SEATTLE—Amazon has driven an economic boom in Seattle, bestowing more than 40,000 jobs upon a city known for Starbucks coffee and Seahawks fandom. Its growth remade a neglected industrial swath north of downtown into a hub of young workers and fixed the region, along with Microsoft before it, as a premier locale for the internet economy outside of Silicon Valley.

Seattle is the fastest-growing big city in America, a company town with construction cranes busily erecting new apartments for newly arriving tech workers. Google and Facebook have joined Amazon in locating large offices here.

When Amazon made a surprise announcement last month that it planned to open a second headquarters with even more jobs, it set off an unprecedented race among cities to lure the tech giant their way. Amazon said it ultimately will need eight million square feet in a second region, making it the biggest economic development target experts can remember.

But as Seattleites will say, keeping up with the internet juggernaut has not always been easy, providing a word of caution for officials from other cities willing to pursue the company at great expense.

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Over the past decade, Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, added new products and business units at a breakneck speed and expected public partners to keep pace.

In Seattle, that meant rehabbing an area of more than 140 hectares at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars in ongoing transportation and infrastructure upgrades, expanding public transit, road networks, parks and utilities.

It also put new strains on housing. Seattle is one of the most expensive places in the United States to live, forcing lower-income residents to move to far-off suburbs and prompting the city and surrounding King County to declare a state of emergency in 2015 over homelessness.

Since then, the problem has worsened. Rents in King County have more than doubled in the past 20 years, and gone up 65 per cent since 2009. Seattle spends more than $60 million (U.S.) annually to battle homelessness, up from $39 million four years ago.

“We started seeing apartment listings that would say ‘No deposit needed and priority for Amazon, Microsoft and Google employees,’ ” said Rachael Myers, executive director of the Washington Low Income Housing Alliance, a Seattle-based advocacy group. She said the area was “in the midst of the greatest affordable housing and homelessness crisis that our state has ever seen.”

How much of Seattle’s evolution is attributable to Amazon is a matter of debate. In the past decade, millennial workers have poured into other big cities exacerbating housing costs and homelessness there.

But few buildups are so linked to the prospects of one company. Amazon has contributed $30 billion to the local economy, and as much as $55 billion more in spinoff benefits. Unemployment in the Seattle area is 3.7 per cent, below the national rate of 4.4 per cent.

Much of that progress is the result of Amazon’s decision to locate its first headquarters downtown a decade ago. John Schoettler, who oversees real estate for the online giant, thought it simplest and least expensive to plan a suburban headquarters campus east of Lake Washington, in Bellevue, Wash., near where Microsoft was located.

Bezos had a different idea. He wanted to stay in Seattle.

“Jeff said the type of employees we want to hire and retain will want to live in an urban environment. They are going to want to work, live and play in the urban core,” Schoettler said.

The decision helped usher in a new era, one in which top employers abandon suburban office parks for lively, urban neighbourhoods integrated into the cities around them. Only seven Fortune 500 companies had research or engineering hubs in Seattle in 2010; now 31 do.

“Their growth has just been so positive to lots of other companies, big and small and medium and in between,” said Jon Scholes, president and chief executive of the Downtown Seattle Association, where Schoettler is a board member.

It’s a boom that has shown little sign of slowing. Seattle added 57 additional people a day for a year through the summer of 2016, according to census data. How best to accommodate that growth provokes regular debate in Seattle and could well shape whatever city Amazon comes to next.

Such details spark little discussion as mayors and governors from coast to coast have embarked upon a sweepstakes fit for a reality show, touting their cities in online videos and dangling taxpayer-funded subsidies of as much as $7 billion, even if their jurisdictions don’t have the workforce or transportation network Amazon said it requires.

“So will the all mayors go to compete on the Ellen DeGeneres show, Kelly Ripa or Anderson Cooper?” said Greg LeRoy, president of the policy group Good Jobs First, which regularly warns that public incentives rarely pay off. “That’s the spectrum of the debate right now.”

Seattle won its own economic beauty contest in 1962, when it hosted the World’s Fair. To serve the crowds, the city built acres of parking and low-slung motels in an area known as South Lake Union.

The bet paid few dividends. Three decades later, the area was probably best known for a printing plant, struggling motels and a Hooters restaurant. Only 677 people lived there in 1990.

Then Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, launched a real estate firm called Vulcan and bought 60 acres in the area. Vulcan executive Ada Healey recalls the early skeptics. During a 2002 pitch meeting, she said that a representative from a prospective company turned to her and said: “Why would I want to move to South Lake Union? It is a wasteland.”

Bezos, though, saw promise in the urban locale. He had started Amazon in his garage in nearby Bellevue, then opened an early office in a former military hospital now called Pacific Tower. Before long, he was searching for more space to accommodate his fast-growing company.

