11 ms·

Amazon is about to host a homeless shelter in its Seattle headquarters

91 points by prostoalex 7y ago

atlasunshrugged 7y ago
I think this is a great move, I'm currently visiting my folks in Nevada and my mother works for the State often dealing with Mentally Ill people who also often become homeless. She was driving me around town showing me what was new after the few years I've been gone and she took me to the main shelter for homeless people. I'm used to seeing homeless on the street after living in SF but it was a good reminder of how many people have to live - and not just junkies or the usual stereotypes but lots of people who run into hard times, lose their homes and have to live in their car and then lose that and so many other ways people end up on the streets in America. I think a homeless shelter in the campus of Amazon's HQ will probably serve as a grounding experience like mine for others too and hopefully spur a little additional compassion and understanding
- number6 7y ago
  I heared this would be shelters for homeless amazon workers. But this sounded a bit wild and dystopian for me.
  - atlasunshrugged 7y ago
    I didn't see that in the article, that would be pretty wild
  - starpilot 7y ago
    I think it'd be called corporate housing in that case.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    Heck they're being sheltered right there already, might as well help with shipping some packages while they're at it. /s
    - tibbydudeza 7y ago
      And ideal Amazon Flex recruiting pool.
- greendude29 7y ago
  I think this is a terrible move. Shelters are NOT a solution to homelessness. This move will give Amazon false bragging rights to say, hey look, our operational style, not paying taxes, and lobbying for a society that punishes the poor more than the rich aren't really that bad because we're helping the homeless. Even if Amazon is able to put every homeless person in the United States in a shelter (they certainly can afford it), that would not be a good thing. That is validating a bifurcated system where we become content with the living conditions of the poor while excusing those who create the system that creates those conditions in the first place (Amazon in this case)
  - ryanlol 7y ago
    >not paying taxes How much taxes should Amazon be paying in your opinion?
    - monoideism 7y ago
      Vastly, vastly more than zero, which is what they have paid the past few years.
      - sieabahlpark 7y ago
        If you actually looked up what they did instead is reinvest to grow the company you'd understand that the taxable income is where that "missing" money is. Stop parroting around uninformed talking points as if they're cut and dry truth. Do you want to punish companies for providing jobs to more people in the area instead?
      - sneak 7y ago
        Amazon pays absolutely mind-bogglingly immense amounts of payroll taxes. To claim that Amazon pays no tax is more than a little bit incorrect. The people they employ pay income taxes, as well, which come out of Amazon’s revenue ultimately. There are many reasons to hate them. Their complying with the tax laws as they are currently written is not one of them.
RandomGuyDTB 7y ago
"It's not one entity that's going to solve this," [Hartman] said. "It's not on corporations. It's not on congregations. It's not on government. It's not on foundations. It's all of us working together." While the system (created by governments and corporations) rewards providing housing priced at however much people will pay we won't see much affordable housing. Real estate laws do not reward and have not ever rewarded "working together". If Seattle funneled the money going towards anti-homeless structures to building municipal housing instead this "homeless crisis" would be resolved quickly. It wouldn't fix everything and it'd be just as hard for someone who's both unemployed and homeless to get back on their feet but it would make it easier for them to stay on their feet.
- atlasunshrugged 7y ago
  But I think the sentiment is probably correct - it seems unlikely that one party could solve the problem unilaterally. It's likely going to take many people coming together and pushing an agenda to produce an outcome that resolves or partially resolves the issues. Of course the problem here is that opposition parties (NIMBYists, corporates, etc.) are usually better organized with deeper pockets than associations and groups advocating for homeless rights, whose members are usually pretty disenfranchised, not organized, and without much money to advocate for their positions.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  > While the system (created by governments and corporations) rewards providing housing priced at however much people will pay But that's not the system! The 2019 system is that building housing is illegal without very costly and hard to get permits in most non Texas big cities. If you could just put up housing on land you own and charge however much people will pay for it, this housing crisis would quickly be gone! You can help: https://yimbyaction.org/give/ https://yimbyaction.org/give/
  - tim333 7y ago
    For that to go through politically you'd probably need support from the existing NIMBY house owners. This could be possible if they allowed fairly free construction in some non central area in return for some vagrancy laws so the homeless were kind of made to go there rather than pooping on the streets where the NIMBYs are. Both groups could win that way.
jorblumesea 7y ago
