Amazon is about to build $1 billion worth of buildings and will create hundreds if not thousands of construction jobs over the next ten years. And once the buildings open, they'll be filled with thousands of well-paying jobs with benefits. They are actively recruiting from around the country, bringing in people with money that will be looking for real estate. Many of them are the young idealistic types that will want to live in the new dense neighborhoods the city wants us to live in.

But, oh noes, they aren't sending people out to the circuit of fund-raising luncheons that the Medina housewives throw to keep themselves busy.

Amazon, be a good neighbor and pick up your dog poop.

Sociopathic tendancies, Corporations --

I was at that Design Review hearing dealing with Amazon's plans to infuse those workers, buildings and lovely strips of public green into the Denny Triangle. Lacking from the DesignReview Board? Backbone, thinking, and demands. NBBJ architects had heads scratched when they couldn't answer the questions about "What is Amazon's plans for the Community around, near, adjacent to the proposed three towers and 2000 seat private conference hall?"

Sorry, but Bezos should have been there, and he was not. Not one Amazon employee or executive spoke. This is not a public process to a very huge footprint into Seattle, and on the skyline. Note that IT and retail services is about more efficiency and more productivity from each employee, and that means FEWER jobs in the future. They want to work people hard in warehouses, until robotics take over and the economy is so sunk that 70-year-olds will work for $9 an hour stuffing Amazon boxes with sex toys for Xmas 2020.

quotable Thom Hartmann below --

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/07/27

Today's modern transnational corporate CEOs-who live in a private-jet-and-limousine world entirely apart from the rest of us-are remnants from the times of kings, queens, and lords. They reflect the dysfunctional cultural (and Calvinist/Darwinian) belief that wealth is proof of goodness, and that that goodness then justifies taking more of the wealth.

Democracy in the workplace is known as a union. The most democratic workplaces are the least exploitative, because labor has a power to balance capital and management. And looking around the world, we can clearly see that those cultures that most embrace the largest number of their people in an egalitarian and democratic way (in and out of the workplace) are the ones that have the highest quality of life. Those that are the most despotic, from the workplace to the government, are those with the poorest quality of life.

Over time, balance and democratic oversight will always produce the best results. An "unregulated" marketplace is like an "unregulated" football game - chaos. And chaos is a state perfectly exploited by sociopaths, be they serial killers, warlords, or CEOs.

By changing the rules of the game of business so that sociopathic business behavior is no longer rewarded (and, indeed, is punished - as Teddy Roosevelt famously did as the "trustbuster" and FDR did when he threatened to send "war profiteers" to jail), we can create a less dysfunctional and more egalitarian society. And that's an important first step back from the thresholds to environmental and economic disaster we're now facing.

Part One --

Jeff Bezos, Free Shipping, and forty Percent of On-line Retail Sales
new buildings proposed for retailer's new campus digs

Sometimes these land use, transportation, design review, and economic development meetings in Seattle make me feel as if I had just been pushed out of some policy wonk's Leer jet 35,000 feet, without a parachute or O2. They all have these great raster maps and scatter plots, the visual language of geographical information systems, the “urban lingo” to advance their techniques and typology-loving aspirations.

But are they planning only for use as opposed to planning for people? Post modern sensibilities have shunted the sides of the same coin into entirely different realms of emphasis and possibilities. Inevitably, one and most important one – social planning – gets the short shrift.

What I have learned, all planning activities should serve the needs and interests of people; however, the modern reductionist tendencies have sluiced the disciplines, professions, and thinking into distinct troughs of specialization. Continually, I run into this attitude on the part of planners (and developers, elected officials, and other community “stakeholders”) that not only follows the money, but takes on the “land use, not people” approach.

Social dimensions from most planning activities are then stripped away, so the meetings focus on financial (profit) , technological, material, and environmental considerations. For any sensible person, we should be fully encompassing the underlying needs and behaviors of human beings. All planning – community, land use, transportation, education, environmental and agricultural.

There are incredible amounts of data mining these young Turks do in order to make a case for this type of urban development or that sort of transportation corridor. Sometimes this leaves the engaged viewer – public – way off the scale of where they fit in, where communities tie in.
These planning wonks, in their high-tech offices, produce some of the most colorful, detailed and smart-looking reports and plans from their 35,000 foot perches.

