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Comment by fmmow | Hacker News Reader

Tech hasn't been kind to Seattle or SF. Maybe to the people attracted likely to be filling this jobs, but not to the people in the surrounding areas.

LIC was mostly warehouses at one point and you're right a lot of the new units are housing for people moving away from Manhattan. But the concern is not just about LIC; it's about Corona, Astoria, Jackson Heights. These are areas with a lot of immigrant communities, communities that'll start getting pushed out once the Amazonians move in.

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Not sure why you would say that tech hasn’t been kind to Seattle — nearly the entire history of Seattle and surrounding areas has been based upon 2 things: resources and technology. Resources like trees and salmon and otherwise don’t actually employ that many people in the modern era.. one person can log huge areas and it takes many years for this trees to grow back so there is an upper limit to how many people can be supported by it. Technology companies like Microsoft and you could also call Boeing a tech company in many ways are basically the reason 90% of the people are in the Seattle area anyway — so amazon and others are part of the latest wave of tech happening in the Seattle area and brings in zillions or dollars from around the world. Many many many people in Seattle area have become very rich from that. If people making money is not what you like to see there are plenty of parts of the country that are full of struggling people who wish they could find a job that pays more than $10 and hour. Maybe people get pushed out in certain areas but often a lot of those people sell their houses at a profit so it’s not horrible for them. Anyway, I just think broadly stating that tech has not been kind to Seattle is a bit of a narrow view for an area that has more to be happy about than many places. By the way, construction workers basically can write their own ticket in Seattle right now.. huge demand and way too few workers. Same thing for trades. Where do they get the work? 95% from people who work for Microsoft, google, amazon, and many of the other tech companies in Seattle / Bellevue area.

No, NIMBYs haven't been kind to Seattle or SF. You are attributing the unkindness to the symptom, not the problem.

The proof of this is what happened elsewhere. the Dallas and Houston metro areas grew more in each of the last two decades the Bay Area has grown total since 1980. But prices haven’t skyrocketed because development has been permitted.

Why Amazon didn't choose Dallas or Houston?

Not enough local talent, most likely.

NY gave them billions of dollars.

This 1000x. It's fashionable to blame the shortage of SF housing on tech, when the truth is that NIMBYs have created the shortage over decades by not allowing high density housing construction.

Tech might not have been kind to the cities of SF and Seattle sure, but tech built the greater metropolitan regions of both of these areas, where Seattle metro's population has doubled as a result of the tech boom since 1980, and the bay area's population has grown by ~70% in the same time frame, for reference, this isn't that far off from the nominal growth seen in greater Los Angeles during the same period.

Seattle was created to supply the Yukon gold rush miners. Then it was heavily dependent on Weyerhauser (lumber). Then it was Boeing (will the last person who leaves Seattle please turn out the lights.) Now tech.

Seattle's always been a one horse economy.

(Something like 15% of workers in Seattle are Amazonians.)

Can you provide a source on the 15% number? Is that 15% of all employed people or just in a specific sector. If it is a specific sector how is that defined?

I read it in one of the flurry of newspaper articles in the last couple days about Amazon, but don't recall which.

Doing some googling:

Amazon Aug 2017 had 40,000 workers in Seattle:

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/thanks-to-amazo...

Workers in Seattle are currently 425,827

https://datausa.io/profile/geo/seattle-wa/

So the 15% figure is plausible.

This person is wrong unless you define the worker market in some weird way that excludes other large employers like Boeing and uw. This article from 2018 lists other large employers, and Amazon looks smaller than expected https://www.tripsavvy.com/biggest-seattle-area-employers-296...

I think the difference is "Seattle" vs "Seattle area."

Google says that Seattle has a population of ~725k. Let's say that half of them are working. 725k * 50% * 15% ~= 54k.

54k Amazon employees in the city limits sounds at least in the ballpark.

The "Seattle area" includes Bellevue, Tacoma, etc., which about triples the number of people.

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