Amazon is about to host a homeless shelter in its Seattle headquarters
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
While the system (created by governments and corporations) rewards providing housing priced at however much people will pay we won't see much affordable housing. Real estate laws do not reward and have not ever rewarded "working together". If Seattle funneled the money going towards anti-homeless structures to building municipal housing instead this "homeless crisis" would be resolved quickly. It wouldn't fix everything and it'd be just as hard for someone who's both unemployed and homeless to get back on their feet but it would make it easier for them to stay on their feet.
But that's not the system!
The 2019 system is that building housing is illegal without very costly and hard to get permits in most non Texas big cities.
If you could just put up housing on land you own and charge however much people will pay for it, this housing crisis would quickly be gone!
You can help: https://yimbyaction.org/give/
I would much prefer to rent "illegally" or sleep in my car before we criminalize being at a certain location at 4am
Then I started looking where I was walking and noticed brown smudge after brown smudge after brown lump. Saw a decent one outside of YC's SF office too maybe halfway down the block.
Homeless people have to use the restroom, if they're homeless they don't have a toilet and are probably going to do it on the sidewalk or in an alley. This is how disease spreads.
It's like saying we should ban batteries because maybe you will throw them in the river.
It's not that simple. Rapidly increasing the housing supply has all kinds of effects on communities:
* Decreasing the value of nearby homes (supply and demand)
* Increasing traffic and strain on community services like schools
* Environmental impact
* Rapidly changing the demographic and possibly culture of the area
Zoning laws and the permit process exist to help ensure safe buildings but also to help protect the home value of existing residents.
This makes sense in communities with the infrastructure to support it though and we definitely should be looking into ways to safely house everyone.
People often overlook this point way too quickly, they don't consider people with mortgages, if you saved up for a house and purchased with a mortgage then when the flood gates are opened and your house value drops, you now owe more than your house is worth, not a good position to be in.
If people would go back to purchasing homes with the full intention of staying there for decades, this wouldn't be an issue for most people.
Or rephrased: "Making housing affordable".
I mean you're right, but this is the entire point of building more housing!
That's why it's not as simple as "build more affordable housing", not everyone wins if it's done too fast.
While we need to provide affordable housing there are reasonable economic / environmental / community reasons why some small towns don't want it in their own backyard.
I see your point, so please don't accuse me of missing it. However comparing an underwater loan to living on the streets is absurd. If the house isn't worth the mortgage file bankruptcy and move on with your life. If you're living on the streets the chances of getting another chance are razor thin. We all should take a hard look at our privilege before we compare the pains of bankruptcy to the immediately life threatening hellscape that is homelessness.
I doubt homeless shelters produce this effect on existing home prices.
And yes, telling a hard working middle class family with kids to just declare bankruptcy and move on is a big deal and worth examining the impact before you create policies that make that a real possibility.
Would I feel bad for someone who bought a sfh and went underwater. You betcha. That's life though. Most car loans are underwater from day 1. Should be artificially restrict the number of cars on the road so car owners can sell their worn and breaking down clunker for a profit too? Should we continue to limit this dynamic to scalable profit generating schemes that disproportionately benefit millionaires and billionaires?
Public schools take forever to build because they need to get a bond approved, procure land, find a builder, staff it, etc. If Washington in general and Seattle in particular were more open to charter schools, there's a better chance of schools keeping up with demand. Additionally, if Washington allowed a voucher system (it's been a while since I checked, but I'm pretty sure it's not allowed), private schools could also pick up the slack.
> rapidly changing the demographic and possibly culture of the area
Is that a bad thing?
I'm okay with zoning laws in general, but for it to work, the city needs to be open to rapid changes in zoning.
The solution is to get our heads around the fact that people need affordable places to live, and work toward satisfying that demand as quickly as reasonably possible without completely overloading services or putting too many homeowners on the edge upside-down on their mortgages. Unfortunately, so much damage has already been done that this will not be easy, but it will only get harder as governments continue to shelter the wealthy at the expense of everybody else and local economies in general.
