To some, a symbol of disparity
Amazon’s homeless shelter faces crisis, criticism in Seattle
SEATTLE — A homeless shelter built on Amazon’s perfectly manicured urban Seattle campus is a major civic contribution that pushes the company to face the crisis and criticism in the hometown it has rapidly transformed.
Believed to be the first homeless shelter built inside a corporate office building, Amazon’s partnership housing a local nonprofit could be seen as the company’s answer to criticism that it hasn’t given back enough to the city.
But as Mary’s Place settles into its new space after opening in March, the spotlight turns to the family homeless shelter as a symbol of the longstanding disparity that advocates insist large corporations help address. For Amazon, it’s a stark display of have and have-nots, given that some blame the tech giant’s growth over the past decade for making living in Seattle too costly for a growing number of people.
When Amazon’s offices reopen postpandemic, the tens of thousands of highman paid tech workers who helped drive up housing costs in the region will now share its pricey downtown neighborhood with vulnerable families who can’t afford any place to live.
Amazon estimates the new Mary’s Place building and ongoing utilities and maintenance will amount to a $100 million commitment to the homeless shelter program. It’s among the largest homeless shelters in the state and the company’s single largest charitable contribution to its hometown.
The company has promised to host the shelter in the gleaming eight-story facility for as long as it’s needed.
Mary’s Place offers private rooms and is expected to house 1,000 people a year, while the other end is dedicated to Amazon’s cloud computing unit. The shelter shares the “Amazonia” aesthetic throughout: exposed pipes, even signs inscribed in the tech giant’s signature office font.
Still, the shelter doesn’t erase the history of resentment over the wealth of Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, and its workers, which peaked after the company and other corporations successfully pressured the Seattle City Council to rescind a tax on large companies that would have funded homelessness services in 2018.
Months later, Bezos, the world’s richest whose stake in the company he founded is now worth more than $160 billion, announced his long-awaited private charitable fund would tackle homelessness — an irony noted by locals and philanthropy scholars alike.
To date, the Bezos Day One Fund has given $196 million in grants to organizations working on family homelessness issues across the country. He is also creating free preschools, though little else is known about the organization since Bezos first announced the $2 billion private philanthropy fund in 2018. An Amazon representative declined to comment on Bezos’ behalf.
Sara Rankin, a homeless rights advocate and lawyer who leads the Seattle-based Homeless Rights Advocacy Project, said Mary’s Place is a safe investment for Amazon because the nonprofit caters to the most sympathetic kind of homelessness. But Rankin said the shelter ultimately does not address the epicenter of the city’s homelessness crisis.
Amazon’s decision to take in Mary’s Place, which has multiple locations around the region, Rankin said, means the company is largely ignoring the chronically homeless who are often suffering from mental health or addiction issues, who are the most expensive and controversial demographic to address.