I am not a real estate broker, but my sense is that it would take a very small and economically depressed area to be positively influenced by 1500 minimum wage jobs. Maybe if you live in rural West Virginia the houses might go from $50k to $75k. I dunno.
If we’re talking a Dpp/AMZL/distribution center
It brings in maybe 500 part time jobs people leave fairly regularly and maybe 30 full time jobs.
Anyone over 7 weeks is a veteran employee; that is how much people want to keep those jobs.
People would rather commute and hope for something better closer to where they live now.
Managers, the ones who can afford houses, do NOT want to be close to work; trust me. Most would rather commute an hour rather than risk being called in constantly for dumb crap from the Site Lead.
800 or more vans plus flex drivers and their cars plus a few semis on neighborhood streets usually screws up the value of houses nearby.
Simple really.
From the three places I have been in the sortation center didn’t have any effect at all, the delivery/distribution station is hurting values near it slightly, and the other is so far in the sticks that it couldn’t have an effect no matter what. Amazon basically knows this which is why they pick former UPS/Fed-Ex sites (where the damage has already happened) or industrial parks in the middle of no-where. But where the smart financial move is something else they aren’t above taking it.
Camper patrol ----- usually more around fulfillment centers; the places where the boxes are filled. Those are the ones with huge staffs and more full-time positions. We had one camper for a month this winter but that was basically until he could get some work done on his truck and get to a FC. Even in Peak Dpp and SCs don’t produce the 60 hour weeks for December most of those folks are really trying for.
FCs are a little different but …
Even at $15 per hour the basic AA these days is bringing in maybe $14k to $16k a year even after you get VET (voluntary extra time) and add that in. Many shifts are 3 hours a day and only 5 days a week or less. When the company raised the pay they also did away with the 18 hour minimum and other stuff we had. Over the year I made less during 2019 than I did in 2015; a lot less. So even in a broke-ass inner-city slum or Appalachia it isn’t going to raise things all that much. It may (and does) let some poor and/or older people stay in their homes but it isn’t going to make a blip in the estate once they are gone.
Don’t get me wrong; I love where I am and stay there even though I don’t have to. But part of what makes it fun is I don’t need it. To rely on it, to think the community will benefit ------- rarely. Very rarely. Even for the places with the serious jobs like the HQs ---- expect more losers than winners.
Wow, lots of acronyms here that go over my head. But I think I get the gist.
The most likely place Amazon will seek out next is less than a quarter mile from my house, in a place that’s already zoned as industrial. Housing is indeed within a few blocks of this site; maybe it’s different here near Silicon Valley, where things are squeezed more tightly together. And all of the housing surrounding the site is upscale, although not super fancy.
Good point about most of any new jobs being part-time, minimum wage jobs. That’ll be good for landlords renting out rooms, but not great for home-buyers.
Using Zillow, I’ve taken a look at housing prices surrounding an Amazon facility in Newark. The surrounding housing doesn’t seem to have suffered, so there’s that.
But Silicon Valley sprawl and traffic is engulfing my little semi-rural town, and an Amazon distribution center a quarter mile away is not what I want.
Well, the town shouted down one attempt, so if this latest plan nears fruition, maybe we’ll shout this one down too. Or maybe we’ll retire before then and move to some rural area that won’t become engulfed until after we die of old age.
Part of that is Amazon; its almost a second language somewhat associated with English but then again ------------ 
A distribution center can be one of several things:
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A huge warehouse operation where they get massive amounts of things from makers and break it down to send out to the various area fulfillment centers. Much space and all the traffic is pretty much semis; not a lot of employees. Say maybe 100?
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A sortation center that gets loads from the FCs (fulfillment centers) and breads them down to individual post office routes and send some as a sort of support terminal to the local AMZL delivery stations. Lot of semis (50 or more a day) and a lot of employees; maybe as many as 300-500.
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A delivery station where loads are broken down to various van and flex driver routes around say a 50 mile circle or a bit more. Tons of all kinds of traffic from semis (4-15 a day) to as many as 1000 cars and vans. Maybe 150 Amazon jobs and most of the drivers want to be commuters so lets not count them.
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Specialized stations for things like washers, carpets, and things that could need installed. A fair amount of semis and maybe 20-30 box trucks. And a total Amazon staff of like 30 people.
