"How Seattle Fell Out of Love With Amazon" (AMZN)
From CityLab:
It’s
been nearly two months since Amazon served notice that it’s ending its
exclusive relationship with Seattle and looking to see other cities on
the side. Since then, the mega-retailer has received 238 bids
for HQ2, its proposed second headquarters. These are places that are
volunteering to pick up where Seattle left off, becoming a “full equal”
with a headcount of 50,000 jobs, many of them superbly well-paid.
These events have caused the following reactions in Seattle: Pick one!
- Good! Now my rent will stop going up.
- Widespread panic
- Widespread panic, but just in government
- Recrimination, but just against government
- All of the above except b.
Answer e is correct—with an emphasis on panic in government.
Specifically, the counties surrounding Seattle ran after Amazon like obsessed teenagers. They made their own bids for HQ2—this one and this one.
And
why? Because local governments needed the tax dollars that Amazon fed
into city, county, and state coffers. This region has some expensive
problems, including astronomical rents and home prices, crippling
traffic, the displacement of people of color, and spiking homelessness.
Greater Seattle needed to keep the Amazon boom going, to buy time to
address the long-festering problems that boom had exacerbated.
“Prosperity allows us to raise the funds to correct the problems from
the past,” King County Executive Dow Constantine told reporters when
his county’s bid was announced. “The notion that less economic activity,
fewer jobs, more poverty is somehow going to benefit us because housing
prices might flatten out is, I think, self-defeating.”
That was a moment of genuine insight. Exactly how much tax Amazon
pays to local governments is a state secret, known to only a few.
But now we know that, despite the millions that have flowed to local
governments in the Seattle area from Amazon, that money isn’t believed
to be enough to pay for all the problems the company’s growth caused.
Constantine is saying Seattle will need much more of it if we want a
chance to solve our housing shortage and public transit crisis.
And
that’s not happening: Since a senior Amazon executive told a tech conference
that the Seattle region had a snowball’s chance in hell of winning HQ2,
we’re going to have to admit that it’s really time to wean ourselves
off our Amazon addiction.
Was
there ever anything we could have done to save the relationship and
remain HQ1 and Only? I turned to the internet to find the signs we should have known our relationship was in trouble.
Little things start to add up
In a relationship, you’re not supposed to keep score. You’re supposed
to let the little points of friction go, in favor of the greater good
of the relationship.
That stopped happening in Seattle.
It was about four years ago that I heard my first “Amazon employees
are getting all the houses” story. It came from a businessman whose
sunny disposition is famous around town. And wow, was he bitter.
Amazonians starting hearing those things too. They got their own version of the Seattle Freeze—that
cold social shoulder Seattle gives to newcomers. But this was
out-and-out talking smack, in coffee shops, at parties, and in the
media....MORE
