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With online shopping sales quickly outpacing brick and mortar sales, one online retailer stands above all the rest. As Amazon’s sales skyrocket so does their reach and influence. Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, and it quickly became a giant in the online shopping market. In 2017 Amazon brought in almost $180 billion dollars in sales, with Jeff Bezos’ net worth topping $100 billion. As its sales grew, so did criticisms about its business practices and its effects on local economies. Working conditions of its warehouse workers, potential monopoly accusations, and its effects on local housing markets have been the most frequent criticisms against the company. As the U.S. is currently in the midst of an affordable housing crisis, large cities all over the country are seeing a spike in homelessness and overpriced housing options. From San Francisco to New York city, gentrified neighborhoods and skyrocketing rents are outpricing residents, pushing them out of their own cities. As news is surfacing about Amazons new headquarters in Virginia and New York many people are wondering what will happen to the area in which these facilities will be built, especially since these two areas are already expensive at the moment.

For some insight into the potential effects of these new Amazon headquarters we can look to Seattle, Washington which has had an Amazon headquarters since 2007. A former classmate of mine, Shenetta Sims, has been living in the Seattle area since 2015.

It has now been some time since Amazon announced that its secondary headquarters will officially be split between Long Island, New York and Alexandria, Virginia putting home buyers, apartment owners, and businesses in a flurry to capitalize on the impending commercial boom. Virginia Tech has already announced a new innovation campus to offer a hub of talent to choose from. Amazon employees are rushing to buy homes in both cities (some before the official announcements), and some Metro stations are already in the process of obtaining facelifts to support this new influx of people. Things seem to be looking up for both cities in anticipation of the move, but some are rightly concerned as to what this could mean for the infrastructure of their respective cities. In order to understand the possible impacts of a behemoth company like Amazon, we only have to study Seattle’s rise in the past ten years from its reputation as a musically inclined fishing hotspot to a technological powerhouse. 

Amazon announced Seattle as its headquarters in 2007 during which time the city was home to nearly 600,000 residents and home sale prices hovered around a median of $390,000. It’s worth mentioning that while Microsoft already had an office about 20 miles away in Redmond and Google would also establish an office in 2009, 13 miles away in Kirkland, Amazon was the first major technologically based company to move centrally into Seattle. Since then the city has experienced a growth explosion that has yielded new restaurants and entertainment that people flock from all over the world to enjoy. This is reflected in tourism rates which have risen around 5% annually between 2010 and 2016 bringing billions in city revenue. It’s a great time to live in Seattle…if you earn well over the average income of $82,000 per household. Many of the new experiences coming to Seattle are cost prohibitive. Seattle’s median home sale prices have skyrocketed to a peak of $720,000 in January of 2018, rent prices have increased by 62%, and homelessness among people living without any sort of adequate shelter has more than doubled. The result is that many Seattleites who once called the city home are pushed farther into the suburbs and surrounding cities which are in turn experiencing their own cost of living increases and loss of diversity. The city of Seattle, realizing that they were facing a crises on their hands, did attempt to remedy this situation by passing a head tax bill which would charge any business grossing more than $20 million a year to pay a tax of $275 per Seattle employee which would then go towards helping combat the homeless and housing the problems the city was facing due to the business influx. However major corporations in the city protested by hiring a consulting firm with ties to President Trump’s campaign to gather signatures in protest. Amazon in particular shut down all construction in Seattle forcing the city to repeal the tax less than a month later.  This is leaving us with a city that is struggling to maintain its identity as it’s pushed closer and closer to something akin to San Francisco.

