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Stay & Build Bellingham
A small story about leaving, staying, and choosing a place.
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Welcome to the first edition of Stay & Build Saturdays.
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This started as a private scribble in the middle of a very public life change: we decided to move to Washington from the Midwest, and I kept hearing versions of the same sentence from smart, tired people: “I’m thinking about leaving.”
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Sometimes they meant a relationship. Sometimes a job. Sometimes a town. Sometimes even an entire region, or a country. And look, I get it. There are moments when leaving is the right call. Leaving can be brave. Leaving can be the thing that saves you.
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For me, moving to Washington mostly wasn’t an escape plan. It was a choice toward a place I’ve loved for a long time. But I also won’t pretend there was zero push. Over the last few years, the culture and the tone around everyday life in Missouri started to feel more heated and more divided than what I wanted as “home.” That wasn’t the whole story, but it nudged the decision along.
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And almost immediately, I noticed a particular kind of fragility in the city where I landed. People love it here, and yet I kept hearing about the loss of Canadian visitors hitting the local economy. I kept hearing about kids who come here for school because they love the area, then feel forced to leave after graduation because they can’t afford to stay.
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That’s the tension I can’t stop thinking about.
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Where this comes from for me
Part of this is personal, not theoretical.
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I come from farmers. Not the romanticized version. The practical version. The work-before-you’re-ready version. The weather-is-your-boss version. The “you can do everything right and still lose” version. The kind where your mom was born on the same farm your grandmother was born on, in the house built by your second great-uncle when his sister and her husband needed a place to live.
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And almost all of them got out of farming.
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Not because they didn’t love the land. Because the math changed.
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Costs went up, margins got tighter, and it became harder and harder to make a stable living that way. So the path to stability ran through the “big city,” or at least through the next-closest place with real jobs.
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So when I hear people talk about leaving their communities now, I hear an echo of that older story: not just individual choice, but a system quietly removing options until leaving feels inevitable.
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That’s what pushed me to name what I’m seeing.
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What I mean by “Stay & Build”
When I say “Stay & Build,” I’m not pitching a brand. I’m naming a choice.
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When a lot of people hear the word build, the loudest story in our culture is the Silicon Valley one: build fast, scale fast, cash out. Grow until you can exit. Treat place as optional. Treat community as something you reference in a mission statement, right up until it slows you down.
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That’s not what I’m fighting for.
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Stay & Build is about roots, not runway. It’s about building a life and a livelihood in a real place, with real constraints, and still finding ways to make it work. It’s about businesses that don’t need to “win the internet” to matter, because they matter to you, your family, and the people who live nearby. It’s about keeping more value circulating locally and building community, instead of watching most of it get extracted and shipped somewhere else.
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And it’s also about what happens when “everyone’s leaving” becomes the default story.
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Sometimes leaving is absolutely the right move. I’m not here to shame anyone for that. But I am here to name the pattern I keep seeing: when enough people leave, the people who remain inherit the consequences. Fewer services. Fewer locally owned businesses. Fewer options for the next kid who wants to stay.
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So this is my bet: small, sane choices add up. Who we buy from. Who we hire. Who we mentor. What we build, and what we refuse to optimize for.
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And I’ll be clear about something: I’m not anti-growth, and I’m not a “buy 100% local” person. There’s a place for micro-businesses through corporations, brick-and-mortar and online, local and global. This is not about purity.
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It’s about noticing where our money, attention, and talent go, and choosing, when we can, to keep a little more of it circulating right here.
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Stay & Build isn’t nostalgia. It’s strategy.
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Why Washington sharpened this for me
Moving to WA didn’t create this idea, but it put it in high contrast.
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When you land in a place with stunning natural beauty, you expect optimism to be effortless. Instead, I found something more complicated. I met a lot of people with ideas and drive, and I also met the friction that gets in the way. You can feel the desire to build. You can also feel how hard it is to turn that into something sustainable.
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And underneath it all, I found a lot of people doing mental math: cost of living, healthcare, kids, climate risk, politics, burnout, meaning.
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In other words, the real stuff.
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And that’s when I realized: “Stay & Build” isn’t a slogan. It’s a question.
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What would make a good person stay?
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What would make it possible for them to build?
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What would make it feel worth it?
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What you can expect from this newsletter
This newsletter is going to be part story, part sensemaking, part practical experimentation.
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Some weeks will be personal. Some weeks will be local. Some weeks will be about small businesses and economic resilience. Some weeks will be about the invisible forces that make people feel like leaving is the only intelligent move.
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But every week, I want it to point toward agency.
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Toward the small, sane actions that create traction.
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One more thing: if you reply to this email, I read every single reply. I’m not running comments on the website, so email is the conversation space for now. When you share what you’re seeing, what you’re wrestling with, or what you think I’m missing, it genuinely shapes my thinking and what I write next.
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One ask for you
If you reply, reply with a sentence or two:
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What would make you stay and build, where you are?
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Or if you’ve already left, what do you wish had been different?
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I’m collecting patterns, not hot takes. And if this becomes anything more than a newsletter, it’ll be because a bunch of us compared notes honestly and built from there.
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P.S. If someone forwarded this to you and you want future editions, you can subscribe on the Cascadia Connections site (I’ll keep it low-noise and human).
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