The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Amazon has made Seattle America’s top company town
Amazon.com’s extraordinary growth has turned Seattle into the biggest company town in America.
Amazon now occupies 19 percent of all prime office space in the city, the most for any employer in a major U.S. city, according to an analysis conducted for The Seattle Times.
Amazon’s presence in Seattle is more than twice as large that of as any other company in any other big U.S. city, and the e-commerce giant’s expansion here is just getting started.
The swarms of young workers crowding into the South Lake Union neighborhood every morning represent an urban campus that is unparalleled in the United States — and they have helped transform Seattle, for better or worse. Amazon’s rapid rise has fueled an economy that has driven up wages and lowered unemployment, but also produced clogged traffic on the roads and sky-high housing prices.
And while Seattle’s booming economy is often attributed to a wide variety of factors, increasingly, it’s all about one company.
Amazon now occupies more office space than the city’s next 40 biggest employers combined.
And that’s only the beginning: Its 8.1 million square feet in Seattle is expected to soar to more than 12 million within five years.
Amazon’s supremacy in e-commerce and cloud computing has translated, locally, into an avalanche of glass, steel, people and money. It’s given Seattle more prominence as a magnet for talent from all over the world, and reshaped formerly forlorn parts of the city into vibrant live-workand-play neighborhoods.
The company’s unparalleled impact in determining Seattle’s fortunes may give some pause to those who experienced the downturn of the 1970s, when the shine of “Jet City” was tarnished as Boeing cut about two-thirds of its huge local workforce.
“Seattle’s been through this before,” said Tracey Seslen, a professor at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business. “If Amazon were to leave, that would create a giant hole in their wake.”
However, unlike Boeing, whose local operations focus on the single business of building airplanes, Amazon runs a vast web of mutually reinforcing but diverse businesses ––selling computing power, retailing nearly everything, publishing books and producing films, among other things.
John Schoettler, Amazon’s director of real estate, says that all he’s experienced in his nearly two decades at Amazon is “steady, continued growth,” the result of the company’s zealous focus on satisfying customers.
The legacy of what so far amounts to $4 billion spent by the company on real estate here will be long-lasting, he said: “These buildings will stand for hundreds of years.”
Amazon’s expansion has led, in the short time since the end of the recession, to a “record level of private investment,” as well as significant levels of public infrastructure investment, according to John Scholes, CEO of the Downtown Seattle Association.
However, Amazon has become the go-to scapegoat for people complaining about Seattle’s problems associated with growth, like housing prices and clogged streets. And while it’s certainly not the only reason Seattle is bursting at the seams, Amazon makes up a disproportionate share of the city’s rapid growth.
Apartment rents this year are 63 percent higher than in 2010, as Seattle has become the fastest-growing city in the country.
Home costs are rising faster here than anywhere else in the nation, and have doubled in the past five years, pushing the middle class to surrounding, less expensive towns.