
Amazon’s Slow Retreat from Seattle - pseudolus
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/04/amazon-seattle-headquarters-tech-jobs-bellevue-crystal-city/586549/
======
ng12
> But in recent years, as Seattle’s citizens begin taking Amazon to task for
> its role in driving urban inequality

Right. It's Amazon's fault for bringing in high-paying jobs. Definitely has
nothing to do with local politics.

~~~
refurb
This is the problem with looking at inequality all on it’s own.

Take a population where everyone makes $20k per year. Great! It’s equal!

Take another population where half make $30k and half make $50k. Oh no!
Inequality!

I’d rather be in the 2nd population.

~~~
ceejayoz
Maybe.

The folks making $30k in the second population may now be spending a bunch
more in childcare and hours more on their commutes, because they've been
priced out of the city and now have travel from further away.

As an example: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/business/economy/san-
fran...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/business/economy/san-francisco-
commute.html)

~~~
epistasis
The only way to be priced out is if the city refuses to accept more people and
build enough housing for people. This is a conscious choice by power brokers
in cities, to restrict housing availability and enrich homeowners and
landlords and real estate speculators.

Pricing people is not an inevitable consequence of population growth, it's the
consequence of an older generation of haves deciding that younger and less
wealthy people do not deserve housing in a city.

~~~
ceejayoz
> The only way to be priced out is if the city refuses to accept more people
> and build enough housing for people.

Which, given that it seems to happen pretty much everywhere, must be factored
into decision making.

"Wouldn't it be nice if humans didn't act like humans" is the sort of dreamy
optimism that kills Communism.

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lazyasciiart
> But in recent years, as Seattle’s citizens begin taking Amazon to task for
> its role in driving urban inequality, and city leaders push to account for
> this cost with higher taxes

What the hell? Maybe also mention as house prices rise so even Amazon
employees are complaining about how hard it is to buy a house, and rents go up
so that even Amazon employees start to think twice, and the number of local
potential hires shrinks...(devs in Seattle who don't currently work for Amazon
but would like to do so, as opposed to those have already quit or would never
touch it)

But no, of course these aspects, the fundamentals of "can I hire people to
work here and how much will I have to pay them", are not relevant.

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zdragnar
When I interviewed there, one of the interviewers took me to a window and
pointed out all of the different buildings amazon either owned outright or had
office space in. It was impressive, at least to realize just how big Amazon
actually is.

I don't know that it's healthy for one company to dominate so much space,
either from the company's perspective or a city's. At that point, with workers
already being remote from each other (blocks or miles apart) it would seem to
make more sense to me to focus on getting the company shifted to full remote
work for anyone not needed in a data, phone or product center.

There are certain things that I miss about working in an office, but I don't
know that I'll ever take another job that isn't remote again.

~~~
ghaff
TBF, I'm sure groups aren't randomly scattered around the place. Still, as
companies grow, there is a natural distribution of workers that you really
can't overcome, especially if you want to keep people if they switch roles and
don't want to relocate.

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neilv
Is natural disaster resilience a factor in geodistributing your white collar
workers?

Everyone knows that the SF Bay Area will get bad earthquakes, and some
accounts of the Cascadian subduction zone suggest that much of the Pacific
Northwest coastal area (including Seattle) has a worse fate looming:
[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-
big...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one)

------
scythe
>Is its pivot to smaller communities a way to avoid messy politics?

I feel very confident there will still be "messy politics", but I think the
tactical situation may be more favorable to Amazon in these cases.

>Last year, Seattle’s city council proposed a per-employee head tax on the
city’s largest businesses, intended to raise $75 million for homelessness and
affordable housing initiatives.

Even an introductory course in economics will equip someone to find a
profusion of problems with this tax. Because taxes affect transactions, not
entities, employees at large companies suffer relative to those at smaller
companies. There is a perverse incentive for companies near the threshold to
manipulate headcounts via subcontractors. And so on.

Companies like Amazon absolutely should pay for the welfare of the less
fortunate, but the way there is not through such rash populism. From 1993 to
2016, the Democrats have been the party of sound economic policy, and I would
expect better from a blog such as CityLab which presents itself as a promoter
of realistic reforms. As Krugman said it:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/19/opinion/varieties-of-
vood...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/19/opinion/varieties-of-voodoo.html)

> America’s two big political parties are very different from each other, and
> one difference involves the willingness to indulge economic fantasies. [...]

> But is all that about to change? [...]

> ...as the economists warn, fuzzy math from the left would make it impossible
> to effectively criticize conservative voodoo.

This blog post certainly didn't make me feel very optimistic.

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CydeWeys
The more I read about Amazon's expansion plans the more I believe that they
never intended to place a substantial office in NYC, or at least had already
abandoned the idea before the opposition to it even grew. It really doesn't
seem like we lost anything we were actually going to get.

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WalterBright
It wasn't just Amazon that opposed it. There were mass protests against the
head tax.