> 'it's not on corporations' to solve the homelessness problem Sure, but corporations (and those who lead them) also lobby local, state and federal governments for policies that benefit them. They pay for campaigns of those who would help them out, and sway local and national politics. Sometimes to no harm, sometimes to immense societal detriment. This last election in Seattle, Amazon funneled $1.5 million to a political action committee that backed candidates seen as business friendly. This ended up backfiring, but it's plainly obvious that entrenched business interests are there and do manipulate their environment. Is it that crazy to posit that local property companies are attempting to manipulate their regulatory environment in their favor? Seems just as irresponsible to label them as blameless as it is to declare that they are entirely the problem.
GoodJokes 7y ago
Or they could you know not blackmail the city into not raising its taxes. This is hugely cynical PR move on its part. Everyone know any one of the top 5 could solve homelessness in their cities if they actually cared about it. Arguing differently is just being needlessly Naive. Yes, we are all literally working nihilistic inhumane entities.
int_19h 7y ago
Amazon got a tax refund of $129 million this past year from the feds alone. How many shelters could be operated for a year with that kind of budget?
- ars 7y ago
  A tax refund just means they overpaid estimated taxes. It's not "found money".
- c3534l 7y ago
  You're confusing "tax refund" with "tax rebate." Also, Amazon had carryforward losses, so they paid too much in taxes in prior years and therefor didn't have to pay taxes this year. Not exactly nefarious, carryforward losses are an intentional part of the tax code that prevents companies from paying more in supposed earnings they have on paper that can never be realized as profit because taxes are based on estimates. Every business, not just Amazon, get carryforward losses when they overpay in taxes. Edit: I suppose it's equivalent to say it prevents them from overpaying in taxes in the future. That might be easier to understand if you consider that in any given year, a company pays zero in taxes if they don't make money, regardless of how much money they lose. That timing difference means that the tax burden changes from year to year as investments in a company are realized through buying and selling goods. It's a smoothing out of taxes. Instead of forcing Amazon to structure it's business to always make the same profit each year, they get to smooth it out over a maximum of a 10 year rolling window. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_operating_loss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_operating_loss
  - clairity 7y ago
    that's a vigorous defense of time-shifting gains and losses for businesses. now how about individual taxpayers?
  - int_19h 7y ago
    Yes, you're right, and I got the word wrong - it is a tax rebate. The point remains that Amazon paid $0 in taxes past year, and actually received money from the federal government instead. And no, it's not just because of carryforward losses. It was also because of the various tax credits, and changes to tax laws in 2017.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
strickman 7y ago
Not a good move. If you reward a particular behavior, you will get more of it.
- beatgammit 7y ago
  I'm near Salt Lake City, and the approach here seems to be raiding clusters of tents, arresting people for possession (and maybe other crimes), and then tell to get as many as are left into shelters or rehab. It sounds cruel, but it seems to work somewhat, and many of the negative externalities of homelessness has gone away (e.g. suicides by drugs). SLC hasn't really solved the homeless problem, but at least you don't see tent cities anywhere, which could be seen as good or bad depending on your outlook. I think something like that should happen elsewhere, but only if it's coupled with actual solutions, like improved homeless shelters and better policies for handling the homeless.
- TheDong 7y ago
  Did you know that we feed prisoners food? Surely that's rewarding the behaviour of being in prison and thus more people will prefer being in prison rather than out of it because they get fed. The proposal is not to give people better houses or more money than they would have if they were not homeless. It's to raise the floor a little bit such that they're able to live a little longer and better their search for gainful employment. Their lives would still be better and more rewarding if they were able to support themselves and live in a larger home with more money for incidental expenses. This is not a "reward" relative to the "reward" of living a self-sustained life, but rather it's a bit of humanity to make their troubles less so. I could only see your objection being reasonable if we gave those who were not gainfully employed more money and better housing than you could gain by being gainfully employed, at which point sure, why get a job. We clearly don't do that, or else you'd hear of people quitting their minimum wage jobs to become homeless and reap the rewards. For what it's worth, there are several studies and anecdotes which show that providing homeless with housing and money does result in a larger percentage of them finding jobs and escaping the viscous cycle of homelessness (who would have guessed, getting a job and a home is easier when you have a home). The most referenced of these studies is this one I believe https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2772270 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2772270 Now, of course, you could say that those studies may not capture everything perfectly, but at the very least I'd like to convince you that it's not as cut-and-dry as you seem to think .
msie 7y ago
Good luck! Sadly, housing the homeless is not so simple. Some prefer their tents to the restrictions and type of accommodations offered. I saw this happen in Vancouver.
yostrovs 7y ago
If homelessness was a housing problem, housing the homeless would help. The real problem is mental issues and addiction to drugs. When society realizes that and addresses those issues somehow other than offering shelter, homelessness would be mostly resolved.
