Amazon Doubles Down on Its Housing Giving. Good Strategy or More of the Same?

Amazon concentrates its affordable housing support around its headquarters in Seattle, Arlington and Nashville. Bumble Dee/shutterstock

There are few firms to compete with Amazon for sheer ubiquity. Like it or not, Amazon’s everywhere, and that poses a distinct challenge for its corporate philanthropy. How and where should the company give for greatest visibility and effect when its logistics operation — digital as well as physical — reaches every nook and cranny of the country?

Part of Amazon’s answer to that question has actually been quite conventional. Corporate philanthropies often focus on the place (or places) where the company is headquartered as a way to concentrate impact, and, at least in this case, generate big-sounding numbers that can be used to cultivate local goodwill. Amazon’s housing affordability work, a staple of its philanthropy, fits that bill.

The company’s Housing Equity Fund, established in 2021 with a $2 billion commitment, first aimed to “create and preserve” 20,000 affordable homes over five years in the company’s “hometown communities”: the Seattle area, Arlington, Virginia, and Nashville, Tennessee. This month, the company announced it had surpassed that goal early — $2.2 billion for 21,000 homes — and has committed another $1.4 billion to up the overall goal by 14,000 homes.

Those impressive-sounding stats, which Amazon further details in a glossy report, reflect a lot of laudable work to mobilize the company’s commitment and tackle housing insecurity, a persistent and escalating problem for millions of Americans. Even so, Amazon’s giving in this arena leaves a lot to be desired.

For one thing, it’s incongruous to see Amazon, an unprecedented corporate phenomenon in so many ways, stick with a beefed-up version of the same type of local, headquarters-focused philanthropy that’s long been the default way for your average company to “give back.” 

This hometown focus is hardly new. In its original home base of Seattle, Amazon has engaged in substantial (though hardly boundary-pushing) anti-homelessness giving for years, motivated no doubt by Seattleites’ well-documented discomfort with the company’s overweening downtown presence and the perception that its heavy footprint in the region had driven up housing costs. 

It’s a fair bet that as Amazon moved to open up new headquarters, first its “HQ2” in Arlington, Virginia, and then a third in Nashville, Tennessee, the Housing Equity Fund has been a way to strategically apply that same principle and get ahead of local criticism. What the Housing Equity Fund doesn’t do, to my mind, is deliver on Amazon’s admittedly CSR-friendly position that “all people should have access to housing they can afford.” 

Direct investments, Amazon says, are limited to “locations where we have a sizable presence.” That’s all well and good, say, for a firm with corporate offices in one city and facilities in a couple of others, but it’s odd coming from a company so omnipresent that you could walk out your door right now and there’s a good chance you’ll spot an Amazon employee down the street delivering packages. 

What might a more geographically ambitious approach to housing giving look like for Amazon? For one thing, the company’s hardly likely to tackle the problem on the level of structural economic justice — after all, it’s the labor movement’s big bad wolf, and I doubt it has much appetite to break bread with movement activists of any sort.

Part of the answer could lie in another part of its stated position: “only governments at the local, state and federal level have the capacity to implement more effective housing policies.” As I’ve written before, backing work to loosen restrictive zoning and land use policies is pretty much a green field for philanthropy. In addition, funders have often paid little attention to the copious red tape driving the cost of creating affordable housing into the stratosphere. 

Even the Housing Equity Fund’s own numbers — 21,000 homes with $2.2 billion — imply outlays of over $100,000 per unit. And 59% of the fund’s support has gone toward preserving existing affordable housing by helping nonprofit developers purchase housing stock and lock in affordable rents, preventing residents from getting displaced. With that in mind, the per-unit spend for building new housing has likely been much higher than $100,000.

If delving into the contentious world of residential land use regulation and compliance seems unpalatable, a company with Amazon’s reach could also do something far simpler, like, say, a point-of-sale matching gift program to encourage customers to support anti-homelessness work in their communities. But wait; that’s wishful thinking too, seeing as the company nixed its similar AmazonSmile program not long ago, citing a lack of “impact.”

In the end, whether it’s Amazon or a host of other major companies, one throughline of our corporate philanthropy coverage has been an ongoing trend toward more strategic giving that draws on and aligns with companies’ for-profit operations. 

That’s clear to see in many of Amazon’s other corporate impact offerings — like its food donations, STEM-heavy education programming, and Amazon Web Services-heavy job skills training, all detailed in another glossy report. On the housing front, the strategy appears to be one of cultivating local buy-in around its white-collar command hubs.

As if to dispel any doubt that Amazon’s community impact strategies are carefully thought out to enhance the company’s position, an internal memo leaked late last year and verified by the Associated Press hammered all that home. Rather than Seattle, Arlington or Nashville, the geographic focus in this case is the Inland Empire of Southern California, where Amazon’s plan to combat “labor agitation” and clear the way for the construction of large warehouses apparently involves “earning the trust” of leading nonprofits in the community.

Now, none of us expects Amazon to pull a Patagonia and orient itself away from profit and toward social good. But it’s nice to imagine a world where a corporate behemoth actually brought its full strategic acumen to bear on social responsibility credos like “housing equity for all,” rather than gesturing at them with one hand while bringing the other fist down on substantive movements for economic justice.