Amazon is laying off hundreds of employees — and it shows the danger Seattle and HQ2 face by hitching their prosperity to the tech giant

AmazonHQSeattle

Amazon will reportedly lay off hundreds of employees, primarily at its Seattle headquarters.
Amazon employs more than 40,000 people in Seattle and has radically changed the city over the last decade.
The cuts point to the danger of a city being too dependent on a single company, an issue Seattle and whatever city wins HQ2 will face in the coming decades.

Amazon is laying off hundreds of employees, primarily at the company's Seattle headquarters, according to the Seattle Times.

The cuts will primarily affect the company's retail division. Amazon is America's second-largest employer with around 566,000 employees as of December. More than 40,000 of those are in Seattle alone.

While the cuts are hardly sweeping, they point to the precarious position that Seattle, and whatever city wins the competition for the company's new $5 billion headquarters dubbed HQ2, will face in the coming decades.

Amazon dominates Seattle, sprawling across downtown and upsetting locals with snarled traffic, soaring housing prices, never-ending construction, and accelerated gentrification.

At the same time, the city has seen an unprecedented economic surge, adding 220,000 jobs over the past decade. Many of those jobs have been due to Amazon's growth and are high-paying.

But for many Seattleites, they've seen this story before. The city was once even more dominated by another company — Boeing.

In 1968, Boeing employed more than 100,000 people in the Seattle area. By 1971, that number had plummeted to 32,500, leading to an infamous billboard exclaiming: "Will the last person leaving Seattle turn out the lights."

While Amazon's layoffs of a few hundred are nowhere near that level, they are a solemn reminder that pinning a city's future on the ebbs and flows of a single company is a precarious place to be.

I recently spent a day in the Seattle neighborhood locals call Amazonia to see how Amazon has affected the city.