Input 2021.01.07 13:08
$2 billion in grants to Seattle, Arlington and Nashville
Loan support at low interest rates other than remuneration and new construction
“I will demonstrate a positive impact on the community”
Amazon, the world’s largest e-commerce company, has decided to provide more than $2 billion (about 2,173 trillion won) to the’Affordable housing’ project in the US city center. Amid strong criticism that Amazon’s business expansion triggered a rise in housing prices in the region, the company plans to offset this criticism by helping to build affordable housing for the middle and low-income income brackets in three cities where its employees are concentrated.
“Most of this investment is aimed at preserving or building affordable housing for low-income families,” said Catherine Buell, Amazon’s head of community development. “It will be a way to support loans at lower interest rates than the market level, as well as subsidies. “I said. He also said, “I will prove that Amazon’s growth plays a positive role in our community as well.”
Amazon currently has 75,000 workers in Seattle, where its headquarters are located. Arlington and Nashville, where the second headquarters and operations center are located, each have more than 1,000 employees. Amazon plans to increase the number of Arlington and Nashville employees to at least 5,000 by 2025.
In particular, more than 60% of the subsidy will be devoted to building 1300 houses near the second headquarters under construction in Arlington. In addition, 1,000 apartments were renovated outside of Seattle, and over 20,000 homes were renovated or newly built in Nashville within five years.
WSJ said that in the process of rapidly expanding businesses, including Amazon, technology companies have been criticized for triggering an influx of population and directly leading to higher housing prices. He explained that this plan was also conscious of such criticism and invested funds. Amazon also supported projects for homeless women in 2016, but it did not subside the criticism that it was the’cause of rising house prices’.
In fact, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft (MS) have also paid huge sums for similar projects. The measure was conscious of the criticism of the surge in housing prices in large cities in the western coastal area due to the influx of high-paid manpower.
In 2019, Google invested $1 billion to solve the housing problem in San Francisco Bay, where its headquarters are located, and in 2017 it had installed 300 prefabricated homes in Silicon Valley. Microsoft has also provided low-interest loans worth $750 million to developers who provide affordable housing in the Seattle area where it is headquartered. Apple and Facebook also decided to release $2.5 billion and $1.1 billion, respectively, in the name of expanding housing supply.
Bloomberg News diagnosed that Amazon’s investment came out of a’housing market chaos’. Bloomberg said, “At the lowest mortgage interest rate ever, the demand for sale has increased and home prices have soared in most areas. Conversely, expensive urban apartments such as Washington DC and Seattle have been turned away and the monthly rent has declined. “It’s too burdensome to bet.”
Some point out that it is not enough to solve the housing shortage through investment by large corporations. Policy changes and large-scale expenditures at the government level must be preceded. Chris Herbert, director of the Harvard Apartment Housing Research Center, told WSJ, “The coronavirus outbreak has put millions of tenants on the verge of eviction,” and said that the federal government’s active investment and policy support are needed to resolve the housing shortage.