Two recent cases last week (March 27 & 29) illustrate how planning today – architecture, too – might be working two sides of very different tracks. The project planned for downtown Seattle, the so-called Denny Triangle, is 3.3 million square feet of Amazon.dot office-headquarters buildings, squeezed into the West Lake area, near the other dozen or so Amazon buildings in the area that add up to a million square feet of whatever Amazonians do.

The other case involves transportation oriented development, large initiatives (not just something Seattle or Portland dreamed up) to create better public transportation routes for the metropolitan area at large and the neighborhoods where people live specifically.

First, let's look at the Downtown Design Review Board meeting where the
public was seated and standing in a packed City Hall room to see for the first time an anchor project for the downtown West Lake area – Amazon's campus expansion. We're talking more than 3.3 million square feet, with three 500-foot high rises in an area that has seen in the past 17 years a huge influx of techy types, from IT to biotechnology.

Restaurants have proliferated, including three from notable Tom Douglas.
Bar tabs have risen. The price of housing has gone out the roof.
The City's land use planner in attendance, Lisa Ritzick, seemed a bit taken aback by the throng of people hovering over the architectural renderings and maps of the proposed Amazon base that includes a 2,000 seat auditorium. She reiterated the downtown design guidelines would only encompass architectural design elements, and not environmental or community elements, or lack thereof.

The architect, John Savo, representing NBBJ, the same firm that designed the Gates Foundation's $500 million campus nearby, plowed through these three block locations, discussing with unabashed confidence FARs (floor area ratios), Class One & Two Pedestrian Street categories, sun pockets, urban rooms, and view blockages.

NBBJ, an international firm, had its Power Point ready and the three dimensional scaled down models, with interchangeable blocks representing three main alternatives/possibilities.

One big contentious issue seemed to be the vacation of alleyways in the
design features. Since the zoning permits buildings of 500-foot heights, and since the three blocks are a bit smaller than traditional city blocks, the idea of being a good neighbor played into the NBBJ design work, Savo said.

We're talking about views of the Puget Sound and Olympics, 3,000
underground parking spaces and thousands of additional people employed by the Internet retailer. NBBJ's two presenters harped on the idea of small public spaces that would allow passage around the three block complexes.

Part Two --

Some in the crowd, during the public discussion, were concerned about what
Amazon-NBBJ was doing to make the community around the proposed sites part of the plan. Pagnesh Parikh, an architect on the Design review Board, posited the questions about how NBBJ and Amazon intended to address the effects of the proposed campus site on surrounding buildings and the community. The query seemed to stump the two NBBJ architects.

Another interested public attendee who works in a building near the
proposed site – which would include demolition of several buildings -- was concerned about the large area of effacement on the three high rises and just how inviting the public spaces would be.

My questions were more pointed, as I addressed the Design Review Board to continue pressing several issues:

a. stronger design and architectural features that would create much more public space, both in size and breadth, maybe even green spaces atop two smaller buildings;

b. the issue of how the public could engage in or use the auditorium;

c. whether Amazon would consider finding several locations in the Seattle area to site their retail offices and incubators, sort of an economic development model seeding in some strong neighborhoods like Beacon Hill or Rainer Beach that would benefit from Amazon's presence as a multiplier for housing, retail and activities

Others at the design review questioned Amazon's business practices tied to recent stories of Amazon warehouses in Pennsylvania and Nevada functioning like sweatshops and the company's amazingly small annual tax rate of 5.5 percent.

See Mother Jones on the warehouse work conditions –
http://motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor

I was wondering where those lingering questions would come from, those tied to the absolutely odd nature of Amazon.dot fighting paying sales taxes while bricks and mortar stores keep paying to help fund the very same infrastructure Amazon uses to package and ship their goods. Or where the community activists were to demand more concessions from Amazon to do much better and innovative “things” for the public in these proposed blocks.

As a final note, I take a bit from the Project for Public Places about the problems dealing with high rises:

“Tall buildings affect cities in two different ways that have almost nothing to do with each other. One is as sculptural objects framed in the sky, where their impact is artistic or symbolic. The other is where the buildings meet the ground and create either pleasant or oppressive spaces where people walk and congregate. Architects regularly misfire with big buildings that are bad by both measures, but the tendency is to fail more often and more egregiously at street level.

