By Jay Greene
SEATTLE -- It's hard to miss the Amazonians downtown here.
"They want cheap, and they travel in packs," said Seattle
celebrity chef Tom Douglas of the young techies who fill the
10-seat tables at his Brave Horse Tavern for lunch. Then they come
back for happy hour.
They wear color-coded ID badges signaling how long they've
worked for Amazon.com Inc. Many take their dogs for midday walks;
Amazon lets thousands of canines accompany their owners to the
office -- so many it had to install pee-proof shrubbery around its
campus.
If Seattle is a guide for the just-announced future hosts of the
online giant's second headquarters, Amazon's arrival will be
transformative. Restaurants and new infrastructure are likely to
follow -- what some Seattleites call the Amazon prosperity bomb --
but the invasion of workers will also bring headaches like traffic
jams and a jump in housing prices.
The company announced Tuesday that it will divide its second
headquarters evenly between New York's Long Island City and
Northern Virginia, with some 25,000 employees in each location. In
a more than than yearlong public contest, metro areas across the
U.S. had offered the company lucrative financial incentives, lured
by the prospect of investment, high-wage workers and a surge of
businesses to support them.
In Seattle, Amazon rewrote the book on how a big company makes
its home in an urban area, putting thousands of employees in the
downtown core rather than a suburban campus.
As Amazon's workforce in the city center has increased more than
ninefold over the past decade, to 45,000, the number of restaurants
and other food-service businesses in the city has jumped 27%,
according to data from the Washington State Department of
Revenue.
Overall, Amazon's workforce accounted for roughly 8% of the
581,780 total jobs in Seattle in 2017, according to data from the
Puget Sound Regional Council.
Lines of workers waiting for burgers, sandwiches and burritos
still stream down city streets at lunchtime. Mr. Douglas says the
Amazon workers who flood his downtown restaurants skew young and
eschew lavish meals and expensive cocktails.
Amazon's campus, which spans over several city blocks, has its
own banana stands that hand out thousands of free bananas. Some
workers have said there is a shortage of bananas at nearby grocery
stores as a result.
Amazon's arrival is likely to strain any city's mass transit --
which could mean much-needed upgrades. The company paid for a
fourth streetcar to ease downtown congestion, as part of a deal
with Seattle. But riders there have found that buses packed with
Amazonians, who receive transit passes from the company, zip past
stops during rush hour, unable to fit more passengers.
That may not bode well for the New York headquarters site. Long
Island City's rush-hour commutes are already nightmarish, with
overcrowded subway cars and delays. Another 25,000 employees could
further hobble the system, though New York has promised
infrastructure upgrades.
The most striking change Amazon has brought to Seattle is a new
skyline. Amazon moved into a ramshackle neighborhood north of
downtown called South Lake Union, transforming it from a hodgepodge
of parking lots, tire shops and small warehouses into a collection
of modern office buildings, apartments and teeming restaurants.
"It was a pit," said Margaret O'Mara, a history professor at the
University of Washington and author of "The Code: Silicon Valley
and the Remaking of America," due out next year. "They are having
an impact on the city that's positive and generative."
At the same time, the rapid growth of Amazon's footprint
downtown has created its own set of challenges, Ms. O'Mara said.
Unlike Microsoft Corp., which built its main campus in the suburb
of Redmond, and Boeing Co., whose factories are in nearby Everett
and Renton, Amazon's offices are close to Seattle's sports venues,
museums and auditoriums. About 15% of Amazon's Seattle workforce
live within the same ZIP Code as their office, and 20% walk to
work, according to the company. While their presence has spurred
the arrival of bike-share services in the city center, traffic
barely budges at the end of most work days.
As Amazon has outgrown South Lake Union, it has expanded into
office towers closer in the city center. The company now uses 10
million square feet of Seattle office space, spread out over more
than 40 buildings.
Seattle's economic boom, fueled in part by Amazon's growth, has
put home prices out of reach for many. Seattle led the nation in
home-price increases for nearly two years -- prices grew 12.8% in
the year ending in June -- until Las Vegas passed it this summer,
according to the monthly S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller National
Home Price Index.
Amazon's growing footprint is making it a local political
target. It's not uncommon to see protesters outside Amazon
buildings, raising concerns about everything from the company's
sale of facial-recognition software to law-enforcement agencies to
cargo pilots contracted by the company seeking better pay.
Ultimately, as the so-called HQ2 contest showed, having Amazon
come to town is a challenge cities were more than willing to take
on. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has said it would be "the single
biggest economic development deal in the history of New York
City."
Despite all the challenges that Amazon's rise has created in
Seattle, many politicians there are eager to keep it happy.
In May, the city passed an "Amazon tax," a per-employee levy on
big companies to fund homeless services, only to repeal the measure
a month later after pressure from Amazon and other businesses.
City leaders don't hide their pride that Amazon calls Seattle
home. So much so that Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan said last week,
when The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon was splitting HQ2
in two, that was "good news."
"I'd call those branch offices," Ms. Durkan told a local
television news reporter.
Write to Jay Greene at Jay.Greene@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 15, 2018 07:14 ET (12:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN)
Historical Stock Chart
From Mar 2024 to Apr 2024
Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN)
Historical Stock Chart
From Apr 2023 to Apr 2024