- zoul 7y ago
  Having a house helps a lot, we already have data on that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_First http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_First
  - yostrovs 7y ago
    What data?
    - zoul 7y ago
      There’s a whole Evidence and outcomes section in the Wikipedia article.
- StanislavPetrov 7y ago
  That's just false. Mental issues and drugs certainly are responsible for a decent portion of the homeless, but the lack of affordable housing is a massive issue for millions of people across the country, many of whom become homeless because they cannot find an affordable place to live. The mentally ill homeless man sleeping on the sidewalk and causing a disturbance is the most visible, but for everyone of them there is someone who is sleeping in their car or on a friend's couch or in a tent. And for every person that is homeless now there are a dozen other people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck, one illness, car accident or other unforeseen expense away from being homeless. The fact is that homelessness is as much an economic problem - one that is becoming worse every year - as it is a problem of mental health and drug addiction. Our social safety net has failed for the poorest Americans and the situation continues to worsen as we whittle away at what remains of that net and more and more Americans slide deeper into poverty.
0x262d 7y ago
The important context is that inequality driven by Amazon's low wages for non-programmers and their tax dodging has driven Seattle's homelessness crisis and they've tried hard to crush every political movement that tries to stop this (see link), so now they are trying to salvage public perception of their effects on this so they can more effectively spend money on politics to dodge more taxes and keep wages low. It is a move that has much more impact on PR than the specter of homelessness. https://jacobinmag.com/2019/10/amazon-kshama-sawant-seattle-city-council https://jacobinmag.com/2019/10/amazon-kshama-sawant-seattle-...
- dgzl 7y ago
  I'm not that paranoid.
  - konspence 7y ago
    You must have missed the recent city council election, then. The parent comment is spot on
- trhway 7y ago
  >inequality driven by Amazon's low wages for non-programmers i think it is absolutely disingenuous to blame it on corporations playing by the rules clearly and explicitly established by the society. It is the society who bears responsibility for the ugly situation that the minimum wage is many times below living wage. The minimum wage must be at least $30-$50, especially in the high cost areas. I don't understand why the people at the local Starbucks who work much harder than me are making on the scale of ten-folds less. The society explicitly and intentionally maintains that situation by maintaining the very low minimum wage. The only reason i can find is that the society seems to want the social darwinism of the 'rat race' and achieves that by maintaining the large gradient between supposed "losers" and "winners" (which i think is almost medievally cruel) which powers the miracle of American economy. Looks like the society is pretty sure that nobody is going to work hard, or at all, if there were a generous safety net, a minimum wage allowing for normal life, etc ...
  - 7y ago
narrator 7y ago
Though certainly not their aim, this has the unintentional side effect of reducing the value of surrounding real estate. Thus, Amazon can further expand their offices to surrounding real estate at a lower cost. The homeless people, simply by being repulsive, are providing a wholly unintentional benefit to Amazon's bottom line. I could imagine that this is a trend that could catch on and become the 21st century politically correct version of blockbusting [1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting
- dwnvoted2hell 7y ago
  This will certainly make land acquisition easier for them. It will also have the side effect of preventing homeless people from targeting Amazon. Smart win-win move for Amazon. Also, if they can rehabilitate, Amazon will have a new source of cheap labor.
zoul 7y ago
Nice. How about paying reasonable taxes instead?
- esarbe 7y ago
  Nice idea!
mathieuh 7y ago
This is one of the worst failures of capitalism. In order to improve their social credit, corporations first cause the conditions that lead to homeless (speculative capitalism) then give with one hand a fraction of what they reap with the other.
- krapp 7y ago
  If corporations and shareholders are making a profit at it, then by definition it is a success of capitalism, not a failure.
pnathan 7y ago
A little context from a local (me). Amazon is doing this in part because it gets a ton of heat for its part in the somewhat overheated Seattle land economy. Housing costs post-recession have skyrocketed and it has reconfigured the local housing system. Too, Amazon is not particularly known for corporate do-gooding (vs, say, Microsoft, Boeing, or Alaska Air) - so this shift is welcome. And Mary's Place is relatively well regarded locally. Happy to answer any questions from a local techie's perspective.
vkaku 7y ago
The first positive thing I've read about this company in years. Tell me there's no hidden agenda, and I can tell you this company is doing something right.
mcdermott 7y ago
I live in Seattle, the homeless problem has absolutely nothing to do with "affordable housing", that's a lie that they keep repeating. All the homeless I see are heroine/drug addicts or insane or both. If apartments were just $500/month they'd still be living outside and committing property crimes/theft and panhandling for drug money. If the city can't even be honest about the problem, they'll never solve a thing.

