Slashdot Mirror
Amazon To Build Homeless Shelter In Its New Seattle Headquarters (cnn.com)
Amazon is trying to do its part to help the homelessness problem in its hometown of Seattle. The company announced on Wednesday that it would donate more than 47,000 square feet of space within its newest Seattle headquarters building as a permanent location to house homeless people. CNNMoney reports: "Mary's Place does incredible, life-saving work every day for women, children, and families experiencing homelessness in the Seattle community," Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement. "We are lucky to count them as neighbors and thrilled to offer them a permanent home within our downtown Seattle headquarters." Amazon is partnering with local nonprofit Mary's Place to create 65 rooms, which will house more than 200 homeless people every night. The new Mary's Place shelter will open in early 2020. It will also have a resource center like those the nonprofit offers in North Seattle and White Center, where 40-plus local nonprofits and volunteers work with staff to help families obtain employment and permanent housing.
5 hobos for the price of 3 (for opening day only). Or is Bezos using them as guinea pigs for manned missions?
"...life-saving work every day for women, children, and families experiencing homelessness..."
Well, at least men got included as long as they support a family. Wouldn't want all of those useless, disposable freeloading homeless men taking up a shelter slot.
Is that what they're calling employee housing nowadays?
I wonder how many of its own employees will take advantage of this.
Amazon could pay a living wage!
Amazon is partnering with local nonprofit Mary's Place to create 65 rooms, which will house more than 200 homeless people every night. The new Mary's Place shelter will open in early 2020.
But this will have no effect on the homeless population until 2020, how does this help the homeless community today?
Ken
Of course men. Women have a valuable commodity they can trade for food/shelter/sugar daddy. I see them doing this as a tax write-off. Why not give them jobs? Even if it's a yard worker or garbage picker upper.
Hey Amazon: They need a huge one in Portland Oregon too. I visited once and haven't seen so many homeless people in my life.
What you saw in Portland were the political activists.
when you got no job, any job is better
Hiring managers are reluctant to hire higher-skilled people for minimum wage jobs because they know that people will leave when a better opportunity comes along. When I was out of work for two years, hiring managers told me I was overqualified for minimum wage jobs and recruiters told me I was unemployable for everything else. I ended up working for a moving company on the weekends for six months until I found another full-time job.
Why not give them jobs?
You have a deep misunderstanding of what causes homelessness and why it is such an intractable problem. They are not "just like you and me" except without homes. Most homeless people have mental health issues, substance abuse issues, and are in general very dysfunctional people. If they were employable, then they wouldn't be homeless in the first place.
Oh, he's close. Just missing things by a few blocks. Down the street from Amazon is the Allen Brain Institute.
Brain. Institute.
Once they take your brain (for science, of course), your only options are either the homeless shelter or politics. The vast majority of people, even after being pithed, would apparently prefer homelessness rather than politics.
There is some hope for mankind.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I find it amusing that this comes to 235sqft per person, and I've taken flack for designing apartment microunits at 224sqft per single individual as part of a universal social security plan. People stopped arguing that it wasn't affordable and started arguing that I'm trying to shove people into prison cells or something (never mind that they're allowed to go anywhere outside)--to which I'd typically respond with something about cardboard boxes, bad weather, and food from dumpsters.
People don't seem to care about making the lives of others better; they just want to win a moral victory so they feel good.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Most chronic homelessness is caused by mental illness and addictions. Instead of putting up shelters, why not spend a little extra and reopen public mental hospitals? Before the deinstitutionalization movement in the 70s, states had huge mental health treatment systems in place. Admittedly, part of that was because there was nothing that could be done to treat mental illness before the 50s and the only thing to do was to lock them away. But, we've seen that treatment isn't 100% effective, people relapse, they self-medicate with drugs and alcohol, etc. Why not operate facilities where people who need treatment can be placed until they're stable enough to actually live in the community?
I have played too much Shadowrun to think this can be anything good.
The problem, and I think you missed this, is that no one is even trying to solve the male homeless problem. Instead we see shelter after shelter set up for women and children, who represent the minority of homeless.
Homeless men have effectively been told they have no value to society UNLESS they are in service to a woman or a child.
This, and literally hundreds of other things, is what goes through most men's minds when we're being lectured about our privilege.
Hence, Kokuyo's joke.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!