Driving into Neah Bay, at Washington’s very northwestern tip, can feel like you’ve come to the end of the world. A worn highway, twisting along the Strait of Juan de Fuca, eventually reveals a remote seaside village surrounded by Pacific-windswept coastal hemlock forests.
Glenn Ellis Jr., a member of the Makah Tribe, doesn’t see it as the last stop. For the tribe, survivors on the continent’s edge for thousands of years, this is where life begins. A tribal creation story describes its people emerging into the world from a mussel shell. The Makah built a life from the sea, harvesting cedar to build long houses near the beach.
“We see ourselves as the starting place,” Ellis told me.
In that tradition, the tribe’s embarking on a new housing project, once again using wood from its own land. This time, it’s in partnership with a Port Angeles manufacturer and other Olympic Peninsula organizations, creating a new model of kit-assembled housing for the Makah — and, hopefully, homes far beyond the reservation as well.
It's the first big test project for something called the North Olympic Peninsula Recompete Coalition. It joins together tribes, county and port commissioners, community college administrators and other leaders who’ve long grappled with how to create new economic opportunities in an isolated corner of the state.
The coalition has homed in on a single metric: growing the lagging amount of local family wage jobs for those of prime working age.
These leaders are bringing a bold yet focused new vision to the peninsula — one that should be watched and emulated in other communities. Their approach is holistic, tackling both the barriers keeping residents from the workforce, such as a lack of child care, and seeking new infrastructure that can enable economic growth.
For instance, the coalition envisions a network of barges that move freight between ports far more cheaply than the peninsula’s limited road network. They see a nimble community college that can tailor courses to the emerging needs of industry. And, in the case of the Makah's hemlock-to-housing plan, they're pursuing new but sustainable forestry solutions that build on the strength of the peninsula’s rich natural resources.
Their plans have won financial backing from a particularly large investor: the U.S. government.
‘From exporting trees to exporting kids and skills’
The coalition beat out more than 550 other communities to win more than $35 million in funds as part of the Distressed Area Recompete Program. Tucked within the semiconductor-focused CHIPS and Science Act passed by Congress in 2022, it funds economic initiatives in communities suffering from long-term decline.
Democratic U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell and former U.S. Rep. Derek Kilmer, a fellow Democrat who represented the 6th Congressional District, advocated for the funding. Often, Kilmer has said the timber industry “took it on the chin,” after the spotted owl decision limited logging on federal lands in the 1990s. In the decades since, dozens of peninsula employers closed operations and thousands of workers lost their jobs, and attempts by the federal, state and local governments have continually failed to reduce a persistent cycle of poverty.
It’s captured in a federal statistic called the Prime Age Employment Gap. In the 1980s, at the height of logging, most 25- to 54-year-olds had good-paying jobs. But today, the north peninsula lags a full eight points behind the national average. That equates to hundreds of people out of work, often in the most remote and isolated pockets of Clallam and Jefferson counties.
It is backdrops like this that gave rise to the economic populism of President Donald Trump — a political figure whose spheres of power are strongest in areas of America left behind. While Kamala Harris carried Clallam in the presidential election with 52% of the vote, the county becomes more politically red as you go west — which doubles as its most economically challenged area.
Echoes of that populism resonate in places like this, though circumstances are sometimes different: a factory shuttered in the rust belt that’s blamed on globalization, a coal mine closed in West Virginia that can’t compete with modern energy sources — and a timber sector viewed as too costly to the environment.
The anger evoked by each circumstance is the same.
Politicians have tried to help the peninsula. Government grants gave workers opportunities to retrain for new jobs. But the resulting impact, for those who took advantage, was often to relocate for a job.
“We went from exporting trees to exporting kids and skills,” said Rod Fleck, Forks’ city attorney of more than three decades.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who represents neighboring timber-rich southwest Washington in the 3rd Congressional District, said recently this very evolution is a slap in the face to rural communities.
“Well, we’re going to shut your mill down, and we’re going to stop harvesting timber,” Gluesenkamp Perez told The New York Times’ Ezra Klein. “But hey, here’s a grant that you could apply for.”
“That’s not what people want,” added the congresswoman, who got 3,000 more votes than Trump in her Republican-leaning district. “People want self-determination and agency.”
The Recompete coalition provides the blueprint. It seeks to remove barriers to employment, using a wraparound service model for those who've been unable to seek a job. It's aligning community college courses to train jobseekers with opportunities available in the community. And infrastructure investments will enable local firms to add good-paying jobs.
Leaders are clear-eyed about what is possible — and what isn’t. They avoid spinning fantasies of a large new corporate campus popping up or a nostalgic return to the era of exporting raw logs. They’re seeking to leverage the peninsula’s economic strengths — vast forests and deep-water ports — to make new local products that generate new sustainable incomes.
“We’re not going to get a savior from the outside,” said Clallam County Commissioner Mike French. “The market has chosen the situation we’re in.”
‘To create something homegrown and local’
What will help, French says, are permanent infrastructure improvements on a peninsula that takes half a day to drive across. The Port of Port Angeles' procurement of a barge fleet is one example. The port’s barges can also move the Makah Tribe’s logs between Neah Bay and Port Angeles as an initial customer.
“We want to create something homegrown and local,” said Ellis, the Makah member who is also managing the new housing project.
Coastal hemlock, which grows like a weed within the tribe's 60-year harvest rotations, has its challenges: 120-plus inches of rain each year means it takes longer than other lumber to dry, and it is susceptible to warping, cracking and decay. Those problems can be overcome through a vacuum process known as thermal modification.
At the Composite Recycling Technology Center in Port Angeles, the Makah’s sustainably harvested wood is modified and then cross laminated into durable long-term panels. They’ve proven their mettle already. The U.S. military ordered emergency shelters made with the hemlock that can be erected anywhere in one day. The shelters have already shown they can withstand a massive earthquake, after testing at a U.S. Army facility last year.
The center plans to deliver the first kit home to the Makah next year. The Recompete coalition also sees potential in it as a new and cheaper way to build badly needed housing across the region. It’s investing some of the federal dollars in the oven-like thermal modification systems so the operation can expand.
The Makah project is emblematic of what the coalition is trying to do: use an existing raw material, make it better locally and sell it widely.
That’s what makes the Recompete plan different: Its federal funding doesn’t develop dependency on federal cash but rather grows economic capacity.
Some might ask: Why not focus the plan on a different peninsula strength? A tourism-based economy could continue to cater to retirees and remote workers, in one of the most picturesque places on the planet, perhaps. Here's why that won't work: It will do nothing for the entrenched generational poverty in the peninsula’s remote areas. For example, the Ph.D. who retires in Sequim also crowds out housing that, at below 3% vacancy, is some of the least available in the state.
“We need to have employment that keeps our kids here with a future,” said Colleen McAleer, director of Clallam’s Economic Development Council. “Retirees take up existing housing stock. So it surges cost of housing.”
A government shutdown may delay release of some funding for the Recompete program, but, hopefully, not for long. This is the peninsula’s best opportunity for economic revitalization.
The reason: trust in the local leadership to deliver the vision. It's an acknowledgment that the people closest to the problem are the most capable of solving it. Let’s give them the room and agency they need to get the job done.
© 2025 The Seattle Times. Visit www.seattletimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
