The Tacoma Club - the end of an era?
September 11th, 2008 by Republican By DefaultThe Tacoma Club was once more than just ‘An Unparalleled Business & Social Club’. For years it was the place to be if you wanted to do business in Tacoma, especially if your company was business-to-business play.
Tacoma’s business community has a lot of unwritten rules. But if you want to do business here you have to know the rules and live by them. Mostly, these rules tell you which organizations to join and which ones to contribute to. The Tacoma Club was one of those ‘must have’ memberships. But all of that changed.
I wish I could say that the rules have gone away, but they’ve just been ‘rewritten’. It used to be that you had to schmooze the local elite and rub elbows with the good ol’ boys. Now you have to show your green credentials and rub elbows with artists. Same game, different names.
I can’t be certain about what I’m about to say, but it’s been substantiated enough for me express my opinion. I believe that those same local elites and good ol’ boys were one of the biggest reasons that Tacoma was unable to attract technology businesses at the peak of the industry’s growth. On the surface the business community in Tacoma bent over backward to show tech companies how much they wanted them here, but behind the scenes it was a different matter.
I think the best explanation is that they were afraid of the new money that came along with those tech companies. Money means power and they didn’t want to lose theirs. I also think that those same people have been at least partly, and possibly largely responsible for the failures in attracting businesses to the downtown area.
While I wish that the apparent end of The Tacoma Club signaled an end to a dark chapter in Tacoma’s history, it’s really just the turning of a page. Instead of the end of a dynasty, it’s just the changing of the guard.
Where it used to be the good ol’ boys keeping business away from Tacoma, now it’s liberals who support environmentalism and the arts. But either way, nobody wants to do business in a Chicago-esque city, especially when there are so many other choices in the area. Changing it to a San Francisco-esque city won’t help (and for you liberals reading this, being like SF isn’t a good thing. It’s why the tech boom happened outside the city in Silicon Valley instead of in the trendy downtown.)
There’s a lot more that could be said about the old guard, but that will likely be the subject of many future posts.
And to be perfectly honest, I think the old guard was cheaper to have around. At least they only built a few colossally stupid projects. This crowd can’t get enough eight and nine digit projects to satisfy their lust for a brave new world. And the old crowd was at least a little business savvy. This crowd thinks they can buy businesses’ loyalty instead of scaring and squeezing them into it. And they act as if businesses owe them their loyalty. The discussions about which companies ’should’ locate downtown shows just how ignorant these people really are.
Here are some links to other sources of information on the troubles at The Tacoma Club. I doubt that there will be much talk about the good ol’ boys because most of the people posting and commenting haven’t been around long enough to have seen it all happen.
Lawsuit threatens to evict Tacoma Club - Business Examiner Daily
Tacoma Club on the ropes? - The Biz Buzz blog (TNT)
The Tacoma Club May Lose Its View - Exit133.com
Update:
Tacoma Club down, but not out
September 11th, 2008 at 9:16 am
I have experienced much of what you are talking about first hand. I purchased my building seven years ago and extensively rehabbed it - I have never felt welcome in this city except by a handful of individuals and being a conservative has only made it worse. I have never experienced this in a metropolitan city before and I have lived in the Bay Area, Portland, and Southern California. Most of the time I feel very depressed and alienated.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:40 am
It’s amazing to me how segmented Tacoma really is. Most of the segments are either ethnic or economic with the addition of the military. I’ve been in Tacoma long enough to see it, but not long enough to figure out what to do about it, other than blog.
Since I’ve been in the Puget Sound area for over 25 years I’ve made a lot of friends, many of whom are currently outside of Tacoma including some of the friends I’ve made in town. But I think if I had moved to Tacoma first it would have been more difficult. Most of Tacoma’s little groups keep to themselves and aren’t inviting of outsiders. I hear that it’s always been that way.
And there really aren’t any venues for conservatives to gather, other than churches, but even those can be a mix in this city. Part of the problem is that this is a union and government town, both of which pressure their members and workers to vote one particular way. So even inside of a conservative Christian church there will be many who are pressured on the job to vote a certain way and never show any dissent. I know of many conservatives who fear losing their jobs if they express their real opinions. It even applies to liberal Republicans.
Maybe Tacoma needs a ‘Friends of Abe’ gathering.