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Amazon Begins Housing Homeless In Seattle (jeffreifman.com) 184

reifman writes: Amazon announced that it will commit one of its buildings to housing 200 Seattle homeless people for the next year, allowing a nonprofit organization to oversee the facilities... With more than 4,505 living on the streets, Seattle's mayor recently declared a homelessness emergency... More than 45 people died on the streets in 2015, heroin related deaths in King County are at a 20-year high, and neighborhoods are up in arms about homeless drug use, crime and people living in cars.
The Seattle Times notes that Amazon's construction on the lot isn't scheduled until 2017, so they reached out to the homelessness nonprofit to temporarily offer its use, hoping to later offer the group a second site. (The nonprofit will pay the site's utility bills).
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Amazon Begins Housing Homeless In Seattle

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 16, 2016 @06:34PM (#51924017)

    When Amazon goes to reclaim the property to begin building, they'll be reviled for taking the shelter away...

    >> The Seattle Times notes that Amazon's construction on the lot isn't scheduled until 2017, so they reached out to the homelessness nonprofit to temporarily offer its use, hoping to later offer the group a second site.

    • When Amazon goes to reclaim the property to begin building, they'll be reviled for taking the shelter away...

      Instead of calling them "homeless", just reclassify them as "an invasive species". Problem solved!

      Worst case, they are already in an Amazon warehouse; turn the robots back on, and drop-ship them to everyone who has bought on Amazon recently, but who was too cheap to pay for "Prime"...

  • by turkeydance ( 1266624 ) on Saturday April 16, 2016 @06:49PM (#51924071)
    my experience (volunteer) with a private business being the owner, but not operator, of a homeless shelter, opens up a "deep pocket" lawsuit probability.
  • One out of 50 children or 1.5 million children in America will be homeless each year.[4] In 2013 that number jumped to one out of 30 children, or 2.5 million.[5] There were an estimated 57,849 homeless veterans https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
  • Isn't this pretty much the economic system in the Hunger Games?
  • I'm tired of these attempts to help the homeless.. so many of them are lost causes.

    Let's help the people who still, just barely, have their own housing... we'll see if we can help the nearly homeless before it's too late.

  • Is it like their computer-assisted warehouses with conveyor belts, scanners and automatic pickers and stuff?
  • by Locke2005 ( 849178 ) on Saturday April 16, 2016 @09:01PM (#51924515)
    Good luck getting them out of there when you're ready to repurpose the property.
    • Most will leave when asked. Any that refuse are now trespassing and the police can be called in to remove them by force. This threat is enough to make sure that most will leave when asked, because staying is only going to result in a police baton to the face.

  • CEO Jeff Bezos, traditionally a libertarian

    This is an odd bone to toss out; as a libertarian he SHOULD be in favor of private charities running homeless shelters as opposed to government agency run shelters funded by taxes.

  • Swansea - a historic city with a massive homelessness problem (3k out of 241k population - a third of seattle), and a massive Amazon warehouse which pays poverty wages. Also in the UK, it is illegal to live in a vehicle and in swansea, illegal to feed rough sleepers. As a major local employer, they set the wage with which others must compete - and keep it LOW
  • At first glance, a mortality rate of 1% seems lower than average and should not be cause for alarm.

  • Here in Silicon Valley, you can never even mention in passing that you are poor.

  • Amazon is one of the top 30 who fires america workers to replace them with H1B foreign workers. Amazon specializes in destroying retail jobs and brick and mortar businesses. Notice the irony of a company that destroys jobs and throws american families onto the street then tries to whitewash itself with fake concern for the homelessness it helps create.

  • The problem of homelessness is exacerbated by the extinction of large predators in North America, before that time there was no such thing as the homeless.

    While that sounds bazar, essentially natural selection has been removed from our environment and now you are seeing the pile up of people near the edge of being unfit to survive lingering on due to social conditions. Even a hundred years ago things like starvation, exposure, and disease cleared out these groups of people on a regular basis. Now more

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