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Comment by jakelazaroff | Hacker News Reader

No one's shaming him for not doing something better. They're shaming him for having a direct role in creating the problem this charity is supposed to resolve.

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How is Amazon creating more homeless people?

Look at their home in Seattle. The influx of people is pushing up housing prices to pretty unbearable levels. It's not as bad as the Bay Area, but the homeless situation there has been bad for a long time.

The large Seattle companies also work in discount deals for housing, which is far from ethical or fair:

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/is-it-hou...

People are critical because Amazon has rarely given to charity, or when they do it's something like letting a charity temporally use an existing building before they renovate it:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/amazons-donating-a-buil...

I mean, maybe we shouldn't be so critical if Bezos is legitimately concerned and they're doing something, but I can understand why people are skeptical based on their track record.

And they're planning on permanently giving them space in one of the new office buildings.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-creating...

Disclosure: i work at Amazon.

Increasing home prices in Seattle, where the median rent is $2,400 [0]. By bringing in people from out of state with high salaries Amazon is making the housing market in Seattle much more expensive as more people compete for a mostly static stock of housing. Zoning laws, mandatory parking, improved public transportation, affordable housing regulations, and new development could all improve the current situation so local and state governments play a role, but it would be naive to assume the largest private employer in the region didn't play a role in creating the current situation either.

[0] https://www.zillow.com/seattle-wa/home-values/

:/ The math you are presenting is “One family gets a large raise. Another gets a slightly harder time finding affordable housing”. Multiply that by a large number and you get a large number of families cannot find affordable housing. But, a similar number got large raises. It’s not a universal win, but it’s still a net win. It’s not even a horribly skewed distribution.

If I could make a genie wish, it would be that there was a bunch of luxury condo&apt construction for the new residents so that none of the old residents would have any pressure to move. But, I can’t blame the lack of construction on Amazon.

> If I could make a genie wish, it would be that there was a bunch of luxury condo&apt construction for the new residents so that none of the old residents would have any pressure to move.

Seattle has had the most cranes in the country for 3 years now [0] and so much new housing has been built prices recently went down [1].

[0]: https://www.seattlepi.com/seattlenews/article/Seattle-three-...

[1]: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/smallest-s...

How is increasing inequality a net win? The situation you've presented is even somewhat zero-sum, i.e. the first family's gain comes at the expense of the second. That's exactly what we should be trying to prevent.

It's not zero sum. One family makes more than before. The other makes the same as before. Net win. The extra money in the pocket of the first family is not coming out of the pocket of the second. It's coming out of Amazon's pocket.

The alternative is that no one gets raises. That's would be loss for a large number of families and no change for others.

You are not presenting a scenario in which one family gains and the other stays the same, you're presenting one in which one family makes more money (gain) while the other makes the same amount of money but is less able to find affordable housing (loss).

It's not strictly zero-sum because the gains and losses may not exactly offset each other, but one agent's gains still come at the expense of another.

I don't know what you are advocating. Amazon paid people a lot locally. That's usually considered a nice thing. As a side effect, that inflated prices locally. That's sad. So, to not be shamed by you, they should have been doing ambiguous something all along. What?

I suppose I'm advocating that we structure our society such that one person gaining wealth does not make it more difficult for another to live their life. I'm pointing out that, in a vacuum, this specific scenario:

> One family gets a large raise. Another gets a slightly harder time finding affordable housing.

is something to avoid, not strive for.

Sure. But, it feels like there is a lot of shooting the messenger here. There is obviously a fault in the housing market of Seattle. If there wasn’t, supply would have risen to meet demand. But, Amazon didn’t cause the fault. They just made it obvious. So, when shit gets bad, who does the pitchforks come out for? The ones who made the problem obvious.

> Zoning laws, mandatory parking, improved public transportation, affordable housing regulations, and new development could all improve the current situation so local and state governments play a role

Wow! "Play a role" has an amazing undertone here; It's Amazon's fault for offering good salaries in Seattle; a better company would offer fewer jobs, at lower salaries, spread out (oh that's what's happening at the warehouses).

Local and State Governments (and the people they represent who are profiting from real estate in San Francisco and Seattle) should not be the distant second you're pointing at here!

Indeed, Amazon HQ2 is considered by many cities to be a giant opportunity for economic growth.

And this is to ignore that Amazon Seattle is located where a previously blighted community was.

Nay, I say, I've considered Seattle as having a higher cost of living since 'You've Got Mail' came out.

Might be hard to do all those things you're proposing when Amazon has tremendous resources to mobilize against any proposed tax.

