As of Tuesday, about 9,000 plants formerly residing in the University of Washington's Botany Greenhouse, were moved to a Redmond, Wash. greenhouse owned by Amazon. According to GeekWire, the space was once a Molbak’s Garden + Home, but it's now being used to store and propagate plants for Amazon's alien-like biospheres, which are under construction in downtown Seattle.
From The Seattle Times:
The UW is building a new, 20,000-square-foot greenhouse as part of its $165 million Life Sciences Building, a five-story, glass-and-steel structure that will go up alongside the Burke-Gilman Trail.
The plants, which live in the 67-year-old Botany Greenhouse, must move because the greenhouse will be razed this summer to make way for the new building.
With room, apparently, to spare, Amazon offered the UW free use of a Redmond greenhouse, an in-kind contribution worth more than $200,000, the company says. About 1,000 of the plants will be housed in the UW’s Center for Urban Horticulture.
This isn't the first time Amazon has offered up its spaces to organizations in its hometown. In mid-April, Amazon announced it would temporarily allow nonprofit Mary's Place to use a former Travelodge hotel to house 60 to 70 homeless families. But, in the end, that is just a small step, Heidi reported. After all, Mary's Place would only be able to use the space as a shelter for just one year, before Amazon built offices on the lot. In the end, just 200 people of nearly 3,000 people living on Seattle's streets would have a safe place to stay.
Yes, Amazon has brought jobs to the city. But the company's rapid expansion in downtown Seattle has made Seattle's housing and rental market a financial nightmare, The New York Times reported.
As tens of thousands of newcomers and longtime residents are finding, the allure of the tech economy comes with big risks and dangers, too, in the rapidly climbing housing and rent prices that have shocked them. The boom has brought with it a crisis of homelessness that the mayor has declared an emergency.
