Drive past the corner of MLK Jr. Way and Division Avenue in Tacoma right now and you will see the most expensive bet Pierce County’s health systems have ever placed on their own future: a six-story, 250,000-square-foot children’s hospital that did not exist in that form a year ago. It is a remarkable thing to watch a region build. The harder question — the one that will actually decide whether…

Pierce Transit’s Stream Community Line Reaches Downtown Tacoma: The Bus Bet Replacing the BRT That Got Away For most of the last decade, the big transit story in Pierce County was supposed to be steel: light rail creeping south, a Bus Rapid Transit corridor with its own dedicated lanes muscling up Pacific Avenue. The reality landing in Tacoma in 2026 is quieter, cheaper, and arguably more useful…

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Tacoma’s Quiet Talent Engine: How Bates, Clover Park, PLU, and UW Tacoma Are Building Pierce County’s 2026 Workforce If you run a manufacturing shop in Frederickson, a clinic on the Hilltop, or a logistics operation near the Port, you already know the hardest part of growing in Pierce County isn’t demand — it’s people. The good news, and it doesn’t get nearly enough ink, is that Tacoma sits on…

If you just got orders to Joint Base Lewis-McChord, you are joining one of the largest military communities in the country — roughly 40,000 active-duty service members spread across more than 90,000 acres straddling Pierce and Thurston counties. That scale is good news and bad news. The good news is that JBLM and the surrounding Pierce County area have built a deep bench of services for…

Pierce County’s biggest employer does not advertise on Indeed. It wears a uniform. Joint Base Lewis-McChord contributes more than $12.1 billion to the regional economy , according to a University of Washington Tacoma Milgard School of Business Center for Business Analytics study, and it is the largest single employer in the county by a wide margin. But the number that should matter most to local…

Ask ten Tacomans where to eat and you will get ten different answers, all of them a little defensive. That is the sign of a healthy food town. Tacoma in 2026 is not Seattle’s quieter neighbor anymore; it is a city with its own steakhouse rooms worth dressing up for, wood-fired kitchens packed on a Tuesday, a waterfront that finally eats as good as it looks, and a fresh crop of openings that…

Platform-Specific AI Optimization (PSAO) is the practice of tailoring content strategy to the distinct user personas, retrieval mechanisms, and citation patterns of each individual AI search platform. It replaces the outdated approach of “optimizing for AI” as though AI were a single channel with a single audience. This article defines PSAO, maps the six major platforms, profiles their user…