then gets spent again, at businesses that are not going anywhere. When we mostly sell to each other, we just pass the same dollars back and forth. And when a national chain opens, even one with a local owner behind the counter, a slice of every dollar leaves the region for good. It quietly funds somebody else’s downtown.
Prosperity here is not mainly about spending more locally. It is about whether more money comes in than goes out. That is why this scorecard grades what kind of employers we are attracting, not just how many jobs got counted.
And the part worth saying out loud, because a page full of weak grades can read like contempt: Spokane is leaps and bounds better than it was twenty years ago. People built that on purpose and they deserve the credit for it. It is also exactly the wrong moment to coast.
This is not a complaint page. It is a scoreboard. The point is to put the numbers in front of the people who make decisions, on a schedule, so the conversation starts from evidence instead of from whoever spoke last.
I have worked at a labor market consulting company. That is why I am comfortable reading employment and wage data, and it is also the best reason to be skeptical of me. I arrived already believing that employer mix and wage levels drive most of what a city feels like to live in. That belief shaped which eight measures ended up on this page. Someone with a different background would have picked different ones, and they might be right.
The second bias is taste, not data. I like neighborhoods with occupied storefronts and independent restaurants that fit the street. That is a preference. Where this site grades storefront vacancy, the economic argument is that it reflects local spending power, which is measurable. The part where I find a full street pleasant is mine, and it does not belong in a grade.
A third prior belongs here rather than on the scorecard: I believe this region leaks too much money to businesses headquartered somewhere else. That is a conviction, not a finding. None of the eight measures test it, you will not see it graded, and I have kept it off the scorecard on purpose. If it ever gets measured here it will arrive the same way everything else does, with a number and a source.
The methodology page exists so you can check those leanings. Every grade is argued in one paragraph, right next to its source. That way a reader who disagrees can see exactly where my judgment came in.
Paid for entirely out of my own pocket. The full cost is a domain name and hosting that is free at this size. Nobody funds it, sponsors it, commissions it, or reviews it before publication.
None of these pay for it, fund it, or see it before it goes up: the City of Spokane, Spokane County, Greater Spokane Inc., any university, any employer named on the site, or any campaign or advocacy group. No money has been asked for or taken. If that ever changes, it gets disclosed here first.
Corrections are the point, not an inconvenience. If a figure is wrong, a source is stale, or a grade does not follow the published rubric, send it and it gets fixed.
Send a correction, better data, or an argument with a grade. The form asks for no name and no email. Leave contact details only if you want a reply.