Sold My Soul To The Company Store

The only question I have about Amazon building "affordable housing" is how much profit they intend to make off the sale.

Amazon said Tuesday it will spend more than $120 million to build affordable-housing units close to transit stations near Seattle and Washington, D.C, the latest example of a tech company trying to address the affordable housing crisis critics say the industry has exacerbated.

Amazon said it is working with Sound Transit and the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority to construct a total of 1,060 homes near four public transit sites. The Washington state sites are in SeaTac and Bellevue. The other sites are Maryland in the cities of New Carrollton and College Park.

Amazon is building out another corporate hub in Arlington, Virginia, and is expanding operations in Bellevue, near its Seattle headquarters.

“We know that our investment in these areas brings many economic opportunities for residents in the region, but we also acknowledge that this growth needs to benefit everyone in the community,” Catherine Buell, director of the Amazon Housing Equity Fund, said in a statement.

That funding comes from a commitment Amazon made in January 2021 to launch its Housing Equity Fund, a $2 billion initiative to preserve and create 20,000 affordable homes.

 

Now, back of the napkin math means Amazon would have to sell the homes for about $115,000 each in order to make their money back, because Amazon is sure as hell not going to build a company town and lose money on it.  If that's how things really work out, that's great. If the housing is under the transit authorities and subject to HUD grants and loans and they are the landlords, that's great too.

But I don't think that's going to happen.

Specifically, I think nearby residents are going to go the full Karen on zoning boards, and the project is going to get scrapped. Nobody is going to vote to lower their own property values by hundreds of thousands of dollars on purpose.

We'll see, but the devil here is definitely in the details. I don't trust the company or Bezos, even when they are actually doing the right thing, and there's no way we should, either.