With these effects in mind, it is understandable to view the new announcement with trepidation if you are someone living in Alexandria or Long Island City. Amazon, like many other large-scale corporations, does have a history of less than ideal business practices and treatment of workers which both cities should anticipate and address as the move occurs. However, as someone who has moved to Seattle from Virginia, I believe that the experience will be much more positive in the new cities. Not only do they have what is essentially a play book of Amazon’s practices going back ten years, but the cities themselves are established in handling large scale industry that is much more diversified than what we have in Seattle. Infrastructure is already in place to handle the mass amount of people moving around two of the nation’s biggest cities, and the current transient nature of Seattle’s population would be nothing new to the areas. In addition, the main tech industry hubs have been largely centered on the West Coast until now, creating a specific culture that will be interesting to see with a more East coast influence. In conclusion, I believe that the move will be mostly exciting for the people in the affected areas. But it will be up to these people and their governments to not be blinded by the increase in revenue and to force companies to maintain a standard of doing business in the area that will protect the most vulnerable; something that would be best accomplished by all three cities working together to put pressure on Amazon to do the same.  — Shenetta Sims

While most commentators on the left are critical of Amazon and skeptical of the complete benignity of the company’s intentions there are some conservatives who are also weary of Amazons influence on local communities and the market at large. Patricia Neil is a conservative that lives outside of Boston, Massachusetts and works in the pharmaceutical industry. As a former resident of one of the newly announced Amazon headquarters in Crystal City, Virginia, she also has a good idea about the potential effects of the company’s new headquarters.

Being that Crystal City is a gateway to Washington D.C., it is already densely populated and congested. There are no shortages of job opportunities in the area as well. An Amazon site is going to be a traffic and population nightmare for Northern Virginia, which already has these issues. Since there isn’t an unemployment problem in Northern Virginia a windfall like this would have been more beneficial in other areas of the state or country. Since Northern Virginia is very expensive to live in already I would be very curious to see an impact analysis on the area. The majority of jobs that will be brought to the area will be lower to middle incomes. These people will not be able to afford housing in the area of the headquarters so will have to commute long distances to work. The commuters from the Fredericksburg area, central Virginia, and Maryland will tax the already maxed out highway system and Wilson Bridge.

Apart from the impact on local communities there is a debate to made about the use of subsidies by states when trying to entice corporations to move to a specific area. Any state that is giving subsidies to Amazon or the optics of Amazon even asking for subsidies is somewhat reprehensible given that they are now a $1 trillion company. As a conservative and a capitalist, unfortunately this is capitalism at its worst. The bottom line is when you’re that powerful you have a choice, you can have your power do something good or you can have that power run the table. I think Bezos is letting his influence run the table, otherwise why would he put a distribution center in Northern Virginia and take subsidies from New York. The part that really bothers me about this deal is that you know there was a room full of bean counters figuring out what the earnings per-share would be as a result of building in Northern Virginia and New York with the subsidies versus say going to a more economically depressed area. We’re talking about cents on the dollar for a company of this size. So, for a cents on the dollar impact on your earnings per-share they would rather have that earnings per-share be a couple cents more than put something in a place that could really benefit from it.

At the end of the day we’re talking about cents on the dollar translating into earnings per share and stockholder value. There is no question that Bezos could’ve gone somewhere that would have had a better economic impact on the local community. Honestly as a conservative I’m offended by how Amazon is behaving. I believe Amazons game is a monopoly, and it’s only a matter of time before the federal government steps in, not unlike the government did with Microsoft. Jeff Bezos should take a page out of Bill Gates playbook and learn from the example set forth by the monopoly rulings of Microsoft. — Patricia Neil

While Amazon, and its two-day prime shipping, has helped to foster a world of convenience, there needs to be a larger discussion about its effects on communities and our economic society at large. Do we really want a company as large as Amazon having as much power as it does, with its tentacles reaching far into every aspect of our lives? Is it time for the government to step in and more heavily regulate Amazon? Is Amazon slowly becoming a monopoly? These are hard questions that need to be asked and investigated. The real question is, will we as a society ask these questions before Amazon gains too much power and it is too late?

Dale Seufert-Navarro

Contributors: Shenetta Sims, Patricia Neil