Amazon killed Seattle's homelessness-relief tax by threatening not to move into a massive new building, then they canceled the move anyway

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/02/28/predictable-af.html

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They have more than enough real estate here already and have been a factor in driving up local property values with growing the population faster than the housing.

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2f0nkk%5B1%5D

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Are they just trying to look like assholes at this point or is there something I’m missing?

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b-but, he started Amazon in his garage you guys, c’mon, isn’t that sweet?

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But it can still be used as a ski jump, right?

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But the drawing of the building is cool. That has to count for something?

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It seems like there may be a pattern emerging here of Amazon backing away from massively expensive real estate investments. Like maybe an internal change of course.

Let’s see what happens with the HQ2 near DC.

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Yup, and now thanks to their moving some facilities to Bellevue those of us on the East side can see our housing prices skyrocket even further. Because that’s precisely what we need here. Those $1m, 1500 sq ft houses out in BFE won’t sell themselves after all.

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So - go back and repass the bill.

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That is not how the Seattle Process works. And it is a feature of the Seattle Process.

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Amazon, you are really making it hard to like you.

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“immensely popular”?? You may want to check your facts. Support for the head tax was in the 35% range. Even the pro-head tax poll showed more than 50% against the tax.



The bill was repealed because no one trusts the Seattle city council, not because Amazon made it so.

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They have office space in the building where Mr. Bells works and ugh … huge pain in the ass. Parking prices went up significantly.

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Nothing in that says it’s legally barred to reverse a decision.

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After these shenanigans, NYC must be feeling like they dodged a bullet.

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Amazon BoD members can’t sleep at night if they stiff their investors. Fiduciary responsibilities equal moral imperative to them.

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Rainier not Ranier.

Personally I was against the head tax, it did not seem like it would have worked in the long run.

My biggest thing about that property is that we need a giant blow up beaver for Photo ops at the base of the old Rainier tower. I have always felt that it would have been a great idea an no one listened. When the tower goes down it will have been a lost opportunity.

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I feel this is mostly true. The city council has been dodgy at best lately. I heard from crosscut there’s now over a billion dollars per year spent to combat homelessness in seattle. The problem is the spending is ineffective. With a recent count of homeless being around 6500 (let’s call it 7500 for margin of error), take the billion that’s appropriated and perform a couple experiments with the money. What we know is that the current effort is short term ineffective. What are some other ways to spend this money for short term and also long term effectiveness? We need some econo-science on the city council, not a bunch of folks with clearly obfuscated and outside funded political agendas.

Personally I would perform a basic income experiment with the money. $1 Billion / 7500 homeless = $0.1333 million per person per year in spending. Even with a basic income of $40k per year per person, which can really change a life if you prop up someone for a few years like this, you have enough left over to fund a 2:1 case manager > homeless person ratio - to ensure they’re not spending the dough on heroin which is a big problem here. This will free up our army of police to concentrate on freeing the city from our hard drug, property crime and murder problem, instead of mobilizing and raiding the homeless camps twice a week.

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