Shrugging Off the Cynicism in Amazon’s Move to House the Homeless
Published 1:30 am Wednesday, April 20, 2016
Saul Spady, who owns an advertising firm in town, teared up a few months ago describing a quintessential Seattle scene: a cold winter night on Pike Street and Broadway, with a family on the corner begging for change.
The moment stuck with him, he told SW reporter Sara Bernard, because that night he did nothing about what he saw, a moment of inaction he’s intent not to repeat.
“It’s not right to say ‘The city should just solve it.’ It’s our city. It’s our community. These are our businesses, and these are our families,” said Spady, grandson of Dick’s Drive-In founder Dick Spady. “It’s not just adult men sleeping outside. It’s kids. And that’s just unacceptable in a city this wealthy.”
Spady is a board member at Mary’s Place, an organization that provides shelter to homeless women with children that has struggled to keep up with the demand for their services. And last week his comments about Seattle businesses taking an active role in the homeless crisis seemed prophetic when none other than Amazon, whose very name is a byword for the rich and unfamiliar place Seattle is becoming, stepped forward in a big way to become part of the solution.
Teaming with Mary’s Place, the tech giant will house 60 to 70 families for the next year in an old Travelodge that sits on land it will one day use for its sprawling headquarters in South Lake Union. The shelter will allow families, even multigenerational ones, to stay together, a rare opportunity in the universe of homeless shelters that often separate clients by gender; The Seattle Times reports that even pets will be allowed in some cases. As a service, the Travelodge seems to embody the tech ideals of optimized user experiences.
Of course, the Travelodge will not really solve anything. In a county with 4,500 people sleeping outside, it will house about 200, and only for a year or so, before Amazon moves forward with the demolition of the old hotel to make way for more office space. A cynic could see this as a dark piece of conceptual art: a yearlong act of street theater in which homeless families, unwittingly playing the part of Seattle residents, make a life for themselves near the banks of Lake Union before Amazon, starring as itself, sweeps them away with the swing of a wrecking ball.
Indeed, Amazon’s act of generosity cannot be, and has not been, seen outside the broader context of what’s driving families onto the streets: in part, the soaring rents and home prices brought on by Seattle’s tech boom. Another cynic’s take: Amazon is generating great PR for itself by providing temporary, marginal housing to people who were in part made homeless by Amazon’s own devil-may-care pursuit of world-commerce dominance.
In other words, we see the cynic’s side of things. But we reject the cynicism. Because whatever part Amazon is playing in this widespread crisis, and however small an impact in the homeless statistics the temporary shelter will have, last week’s news provides an important affirmation to Spady’s assertion: This is everybody’s problem.
Amazon’s actions have thrown down a gauntlet to other Seattle corporations to become part of the solution in big, visible ways. Clearly most companies don’t have vacant hotels just hanging out on their asset ledgers, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have their own unique suite of resources to put forth. We hope conversations about what those resources are are happening in boardrooms right now.
Amazon is also signaling to its own employees that it values civic engagement in Seattle. That’s a big deal. In this paper and in others, Amazon workers have long been cast as maddeningly aloof to issues facing the city. As woebegone City Council candidate Gus Hartmann put it to us last year: “The little fuckers don’t vote . . . They are not civically engaged.”
With regard to homelessness, a representative of the philanthropy group Seattle Effective Altruism suggested that its members, many of whom are millennial tech workers, have reservations about donating to homeless services for fear that the benefits are not quantifiable. As homeless families begin to move into South Lake Union and are provided the dignity of a room with their own shower and bathroom, the stability of staying together as a family unit, the joy of keeping their dog, perhaps the quantities of good that come from helping the needy will become easier to suss out. E
editorial@seattleweekly.com
CORRECTION In last week’s cover feature (“There Goes the Neighborhood,” April 13), our reporter stated that city attorney Pete Holmes was present during a January 6 meeting of the Neighborhood Safety Alliance at the Magnolia United Church of Christ. He was not in attendance.
