Amazon vs. Seattle
FOR decades, Seattle was a city that worked. People could travel across town without having an anxiety attack. They could park near a destination. Not so much anymore. The tech and web industry expansion has clogged roadways, changing the way the place functions. Or doesn’t.
It is Amazon that is often singled out for Seattleites’ wrath. If you ask who has the better deal in the uneasy relationship between the e-commerce giant and “superstar city,” the company holds the larger end of the stick.
Long standoffish, Amazon is trying to change its image with worthwhile and sizable efforts.
Just this week, it announced plans to permanently house more than 200 homeless people in one of its new buildings, probably the company’s most enduring gift yet to the city. Amazon earlier lent an old hotel scheduled for future development to the same nonprofit group that serves homeless women, children and families.
The company has also announced it will provide space and equipment for five restaurants catering to employees and the public, to be managed by a nonprofit called FareStart. The goal is to train entry-level food-service
workers so they can land higher-paying jobs.
But “realistically, this will probably help a few dozen people in a nation where we have millions living in poverty,” said Jacob Vigdor, a professor of public policy and governance at the University of Washington.
Amazon is Seattle’s largest property taxpayer and private employer, and it pays its employees here pretty well. The accompanying construction boom and hiring spree have boosted the broader vibrant economy, which has seen 99,000 new jobs added in the last seven years. Thirty percent of them are in tech.
On the other side of the ledger, the runaway growth has made the place less affordable for longtime residents and compounded the income divide. At the same time, Amazon and its top employees benefit from a favorable tax climate. Neither the state nor the city has an income tax, though a few mayoral candidates and the city council would like to change that.
Longtime residents, meanwhile, feel they have paid for infrastructure that Amazon is capitalizing on. Historian Knute Berger, for one, feels that Amazon bears a big responsibility for much of the rapid change, even if he doesn’t blame the company for all the ill effects.
“I think Amazon gets the best part of the deal,” Berger said. “I lived here before Amazon. It was a great city. Now I think it is a city with big problems.”