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.

Comments

And you can order one today!

[bazmail]

5 hobos for the price of 3 (for opening day only). Or is Bezos using them as guinea pigs for manned missions?

Re:And you can order one today!

[Oswald McWeany]

He needs cheap workers that will work for pennies and be thankful for his next packing warehouse, now that outsourcing into Mexico isn't feasible anymore.

Based on what I've heard about how much Amazon pays, I think most of the people in the homeless shelter will be Amazon employees. If they were honest they'd call it Employee housing.

equal opportunity homelessness

[crafoo]

"...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.

Re:equal opportunity homelessness

[Dutch Gun]

The "homeless problem" in Seattle isn't really represented by transitory homeless, like are describe here, families with women and children, although certainly that does account for some percentage, of course. The bulk of the problem is a bit tougher to deal with: the perpetual homeless, mostly men (roughly 6:1 men/women ratio, with under 1% being minors, out of an estimated 10,000 pop, of which about half are "unsheltered"), many with some form of mental illness, and many with substance addictions. Unless we as a society decide that some people are unable to live responsibly on their own and should be institutionalized, we'll have permanent homeless. Even if you build free housing, you can't force someone to live there if they choose not to, for whatever reason.

So for the past few decades we've been shuffling them around from temporary site to site. Or a few entrepreneurial homeless find little niches in a tent nestled in some bushes in an industrial park somewhere, and no one wants to try to kick them out for fear of getting knifed by a semi-crazy person (and because it's effectively a crime to evict them now). And my sister-in-law has to passes by a homeless man on her way to work who's sunning himself on a public lawn and masturbating to a magazine, and everyone else has a similar story. And on it goes.

It's an ugly truth, and we've been kicking this can down the road for a generation now, because we're apparently too "compassionate" to institutionalize people that need it. Who knows... maybe it *is* more compassionate to let these people live as they want... If there were an easy answer, I suppose we've have already solved it.

So, kudos to Amazon for being willing to help, I guess, but it's not going to put much of a dent in Seattle's larger homeless problem if they're only going to take homeless families. I certainly don't blame them for this, because few people want a large population of the "ugly" homeless housed near them. Seattle's government is really the only ones who have the authority to rectify the situation, and all they've done is to talk endlessly about the problem. A year or two ago the Seattle mayor declared some sort of "homeless state of emergency", but like a lot of things he does, it's more about political perception than actually getting everything done. So far, it seems like its been private charities and organizations that have done the most and best work in helping these people.

Homeless Shelter

[SJ]

Is that what they're calling employee housing nowadays?

Or! Or!

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazon could pay a living wage!

Re:Aplaud the intent...

[tsqr]

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?

It doesn't, and it obviously isn't supposed to. But not to worry, there will probably still be homeless people in 2020.

Re:Portland Oregon

[Applehu Akbar]

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.

Re: Why?

[__aaclcg7560]

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.

Re: Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Maybe we should focus on fixing the root cause

[ErichTheRed]

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?

Re:So in other words

[grasshoppa]

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.