Schoettler initially secured about 1.7 million square feet in 10 buildings. It was enough, he thought, to contain the company through 2016, when it was projected to have 9,300 employees.

Instead, Amazon grew five times as fast. It now has more than 40,000 employees in 33 Seattle buildings totalling 8.1 million square feet. It occupies 19 per cent of the high-end office space in the city, according to an analysis by the Seattle Times, as many square feet as the city’s next 40 biggest employers combined.

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Next year, Amazon will complete its most prominent addition: three glass biospheres featuring about 40,000 plants, “a unique environment for employees to come and collaborate and innovate,” Schoettler said.

Seattle officials raced to keep up, approving $480.5 million in improvements for South Lake Union. Amazon and Vulcan, in need of approval to take over city alleys for its development, chipped in some funding.

A $190.5-million road realignment program included $31.4 million from property owners led by Vulcan. A new, two-kilometre streetcar line cost $56.4 million and benefited from $5.5 million from Amazon, including the donation of a fourth car. Now, the city has embarked on a $201.5-million electrical substation, work that includes burying electrical wires.

During weekdays, South Lake Union teems with young workers sporting Amazon name tags, eating bananas that the company offers free to passersby. Many can be seen walking their dogs, as 4,000 employee-owned pups are registered with headquarters access, helping Seattle earn notoriety recently for having more dogs than children.

The campus has produced spillover benefits for the city. Amazon’s buildings are home to 34 restaurants, including a culinary job training program called FareStart. More than 20 per cent of employees walk to work, and less than half drive.

The company’s longtime support for LGBT rights — including a $2.5-million donation that Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, made to advance same-sex marriage — dovetail with the city’s progressive politics. In June, the company flew a rainbow flag above its headquarters for LGBT Pride Month. It has more than 40 “glamazon” chapters for LGBT affinity around the world.

“We could have gone to the suburbs and we could have built a campus, and we would have had an entry gate where everybody would come and go so you would be very inward-looking and very exclusive,” Schoettler said. “As opposed to being in a very urban environment where you have to look outward, so you’re very inclusive and everyone is your neighbour — and everyone is welcome.”

Maybe no city could have built housing fast enough to keep prices from spiralling during Amazon’s growth, but Seattle — despite nearly leading the nation in new apartment construction — hasn’t come close.

On the sidewalks, alongside rentable neon bikes, people subsist in tents and in sleeping bags, in places locals say they did not congregate 10 years ago — a warning sign for cities nationwide trying to capture a version of Seattle’s glory.

“We don’t have enough housing for low-income people especially, but we also just don’t have enough housing,” said Myers, a longtime Seattle housing advocate. “And Amazon obviously impacts both of those things.”

Officials at Bellwether Housing, the city’s largest non-profit manger of affordable housing, at 2,000 units, reports a vacancy rate of 1 per cent. “It’s very rare that someone moves out because they have nowhere else to go,” chief executive Susan Boyd said.

An analysis of evictions found they were driven not by social problems, but by economics. Since Amazon’s boom began, the city approved a rule requiring landlords to accept the first viable renter who applies — rather than cherry-pick a tech worker. The government also adopted an inclusionary zoning policy requiring developers to set aside some new units at below-market rates or pay into a fund to develop other affordable units.

Myers suggests other jurisdictions pay heed: “If you’re going to get an Amazon that’s going to create a ton of high-paying jobs and a ton of pressure on the housing market, what are the things you can do before rents really skyrocket?”

Ask 10 experts where the company will put its next headquarters and you may get 10 different answers. The company prides itself on zigging when others zag, making it more difficult to read the tea leaves. Still, many in Seattle think the company has a good idea of its options. “I suspect they have a shortlist,” said Healey, the Vulcan executive.

Landing the second headquarters would be a legacy-defining achievement for nearly any governor or mayor, but lessons from Seattle’s Amazon experience have bidders scrambling to show how they can meet Amazon’s insistence on speed, low costs, transportation and inclusion — particularly if they didn’t focus on them ahead of time.

East Coast cities such as Boston, New York and Washington may need to answer for their own runaway real estate and housing prices. Governors, including Chris Christie of New Jersey, Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Larry Hogan of Maryland, may have to explain why they cancelled major transit projects. Charlotte and Indianapolis are bidding, but Amazon may want to know the effect of state laws there affecting the rights of gay or transgender employees.

Amy Liu of the Brookings Institution said the Amazon competition will hopefully serve as a chance for elected leaders to take the temperature of how prepared their neighbourhoods and infrastructure are to drive growth, whether from Amazon or elsewhere.

“These are things every city should be doing anyway,” she said.

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