Oh, and hand-wringing about changing demographics and culture is not helping. Change happens. Integration is necessary.
Culture matters to a lot of people. Why do you like one town versus another? Maybe the weather, maybe the jobs, but probably also because of the people, the shops, the architecture, the parks, etc. The later are all a function of culture.
Some of the most unique cities are ones with a strong identity. If you take an agricultural town with lots of great festivals, open space and farm to table restaurants and basically make it an affordable housing suburb for the nearby big cities, it's not an easy win/win. You'll need to take that open space and popup some fast food restaurants to feed the demand. Something is lost culturally in that process and it's worth examining rather than saying it's inevitable or necessary.
Fetishizing yesterday's culture is a poor substitute.
Seattle has had 20 years of almost continuous growth, with little housing expansion, and almost no affordable units (compared to growth. Yet, it has this idea, that if we ignore the problem it'll just go away.
Realistically, every city needs to accept that it is not an ocean liner, and cannot pull up the gangplanks and go "oh, sorry, we're full now, maybe you should try Portland? best of luck to you!"
False. "Seattle not only has more cranes than any other major city in the country, it’s by a landslide—the city with the next-highest crane count is Chicago, with 40." https://seattle.curbed.com/2018/7/24/17608278/seattle-constr...
> almost no affordable units
Rents have actually declined over the past few years, and housing outside the urban core is affordable. Not everyone needs to live in SLU.
> if we ignore the problem it'll just go away.
If you just stop interfering with the market, the market will fix your problem for you.
My rent more than doubled from 2012, to 2015, and then went up 10% a year thereafter - you are mostly correct, for one year in there my rent didn't go up - then the northward climb began again in earnest. I was living for most of that in what most would call affordable housing.
The market probably would do its job and solve the issue, provided we didn't make it so dang hard to actually build anything in the City of Seattle.
With you there. But compared to the Bay Area, Seattle is practically permissive.
People conflate "luxury" and "expensive".
Any housing you build in an acute housing shortage will be expensive. This is because there is so much unmet demand, not because it's "luxury".
So it's impossible to build cheap housing in a housing crisis, and if you demand that only cheap housing be built, you're actually demanding no new housing!
For existing home owners and landlords, that is a profitable strategy to weed out competition for their assets. For anyone else: Don't get fooled!
So, instead of flipping your house after 2-5 years for 5x what you paid for it, you'll have to stay in it for 10-50 years and only get 2-3x what you paid for it?
"The 2019 system is that building housing is illegal without very costly and hard to get permits in most non Texas big cities.
If you could just put up housing on land you own and charge however much people will pay for it, this housing crisis would quickly be gone"
Is the idea that the public picks up the whole tab and the issue is just that the money just doesn't go as far with current rents?
Public assistance pays nothing, and section 8/housing authority has years or decades long waiting lists.
Often people who are homeless had jobs right up until the time they became homeless, and have marketable skills, but not ones that can pay for a median rent price, Basically the lack affordable housing puts stress on people who are already on the margins or in near crisis and puts them out of the street. Most of the homeless people fit into this category.
There is another group of homeless folks though, who are long term chronic homeless, they have other complicating factors, like drug abuse, mental health issues, criminal records that make it hard to rent a home or find a job - often being in the first category of homelessness can lead you to slip into the second category, by simply the on the street.
The first group of homelessness would be largely solved with affordable housing and a program to get people into it, Unfortunately for those of us who want to solve the problem the most visible homeless are the chronic variety not the people suffering from a life event.
[1] - https://www.marketplace.org/2019/12/23/interview-la-mayor-er...
And, while I believe it's a minority, in the US a shockingly high percentage of homeless people remain employed.
Even single bedroom apartments are too luxurious with regards to the homelessness problem. Aim lower.
Typical NYC residents live in Studio Apartments (granted, at $2000/month, but that's NYC pricing there). A singular building can house hundreds, maybe thousands, of 300 Sq. Ft Studio units.
