Would you shut up about the harm Amazon is doing to the business of books if the company offered to buy you a $3.7 million streetcar? How about if it also paid to operate that streetcar for you for the next 10 years? No? Okay, well what if Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos also threw in $10 million for a sparkling new Museum of History & Industry that does honor to your city’s heritage? Plus your very own urban cycle track, high-paying jobs for about 15,000 people, and plans for three new high-rises in a redeveloping urban neighborhood? What then?
And what if Amazon was responsible for 100,000 hotel stays every year in your city? What if it occupied 3.2 million square feet of local office space (with 4.7 million more square feet on its wish list)? What if the company was projected to more than double its highly paid local workforce of engineers and executives in the coming years? And what if, as Seattle’s Office of Economic Development put it in a recent report, Bezos and Amazon were spending all of this cash, and making all of these plans, and ordering up all of these new buildings “during times of economic hardship, when the employment and taxes generated through construction helped soften the blow of two recessions”?
Well?