X used to own a bookstore. It was good enough to put him in middle class. Then the culture changed, it was easier for people to read reviews online and buy, than to shop in book stores. His shop has to close down, now he drives for Uber and tries to make ends meet. He is no longer in middle class. Not homeless, but I'd imagine if there are more competition for unskilled labor, more people would be squeezed into homelessness

succeeding too much by being to useful and employing too many people, and failing to respect modern cities inability to grow

By centralizing giant swathes of the consumption economy to run through Amazon, destroying jobs at every step of the way. Sweden have banned Amazon so their local economies can flourish. I think this is good macro business logic for a nation state. https://www.politico.eu/article/sweden-amazon-competition-ec...

So Amazon gets credit for killing jobs, but no credit for creating jobs? Without a doubt Ikea has killed the small time furniture making industry, yet is listed as a "charity."

My own company has been slowly getting killed by amazon in the past 10 years, but we’ve also killed countless brick and mortar stores along the way. Where will we draw the line? Are we to fight the newfound efficiencies of technologies like the Luddites?

Sweden did not ban Amazon. Amazon just doesn't operate in Sweden (yet). People in Sweden can already buy things from the other EU Amazon stores.

I'm not sure that's accurate, I think there has been considerable political and therefore bureaucratic opposition to Amazon in Sweden

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/how-a...

In case you don't care to read an article they're just coming off an effort to kill a tax that would have affected them and which was specifically designed to combat homelessness.

So shame on them as opposed to most of society that has an indirect role and we therefore are not part of the problem? Society keeps buying things from Amazon. We as society created Amazon. I don't have a lot of sympathy for big corporations but also dislike when individuals try to disproportionally blame them without taking a look at what we do at an individual level to make a difference. By almost any standard I'd consider the average HN'er 'rich' (myself included) and benefiting of the same conditions that are in some way also responsible for the same problem (tech bubble, big tech corporations) Amazon is allegedly guilty of.

Isn’t this “problem created by” anyone who is rich then?

And conveniently the definition of 'rich' for almost everyone is anyone who has more money than me.

You could make that argument as well, but I'm specifically talking about Amazon's underpayment of workers and efforts to kill taxes that would fund efforts meant to curb homelessness, among other things. Some of the other replies to my comment have links to articles about these.

You certainly would not have to look very hard to find people who would argue that

Yes. We should tax billionaires out of existence. This level of wealth and power accumulation is as unseemly as it is dangerous to our democracy and economy.

Taking other people money by force is even more dangerous for democracy and economy.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this idea means we shouldn't have any government at all.

Not sure if that’s the line of reasoning. A well known danger of democracy is rule by mob. For instance a tough thing to get right is protecting rights of minority groups. If everyone voted for their own direct benefit, we’d just be locking minorities up and taking their assets with power of the majority. Luckily doesn’t seem to happen much.

If the government taking things by force, or by the implied threat of force, is bad, then taxation is bad, and if you don't have any kind of taxation you don't have a government in any meaningful sense.

I think taxes are a bit better because you're also agreeing to pay your own money (vs only taking other people's money only as the original commenter said). I had a different reading of "taking other people's money by force" as meaning specifically voting to tax a minority group more just because you can. This is based on the GP comment being "We should tax billionaires out of existence" as opposed to "taxes are immoral"

OP can clarify if necessary.

That isn't taxing a "minority group." It's just progressive taxation, an idea almost everyone accepts to some extent. "Taxing billionaires out of existence" could be achieved simply by increasing marginal tax rates.

billionaires are literally a minority group. they certainly don't need protected status, but, whether or not it is "good" to take their money, they can't effectively oppose this just by voting.

The argument for preventing one person to amass that much wealth is at least in part that it gives them tremendous political influence. The preferences of Sheldon Adelson arte far more consequential than an average voter living in the same district, for instance. Appropriating the language of "minority" discrimination, which traditionally refers to marginalized groups, to talk about people who are very rich strikes me as distasteful.

one could just as easily make the argument that academics and social theorists have appropriated a word that has a commonly understood statistical meaning. no one objects to calling the alawites of syria a "minority group", even though they are relatively privileged and literally control the country. especially in the context of a (putative) democracy, it makes sense to use the word in the statistical sense.

By your standard criminals are also a minority group.

i mean yeah, in addition to actually being disenfranchised.

Nonetheless, most of us would agree that some abridgement of rights is acceptable for this "minority group." This is why I don't think talking this way is helpful.

Let's not pretend that homelessness has nothing to do with addiction and mental health. Stop avoiding the real issues- it's harmful when everyone pins Washington's problems all on Bezos.

Who's pretending that? I said Bezos and Amazon play a direct role in creating poverty and homelessness, not that they alone are culpable; obviously there are many factors. Let's also not pretend that homelessness has nothing to do with our economy and political systems.

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