ajc.com
SEATTLE — Travis Nguyen sees both the good and the bad with Amazon.
Nguyen works in an auto repair shop in the shadow of Amazon’s Day 1 tower, where CEO Jeff Bezos keeps his office. Amazon has helped make Seattle more diverse and created tens of thousands of jobs, Nguyen said, and Washington state’s tech industry produces many times more.
But with Seattle’s explosive tech boom have come soaring housing costs, clogged roads and strains to other vital infrastructure. There’s also a brooding sense among many like Nguyen, who don’t work in technology, that the high wages and billions in corporate investments have put the squeeze on folks who are on the outside looking in.
His advice to metro Atlanta should the region win Amazon’s second headquarters and the promise of 50,000 high-paying jobs? “Just be prepared for growth and fast growth,” he said.
Seattle’s tech community, which is much broader than Amazon, has been a double-edged sword for the Emerald City. It’s produced vast amounts of wealth and revitalized neighborhoods across the city. But that prosperity also exacerbated income inequality, turbocharged displacement and contributed to nightmarish traffic and high rates of homelessness, observers say.
HQ2 is arguably the nation’s biggest jobs prize in a generation, pitting job-hungry states against one another in an Olympics-like chase for one of the world’s most admired companies.
Seattle political and community observers say metro Atlanta and Georgia policymakers need to grapple with the fact that if HQ2 comes to Atlanta, it will not only create jobs that will potentially uplift generations of Georgians and cement the region as a global business capital, but HQ2 also risks putting unanticipated strains on the fabric of any winning community.
Anticipating the strains, they say, and planning ahead in Atlanta could avoid some of Seattle’s problems and make an Amazon win even more of a victory.
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