and while we’re on the subject of Amazon, I’d like to mention how it’s affected the city I’ve grown up in and love so dearly.
Amazon is in part directly responsible for the godawful housing market in Seattle and it’s surrounding towns. The average rent for a small home in my neighbourhood, 30 minutes north of Seattle, can top off to $1,900 a month. I live in a small, 3 bedroom rambler that’s nothing special and our rent is $1,800 per month and climbing as amazon tries to bring in more employees to the area. We’re in the middle of a homeless crisis because many people cannot afford to live here anymore with rent skyrocketing and the gentrification of many low-income neighbourhoods in order to create space for more amazon transplants.
just so y’all can see how much Seattle natives haaaate amazon and their impact:
and if y’all are interested or have time, do check out @/vanishingseattle on Instagram. Cynthia is lovely and she’s been documenting the destruction of Seattle due to amazon for years.
part of this is all the workers they bring in from cali who are used to paying a fuck load for housing, and local landlords think they can take advantage of it
Build. More. Houses.
someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my city is dying
build more housing
no, i want to drive out employers
tsk, the real constituency of a city, for the benefit of which it’s run, isn’t whoever its occupants happen or happened to be at any given time - they can be replaced, it’s run for the benefit of its fixed real estate
Not unless the landlords have the vote.
It’s not any given landlords, it’s property value. It would have to be, really, cities being funded primarily through property tax, and if the thriving and capability of your body is related to variable X, you will find yourself maximising for X as an emergent property of the system.
Have you ever read The Power Broker? It lays out, in tedious detail, how this works in practice, how if a body tries to not maximize for X, it just means that it stops being the real governing agency and power flows to some other body that will.
Think about Red Vienna. What’s that saying, do not think you will be permitted to just vote away power? They tried to do that and favor people over property value and they got away with it for a bit until the system seized and chewed them up entirely.
It’s not so direct as there, when they raised an army in the countryside, but one thing is that landlords can operate at scale. Even if it’s purely electoral and nonmilitary, even if you use people power to control a city, the landlords will take control of the next larger unit. Rent control is weakened or prohibited in New York, California, Oregon, and probably more at the state level.
Like, you can even kill the landlords and that won’t change it. The significance of the storming of the Bastille is that for centuries, landlords dealt with popular uprising by retreating into a fortification while their allies raised armies in the countryside, this time the fortification didn’t hold.
But the July Revolution (1830, the “Liberty Leading the People” one), the June Rebellion (1832, the Les Mis one), and the Paris Commune (1871) indicates even this was not a conclusive resolution in favor of the people of Paris.