91 points by prostoalex 7y ago

I think this is a great move, I'm currently visiting my folks in Nevada and my mother works for the State often dealing with Mentally Ill people who also often become homeless. She was driving me around town showing me what was new after the few years I've been gone and she took me to the main shelter for homeless people. I'm used to seeing homeless on the street after living in SF but it was a good reminder of how many people have to live - and not just junkies or the usual stereotypes but lots of people who run into hard times, lose their homes and have to live in their car and then lose that and so many other ways people end up on the streets in America. I think a homeless shelter in the campus of Amazon's HQ will probably serve as a grounding experience like mine for others too and hopefully spur a little additional compassion and understanding

number6 7y ago
I heared this would be shelters for homeless amazon workers. But this sounded a bit wild and dystopian for me.
- atlasunshrugged 7y ago
  I didn't see that in the article, that would be pretty wild
- starpilot 7y ago
  I think it'd be called corporate housing in that case.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  Heck they're being sheltered right there already, might as well help with shipping some packages while they're at it. /s
  - tibbydudeza 7y ago
    And ideal Amazon Flex recruiting pool.
greendude29 7y ago
I think this is a terrible move. Shelters are NOT a solution to homelessness. This move will give Amazon false bragging rights to say, hey look, our operational style, not paying taxes, and lobbying for a society that punishes the poor more than the rich aren't really that bad because we're helping the homeless. Even if Amazon is able to put every homeless person in the United States in a shelter (they certainly can afford it), that would not be a good thing. That is validating a bifurcated system where we become content with the living conditions of the poor while excusing those who create the system that creates those conditions in the first place (Amazon in this case)
- ryanlol 7y ago
  >not paying taxes How much taxes should Amazon be paying in your opinion?
  - monoideism 7y ago
    Vastly, vastly more than zero, which is what they have paid the past few years.
    - sieabahlpark 7y ago
      If you actually looked up what they did instead is reinvest to grow the company you'd understand that the taxable income is where that "missing" money is. Stop parroting around uninformed talking points as if they're cut and dry truth. Do you want to punish companies for providing jobs to more people in the area instead?
    - sneak 7y ago
      Amazon pays absolutely mind-bogglingly immense amounts of payroll taxes. To claim that Amazon pays no tax is more than a little bit incorrect. The people they employ pay income taxes, as well, which come out of Amazon’s revenue ultimately. There are many reasons to hate them. Their complying with the tax laws as they are currently written is not one of them.

