Dear cities HQ2: Here's how to deal with Amazon. Love, Seattle.

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

In the "pro" column, the company has been the engine of the recent renaissance of our city. In the eight years since Amazon began creating tens of thousands of jobs, Seattle has achieved second highest income per capita and his 11th fastest job growth. We host a disproportionate share some of the best American restaurants. The influx of technology workers and tax revenues has resulted in a increase in public spending. Our buses operate more often than ever before, our light rail network is expanding and our parks are so well maintained that we sometimes forget that we can only take advantage of them three months a year.

In the column "against", however, it is undeniable that the explosion of the city was made on the backs of its poorest inhabitants. The influx of people – Seattle has grown more over the past seven years than during the last 30 years – a pushed housing prices uptransforming landlords into millionaires and tenants into refugees. Our homelessness crisis is so serious that the mayor has declared an emergency. Our public schools run the bigger deficits since the 1970s. All these new chic restaurants? Like many other cities in Seattle's old city, I can not afford a meal for most of them.

But the most important thing to know about what happened in Seattle is that it's not all Amazon's fault. All the effects of the expansion of society were both predictable and preventable.

This week, Amazon announced that its second headquarters, HQ2, would be split between the Queens Borough of Queens and "National Landing", a name invented for an existing suburb of Virginia, Washington, DC . 25,000 new jobs and billions of investments at each site.

It will disturb, but it is not disastrous. Amazon is a giant, amoral and for-profit monster. His new hosts can not do anything about it. What they can do, however, is enact laws to ensure that the effects of society are positive.

There is no good or bad business. there are only good and bad laws that regulate them. Here are some of the things that Seattle did when we became a corporate city and others that some of us would have liked to do earlier.

The logic behind New York and Virginia massive subsidies For Amazon (respectively $ 48,000 and $ 22,000 per job), the company will have a multiplier effect, forming clusters of technology workers and services on its campuses.

It is even proven that this will happen as legislators want. A study conducted in 2017 in more than 300 cities revealed that every new job in high technology created five others in auxiliary industries. The study also revealed, however, that the majority of these additional jobs were not in the high-tech sectors. Each highly paid and highly technical position created three jobs in "non-professional" jobs. This means that for Head Office 2 cities, along with another five figures of software developers, they could end up with 75,000 new servers, chefs, hairdressers, hairdressers, cashiers and janitors.

Virginia minimum wage is $ 7.25 hour. Neither the state nor the city of Arlington, where most of Amazon's investments will go, have policies guaranteeing paid sick leave or family leave for workers. If National Landing does not improve basic working conditions, Amazon's investment will have the effect of creating an army of poor and precarious workers. If Amazon, a publicly traded company, can guarantee its workers a minimum wage of $ 15 per hour, Virginia has no excuse for not doing the same.

Legally, things seem a little better in New York. The city already has sick and family leaves and a minimum wage going towards $ 15 hour. The city will collapse however, it is the law enforcement. An evaluation in 2017 found widespread evidence of informal work, wage theft and sexual harassment, particularly among women and men workers. Almost 20% of food service employees hired as "casual workers" reported receiving less than the minimum wage.

Many of the workers hired by Amazon for its HQ2 sites will benefit from six-figure salaries as well as luxury services. If the new host cities want to make the most of the company's investments, they can at least tackle the exploitation of the people who feed, clothe and clean the homes of its workers.

One of the painful and forgotten truths of municipal politics is that cities do not decide on the size of their population. Amazon has not asked permission from Seattle to develop 35,000 workers in 2010. The 114,000 people who have moved here in the last eight years have not applied for a visa. Everything just happened.

But, although cities do not control their own growth, they control how they respond to it. Since Amazon began its rapid expansion, Seattle has built approximately a new house for three new jobs. That makes us superstars compared to San Francisco, where the ratio is 1 to 8but this is still not enough to meet this need.