~~~
ceejayoz
With 40k workers in Seattle, there'll be a lot of Amazon-aligned third
parties. Construction, restaurants, etc.

Amazon wound up doing what they threatened anyways, even though Seattle gave
up and rescinded the tax. I do wonder how those protesters feel about that
after the fact.

~~~
lazyasciiart
Still smug and self righteous, plenty of them are anti-amazon in any other
discussion and we're just happy to take their support on this. A significant
percentage believed the head tax would be too expensive for small businesses
(aka didn't even know who would have to pay it).

~~~
MagicPropmaker
> (aka didn't even know who would have to pay it).

Small business people aren't stupid. It's sad you think they are. I can assure
you that the small business people--the shop owners and house cleaners and
barbers and contractors -- knew who had to pay it and who weren't.

You'd be surprised to learn that some people like things to be fair even if
they aren't directly involved in a transaction or agreement.

~~~
lazyasciiart
No. They argued that small businesses would have to pay it and could not
afford this cost. Some of them even tried to suggest that it would be a
reasonable idea if it would only apply to larger businesses.

Also, you don't have to be stupid to not know that, just uninformed. I suppose
it depends on the definition of stupidity.

~~~
MagicPropmaker
Well, show me were people were saying that. Small business people who served
large employers were correctly saying it affected them, and they knew the
reasons.

~~~
lazyasciiart
I don't know, but it's not happening in this thread so far as I can tell so
I'm not sure when he does.

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fwip
They could stand to go a bit faster.

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m0zg
Yeah, you should see the composition of the Seattle City Council to understand
why Bezos is backing away slowly. Basically all Democrat, with an activist
Socialist mixed in and controlling the conversation (she was the one who
pushed for "head tax", and continues to do so even after it was repealed).
That's great for business, I'm sure.

[https://www.theringer.com/tech/2018/7/17/17578524/seattle-
am...](https://www.theringer.com/tech/2018/7/17/17578524/seattle-amazon-
kshama-sawant-socialist-local-politics)

------
iFred
From the tone of the article and what I would expect to see from some of the
comments here eventually, you would think that Seattle united in fighting its
corporate fascist oppressors by taxing it fairly to cover the problems the
capitalist class creates and in response, Amazon is moving far and away from
the scene of the crime; both straw structured arguments are patently false.

There has always been a vocal minority in Seattle that has bemoaned any kind
of growth and change in the city, and the recent cause that they latched on
was all of disruptions Amazon was claimed to be at fault for, or how the "tech
bros" ruined the city. These were probably the same people who hated that the
Microsoft of a decade or two prior washed the city over with a tech scene,
they probably complained that Boeing made noisy jets for the military
industrial complex and those "av bros" were destroying neighborhoods with
hundred and hundreds of months of established character. This is a west coast
city that I have lived most of my life in and around, it has always been
changing and growing, and I along with my wife, friends, and family, love it
for the opportunities and ever evolving landscape.

Then there is the argument that Amazon is taking its toys and going to play
ball elsewhere, used as proof that somehow Amazon wasn't going to work with
the city to begin with. Amazon is probably at the top of the current curve of
growth, and some of their recent announcements in jobs and locations show
somewhat of a diminished drive to expand. Additionally, to pick up and leave,
or to leave the region all together is pretty expensive and disruptive to
operations. Bellevue is right across the lake. It offers a city government
that wants to grow as fast as possible and as dense as possible, and willing
to work with anyone. The recent announcement that the local transit authority
was on schedule with the light rail expansion in Bellevue lines up with Amazon
and a few other companies looking to expand in the city. Bellevue is looking
to be a great place to be "in Seattle" without having to be in Seattle.

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meathouse
hello, long time seattle tech person here - this article is a bit slanted and
doesn't tell the whole story. i for one, however, hope amz stops building in
seattle and starts in earnest elsewhere. it is has become a nuisance of a
company that the city is becoming too dependent on. it's not healthy for our
local economy, and i would love to see the am-holes spread out and infect
other cities.

