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

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.

Or! Or!

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazon could pay a living wage!

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.