RandomGuyDTB 7y ago

"It's not one entity that's going to solve this," [Hartman] said. "It's not on corporations. It's not on congregations. It's not on government. It's not on foundations. It's all of us working together." While the system (created by governments and corporations) rewards providing housing priced at however much people will pay we won't see much affordable housing. Real estate laws do not reward and have not ever rewarded "working together". If Seattle funneled the money going towards anti-homeless structures to building municipal housing instead this "homeless crisis" would be resolved quickly. It wouldn't fix everything and it'd be just as hard for someone who's both unemployed and homeless to get back on their feet but it would make it easier for them to stay on their feet.

atlasunshrugged 7y ago
But I think the sentiment is probably correct - it seems unlikely that one party could solve the problem unilaterally. It's likely going to take many people coming together and pushing an agenda to produce an outcome that resolves or partially resolves the issues. Of course the problem here is that opposition parties (NIMBYists, corporates, etc.) are usually better organized with deeper pockets than associations and groups advocating for homeless rights, whose members are usually pretty disenfranchised, not organized, and without much money to advocate for their positions.
BurningFrog 7y ago
> While the system (created by governments and corporations) rewards providing housing priced at however much people will pay But that's not the system! The 2019 system is that building housing is illegal without very costly and hard to get permits in most non Texas big cities. If you could just put up housing on land you own and charge however much people will pay for it, this housing crisis would quickly be gone! You can help: https://yimbyaction.org/give/ https://yimbyaction.org/give/
- tim333 7y ago
  For that to go through politically you'd probably need support from the existing NIMBY house owners. This could be possible if they allowed fairly free construction in some non central area in return for some vagrancy laws so the homeless were kind of made to go there rather than pooping on the streets where the NIMBYs are. Both groups could win that way.

jorblumesea 7y ago

> 'it's not on corporations' to solve the homelessness problem Sure, but corporations (and those who lead them) also lobby local, state and federal governments for policies that benefit them. They pay for campaigns of those who would help them out, and sway local and national politics. Sometimes to no harm, sometimes to immense societal detriment. This last election in Seattle, Amazon funneled $1.5 million to a political action committee that backed candidates seen as business friendly. This ended up backfiring, but it's plainly obvious that entrenched business interests are there and do manipulate their environment. Is it that crazy to posit that local property companies are attempting to manipulate their regulatory environment in their favor? Seems just as irresponsible to label them as blameless as it is to declare that they are entirely the problem.

GoodJokes 7y ago

Or they could you know not blackmail the city into not raising its taxes. This is hugely cynical PR move on its part. Everyone know any one of the top 5 could solve homelessness in their cities if they actually cared about it. Arguing differently is just being needlessly Naive. Yes, we are all literally working nihilistic inhumane entities.

int_19h 7y ago

Amazon got a tax refund of $129 million this past year from the feds alone. How many shelters could be operated for a year with that kind of budget?

