Newcastle is a small suburb near Seattle, WA which voted 70% for Biden and Harris in the past two elections. In the previous article, I mentioned how “Newcastle First!” city council candidate Sarah Goodman donated to Donated Trump’s WinRed platform in 2024, but I neglected to look into who she receieved money from for her campaign. That was a mistake.
In addition to recieving $250 from creationist evangelical Steve Buri, Sarah Goodman’s single biggest donation comes from Kemper Holdings LLC run by Kemper Freeman, for the maximum legal amount of $1200. Kemper Freeman owns most of downtown Bellevue, with buildings estimated to be worth over $2 billion way back in 2016. Here is how they describe themselves:
Kemper Development Company is a fourth-generation, family-owned company whose growth has mirrored the astounding boom of the Eastside of Puget Sound.
Meanwhile, here is an excerpt from Sarah Goodman’s website:
“Newcastle is experiencing tremendous expansion and current residents are in the eye of the storm… I will preserve Newcastle’s small-town quality of life, maintaining our beautiful open spaces and quiet neighborhoods and keep it from becoming another Seattle.”
At first glance, these two positions seem diametrically opposed to each other. Kemper Freeman takes pride in Bellevue’s expansion, and yet they’re bankrolling a woman who advocates the total opposite. What do they have in common?
No real economic interest in Newcastle
The Kemper donation stands out because it was the only one that came from a business and not an individual, but there doesn’t seem to be any real business justification for it. They have no plans to develop in Newcastle, or anywhere else outside of Bellevue. Lincoln Square luxury apartments charges $13,000 for a 2-bedroom unit and doesn’t even list the price of a 3-bedroom unit, so I doubt they’re concerned with killing the competition.
Since Kemper Development is privately owned, they don’t have a fiduciary duty to shareholders to maximize profits, and they don’t need to explain his decisions. There’s no way to know for sure what Kemper Freeman is thinking, but we can try to guess based on his other campaigns in the past.
Elitism over greed
Just like the white farmers and the truckers who voted for Trump, Kemper Freeman is willing to campaign against his own financial self-interest for the sake of ideology. Unlike the farmers and the truckers, Kemper Freeman actually understands the consequences of his actions, but he’s wealthy enough not to care. He’s already won the game of capitalism, and he doesn’t need to run the scoreboard.
To really understand the type of man Kemper Freeman is, I highly recommend watching this video from Yet Another Urbanist outlining his war on public transit, a position which has been heavily criticized by the rest of the business community:
Kemper Freeman has spent millions of dollars over the past 30 years to campaign against it, because he doesn’t want light rail anywhere near his properties. This is in stark contrast to the rest of the business community.
Back in the 1990s, the co-chairman of Ben Bridge Jewelers once complained that Kemper Freeman “has an elitist attitude and doesn’t want poor people in his mall.” Public transit will bring in more customers, but Kemper Freeman views them as the “wrong” customers, and Kemper Freeman prefers quality over quantity. He complains that the Southcenter mall 30 minutes away is full of unsophicated people with the wrong type of shoes and the wrong color hair, and he doesn’t want that to happen to Bellevue. He has produced propaganda videos arguing that cars are a symbol of American freedom and exceptionalism, and has even argued that dependence on public transportion is the reason socialist nations fail. His anti-transit agenda aligns perfectly with the small-town suburban candidates who advocate for increased car dependence.
Keep in mind that Kemper Freeman’s definition of “poor people” is unlikely to match your own definition of “poor people,” like the infamous WSJ infographic depicting struggling families earning only $650,000. Poor people aren’t exactly buying goods from Ben Bridge, but Kemper Freeman will still look down on them if they rely on public transportation. He sees a clear distinction between the upper-upper class and the lower-upper class.
Keeping Newcastle small as a form of border control
Kemper’s grandfather Miller Freeman was the secretary of the veterans commission, and was highly influential in advocating for the Internment and forced deportation of the Japanese population. There was no I-90 bridge connecting Bellevue to Seattle back then, so Bellevue was a distant town for Japanese strawberry farmers. Miller Freeman sought to change that, and WWII provided the opportunity.
After internment and relocation, Japanese farmland was purchased and re-purposed by white owners, which eventually became the home of Kemper Freeman’s Bellevue Collection. Following the construction of the I-90 bridge, Bellevue went from being the most distant neighbor on the Eastside to the closest, and the economy boomed.
My article cannot do justice to the amount of injustice that the Freeman family has done to the Japanese population, as well as their later campaign to white wash the history books so the people of Bellevue never learn about it. Joseph Shoji Lachman of the International Examiner writes:
He and other white men were jealous of Nikkei agricultural success, and he saw a way to turn anti-immigrant bigotry into wealth that has lasted for generations. Kemper Freeman Jr., his grandson, donated $100,000 to the campaign for Trump, whose campaign surrogate referenced our incarceration as a ‘precedent’, and who now uses his administration’s power to oppress and exploit immigrant and minority communities.
Hence, Kemper’s desire to keep Newcastle small can simply be viewed as another form of border control, but at the Bellevue level. He wants to fund candidates who will block affordable housing, because he doesn’t want “poor people” at the Southern border of Bellevue, nor does he want to give metro a reason to offer additional bus routes connecting the city.
Why is this important?
Kemper Freeman’s maximum donation to Sarah Goodman doesn’t reveal any sort of secretive plan, but it does highlight their shared values of exclusion and gatekeeping. Kemper Freeman doesn’t care if his opposition to mass transits hurts his businesses, and the “Newcastle First” don’t care if their opposition to affordable housing hurts the city. The only thing they care about is keeping out the “wrong” people, where even the lower-upper class are considered “poor.”
But there’s one important difference: Kemper Freeman still believes in the advantages of high density development, which has been immensely profitable. As such, he’s both willing and able to pay the cost of exclusion, even if it means putting his personal finances at stake.
By contrast, “Newcastle First” advocate for inefficient low-density housing development to support their expensive lawn fetish. They are neither willing nor able to pay for the exclusion they want, but that doesn’t matter to them, because the city is on the hook for their failures. They aren’t putting any of their own money at stake, and the most likely outcome is they beg the neighboring cities who they despise to bail them out.
The “Newcastle First!” candidates running on a MAGA platform are Sarah Goodman, Kevin Kirkaldie, Maggie Lo, and Jim Quigg. Their opponents are four sane candidates endorsed by the democratic party: Andy Jacobs, Chris Villasenor, Paul Charbonneau, and Karin Blakley. We have an upcoming election in November, and if you don’t support MAGA, then I strongly recommend you support the second group and spread the word if you know anyone who lives in the greater Seattle area.
