Ben Kothe / BuzzFeed News; Getty Images

I’m writing these words in a coffee shop in the Seattle neighborhood of South Lake Union, formerly a wasteland of empty warehouses that the online retail giant Amazon has entirely rebuilt. In less than a decade, those rundown buildings that used to house (pretty good) experimental theater productions and (very fun) illegal raves have been torn down and replaced by a brand-new city. Tesla dealerships and preppy bars and a surprisingly excellent Goodwill thrift store outlet and swanky restaurants and yoga studios and food trucks have popped up on these once-desolate streets, all as shiny and new as a toy on Christmas morning.

Amazon is the engine of this growth. Its young employees — and their loyal army of small but stately dogs — fill the sidewalks and patronize these new businesses. According to the Seattle Times, Amazon, now the biggest employer in the city, has filled nearly one-fifth of the office space downtown — over 8 million square feet. In 2010, Amazon employed 5,000 people locally. By 2020, it’s estimated that the company will have 55,000 employees here. And that’s about to happen all over again in New York. This week, Amazon announced that it would build large campuses in a Virginia suburb outside Washington, DC, and Long Island City, a neighborhood in New York City’s Queens. The announcement came after a yearlong reality-show-style quest for “HQ2,” which would supposedly become Amazon’s second-but-equal corporate headquarters. Washington’s response to the announcement was mostly celebratory, but New York’s has been mixed, ranging from a rare glowing press conference held jointly by Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo to a series of critical tweets issued by Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a scathing editorial from the New York Times editorial board. The Times reports that Amazon will bring as many as 25,000 employees to its Queens campus, eventually filling as much as 8 million square feet of office space. (By comparison, Queens employers have created just over 100,000 jobs in total over the last decade.) That’s a tremendous number of new jobs for one employer — even a city as seemingly unending as New York can’t absorb that kind of growth without a shock to the system. While the media and elected officials argue over billions in taxpayer-funded subsidies and helipads for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the question most New Yorkers care about is this: What does this mean — actually mean — for the people of New York? First off, more jobs means more people. And all those bodies have to go somewhere: People need homes, and people need to commute from home to work. As you might expect from a city that added 100,000 residents in less than a decade, Seattle’s commute has worsened dramatically; we now have some of the worst traffic on the planet, and our meager public transit system is groaning under increased demand.

Seattle is now more than ever a city of haves and have-nots living in uneasy proximity.

All those well-paid young Amazon employees tipped Seattle’s housing market into a frenzy. In less than a decade, the city’s average rent skyrocketed from $1,020 a month to a high of nearly $1,700 a month. The average home price has leaped to over $800,000. These are price tags that lower- and middle-class Seattleites simply can’t afford to pay. Seattle is now more than ever a city of haves and have-nots living in uneasy proximity. Multiple studies have proven that homeless populations rise in direct relation to rent increases. A report from Zillow finds that a 5% rent increase in New York City — which is all but guaranteed, given Amazon’s dramatic proposal — would leave 3,000 more people on the streets. Those aren’t hypothetical numbers. Travel to Seattle now and you’ll see tent cities sprouting up like mushrooms under our highways and bridges. Unhoused people suffering from psychotic episodes wander around the streets until they become enough of a danger to themselves and others that they get scooped up by police for a few nights, and then they’re released to start the cycle over again. Three years ago, Seattle's then-mayor, Ed Murray, announced a state of emergency to draw attention to Seattle’s homeless populations. Today, we’re still in a state of emergency, but almost nothing has changed. On the bright side (for those who can afford to live here), Seattle is now a world-class restaurant city. All those young and overworked programmers need to eat, after all, and as a result, we have more drinking and eating places than at any time in our history. Thanks to a progressive local government that embraced a $15 minimum wage before any other big American city, the workers in those restaurants might be able to afford an apartment in Seattle — as long as they don’t mind living with roommates. Our unemployment numbers are at record lows, and you still can’t walk three blocks in the downtown area without stumbling across some sort of construction. But those are the quantifiable effects of Amazon. Scratch the surface, talk to a local, and you’ll discover a different price tag — one that’s not so easily measured through economic data points. After all those Amazon employees leave their offices at night and take to the streets of South Lake Union, what do they do? Aside from a few restaurants and bars, there’s not much going on: South Lake Union doesn’t have any theaters or nightclubs or bookstores or concert venues. When the hardiest workers have finally caught the last bus home to their Capitol Hill condos or their Ballard craftsman houses, the neighborhood feels something like an amusement park after closing time. You can build a city in less than a decade, turns out, but you can’t force people to live there.

Ted S. Warren / AP A South Lake Union streetcar with the Amazon.com logo moves along a street in Seattle's South Lake Union neighborhood.

Bucking nearly a century of American business tradition, corporate philanthropy basically doesn’t exist at Amazon.