ars 7y ago
A tax refund just means they overpaid estimated taxes. It's not "found money".
c3534l 7y ago
You're confusing "tax refund" with "tax rebate." Also, Amazon had carryforward losses, so they paid too much in taxes in prior years and therefor didn't have to pay taxes this year. Not exactly nefarious, carryforward losses are an intentional part of the tax code that prevents companies from paying more in supposed earnings they have on paper that can never be realized as profit because taxes are based on estimates. Every business, not just Amazon, get carryforward losses when they overpay in taxes. Edit: I suppose it's equivalent to say it prevents them from overpaying in taxes in the future. That might be easier to understand if you consider that in any given year, a company pays zero in taxes if they don't make money, regardless of how much money they lose. That timing difference means that the tax burden changes from year to year as investments in a company are realized through buying and selling goods. It's a smoothing out of taxes. Instead of forcing Amazon to structure it's business to always make the same profit each year, they get to smooth it out over a maximum of a 10 year rolling window. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_operating_loss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_operating_loss
- clairity 7y ago
  that's a vigorous defense of time-shifting gains and losses for businesses. now how about individual taxpayers?
- int_19h 7y ago
  Yes, you're right, and I got the word wrong - it is a tax rebate. The point remains that Amazon paid $0 in taxes past year, and actually received money from the federal government instead. And no, it's not just because of carryforward losses. It was also because of the various tax credits, and changes to tax laws in 2017.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

strickman 7y ago

Not a good move. If you reward a particular behavior, you will get more of it.

beatgammit 7y ago
I'm near Salt Lake City, and the approach here seems to be raiding clusters of tents, arresting people for possession (and maybe other crimes), and then tell to get as many as are left into shelters or rehab. It sounds cruel, but it seems to work somewhat, and many of the negative externalities of homelessness has gone away (e.g. suicides by drugs). SLC hasn't really solved the homeless problem, but at least you don't see tent cities anywhere, which could be seen as good or bad depending on your outlook. I think something like that should happen elsewhere, but only if it's coupled with actual solutions, like improved homeless shelters and better policies for handling the homeless.
TheDong 7y ago
Did you know that we feed prisoners food? Surely that's rewarding the behaviour of being in prison and thus more people will prefer being in prison rather than out of it because they get fed. The proposal is not to give people better houses or more money than they would have if they were not homeless. It's to raise the floor a little bit such that they're able to live a little longer and better their search for gainful employment. Their lives would still be better and more rewarding if they were able to support themselves and live in a larger home with more money for incidental expenses. This is not a "reward" relative to the "reward" of living a self-sustained life, but rather it's a bit of humanity to make their troubles less so. I could only see your objection being reasonable if we gave those who were not gainfully employed more money and better housing than you could gain by being gainfully employed, at which point sure, why get a job. We clearly don't do that, or else you'd hear of people quitting their minimum wage jobs to become homeless and reap the rewards. For what it's worth, there are several studies and anecdotes which show that providing homeless with housing and money does result in a larger percentage of them finding jobs and escaping the viscous cycle of homelessness (who would have guessed, getting a job and a home is easier when you have a home). The most referenced of these studies is this one I believe https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2772270 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2772270 Now, of course, you could say that those studies may not capture everything perfectly, but at the very least I'd like to convince you that it's not as cut-and-dry as you seem to think .

msie 7y ago

Good luck! Sadly, housing the homeless is not so simple. Some prefer their tents to the restrictions and type of accommodations offered. I saw this happen in Vancouver.

yostrovs 7y ago

If homelessness was a housing problem, housing the homeless would help. The real problem is mental issues and addiction to drugs. When society realizes that and addresses those issues somehow other than offering shelter, homelessness would be mostly resolved.

zoul 7y ago
Having a house helps a lot, we already have data on that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_First http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_First
- yostrovs 7y ago
  What data?
  - zoul 7y ago
    There’s a whole Evidence and outcomes section in the Wikipedia article.
StanislavPetrov 7y ago
That's just false. Mental issues and drugs certainly are responsible for a decent portion of the homeless, but the lack of affordable housing is a massive issue for millions of people across the country, many of whom become homeless because they cannot find an affordable place to live. The mentally ill homeless man sleeping on the sidewalk and causing a disturbance is the most visible, but for everyone of them there is someone who is sleeping in their car or on a friend's couch or in a tent. And for every person that is homeless now there are a dozen other people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck, one illness, car accident or other unforeseen expense away from being homeless. The fact is that homelessness is as much an economic problem - one that is becoming worse every year - as it is a problem of mental health and drug addiction. Our social safety net has failed for the poorest Americans and the situation continues to worsen as we whittle away at what remains of that net and more and more Americans slide deeper into poverty.

