Amazon Pauses Huge Development Plans in Seattle Over Tax Plan | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Pauses Huge Development Plans in Seattle Over Tax Plan

nytimes.com

11 pointsstablemap8 comments

I know I'm biased as I live in Seattle.

But GTFO Amazon and let other businesses come into town. Maybe we'll have sprawling businesses all over the city/state instead of trying to be glutted into East Lake Union.

At one point you brought in more than 1,200 employee's a week. We couldn't keep up with the housing.

So help your employee's who couldn't get a place and pay the head tax. ;)

I know you won't.

How is paying the head tax going to help Seattle-area employees? It's unlikely that many Seattle-area employees are going to qualify for the 1800 "affordable housing units." The underlying issue appears to be Seattle's restrictions on development. The crazy cost of housing in the area is the result of restrictions on supply (and the high incomes of many tech employees). I'm also unpersuaded that this tax will have any significant impact on homelessness in the area unless restrictions on development are eased. It's going to be interesting in the long term to see how the socialist city council reconciles their political philosophy with their constituents' demands for tight controls on development. We only have to look at San Francisco to see the likely outcome.

It's designed to help the homeless. If those employee's are homeless it would be there to help them.

It's hard but we need to stop looking down at them like a blight; put yourself in their shoes and see how you would look.

People are homeless for a variety of reasons but most of them could be handled with affordable housing for them and mental help and job counseling.

Lots of people think that's giving them too much but the State gives us a lot to begin with.

The city of Seattle has had the highest spending for homelessness in the past year and the issue has gotten worse.

Tell me, what do you think would happen if you gave them $500 million more?

I saw a local grocer give her opinion when Seattle’s city was having a hearing for this. This tax is going to negatively impact her as she’s already having razor thin margins. It’s her company that’s donating tons(literally) of food to the shelters. Boy that’s a great thing, negatively impact private charity with inefficient government taxes.

Milton Friedman once said that if you put the government in charge of running the Sahara, they would shortly run out of sand. I think if you gave Seattle’s government more tax money they would burn it all and come back looking for more shortly after. Just like they have been doing.

> Tell me, what do you think would happen if you gave them $500 million more?

Honestly with the way Seattle is with it's taxes. I highly doubt it; there's already 90 million allocated and all they have been doing is studies and trying to help outreach programs.

I know what I could do with 500million if I had it; I'd build a bunch of low income housing apartment complexes all over town and use outreach to bring people off the streets.

I don't think Durkan is up to the task however.

> I'm still waiting for them to fix the roads after we gave them another tax levy to fix the roads. It's been almost 4 years in some area's.

Now if you want to argue that Seattleite's are overtaxed and we don't see enough out of it. I'm game i'll agree with you.

But as far as Amazon; my view is they are one company who is too big. If they were like other companies like Nintendo and Microsoft and Google who have offices all over Metro Seattle and King County I would have much more sympathy.

If they were a little guy trying to make ends meat I would.

However Amazon is a big fish. Their earnings show it.

Revenue: $51.04 billion vs. $49.78 billion, as estimated, according to Thomson Reuters EPS: $3.27 per share vs $1.26 per share, as estimated, according to Thomson Reuters AWS revenue: $5.44 billion vs. $5.25 billion, as estimated, according to FactSet

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/26/amazon-earnings-q1-2018.html

Amazon profits are like 1%-2%. At the end of the day, they don't make money like Microsoft, FB, or Google. Their stock price has whatever future potential baked in at their insane P/E ratio.

You have sympathy for the other companies because they're spread out in the Bellevue/Seattle/Kirkland/Redmond region vs primarily being situated Westlake/SLU?

Your argument doesn't make sense to me.

I don't think Amazon is too big. People just shit on them because their jobs are mostly on the SLU area and do well at highlighting the wealth or income disparity in downtown vs someone like MSFT who is further out in places like Downtown Bellevue and Redmond, where there are hardly any homeless people.

On the east side, 405 traffic is just as horrible as I5 is next to Mercer. You can't pin that all on Amazon.

There are people in the streets in Seattle who legitimately need government assistance to get back on their feet.

Then there are folks who don't need and don't care for any of this. They don't want to work. Any housing you give them will have shit smeared on the walls or needles everywhere.

The people who we can legitimately help are some smaller subset of the population.

Throwing more money at thid problem isn't going to make it go away. It's literally just punishing the rest of us here who work 80 hour weeks and hardly ever see our kids. We can't save money because the socialist morons in our government want to give everything away.

Actually, Seattle has been great at approving new housing development which is why we have had the most cranes in the country for a while now.

In fact, despite the massive increase in residents, rent prices even went down recently: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-ar...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com