Warning

I no longer live there. I believe many of the buildings in the downtown area are not fit for human habitation and should be bulldozed. I have no idea how one might redevelop the town in the face of that significant issue.

That's in the sidebar. Based on writing elsewhere, I likely added that paragraph 20 November 2025, just shy of two months ago.

I no longer believe it's adequate to state that This is not an endorsement of Aberdeen, Washington. This is a SAMPLE SITE and is only intended to serve as a sample of my work. 

I have reason to believe people will gloss over that as legalese or sour grapes because I never got the job they dangled in front of me or otherwise feel that it's not anything important.

The most charitable interpretation I have of the shit that goes on there is "So many of the old buildings are contaminated with mold and god knows what, you can't fix the crazy without bulldozing a bunch of it."

I wrote two pieces about mold and other problems in old buildings on 20 November 2025:


There is a Main Street program there. Their entire premise is redevelopment rooted in historic preservation. They will never recommend environmental clean up as a higher priority than historic preservation. 

I've grown substantially healthier since leaving Aberdeen. I've done so while homeless and sleeping in a tent most of that time.

It may be insufficient to try to remove a few old buildings from the downtown area. It may not be fixable without declaring the downtown a superfund site.

The people I dealt with when I lived there probably won't pursue either path because they both look like they would be the death knell of a town already despised by most people flooring it to get through there on their way elsewhere. 

I wrote Back-End Analysis in June 2023 when I still lived there and it more gently states that mold is a widespread problem and if you want redevelopment, you need to be addressing that.

The problem is even IF you can get fools to rent space in your environmental disaster zone, their businesses won't thrive. If you brought in perfectly healthy employees from elsewhere, they would soon be sick and making mistakes and having accidents, etc. 

Customers passing through are likely to not want to linger. Even without consciously knowing why, people tend to leave places that make them sick.

I don't know what else is happening in Aberdeen beyond widespread mold.

The buildings I lived in contained chemicals that make people sick, plus roaches, bed bugs and I believe have legionella in the hot water heaters. It was NOT being addressed by the owners.

The two buildings aren't fit for habitation. 

And those were OCCUPIED buildings. Many buildings in downtown were EMPTY the entire time I lived there and visibly growing mold on the exterior and gradually crumbling.

Having lived there and dealt for over six years with the insane locals, I don't believe locals will ever do anything about this. 

I suggest you not invest in the town and not move there.

Perhaps someday the state or federal government will step in. I'm not holding my breath.

I assume people reading this will see it as an alarmist overreaction by someone with an ax to grind or otherwise see this as not reliable information. 

I'm a few classes short of a BS in Environmental Resource Management with a Concentration in Housing via an online program offered by CSU-Bakersfield. Please note that the state of California is the birthplace of the national environmental movement in the US and a lot of our federal environmental laws and standards grow out of activities in California. I was pursuing this online degree before online education was cool.

I have a Certificate in Geographic Information Systems from the Summer School bootcamp offered by UC-Riverside, the equivalent of Master's level work from the world's foremost GIS program where some of the instructors work full time at ESRI, maker of the world's foremost GIS software, and moonlight as college professors.

I also have a technical certificate in life and health insurance from Columbus Technical College in Columbus, Georgia, a program my employer put me through so I could do my job. I read medical records all day everyday for 5 years at my job plus some portion of my three months of training. My employer was the Fortune 500 company Aflac. 

But people don't like hearing "This entire TOWN is seriously messed up." Never mind how obviously it's falling apart and not recovering and has been for decades, no, I must have a personal issue.