If land is more readily available, then trailer-parks provide more room than a Studio and are probably cheaper to build out. A trailer costs $20,000 to construct, and maybe $600/month to rent out the land.
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The problem is that low-end housing drives down property values. No one wants to live near a trailer park. But by golly, it fixes the housing problem really cheap.
I think people need to "wake up" and see the advantages that trailer parks can bring to their community. Yeah, trailer parks kinda suck for land value, but so do hoards of homeless people sleeping in the streets. And yes, I'm purposefully being callous: its the only real way to fight against NIMBY: you gotta "sell" how a trailer park can benefit a community in a callous way if you expect the NIMBY crowd to agree to it.
They often go on marginal land without sewer, so you need more land to make a septic tank work. Trailers in the boonies outside of Vicksburg MS where I lived as a kid got maybe electricity, you had to take care of your own trash (usually by burning); I had many friends out there who were living in squalor. A trailer park was actually a step up from these places.
I pay $1100 a month rent, no utilities/services included, for a 2 bedroom just west of Indianapolis, it's insane. The prices are that though because housing prices keep climbing.
Fiance and I are starting to look at homes so we can get pre-approved once she has a teaching contract here and... new construction homes a mile or so from me are starting at 250k for 1 bedroom homes with 2-3 bedroom homes stating around 300k. There's actually a home, bank repo, about 1/4 of a mile from my apartment that they want 320k for in a cookie-cutter addition, with a messed up driveway and exterior damage, that's not even 5-10 years old. The median household income is 59k here...
House prices have been climbing like crazy the past several years, but most people can't actually afford them. There are definitely not a lot of jobs around where I live that justify multiple new housing additions with homes at 300-350k a pop. I just don't get it.
And long after today, most of the homeless people, or the people currently getting displaced, will be dead or gone.
YIMBY people don't seem to understand that this response is the housing equivalent of "let them eat cake". People who are at risk of displacement are not really interested in hearing about the affordable housing they might be able to afford twenty years from now if they have to spend the meantime picking between sleeping on the street and leaving.
We obviously have to build our way out of an incredibly tight supply. But talking past people and basically ignoring their concerns is not going to get people on board.
This is what I mean when I say:
> But talking past people and basically ignoring their concerns is not going to get people on board.
Is what you're saying valid? Yes. But if you just act dismissive of other people don't be surprised if they're not rushing to your defense, or even against you.
Rent-seeking will always drive the prices to the barely-acceptable and thus will make it affordable for a large portion of the population. That portion is either driven to the periphery or denied housing altogether.
So no; housing will not automatically become affordable. There are forces in the market that prevent that.
We use prices to ration access to scarce resources. Why should housing in the center of a desirable city be cheap?
Because they bought low-property housing from the entity who previously owned it without a guarantee that the demand was going to be there and then demand grew. Risk meet reward.
Are you suggesting to violate property rights because you did not have the foresight, luck and/or the resources to make the same investment?
Risk? More often than not, they engineer the growing of demand, help throw out old tenants (even with thuggish methods), select new tenants to drive up values (e.g. with redlining), use connections in the city government to develop specifically the areas they bought or intent to buy, and so on...
Who has the money other than massive developers? Of course they want to make €£¥$
This is basic stuff. Surprised that people are not aware of it!
Near me, in a London suburb, there are at least half a dozen ~40+ story residential buildings that have approval where no construction is currently happening because the market conditions are not there to make it worthwhile vs. simply waiting a couple of years, because scarcity in house supply keeps driving up prices to the extent that it's not always clear that building now is the right choice, especially not when there are other buildings going up - it's easy to just sit and wait until there's less competition and start construction then. If planning was all that was stopping them, we'd have plenty of these buildings going up right now.
Importantly, because these developers have a relatively safe bet in terms of returns once they eventually construct, they are able to find investors to finance assembling and sitting on relatively large tracts of land or low density housing, and thus participate in keeping the supply lower, and thus contribute to the house price growth.
