A WARNING FROM SEATTLE
What New York must learn now from Amazon’s hometown
SEATTLE - In January of 2010, I walked from my studio apartment — which was admittedly awful, but affordable at $710 per month — to a boxy event space in South Lake Union, a neighborhood adjacent to downtown Seattle. It was cold, dark and misty but, in spite of the weather, I was greeted with a line that snaked around the corner.
It was a job fair for the Hard Rock Cafe, slated to open later that year. The restaurant chain was promising 140 jobs for local residents; that night, at least 100 people stood clutching resumes, waiting to get inside and interview. The job fair was a week long and drew a crowd every single day.
Times were hard in Seattle in 2010. The city had been hit hard by the recession — a hangover from the early 2000s’ dot-com bubble bursting wouldn’t subside, leaving construction projects unfinished and a lot of people out of work. That year, in spite of years of restaurant experience, I could barely get a job cocktailing because, one manager told me, there were just too many people who were applying.
In all of Seattle’s history, it’s been a city of industry, defined by what we export. From timber to airplanes (Boeing) to grunge (Nirvana) to coffee (Starbucks) to software (Microsoft), we have been shaped by what we make. And in the downturns, we’ve been shaped by what we aren’t making. No local can forget the billboard asking that the last person in Seattle please turn out the lights. Which is why it’s not surprising that, when things picked up later that year — thanks in large part to Amazon’s expansion and investment in the city — everyone was excited. There would be even more jobs coming, more industry, and something new that we could make and do and be proud of. But it all happened too fast, and without enough warning. Though Amazon seemed like a welcome new addition to a city in a hard time, the city of Seattle was unprepared for the sudden influx of new residents that it brought — and slow to react when the reality became apparent. The East Coast cities chosen to split the 50,000 jobs as part of the mega-corporation’s second headquarters, though, have the benefit of learning from our mistakes — and I think they should. Here is how Seattle has changed since 2010. Here is how we could have prevented some of the worst of it. That apartment that I lived in costs nearly twice what it did eight years ago. Rental increases like that directly correlate to increases in homelessness — Seattle’s homeless population grew by an estimated 40% between 2015 and 2017— which directly translate to more taxpayer money going to fund services. In 2017, the City of Seattle spent more than $71 million on homelessness services. In 2018, that increased to $77 million.
Not all of this is Amazon’s doing; some of it was simply poor planning. Growth projections from the City of Seattle in 2005 estimated that by 2024, the city would grow by 47,000 households. Yet, not nearly enough housing was being added, even for such a modest model — between 2005 and 2013, only 35,000 new housing units were built.
Then again, much of it can be pegged to Amazon’s rapid growth; between 2010 and 2017, Amazon hired about 35,000 people, many of whom were not from Seattle to begin with.
Therein lies the first significant lesson: Assume that Amazon will, like a gas, fill whatever space is available. Public and affordable housing are and have always been a thorny subject for municipalities, requiring ever more capital — but it’s a worthwhile investment to continue to find ways to make space. Amazon employees will need somewhere to live — and if the city doesn’t make a concerted effort to ensure the growth is equitable, the displacement of 1,000 public-school employees who oversee student transportation services will be just the beginning.
Seattle noticed too late that zoning had concentrated all of the local growth into just a few areas, putting excessive pressure on neighborhoods that had once been quaint and quiet. This has created upset and ire; in the last five years, the sense of rage about a changing city has bubbled up from neighborhoods like Ballard while the City Council scrambles to find ways that spread the growth around.
This summer at a community meeting, I witnessed grown adults — homeowners from North Seattle — screaming “listen to us! You never listen to us!” at public employees. These individuals, who were all white and mostly Baby Boomers, were furious and terrified. Their neighborhood was changing as new townhouses replaced craftsman-style buildings, the byproduct of their neighbors selling their land to developers from a cool seven figures.
It was a confusing environment and it was frightening to behold; they had no solution other than “stop the growth” and wouldn’t stop yelling long enough to hear what else might be proposed. All I could think was “it’s too late. We waited to long to fix it and now everyone is angry.”
This is back-filling — it’s something we probably should have handled before we were building out from under the changes. Consider that to be another lesson: Fix your problems before you get new ones.
