Dear HQ2 cities: How to handle Amazon. Love, Seattle.

Like most Seattleites, I have a complicated relationship with Amazon.

In the "pro" column, the company has been the driving force behind the city's recent renaissance. In the eight years since Amazon began to add tens of thousands of jobs, Seattle has achieved the country's second highest per capita income and its 11. fastest job growth . We host a disproportionate share of America's best restaurants. The influx of technicians and tax revenues has led to an increase in public spending . Our buses run more often than ever, our lane system expands and our parks are so well-groomed that we sometimes forget that we can only enjoy them three months out of the year.

However, in the "con" column, it is undeniable that the city's bomb has come to the rear of the poorest residents. The influx of the population ̵[ads1]1; Seattle grew more in the last seven years than it did during the previous 30 – have pushed housing prices upwards which made homeowners to millionaires and tenants for refugees. Our housing crisis is so bad that the mayor has declared it an emergency . Our public schools run the biggest deficits since the 1970s . All the fancy new restaurants? Like many other old Seattle townies, I can not afford a meal at most.

But the most important thing to know about what has happened to Seattle is that it's not Amazonian's fault. Each effect of the company's expansion was both predictable and preventable.

This week, Amazon announced that its second headquarters, known as HQ2, would be shared between New York City's Queens District and "National Landing", a complete name for an existing Virginia suburb of Washington, DC. The company will allegedly inject at least 25,000 new jobs and billions in investment in each site.

It's going to be intrusive, but it does not have to be catastrophic. Amazon is a giant, amoral, profit-driven behemoth. There is nothing the new hosts can do about it. What they can do, however, are passwords that ensure that the company's effects will be positive.

There is no such thing as a good or bad company; There are only good and bad laws that regulate them. Here are some of the things Seattle did when we became a corporate city and others that any of us would like we had done before.

The logic of New York's and Virginia's Massive Subsidies for Amazon ($ 48,000 and $ 22,000 per Job respectively) is that the company will have a multiplier effect that forms clusters of tech and service workers around their campuses.

There is even evidence that this will happen as legislators want it. A 2017 study of more than 300 cities found that every new high-tech job created five more in the support industry. However, the study also found that the majority of these additional jobs were not in high technology sectors. Each highly paid, high technical position created three jobs in "non-professional" professions. What this means for the HQ2 cities is that along with five more digits of software developers, they can find up to 75,000 new waiters, chefs, hairdressers, cashiers and janitors.

Virginia's minimum wage is $ 7.25 an hour. Neither the state nor the city of Arlington, where most of Amazon's investment will go, has guidelines that guarantee paid sick leave or family holidays for workers. If National Landing does not improve basic working conditions, the primary impact of Amazon's investment will be the creation of an army of poor, unsafe workers. If Amazon, a massively listed company, can guarantee its employees a salary of $ 15 per hour, Virginia has no excuse not to match it.

Legally speaking, things look a bit better in New York. The city has already paid sick leave and family holidays and a minimum salary heading for $ 15 per hour. However, where the city falls down, it is enforcement. A 2017 evaluation found vast evidence of casual work, theft and sexual harassment, especially among female workers and immigrants. Nearly 20 percent of the food service employees employed as "hired workers" said they were paid below the minimum wage.

Many of the workers Amazon are employed for their HQ2 sites, will enjoy six-way salaries along with luxury benefit packages. If the new host cities want to make the most of the company's investment, the least they can do is to break the utilization of the people, feeding, clothes and cleaning their workers' homes.

One of the annoying, forgotten truths in city politics is that cities do not decide how big their populations will be. Amazon did not ask Seattles permission to expand within 35,000 workers in 2010. The 114,000 persons who moved here for the past eight years did not apply for a visa. Everything just happened.

But even though the cities do not control their own growth, they control how they respond to it. Since Amazon began its rapid expansion, Seattle has rebuilt a new home for every three new jobs. It makes us superstars compared to San Francisco, where the relationship is 1 to 8 but there is still no place to meet the need.

