Photos of early-day downtown Spokane that adorn the walls of the Journal of Business newsroom have a strong allure for me, sometimes making me wish I could step through the frame and spend a day in the bustling young city as it existed back then.

I also sometimes ponder what our community will look and feel like 100 years from now—perhaps seeming as barely recognizable in the 22nd century as it does in the photos from long ago.

Our goal with this special year-end edition of the Journal is to gaze into the crystal ball to see what’s coming in the near future, 10 to 15 years from now—well outside of our typical year-to-year prognosticating, but not so far beyond the horizon as to be irrelevant to our readers.

Eleven business, nonprofit, and community leaders graciously agreed to share their thoughts on how they see those years unfolding within their companies, organizations, and industry sectors. We hope you find their future-gazing informative.

Looking at things from an area-wide perspective, based on nearly 27 years of business reporting at the Journal and 37 years of observing and covering the community as a journalist, here are a few of my own predictions, perhaps a few of them colored by wishful thinking.

Collectively, they represent sort of a moment-in-time snapshot—through my own camera lens, so to speak—of future local history in the making.

• The Inland Northwest population will increase by more than 20 percent by 2030, pushing Spokane County’s population to nearly 600,000 and the combined Spokane County-Kootenai County metropolitan area population to around 780,000. That growth will bring with it a commensurate increase in business activity, employment opportunities, and gross domestic product growth.

Idaho’s Kootenai County will continue to grow at a faster rate than Spokane County, reaching about 35 percent of the cross-border Washington county’s size by 2030.

The city of Spokane’s population growth rate will remain well under half of Spokane County’s growth rate, with the city rising to perhaps around 235,000 residents by 2030. However, a greater portion of the city growth than in past years will occur in the downtown area. 

People in those bookend generations are becoming more interested in living in the city’s core—drawn by its much-expanded dining and entertainment options—than in the suburbs. Their interest will rejuvenate the upper floors of formerly deteriorating downtown structures, gentrifying some blighted downtown pockets.

Overall, though, most of the county’s population growth will occur outside of the city of Spokane, as in-fill development in Spokane Valley, Liberty Lake, and unincorporated areas create a denser urban corridor between Spokane and the Washington-Idaho border.

• Augmenting the momentum in downtown Spokane will be the accelerating development of the big Kendall Yards property just northwest of downtown, with a continuing proliferation of apartment and condo buildings and single-family homes.

A sprinkling of additional mixed-use and professional office buildings also likely will be developed and open by then, along more with restaurants and retail stores, enhancing the urban village vibe that already is emerging there. Future development activity, though, won’t include construction of the large amounts of office space envisioned there before Greenstone Corp. acquired it.

• Some of the most dynamic activity will be occurring near the other end of downtown Spokane, on and near the Washington State University Health Sciences campus.

There, the $15.4 million pedestrian bridge spanning Martin Luther King Jr. Way and the BNSF Railway Co. tracks will be spurring additional new commercial and residential development in the University District and the East Sprague neighborhood.

The rising prominence of the WSU medical school and expansion of the University of Washington School of Medicine-Gonzaga University Regional Health partnership also will be paying dividends by serving as a catalyst for other educational and capital initiatives there.

Redevelopment of the former Jensen-Byrd building and surrounding properties will be completed and creating additional vitality in the U District, although the completed complex might look a bit different than the $45 million, 300,000-square-foot-plus project currently being proposed.

• Fairchild Air Force Base still will be the largest overall employer in the area, actually even expanding its combined military and civilian workforce a bit, thanks to a U.S. Air Force decision to make it one of the home bases for KC-46A Pegasus refueling tankers, which will have begun arriving here in 2020.

 • In Airway Heights, the Spokane Tribe Economic Project, also referred to just as the STEP project, will have become a reality, providing competition to the nearby Kalispel Tribe-operated Northern Quest Resort & Casino.

The tribe has said the mixed-use complex, at full build-out, will include a casino, resort hotel, space, entertainment venues, and other features, potentially within 10 years. However, at least some phases of that ambitious, multiphase $400 million project—dependent on demand—likely won’t have been completed by 2030; nor will the project have shown yet that it can bring 5,000 jobs to the region, as the tribe has claimed.

Nonetheless, the development activity there and the rejuvenated mission at Fairchild will cause Airway Heights population to leap.

• The Washington state Department of Transportation will be wrapping up work on the remaining portion of the North Spokane Corridor from Francis Avenue to Interstate 90 at a cost of about $750 million. At long last, after decades of discussion and planning, traffic will be starting to flow along the entire 10.5-mile route.

• In Spokane Valley, a recognizable city center will have started to form around the three-story, 50,000-square-foot City Hall complex developed at the southeast corner of Sprague Avenue and Dartmouth Road, on a portion of the former University City mall site.

• In perhaps one of the most significant, yet relatively unheralded changes, a rise in family-wage jobs here—due partly to a steady gain in well-paying health care and expanding aerospace-related positions—will have per-capita income trending upward. After decades of hovering at 82 to 87 percent of the U.S. average, it finally will be within sight of matching, and perhaps surpassing, that benchmark.