Ask Seattle if Amazon brought in 50,000 workers
SEATTLE: Amazon has driven an economic boom in Seattle, bestowing more than 40,000 jobs upon a city known for Starbucks coffee and Seahawks fandom. Its growth remade a neglected industrial swath north of downtown into a hub of young workers and fixed the region, along with Microsoft before it, as a premier locale for the Internet economy outside of Silicon Valley.
Seattle is the fastest- growing big city in America, a company town with construction cranes busily erecting new apartments for newly arriving tech workers. Google and Facebook have joined Amazon in locating large offices here.
When Amazon made a surprise announcement last month that it planned to open a second headquarters with even more jobs, it set off an unprecedented race among cities to lure the tech giant their way. Amazon said it ultimately will need eight million square feet in a second region, making it the biggest economic development target experts can remember.
But as Seattleites will say, keeping up with the Internet juggernaut has not always been easy, providing a word of caution for officials from other cities willing to pursue the company at great expense.
Over the past decade, Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, added new products and business units at a breakneck speed and expected public partners to keep pace.
In Seattle that meant rehabbing an area of more than 350 acres at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars in ongoing transportation and infrastructure upgrades, expanding public transit, road networks, parks and utilities.
It also put new strains on housing. Seattle is one of the most expensive places in the United States to live, forcing lower-income residents to move to far- off suburbs and prompting the city and surrounding King County to declare a state of emergency in 2015 over homelessness.
Since then, the problem has worsened. Rents in King County have more than doubled in the past 20 years, and gone up 65 per cent since 2009. Seattle spends more than US$ 60 million ( RM270 million) annually to battle homelessness, up from US$ 39 million four years ago.
“We started seeing apartment listings that would say ‘No deposit needed and priority for Amazon, Microsoft and Google employees,’ “said Rachael Myers, executive director of the Washington Low Income Housing Alliance, a Seattlebased advocacy group. She said the area was “in the midst of the greatest affordable housing and homelessness crisis that our state has ever seen.”
How much of Seattle’s evolution is attributable to Amazon is a matter of debate. In the past decade, millennial workers have poured into other big cities - Washington, San Francisco, Boston - exacerbating housing costs and homelessness there.
But few buildups are so linked to the prospects of one company. Amazon has contributed US$ 30 billion to the local economy, and as much as US$ 55 billion more in spinoff benefits. Unemployment in the Seattle area is 3.7 per cent, below the national rate of 4.4 per cent.
Much of that progress is the result of Amazon’s decision to locate its first headquarters downtown a decade ago. John Schoettler, who oversees real estate for the online giant, thought it simplest and least expensive to plan a sub-urban headquarters campus east of Lake Washington, in Bellevue, Washing, near where Microsoft was located.
Bezos had a different idea. He wanted to stay in Seattle.
“Jeff said the type of employees we want to hire and retain will want to live in an urban environment. They are going to want to work, live and play in the urban core,” Schoettler said.
The decision helped usher in a new era, one in which top employers abandon suburban office parks for lively, urban neighbourhoods integrated into the cities around them. Only seven Fortune 500 companies had research or engineering hubs in Seattle in 2010; now 31 do.
“Their growth has just been so positive to lots of other companies, big and small and medium and in between,” said Jon Scholes, president and chief executive of the Downtown Seattle Association, where Schoettler is a board member.
It’s a boom that has shown little sign of slowing. Seattle added 57 additional people a day for a year through the summer of 2016, according to census data. How best to accommodate that growth provokes regular debate in Seattle, and could well shape whatever city Amazon comes to next.
Such details discussion as spark mayors little and governors from coast to coast have embarked upon a sweepstakes fit for a reality show, touting their cities in online videos and dangling taxpayer-funded subsidies of as much as US$ 7 billion even if their jurisdictions don’t have the workforce or transportation network Amazon said it requires.
The company has set Oct 19 as the deadline to receive proposals.
Tucson officials, with an airport one-tenth as busy as Seattle’s, mailed the company a 21-foot cactus to get its attention.
Stonecrest, Georgia, with a total population barely larger than Amazon’s Seattle workforce, offered to de- annex 345 acres of its land and rename it the “City of Amazon.” — WPBloomberg