There certainly are places where planning is the main thing driving prices up, including parts of London, but the point is that just addressing that tends to be insufficient to address this problem, as cost of increasing density goes through the roof very quickly, and so in hotspots where land is expensive you tend to end up with expensive housing anyway, unless you have governments prepared to force the issue and saturate the market to take out enough demand to drive the price of land down.
If you want to address housing prices in a less heavy handed manner, you need to address the centralization of jobs, which tends to mean addressing transport. A pet peeve of mine for London, which applies equally to a lot of big cities, is that addressing the housing and congestion issues in the centre is a net negative overall:
It costs a fortune to drive up the density and transport capacity in an already dense area, and it just attracts more demand until things are just as bad and the next "solution" is far more expensive. The more cost-effective solution tends to be actual planning on a larger scale to make bypassing the expensive/congested region easier and more attractive.
E.g. in the case of London there are a number of towns that feed a huge amount of people into London. Most of these towns would find it a lot easier to subsume additional housing density at far lower costs. What they lack is the ease of transport from a large enough base to be more attractive places for companies to locate. What's required to kickstart that is largely an initial willingness to invest in upgrading transport links to other places than London. Ironically many of these towns are "new towns" [1] that were in many cases constructed pretty much entirely from scratch to reduce strain on London (and other cities) after the war. And they achieved that, but instead of building on that and also decentralising transport to encourage these towns to grow as hubs in their own right, transport has instead become increasing focused on making commuting in to London faster, so even though many of these towns have their own small commuter belts they are to far too great an extent feeding the problems in London.
You don't solve that by letting planning loose, because a lot of these investments are beneficial to wider society but not necessarily profitable individually unless you can take into account how they affect overall economic growth and tax receipts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_in_the_United_Kingdo...
I stand by my description of it!
This is overall not a location specific phenomenon anyway; it's a factor of the fact that the construction cost per unit goes up above a certain size because of overhead (e.g. lifts, structural elements and services makes up an increasing proportion of the overall building volume), and that network effects tends to drive up demand to desirable locations when accessibility improves. You simply can not increase density to a particularly high level without driving costs per unit of space up to levels that prevents you from cutting prices much. The inflection point changes over time, but not particularly fast.
This means that any area that is already relatively high density, like the Bay Area, faces a rapidly diminishing return on investment in trying to increase density.
Now consider the vast amount of pent up demand in this region, and you can increase supply dramatically without much impact on prices.
I see this sentiment shared often but the reality is that the major Texas cities are going through similar growing pains as companies and people move out here. The cities are designed to grow outwards, rather than upwards which has a huge problem in that traffic quickly becomes a disaster due to poor infrastructure and city planning.
Putting housing on land you own wouldn't solve much because it would still result in poor people being pushed further and further out of the city and congestion being made a major problem. This isn't to say NIMBYs aren't a problem, but rather that even if you removed them greed from landlords and land value in cities would still be a problem.
Citation needed. Most cities that have a lot of density also have a lot of people who don’t own cars.
It's a fact that Texas cities have generally handled density through sprawl.
Cities grow out, until they grow up. Even NYC didn’t have skyscrapers at one time.
It will remain car-centric until such time density becomes sufficiently high that one can walk to enough different things, the achievement of which requires building vertically.
Austin as a whole consistently ranks low in terms of walkability and the public transit here pales in comparison to other major cities. Just because a small slice of the city occupied by the upper-middle class have the luxury of living next door to work does not a good city make.
> Austin as a whole
Shrug, neighborhoods matter way, way more than arbitrarily drawn city borders. There are neighborhoods of Austin that are more enjoyable to live in car-free than ones in NYC, for example.
By your argument, we might as well say San Francisco is perfectly OK to live in because we can find one neighborhood that isn't a hellscape. You're not really addressing my points or arguments at all, just weirdly trying to sidestep it.
If I go up thread you say "[Texas] cities are designed to grow outwards, rather than upwards" and "even if you removed [NIMBYs] greed from landlords and land value in cities would still be a problem."