One reason is that it’s fairly difficult to make a 500-foot-high building seem humane and welcoming to a 5-foot-something biped approaching it. The other is that a building’s owners are naturally more concerned with the way the building reads in the skyline, because that’s where its marketable image gets fixed in the public eye.”

Seattle's skyline and view-shed keep changing, and many older timers think its not for the best, no mater how dense the downtown gets.

I am with the Mariners regarding any new stadium, except I am against any stadium anywhere that involves public money in any way. For this proposal, we would be putting up money in a way similar to what we did for Key Arena, and we know how that came out.

Also, despite McGinn's boosterism re all the transit possibilities in the SODO area, people would have to actually use them to travel there, and I don't see that happening at a meaningful rate. It also ignores the fact that sometimes people have unavoidable needs to go to that area at the same times games are scheduled. It's a nightmare for drivers already, and I doubt it would get better.

Furthermore, teams seem able to schedule games so that arrival and/or departure times for fans coincide with peak traffic hours, and there seems to be no appetite for changing that to put the interests of people with no alternative but to travel those times ahead of the teams' needs.

We should not be spending money to study this, we should not spend money to make it happen. I'd like to see an analysis of how much more it would cost us to make all the transit McGinn touts available for servicing people who would wish to travel to the games by those modes as well. No one so far seems to be interested in discussing, or at least disclosing, that.

We've had some startups around Seattle, Real Networks comes to mind, that were good citizens, said all the right things and may have been generous donors. If they don't grow or if they die it does not help Seattle or the surrounding area. I'll take Amazon. The carping above about their headquarters is misplaced. Owners of surrounding property will benefit from this construction; restaurants and shops will feed off the new population; SLUT might pick up a few riders. Did the establishment of the Fred Hutchinson development hurt the surroundings? well it did if you want to find a free parking space but otherwise it has done what development is supposed to do: provide appropriate space for work that is in demand.

Eventually when the spin machine runs out of hot air, the reality will sink in that the transportation matrix for downtown, including the ability to efficiently negotiate north / south has been destroyed by a collection of special interests. There should never have been any solutions proposed for 99 that did not meet the current capacities provided by the viaduct. Tax payers are literally being defrauded by the very people they elect to manage this function. Billions of dollars heaped on the backs of tax payers for reduced capacities and congestion producing transportation solutions is wrong. Unfortunately, those responsible for this mess will retire to cushy jobs as consultants or come back like re-capped tires to run for additional terms at the public trough.

No other proposed configuration for replacing the matches the existing viaduct in any transportation related category. The rights of ways already exist. The configuration already can handle 110,000 vehicles a day. It already provides a bypass for downtown and off ramps for the core, Ballard and West Seattle. It already meets the demands for commercial vehicles. It can incorporate modern seismic protections and other enhancements for noise abatement, bikes, pedestrians and aesthetics. It provides the only effective way to modulate traffic in the core. And it’s billions of dollars cheaper than this present tunnel/surface mistake in the making.

The tunnel/surface option is an inadequate substitute for one of the most successful north/south arterials in the city by eliminating half of its capacity and most of its access. It will add to the tax bill of the over-taxed, and it will add to the congestion faced by regional commuters and sports fans. Seattle is preparing to get out of step once again by showing more concern for how the city appears on a post card than the mobility of its citizens.

Regarding Amazon, years ago the high techies said they could not work in all the vacant downtown highrises because it stifled creativity so they went for the lowrise, campus style or the older Pioneer Square loft with high ceiling. The forced density crowd loves the high rise watercloset cramming of 500 foot buildings that overwhelm surrounding long standing businesses and neighborhood storefronts. Whole Foods welcomes the new Amazon grocery shoppers. Sigh; but at least the private sector is playing the game and is not fueled by the eminent domain, condemnation scam in the 1990's that was called the Seattle Commons. As for the Mariners it's too bad that the existing footprint for the stadium district has given up the north parking lot for politically correct housing. The new arena for basketball and hockey and other events should be right across from Pioneer Square and the excess parking facilities could be built near Terminal 46.