0x262d 7y ago

The important context is that inequality driven by Amazon's low wages for non-programmers and their tax dodging has driven Seattle's homelessness crisis and they've tried hard to crush every political movement that tries to stop this (see link), so now they are trying to salvage public perception of their effects on this so they can more effectively spend money on politics to dodge more taxes and keep wages low. It is a move that has much more impact on PR than the specter of homelessness. https://jacobinmag.com/2019/10/amazon-kshama-sawant-seattle-city-council https://jacobinmag.com/2019/10/amazon-kshama-sawant-seattle-...

dgzl 7y ago
I'm not that paranoid.
- konspence 7y ago
  You must have missed the recent city council election, then. The parent comment is spot on
trhway 7y ago
>inequality driven by Amazon's low wages for non-programmers i think it is absolutely disingenuous to blame it on corporations playing by the rules clearly and explicitly established by the society. It is the society who bears responsibility for the ugly situation that the minimum wage is many times below living wage. The minimum wage must be at least $30-$50, especially in the high cost areas. I don't understand why the people at the local Starbucks who work much harder than me are making on the scale of ten-folds less. The society explicitly and intentionally maintains that situation by maintaining the very low minimum wage. The only reason i can find is that the society seems to want the social darwinism of the 'rat race' and achieves that by maintaining the large gradient between supposed "losers" and "winners" (which i think is almost medievally cruel) which powers the miracle of American economy. Looks like the society is pretty sure that nobody is going to work hard, or at all, if there were a generous safety net, a minimum wage allowing for normal life, etc ...
- 7y ago

narrator 7y ago

Though certainly not their aim, this has the unintentional side effect of reducing the value of surrounding real estate. Thus, Amazon can further expand their offices to surrounding real estate at a lower cost. The homeless people, simply by being repulsive, are providing a wholly unintentional benefit to Amazon's bottom line. I could imagine that this is a trend that could catch on and become the 21st century politically correct version of blockbusting [1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting

dwnvoted2hell 7y ago
This will certainly make land acquisition easier for them. It will also have the side effect of preventing homeless people from targeting Amazon. Smart win-win move for Amazon. Also, if they can rehabilitate, Amazon will have a new source of cheap labor.

zoul 7y ago

Nice. How about paying reasonable taxes instead?

esarbe 7y ago
Nice idea!

mathieuh 7y ago

This is one of the worst failures of capitalism. In order to improve their social credit, corporations first cause the conditions that lead to homeless (speculative capitalism) then give with one hand a fraction of what they reap with the other.

krapp 7y ago
If corporations and shareholders are making a profit at it, then by definition it is a success of capitalism, not a failure.

pnathan 7y ago

A little context from a local (me). Amazon is doing this in part because it gets a ton of heat for its part in the somewhat overheated Seattle land economy. Housing costs post-recession have skyrocketed and it has reconfigured the local housing system. Too, Amazon is not particularly known for corporate do-gooding (vs, say, Microsoft, Boeing, or Alaska Air) - so this shift is welcome. And Mary's Place is relatively well regarded locally. Happy to answer any questions from a local techie's perspective.

vkaku 7y ago

The first positive thing I've read about this company in years. Tell me there's no hidden agenda, and I can tell you this company is doing something right.

mcdermott 7y ago

I live in Seattle, the homeless problem has absolutely nothing to do with "affordable housing", that's a lie that they keep repeating. All the homeless I see are heroine/drug addicts or insane or both. If apartments were just $500/month they'd still be living outside and committing property crimes/theft and panhandling for drug money. If the city can't even be honest about the problem, they'll never solve a thing.