I mean... it's illegal to build anything except a single family home in most lots in Austin. NIMBYism is the problem. What else about Austin makes it "designed to grow outward" other than the zoning? How else do you push back against landlords and the high cost of land but via more units per acre? I assume you'll mention public transit, but I don't think any city built out a subway/rail system before it had some level of density. It's a chicken and egg problem and we need density in our urban core before we'll be able to pass more funding for transit, sadly. And we definitely can't afford to have a super great bus or rail system serving low density neighborhoods with low ridership.
Also, I live in Central East Austin and many of my neighbors are poor. I don't buy arguments about central living being only for upper-middle class people (at least in Austin). The fact is most people choose to add miserable car commutes to their lives because they want more space, or they're afraid of living near people different than them (I'm being kind...), or whatever.
The claims I've been making have been about the city as a whole. Don't try and twist this around into me making the argument about a random address not being walkable, because your entire argument has been taking a random address, claiming its walkable and then trying to extrapolate that to the rest of Austin.
>I mean... it's illegal to build anything except a single family home in most lots in Austin. NIMBYism is the problem. What else about Austin makes it "designed to grow outward" other than the zoning? How else do you push back against landlords and the high cost of land but via more units per acre? I assume you'll mention public transit, but I don't think any city built out a subway/rail system before it had some level of density. It's a chicken and egg problem and we need density in our urban core before we'll be able to pass more funding for transit, sadly. And we definitely can't afford to have a super great bus or rail system serving low density neighborhoods with low ridership.
I never denied NIMBYism isn't part of the problem, but it is only part of the issue. The other half of the issue is the glorified car culture in and around Texas where people value driving more than they do other forms of transit. This can't be illustrated any better than the amount of sidewalk islands Austin has where buildings or malls are surrounded by sidewalk that connects to nowhere. Because everyone drives to the building next door, because cities like Austin grew outwards and spaced buildings and places accordingly.
Your second claim about subway/rail systems isn't correct because New York and Seattle both proactively added new forms of public transit to fit a growing population, rather than trying to retrofit public transit after the population has already blown up. Austin in this scenario isn't even trying to add more public transit, but rather expand highways while people complain about the metro rail being too 'cost inefficient'.
Most people don't chose to add car commutes, this era of white flight is less about moving to the suburbs and more about gentrification and pushing out the poor and minorities from locations closer to the city.
Uh, what? I've repeatedly stated that neighborhoods matter more than cities. My whole point has been that generalizations about the city/region/state as a whole aren't useful. I would no sooner live in many parts of Austin than I would in rural Oklahoma. But that doesn't mean there aren't great, walkable parts of Austin and many people living car-free here. Which is literally what I said to start this conversation...
You, however, stated: "Austin as a whole consistently ranks low in terms of walkability." I don't live in "Austin as a whole." Nobody does. They live in their house/apartment/condo/whatever in a specific location. The walkability score near the border of Round Rock matters as much to me as the walkability score of... well, rural Oklahoma.
> The other half of the issue is the glorified car culture in and around Texas where people value driving more than they do other forms of transit. This can't be illustrated any better than the amount of sidewalk islands Austin has where buildings or malls are surrounded by sidewalk that connects to nowhere. Because everyone drives to the building next door
I completely agree. Where we'd probably disagree is that since we're (again) generalizing to areas as large as a state (!), here are some other car centric states: California, New York... It's a true American problem.
> New York and Seattle both proactively added new forms of public transit to fit a growing population
I'd be interested in the data there. I'd be amazed to learn that NYC/Seattle dug out subway lines to neighborhoods that were anywhere near as sparsely populated as non-central Austin neighborhoods are.
> Austin in this scenario isn't even trying to add more public transit
Yes, it is. You might be interested in CapMetro Engage. In addition, CapMetro ridership is rising, which is great for the chicken and egg issue.
> but rather expand highways while people complain about the metro rail being too 'cost inefficient'
And we're definitely doing this, too. I agree it's a problem.
> Most people don't chose to add car commutes, this era of white flight is less about moving to the suburbs and more about gentrification and pushing out the poor and minorities from locations closer to the city.