The result is almost a decade of implacable gentrification but mostly invisible. While many glass and steel towers have been erected in the city center, the vast majority of the city is preserved in amber by zoning regulations that make it illegal to build other buildings than the McMansions. This did not stop the technicians from setting up here, but it pitted them against each other in auction wars for the houses already installed here. According to their Zillow app, the two Microsoft employees who moved into my last apartment – I decided to leave after two years of rent increase of 10% – have a combined income of $ 248,000 a year . The appearance of my neighborhood has not changed, but the wealth of its inhabitants has changed.

The new host cities of Amazon should not make the same mistake. Even before the company announced its new host cities, Arlington had a housing shortage, price up sharply and one local debate on the opportunity to relax the restrictions on the construction of apartments. On the other side of the river, Washington's lack of affordability is well documentedand the city is already late on the estimate 690,000 units housing needs by 2045 just to keep pace with job growth.

The queen, as part of a city a little more comfortable with skyscrapers, has a better appearance on this point. The HQ2 site in Long Island City has already build more housing like in any other New York neighborhood since 2010. Nevertheless, since the announcements of Amazon, calls to stop the construction and slow down the planned rezoning intensified.

The concerns of local residents are logical. The neighborhood is already suffering from rapid gentrification and the buildings of Amazon are located right next to the neighborhood largest social housing complex. The ostensible reasons for Mayor and Governor to invite Amazon are to lift local residents and not move them with luxury condos.

But if the Seattle experience proves anything, it is that refusing to build new homes will not reduce the pressures on gentrification. This will intensify them. Amazon workers, like everyone else, want to live close to their jobs. If the city is built as high and as dense as possible, new apartments could play the role of release valve in case of influx of new demands. If the city refuses – as San Francisco has done for decades – rich technicians will buy or lease all the real estate that already exists.

Nobody likes a group of new soulless apartment towers that mounts next door. But over the past two years, as Seattle has added to the dozen, rents have finally stabilized. We have also added fees to sponsors who are putting money into a fund to preserve affordable housing. There is still a long way to go, but the city is a lesson to be drawn from the principle that can get out of a housing crisis, even if what you build is not always beautiful.

King County, where Seattle is located, has the third largest homeless population in the USA. Nearly 50% are not protected.

Last year, the city authorities adopted a modest tax on large businesses to intensify the city's response to the crisis. Almost immediately, the makers of Amazon threat put an end to its expansion and transfer thousands of jobs to other cities. Then, when the municipal council did not give in, the 's business is associated with Starbucks to fund an effort to repeal the tax by a voting initiative.

It worked. Faced with a very serious advertising campaign, the city council reversed its decision and abrogated the law. In a way, two of the largest companies in the world convinced voters that the mandatory contributions to solving the problems they (partially) helped to solve were too far apart. Two months later, Amazon's president, Jeff Bezos, announced that he was make a donation $ 2 billion, or about 1.2% of its personal wealth, to end homelessness and support early childhood education. However, he declined to specify which charities he would give or how many per year.

This is an obvious lesson, but you must constantly remind city leaders: Businesses are not your friends. Amazon has neither a moral conscience nor a mandate in terms of social responsibility. It's just a company that, like everyone else, will always be pleased to please its shareholders before taking care of its community.

City officials must keep this basic fact in mind. Amazon Press release This week highlighted the "community investments" it would make on each of its sites. In New York, she will book offices for a primary school and artist workspace. In Virginia, he will make a donation to improve the pedestrian, airport and metro infrastructure.

But as Seattle's experience over the past year shows, these community investments are voluntary, contingent and tiny in relation to the effects the company will have. Any attempt by the city to obtain more funds from society – or to make its commitments mandatory and permanent – will lead to violent reactions, including misinformation campaigns and cynical political stances.

New York and Virginia are already applying progressive income taxes, which means they are better positioned than Seattle to turn Amazon's investments into higher tax revenues. But in the future, as society strains municipal infrastructure and political goodwill, municipal leaders will need automatic systems to force it to intervene to mitigate its effects. And if politicians forget this obligation, their constituents will have to remind them.

So, let's take the case of Seattle, HQ2: Amazon will be neither good nor bad for you. It will be both. And it's always up to you to decide on balance.