Amazon has promised to spend more than $ 2 billion over the next five years to build tens of thousands of affordable housing units in three of the e-commerce giant’s most important employment centers, highlighting the ongoing housing crisis in parts of the US where big, high paying technical employers live. Amazon’s pledge, announced Wednesday, follows similar commitments from Apple, Facebook and Google, which previously pledged between $ 1 billion and $ 2.5 billion each to address similar issues plaguing the San Francisco Bay Area.
Parts of the U.S. Amazon are planning to invest in, including the Puget Sound region of Washington which includes Seattle, as well as Arlington, Virginia and Nashville, Tennessee, where Amazon has opened fast-growing offices. The company employs more than 75,000 people in the Puget Sound region alone, thanks to its state headquarters, and has about 1,000 employees in Virginia and Tennessee with plans to expand the workforce to more than 5,000 employees in each sector. (These numbers do not include Amazon’s much larger warehouse, seasonal and contract staff, which has pushed its workforce to more than 1 million people since October last year.)
Amazon’s announcement may have even included the planned investment for New York City, after lawmakers entered into an agreement with the company in early 2019 to bring work to Long Island City, Queens, as part of a much-publicized competition that the company held to attract bids from municipalities. across the country. But fierce backlash from locals and criticism from politicians, including U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), has led Amazon to scrap its controversial NYC plans and instead focus on expanding its offices in Arlington and Nashville. .
‘Amazon has a long-standing commitment to helping people in need, including the Mary’s Place family shelter we built in our Puget Sound headquarters. The shelter now supports more than 200 women and children who are homeless every night, “said Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, in a statement. ‘This new $ 2 billion housing fund will create or preserve 20,000 affordable homes in all three of our headquarters regions – Arlington, Puget Sound and Nashville. It will also help local families achieve long-term stability while building strong, inclusive communities. ”
Amazon spends its money mostly in the form of cheap loans, starting with nearly $ 382 million to the Washington Housing Conservancy to ‘preserve and create up to 1,300 affordable homes on the Crystal House property in Arlington’ and $ 185.5 million to King County Housing. Authority for an additional 1,000 affordable homes in the state of Washington. Amazon plans to announce additional investments in both regions as well as Nashville in the coming months and years. The pledge also includes $ 125 million in cash grants to small businesses, non-profits and minority-led organizations, with the aim of helping them ‘build a more inclusive solution to the affordable housing crisis’.
The unspoken reality of these huge housing promises is that technology companies often play an important role in gentrification and displacement of local communities. This is often due to a complex interplay of factors related to excessively high wages and unparalleled benefits that allow employees to live in and around downtown, although they sometimes work in a more rural or suburban environment, where housing is cheaper and less popular. is. And as part of its long-term strategy to attract and retain talent, a company like Amazon has an incentive to make the urban centers and regions that turn it into key work centers more affordable housing.
One big goal is to avoid employees who can not afford to live somewhere like Seattle or in the case of companies like Facebook and Google, in San Francisco or Silicon Valley. Another goal is to ease the pressure of politicians and activists who often criticize technology companies and their workers for doing little to give back to the communities within which they build their businesses.