We'll have to agree to disagree here.
Anyway, I doubt I'll convince you of much. Which is fine. I mostly post these responses so other HN readers know they can find a place to live here that isn't car dependent. Because they do exist, they are getting better, they are getting more numerous, and I'm all for more pro-city, pro-density, pro-urbanism, anti-car people moving here and voting with their dollars and, well, votes.
The reality is that it's a problem you have to tackle before it becomes a problem. You have to design your city with public transit in mind, or else you end up with issues like LA where you have endlessly expanding highways with zero ways of managing traffic.
Pretty much every single city with skyscrapers stands in contradiction to this premise.
No city in history, except those entirely planned ones in China recently, was originally designed to grow upwards. I think you have created a false dichotomy.
Any city can build skyscrapers.
The problems in Seattle and California are neighbors and government, not some ur-plan that makes skyscrapers impossible. Look at the giant ugly salesforce building, for example.
Even ugly, I’d love to see a few dozen more built there.
“It has always been done this way” is not the same thing as “it must be done this way”.
The answer is because again, we designed our cities with urban sprawl and car ownership in mind (see: white flight). I didn't create a false dichotomy, you're attempting to over-simplify city growth into 'builds skyscrapers / doesn't build skyscrapers' when there's a lot more math that goes into the equation. Especially when you start factoring in our cultural demand for parking space and inefficient forms of transit.
They're growing, so they're going through growing pains, sure. But it's different pains!
SF has decided to not grow. It's pains come from having to force a resident to move out for each new worker moving in.
San Francisco’s population is growing, it doesn't have to (and doesn't) force a resident out for each new resident, worker or otherwise. It's not growing super rapidly, but it's never grown much faster than it is now since it was fully urbanized; the faster-growing US cities pretty much all have surrounding non-urbanized land to expand into.
This is an unavoidable consequence of people moving in and the housing supply not growing (you're right that it's growing a little, I exaggerated somewhat to make the point).
It's a multi-pronged approach to solve the issue, which prongs you use is a matter of how aggressive you're willing to get to solve it however.
Yes, you can. It really is that simple. The homeless problem isn't persistent because it's technically hard. It's persistent because a segment of society is addicted to moral posturing in a way that blocks necessary and obvious solutions.
There is no legal or moral problem. Build adequate shelters in inexpensive locations and arrest everyone who camps on the street and refuses to go to one of these shelters. (This approach is also compatible with the recent SCOTUS stance on the subject.) Everyone needs a place to sleep, but there is no reason for society to support squatting on random public land as a lifestyle choice.
What's your proposal, arrest everyone who's homeless and jail then forever?
At least then the homeless would have guaranteed access to shelter, food and medical care, and likely drug treatment and employment programs.
It's more humane than lining public spaces with spikes and caltrops to drive the homeless away like unwanted animals, and Americans would likely much rather pay taxes to jail the homeless than to subsidize "socialist" initiatives like public housing and food distribution.
Whenever I go downtown, even the semi-public restrooms in the store are constantly used by the homeless (making it difficult for other people to use, another reason not to go downtown), so they have that also.
But they still poop in the parks because it is closer to their tents, what can you do?
I worked in downtown in the 90s at palace where the homeless would hang out at night (3rd and pine McDonalds), and it wasn’t so bad back then that people would avoid going downtown. Now its just depressing and stores are moving out (eg the iconic Macy’s is going to become an amazon office building probably).
In general, West Coast Cities seem to have this idea, that if you ignore the problem of insufficient housing - be it the symptoms (high rent, no affordable units) or the causes excessive permitting costs/lengthy approval times and restrictive zoning, it'll just go away. There are prosperous bustling big cities without housing affordability issues, they build housing, either in the city, or in nearby suburbs.
The reality of it is people are moving there whether they like it or not. Seattle has had 20 years of almost continuous growth, with little housing expansion, and almost no affordable units (compared to growth. it can't pretend to be an ocean liner, and pull up the gangplanks and go "oh, sorry, we're full now, maybe you should try Portland? best of luck to you!"
