With Seattle's housing costs increasingly out of reach, it's no surprise that Amazon, one of Seattle's largest employers, is dabbling in housing issues itself. According to a recent article by Aria Bendix of Business Insider, Amazon is following through in a surprising way: By building a homeless shelter within its Seattle headquarters.
Bendix reports, "Two years ago, Marty Hartman, the executive director of Mary's Place homeless shelter in Seattle, received a package from Amazon: The company presented her with a golden key symbolizing access to eight floors of a building in its Seattle headquarters." Under the arrangement, Hartman was offered "permanent space in one of Amazon's corporate offices. Now, that space is almost finished."
Anticipated to open in 2020, the shelter will be able to house and serve 275 people per night. Although those numbers are merely a fraction of Seattle's overall homeless population (roughly around 12,500 in King County, according to Benix), the shelter will still be the largest in the area.
With construction close to completion, Amazon has "offered to pay for the space's utilities, maintenance, and security for the next 10 years. It's also covering the rent."
1 Comment
yikes. the implications of the private sector, especially amazon, getting into housing is really grim. seattle seems to be ground zero for this - with microsoft and amazon donating huge sums (although extremely tiny compared to what their profits are) to the city to "help" the housing crisis. imagine what they could do after a decade of slowly shifting public responsibilities to their "philanthropy" budgets, which are already a handy tax avoidance scheme. it's a clear strategy to assume a little bit of public control in order to be completely forgiven for any dirty dealing or siphoning of public money to help them "invest in the community." we can't see this as a good thing. in the short term, they appear as angels, but just as Uber seems to be an affordable alternative, once they successfully ruin all taxi companies and reduce public transit spending, they achieve a monopoly and then can charge whatever they want. amazon isn't our friend, and architects have to maintain scope awareness and look long term. private companies will always do what it takes to make more money - this is no different.
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