State Farm leaving Tacoma, WA

Written By H. Pike Oliver

Marc Stiles of the Puget Sound Business Journal reports that at the end of 2018, State Farm is shutting is call center in downtown Tacoma, 33 miles south of downtown Seattle. 

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It was only a little more than four years ago that State Farm came to Tacoma in the fourth quarter of 2013 to occupy two buildings that Russell Investments had vacated when that firm relocated to downtown Seattle.

The bad news is that Tacoma will lose about 1,400 jobs. The possible good news is that the office space is high quality and could attract firms that offer higher wage jobs than the relatively low-paid positions at the call center.

H. Pike Oliver

Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, H. Pike Oliver has worked on real estate development strategies and master-planned communities since the early 1970s, including nearly eight years at the Irvine Company. He resided in the City of Irvine for five years in the 1980s and nine years in the 1990s.

As the founder and sole proprietor of URBANEXUS, Oliver works on advancing equitable and sustainable real estate development and natural lands management. He is also an affiliate instructor at the Runstad Department of Real Estate at the University of Washington.

Early in his career, Oliver worked for public agencies, including the California Governor’s Office of Planning and Research where he was a principal contributor to An Urban Strategy for California. Prior to relocating to Seattle in 2013, Oliver taught real estate development at Cornell University and directed the undergraduate program in urban and regional studies. He is a member of the Urban Land Institute, the American Planning Association and a founder and emeritus member of the California Planning Roundtable.

Oliver is a graduate of the urban studies and planning program at San Francisco State University and earned a master’s degree in urban planning at UCLA.

https://urbanexus.com
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