I could imagine that this is a trend that could catch on and become the 21st century politically correct version of blockbusting [1].
The fact is that homelessness is as much an economic problem - one that is becoming worse every year - as it is a problem of mental health and drug addiction. Our social safety net has failed for the poorest Americans and the situation continues to worsen as we whittle away at what remains of that net and more and more Americans slide deeper into poverty.
Amazon is doing this in part because it gets a ton of heat for its part in the somewhat overheated Seattle land economy. Housing costs post-recession have skyrocketed and it has reconfigured the local housing system. Too, Amazon is not particularly known for corporate do-gooding (vs, say, Microsoft, Boeing, or Alaska Air) - so this shift is welcome. And Mary's Place is relatively well regarded locally.
Happy to answer any questions from a local techie's perspective.
Shelters are NOT a solution to homelessness. This move will give Amazon false bragging rights to say, hey look, our operational style, not paying taxes, and lobbying for a society that punishes the poor more than the rich aren't really that bad because we're helping the homeless.
Even if Amazon is able to put every homeless person in the United States in a shelter (they certainly can afford it), that would not be a good thing.
That is validating a bifurcated system where we become content with the living conditions of the poor while excusing those who create the system that creates those conditions in the first place (Amazon in this case)
How much taxes should Amazon be paying in your opinion?
The people they employ pay income taxes, as well, which come out of Amazon’s revenue ultimately.
There are many reasons to hate them. Their complying with the tax laws as they are currently written is not one of them.
Payroll taxes and income tax have a different intent, and the money from them goes to different ends. Paying payroll taxes does not relinquish your duty towards paying your income taxes and has no relation to the above.
> The people they employ pay income taxes, as well, which come out of Amazon’s revenue ultimately.
It is mindboggling to hear that. "Amazon's revenue" is not generated via magic, but people's work. When someone works for Amazon and gets paid for it, Amazon is not doing them a favor and giving them a portion of their revenue, it is the money that solely belongs to the person who earned it.
That person is paying the taxes from their revenue, not Amazon. The person in this case is taking a cut from their dues for the work they to support society and the infrastructure that industry (like Amazon) runs on.
Amazon is absolutely skirting its responsibilities by not paying income taxes, and this should be considered deeply unethical by all.
Complying with the tax law, as written, is not itself an unethical act.
People disagree on whether or not paying the minimum amount of tax required by law is moral or not.
I believe that most people generally agree that the tax law’s current angle of not taxing companies without profits is a reasonable decision.
I don't think anyone would advocate that we all go home and say problem solved after this shelter goes up, and I doubt anyone will really forget that Amazon contributed to the issue in Seattle.
https://jacobinmag.com/2019/10/amazon-kshama-sawant-seattle-...
i think it is absolutely disingenuous to blame it on corporations playing by the rules clearly and explicitly established by the society. It is the society who bears responsibility for the ugly situation that the minimum wage is many times below living wage. The minimum wage must be at least $30-$50, especially in the high cost areas. I don't understand why the people at the local Starbucks who work much harder than me are making on the scale of ten-folds less. The society explicitly and intentionally maintains that situation by maintaining the very low minimum wage. The only reason i can find is that the society seems to want the social darwinism of the 'rat race' and achieves that by maintaining the large gradient between supposed "losers" and "winners" (which i think is almost medievally cruel) which powers the miracle of American economy. Looks like the society is pretty sure that nobody is going to work hard, or at all, if there were a generous safety net, a minimum wage allowing for normal life, etc ...
Their tax-avoidance schemes and their lobbying have robbed society of resources that are needed to address and ameliorate the many problems we face.
Supply and demand. If starbucks baristas were paid $50/hour think about how expensive coffees would be. People would either start making their own coffee at home or buying expensive machines that are still cheaper than $50/hour to operate.