If you’re unsure of how to pay for all of this, consider asking Amazon to chip in some; in Long Island City, Amazon will be contributing substantially, through income taxes and the investments laid out in the agreement between the City and the company. However, they’ll also be getting sizeable tax breaks to the tune of several billion. Is it a fair deal, and will it pan out? Now is the time to do the math.
Failing to collect from the success of the business has been a fatal flaw in Washington, where Amazon pays zero income tax and about $250 million in annual state and local taxes — of which
Seattle sees an undisclosed amount— leaving local taxpayers on the hook for much of the necessary new spending. And attempts to recoup some of the costs have been met with impossible opposition; earlier this year, the company aggressively opposed a proposed employee hours tax, which would have raised another $75 million for homelessness in Seattle (enough to cover much of the increase in service costs created by Amazon).
But perhaps one of the biggest errors that Seattle made when planning around Amazon was assuming that the private sector would figure itself out — that somehow there would just be enough housing for everyone, even those who don't work at Amazon. Instead, the private sector has done what the private sector always does and followed the money.
A 2015 investigation in Seattle found that many landlords were giving special discounts to Amazon employees to woo higher-paid individuals into their units, exacerbating the crisis of rent inflation. Meanwhile, Quicken Loans proudly offers special rates to Amazon employees looking to buy a home.
This is the next big lesson: Though Amazon brings with it the promise of jobs, those jobs are not necessarily going to go to people who already live in your city, and they are not necessarily equitable in their hiring.
Sure, coffee shops and restaurants in Long Island City and elsewhere will need to increase their staff, but those high-paying positions — the ones that bring people with a stack of cash from a $5,000 relocation bonus and all but ensure displacement of lower-income folks — are going to mean new people. And with a management team that's 74% male and 63% white, according to Amazon's own diversity reports, expecting Amazon to address existing inequities in your city is a pipe dream.
Though Amazon has promised, in its agreement with Long Island City, to invest in job fairs and workforce development, the company cannot be the sole proprietor of these decisions; local government has to get involved to hold the organization accountable.
Instead of offering tax breaks to the company just for doing business and accepting fairly vague promises about diversity and “community engagement,” which is the model being pursued by New York City and State, try to lock in real promises for diverse, local hiring. Similarly, this would be a good time to use the new revenue from Amazon to investment in community colleges, which can help workers acquire the kinds of skills that the company looks for in its new employees.
Regardless of how many people move to your city to take a job at Amazon, expect the increase to be palpable. Seattle, a city which already struggled with traffic due to the constraints of water, hills and a failure to invest in rail transit when we had the chance, has become so gridlocked in the last five years that getting across town requires an hour, at least.
Amazon workers are multimodal; the company pays to ship its employees' cars to their new locations and encourages them to take transit by subsidizing bus passes. Amazon also directly invested a very modest amount in expanded bus service. Additionally, many use ridesharing apps, which have increased wear and tear on the roads, as well as added to frustration for other motorists.
The result of all of this is more crowded streets, more crowded buses and more difficulty navigating a city that was never meant for this volume of road traffic. Coupled with the nearconstant construction, often leading to road closures, and getting around the area has become extremely difficult.
I know New York City is not Seattle; its transit infrastructure is literal centuries ahead of ours. I also know, though, that the MTA is struggling, that public housing is already a quagmire, that affordability is massive question mark — and that Amazon will pose serious challenges to all of them. Start planning now.
That is ultimately the lesson: Learn from our mistakes. Start. Now.
It's an unfortunate reality that predicting the future is hard to do in the face of unprecedented investment and growth by a behemoth corporation the likes of which the world has never seen. Amazon caught Seattle by surprise and, while the promise of jobs was clearly necessary, the reality did not pan out as the city had hoped.
What is left is an untenable real estate market, a record number of individuals being traumatized by life on the streets, and jobs which, for many, don't pay enough to rent a place.
For other regions to fail to look at what Seattle did and, most importantly, didn't do, would be a mistake. Because you don't need to read tea leaves to learn how Amazon will impact your town. You just need to look at what a company of that size and scope has meant to a small city in the Northwest.