The result is almost a decade of relentless but most invisible gentrification. While many glass and steel towers have gone up in the center, the vast majority of the city is preserved in amber by zoning regulations that make it illegal to build anything other than McMansions. It has not stopped tech workers from moving here, but it has pitted them against each other in switching wars for homes already here. According to their Zillow application, two Microsoft employees moved into my last apartment – I decided to move after two years with 10 percent rent increases – a total income of $ 248,000 a year. The prospect of my neighborhood did not change, but the people of the country did.

Amazon's new host cities should not make the same mistake. Even before the company announced its new host cities, Arlington had a housing shortage steep rising rates and a local debate to abolish restrictions on building apartments. Over the river, Washington is inexpensive well documented and the city is already on the estimated 690,000 units of homes it needs by 2045 just to keep up with job growth.

Queens, as part of a city that is a little more comfortable with skyscrapers, looks better on this score. The HQ2 area of ​​Long Island City has already built more homes than any other New York neighborhood since 2010. Nevertheless, since the Amazon announcements called for stopping the construction and lowering a planned rezoning, is intensifying [19659003]].

The people's concerns make sense. The neighborhood is already suffering from rapid gentrification, and Amazon's buildings are located right next to the country's largest public housing complex . The mayor and governor's obvious reasons for inviting Amazon is to lift local residents, not to disturb them with luxurious condos.

But if Seattles experience shows something, refusing to build new homes will not reduce gentrification pressure. It will intensify them. Amazon workers, like everyone else, want to live close to their jobs. If the city is built as high and as close as possible, new apartments can act as a release valve for the influx of new demand. If the city refuses to – as San Francisco has for decades – rich techies will only buy or rent all the properties already there.

Nobody likes a bunch of soulless new towers that go up next door. But in the past two years, as Seattle has added them to the dozen, the tenants have finally reached. We have also added fees to developers who pay into a fund to maintain affordable housing. There is still a long way to go, but the city is an object lesson in the fact that you can build you out of a housing crisis – although what you build is not always pretty.

King County, where Seattle sits, has the third largest homeless population in the United States. Almost 50 percent are unsheltered.

Last year, the city officials became a modest tax on large companies to achieve the city's response to the crisis. Almost immediately threatened Amazon officials to stop the company's expansion and move thousands of jobs to other cities. Then, when the city council did not dissipate, collaborated with Starbucks to finance an attempt to lift the tax through a ballot paper.

It worked. Unlike a deep pocket parking campaign, the city council reversed its decision and lifted the law. Somehow, two of the world's largest companies have convinced the voters that compulsory contributions to solving the problems they partially contributed were a bridge too far. Two months later, Amazon announced CEO. Jeff Bezos that he donated 2 billion dollars, or about 1.2 percent of his personal wealth, to end homelessness and support early childhood education. However, he refused to specify which charities he would give to or how much per year.

It's an obvious lesson, but one of the city's leaders must constantly be reminded: Businesses are not your friends. Amazon has neither a moral conscience nor a mandate for corporate social responsibility. It is simply a company that, like everyone else, will always delight its shareholders towards caring for society.

City officials must keep this basic fact on the front of their minds. Amazon's press release this week highlighted the "community investment" it would do on each of its websites. In New York, it will reserve office space for an elementary school and artists' work areas. In Virginia, it will donate funds to improve pedestrian, airport and subway infrastructure.

However, as Seattle experiences over the past year demonstrate, these community investments are voluntary, conditional and less than compared to the impact the company wants. Any attempt by the city to push more funding from the company – or make its commitments mandatory and ongoing – will invite massive setbacks, including disinformation campaigns and cynical political follow-up.

New York and Virginia already have progressive income taxes, which means they are better positioned than Seattle to make Amazone's investment in higher tax revenues. But in the future, as the company originates from municipal infrastructure and political goodwill, city leaders will need automated systems to force the company to chip in to reduce its impact. And whose politicians forget this commitment, their voters must remind them.

So take it from Seattle, HQ2: Amazon will not be good for you or bad for you. It will be both. And it's still up to you to decide the balance.