SEATTLE — Seattle residents are glad Amazon and other tech companies are here.
A recent Seattle Times/Suffolk University poll found a majority of respondents say the tech industry — and Amazon specifically — improves life in the Emerald City. While a clear majority were sold on the benefits of tech companies, respondents were more divided on the e-commerce giant that has shaped Seattle’s downtown and changed the way the world shops online.
A narrow majority — 51.4% — said Amazon had improved life in Seattle, while 38.2% said it had not and 9.4% were undecided.
John Schoettler, vice president of global real estate and facilities at Amazon, said in a statement that the company has created opportunities for restaurants and other small businesses near its Seattle headquarters while providing high-paying jobs to the city. Schoettler acknowledged that Amazon’s growth has also come with challenges and pointed to the company’s support for affordable housing and mass transit.
“For over 25 years, Amazon has grown along with Seattle,” Schoettler said. “Early on, we made a decision that was unusual for a company like ours — to build our headquarters in the heart of downtown.
“We’re proud of all the benefits that’s brought to the city.”
When it came to tech overall, 67.4% of people said the industry had improved life in the city, while 26.2% said it had not and 6% were undecided.
Jeffrey Shulman, a marketing professor at the University of Washington who has studied Seattle’s changing economic landscape, wasn’t surprised by the gap. Amazon is a tech company but, because of its size and influence, residents think of it differently than the others, he said.
“Seattle seems to have a love-hate relationship with Amazon,” Shulman said. In the years since Amazon has been here, “lots of people’s lives were dramatically changed — some experienced that change for the better and some for the worse.”
Founded in 1994 in Bellevue, Amazon set up shop in South Lake Union in 2010. It invested more than $4.5 billion in Seattle alone and created what has now become its own economic ecosystem with 10 million square feet of space and room for 50 retailers.
Seattle and the surrounding area are also home base and a popular hub for other tech companies including Microsoft, Google, Meta and Salesforce. Tech workers make up nearly 13% of the workforce in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue area.
Amazon is the city’s largest employer. It vies with Boeing as the top private employer in Washington state and now employs roughly 55,000 people at its South Lake Union campus and 10,000 more in Bellevue and the Eastside. The company has cut 27,000 jobs since November, but it’s still not clear how those layoffs have impacted the Seattle workforce.
Outside of its corporate workforce, Amazon says its investments in the Puget Sound region indirectly supported 298,000 jobs in 2021 in construction, logistics and other professional services. Consulting firm Keystone Strategy estimated the company’s investments contributed $151 billion to the region’s economy since 2010, according to data shared from Amazon.
Amazon has supported 200 local organizations, invested more than $172 billion in the region and supported more than 350,000 total jobs, Amazon’s Schoettler said. In 2022, he continued, the company donated over $70 million to local nonprofits.
“We’re optimistic about the future of the region, and we’re committed to listening to feedback from our neighbors — both positive and negative — and working with them to keep getting better each day,” he said.
Since Amazon’s growth in Seattle exploded in the late 2000s, there has been tension between those who support it and those who don’t. That intensified in 2019 when the company dipped its hands in city politics, UW’s Shulman said. That year, Amazon poured nearly $1.5 million into seven city council races through a political action committee.
Years later, Seattleites are still debating the impact of city politics on the companies that are based here. Some residents feel big companies should help fund city initiatives through tax dollars while others worry that raising taxes could prompt the tech companies to move elsewhere — taking the jobs with them.
According to a Seattle Times/Suffolk University poll, a majority of Seattle residents support a citywide capital-gains tax aimed at the wealthy, to complement the new statewide capital-gains tax that went into effect this year.
Those who oppose the tax were also more likely to say Amazon had improved life in Seattle (67%), as well as the tech industry overall (73%).
The wealthiest poll participants were more likely to favor Amazon and the tech industry than those in middle-income brackets: 68% of people who made more than $250,000 annually said Amazon had improved Seattle, compared with 35% of people who made less than $75,000. Similarly, 85% of people who made more than $250,000 said tech had improved Seattle.
On the opposite end of the income scale, 70% of people who made less than $20,000 said both Amazon and the tech industry had improved life in Seattle.
Tim Thomas, the research director for the Urban Displacement Project at the University of California, Berkeley, said the increased cost of living over past decades likely contributed to the split in opinion.
The majority of people who said Amazon and tech had not improved Seattle are likely “folks who are struggling to stay there,” he said.
Thomas previously worked at the University of Washington and spent nearly two decades in Seattle before leaving for California. Referring to the poll, he added, “you’re not going to get a response from people like me who are not there to answer the call.”
The poll did not show a clear difference in opinion based on how long individuals had lived in Seattle.
About 45% of people who had lived in the region their whole life said Amazon had improved Seattle, while 47% said it had not.
There was a similar breakdown among those who had lived in Seattle for six to 10 years, during Amazon’s explosive growth: 42% said Amazon had improved Seattle and 47% said it had not.
Homeowners were more likely to answer “Yes” to both questions than renters. About 75% of homeowners said tech had improved Seattle, while 57% of renters said the same.
Shulman, from UW, said Seattleites are in “complicated times.”
“You have a lot of change that happened in the previous decade [and] a lot of change that happened in the last three years,” he said. Now, we “have to decide. What’s the city we want to build and how do we want to build it?”
The Seattle Times/Suffolk University poll of 500 Seattle residents was conducted June 12-16 by phone. It has a margin of error of 4.4 percentage points.
