Amazon employees also have a bad reputation (not individually, but collectively) in my experience. To be fair, I think that has a lot to do with over-eager college interns.
In a way, they are correct. In another way, well, no. Amazon needed employees, lots of them, and hired them. Suddenly, you have increased demand for housing. The city ought to, in response, see that this is happening and do what needs to be done to increase supply of housing. Allow more density, build up, build more and do it quickly.
Instead, it's chosen the typical west-coast attitude of blaming the people bringing the jobs and wealth to the city and preventing serious density increases anywhere they can. And the citizens, the same ones complaining about housing prices, are also against any increase in density.
The end result? Well, Amazon is opening offices left and right in every other city on the planet, and hiring elsewhere. Those jobs might have been in Seattle, bringing in more local taxes, but instead they are in places like Winnipeg, Manitoba. (Seriously, there's an office there, what the heck?).
(Bias: Amazon employee, once lived in Seattle and loved the city)
If you own, you pat yourself on the back for making a wise financial decision.
Funny how that works :)
The efforts that the OP is talking about are meant to make Amazon appear better to the Seattleites of this universe than it would appear to the Seattleites of some alternate universe in which Amazon wasn't making the same efforts.
That's a wholly different goal than making Amazon appear better to Seattleites than it does to residents of other cities.
I'm contending that Amazon has approximately the same reputation in Seattle that Google has in the Bay Area.
And yes, I'm just bitter because nobody bothered to thank me for moving TO California :)
That was mostly before on-call employment for retail employees and the collapse of malls. It was a better time for most folks economically.