SLC hasn't really solved the homeless problem, but at least you don't see tent cities anywhere, which could be seen as good or bad depending on your outlook. I think something like that should happen elsewhere, but only if it's coupled with actual solutions, like improved homeless shelters and better policies for handling the homeless.
The proposal is not to give people better houses or more money than they would have if they were not homeless. It's to raise the floor a little bit such that they're able to live a little longer and better their search for gainful employment. Their lives would still be better and more rewarding if they were able to support themselves and live in a larger home with more money for incidental expenses.
This is not a "reward" relative to the "reward" of living a self-sustained life, but rather it's a bit of humanity to make their troubles less so.
I could only see your objection being reasonable if we gave those who were not gainfully employed more money and better housing than you could gain by being gainfully employed, at which point sure, why get a job. We clearly don't do that, or else you'd hear of people quitting their minimum wage jobs to become homeless and reap the rewards.
For what it's worth, there are several studies and anecdotes which show that providing homeless with housing and money does result in a larger percentage of them finding jobs and escaping the viscous cycle of homelessness (who would have guessed, getting a job and a home is easier when you have a home). The most referenced of these studies is this one I believe https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2772270
Now, of course, you could say that those studies may not capture everything perfectly, but at the very least I'd like to convince you that it's not as cut-and-dry as you seem to think .
So, I think you said this in sarcasm but there are people that actually try to get into prison.
Here are some articles:
https://www.businessinsider.com/jail-getting-arrested-delibe...
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-47033704
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-42057173
https://www.thespec.com/news-story/4425874-choosing-prison-w...
Also, IIRC, on TED Radio Hour in the past month or so one of the speakers was in prison and said something along these lines (I may be mistaken but I'm pretty confident he did).
How many shelters could be operated for a year with that kind of budget?
Also, Amazon had carryforward losses, so they paid too much in taxes in prior years and therefor didn't have to pay taxes this year. Not exactly nefarious, carryforward losses are an intentional part of the tax code that prevents companies from paying more in supposed earnings they have on paper that can never be realized as profit because taxes are based on estimates. Every business, not just Amazon, get carryforward losses when they overpay in taxes.
Edit: I suppose it's equivalent to say it prevents them from overpaying in taxes in the future. That might be easier to understand if you consider that in any given year, a company pays zero in taxes if they don't make money, regardless of how much money they lose. That timing difference means that the tax burden changes from year to year as investments in a company are realized through buying and selling goods. It's a smoothing out of taxes. Instead of forcing Amazon to structure it's business to always make the same profit each year, they get to smooth it out over a maximum of a 10 year rolling window.
The point remains that Amazon paid $0 in taxes past year, and actually received money from the federal government instead.
And no, it's not just because of carryforward losses. It was also because of the various tax credits, and changes to tax laws in 2017.
Where? Determine where and then determine
- rent/purchase price of a property.
- cost of utilities
- cost of maintenance and cleaning
- cost of security and other staff
- adequate liability insurance
- cost of any programs/services to help the people using the shelter to get back on their feat (if they even want to)
- cost of therapists/psychiatrists/psychologists/medical doctors to visit and provide services
It looks like 'supportive housing' cost $12,800 [1] per head per year and I don't believe that factors in food/supplies/medical etc.
So realistically, they could probably provide 12-18 months of housing/food/bare bottom basic medical care/a few sessions of therapy/a few outfits/interview training to 5000-7500 people for 129 million dollars.
[1] https://endhomelessness.org/resource/ending-chronic-homeless...
Sure, but corporations (and those who lead them) also lobby local, state and federal governments for policies that benefit them. They pay for campaigns of those who would help them out, and sway local and national politics. Sometimes to no harm, sometimes to immense societal detriment. This last election in Seattle, Amazon funneled $1.5 million to a political action committee that backed candidates seen as business friendly. This ended up backfiring, but it's plainly obvious that entrenched business interests are there and do manipulate their environment.
Is it that crazy to posit that local property companies are attempting to manipulate their regulatory environment in their favor?
Seems just as irresponsible to label them as blameless as it is to declare that they are entirely the problem.