Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

by Brad Stone

By the opening of the Spheres that January in 2018, forty-five thousand Amazon employees worked in Seattle, and the company occupied about a fifth of all the premium office space in the city. New hotels, restaurants, and construction sprouted in an already dense downtown core. Amazon had altered the quirky character of its hometown, once known as an industrial city and as the source of alternative trends like grunge music and fashion. All of the downsides of twenty-first-century urbanism had accompanied these rapid changes. Historic neighborhoods with rich cultural histories, like the largely Black Central District three miles east of Amazon’s offices, had gentrified at an alarming rate. The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Seattle increased by 67 percent between the years of 2013 and 2017, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Traffic on the I-5 freeway into the city, and over the bridges to West Seattle and to the eastern suburbs, crawled to a standstill during rush hour. With restrictive land use regulations and neighborhood opposition limiting the construction of new housing, low-income families were displaced and homelessness on Seattle streets became sickeningly ubiquitous.