In an unusual arrangement, the company has agreed to give the shelter, Mary’s Place, a permanent home inside one of the new office buildings for which it will break ground in the fall. But come October, the hotel will be torn down to give way to two new Amazon office buildings. Amazon will give roughly half of the six-story building to the shelter, providing it with 47,000 square feet of space with private rooms that can hold 65 families, or about 220 people and their pets. The facility, expected to open in early 2020, will have its own entrance and elevators. “To have a permanent downtown Seattle location within Amazon is a game-changer for Mary’s Place and the families we serve,” said Marty Hartman, executive director of Mary’s Place, in a press release. It also lets multigenerational families and those with pets stay together under a roof.
– Amazon has announced what the Seattle Times is calling its "biggest philanthropic venture to date." Inside an office building at its new Seattle headquarters will be 47,000 square feet of space dedicated to a homeless shelter known as Mary's Place. Since April 2016, Amazon has allowed Mary's Place to occupy an old hotel it owns without charge, but the building will now be torn down to make way for new construction. But in a YouTube video published Tuesday—"obviously designed to create a viral video moment," observes Chris O'Brien at VentureBeat—Amazon tells the non-profit's executive director, Marty Hartman, that six floors of an Amazon building will be set aside as a permanent rent-free home for the shelter, allowing it to house more than 200 people. Amazon's head of real estate, John Schoettler, says Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos loved the idea when Schoettler first suggested it in January. He adds Amazon will cover the "tens of millions of dollars" in construction costs, plus all future utility bills "until homelessness is solved." Hartman says it's a "huge gift," though the New York Times reports it comes at a time when Amazon, Seattle's largest private employer, is shouldering some of the blame for the city's rising housing costs, which gave the area the third-largest homeless population in the country in 2016. Mary's Place, which hosts women and families until they can find permanent housing, will be located in another former hotel owned by Amazon until its new home is completed in early 2020. (In other Amazon real estate news, Bezos has purchased a former museum.)