Just what is being planned near you I don’t know and if the company says it could very well be not the truth. Not because they want to lie but because everything is “need to know” where Seattle figures no-one needs to know. I got friends <push nose to the side> in Phoenix (some of your "away/start-up team would come from there) ------- I could reach out and see what the skinny is; us peasants often know well before the bosses. Peasants are like that. But for purposes of this discussion it really doesn’t matter. Just call it some bad possible, some good unlikely, and right around status quo around normal.
Missed the edit window
Not minimum wage (depending on your state) since their/our standard is $15 per hour. But when you extend out the math:
$15x15 hour week = $225 a week before taxes
x 52 weeks = $11,700
And since almost every place has some sort of voluntary overtime/extra time (as we call it), and some places have some longer shifts, you can usually get more like $13k-$14k a year but the days of working as a peasant/AA/Tier 1/Amazonian and bringing in $18k over the course of a year went away when they jumped the standard pay from $11.25-12.50 to the $15 thingy.
Because overtime (federal and state) kicks in once we hit 40 hours Seattle makes sure everyone overstaffs to the point that you CAN’T go over 40 hours. You are only allowed 2 shifts a day, 6 days a week. In 2015 I did 8 shifts a week for Peak and averages 53 hours a week. This year, for Peak 2019, I did 12 a week and went over 30 hours once. Again, I understand the business side and I am not saying its a bad thing, but the end result of our pay raise was a cut in income.
There is a book out there called The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon ---------- its worth the read even though its terribly dated now.
One of these Amazon facilities moved to 3 miles from my house a few years ago. I can’t actually tell the difference. Haven’t been studying real estate prices, tho.
Remember that their lowest FT salary is $15/hour, over $30k a year. That’s not typically food stamp money, in my experience.
The Amazon site here is in an industrial area, clearly chosen because it’s within a half mile of a FedEx, UPS, and USPS processing center, as well as another distribution center. There are some houses scattered around, but they’re farmhouses that pre-date all the industrial stuff, where the original owners sold all the land surrounding the house but chose to stay where they were, noise, traffic and all.
You’re falling for a most typical lie.
“FT salary” – meaning full-time salary. But by far most of their workers are NOT full-rime, they are only hourly part-time. Which also means they don’t get benefits lik health plans, sick leave, vacation, etc.
with the unemployment rate so low can they really find people who only want to work part time? Pretty sure that would be a problem here.
One of the oddities of the current cycle is that workers’ salaries are not rising due to the low employment rate. A lot of people are still stuck working 2 or more part time jobs.
It’s not just Amazon.
Most of the people who currently work part time are doing so because they aren’t in the market for full time work.
The rate of multiple jobholders is historically low, although BLS has only been tracking it since the mid-90s. It doesn’t fluctuate much, good economy or bad. The minority (~25%) are working multiple part-time jobs.
(Real) household, family, and personal income are all higher today than they’ve ever been.
I’ve been to over thirty Amazon DCs - I work for one of the outfits that does the automation inside. None that I can remember are anywhere near homes.
Do you work for Dematic?
For our DC and the other ones I’m aware of, most of the people are from temp agencies due to seasonality/variability of the work. Each day/week the number of people required is sent to the agency based on current work conditions and they send that number. Those same workers are typically bouncing around between some number of local DC’s based on need.
For the best workers, we either hire them perm if spots are available or we request them continually so they end up with full time work generally.
Nah. It brings in a fraction of those jobs, most are part time or don’t pay well enough for the employees to buy houses and, unless you’re living next door, you’re going to need to drive anyway. Most of the warehouse employees are hired through temp agencies and dropped before they have to be offered full employment (“Direct hire after 90 days!”).
Truck traffic takes a massive toll on the local infrastructure (plus the trucks regularly ignore local ordinances about residential roads), housing prices stay low because most people don’t want to live next to a busy warehouse and people who do work in the warehouses aren’t making much money so the new local businesses tend to be dollar stores, payday loan shops and fast food joints. Plus, the local municipality usually gets screwed on the tax incentive deals they offered to attract the warehouses in the first place.
Edit: Should note that Amazon distribution centers aren’t built in a void. At least around here, they’re in the same region as multiple other similar warehouses and distribution centers.
Hard numbers are almost impossible to find but going by what I know ---- say 3-5% are full-time including those at the $15 level such as production assistants and the like. Amazon has a habit of contracting out most of the full-time work like drivers and janitorial services rather than deal with things like health care and benefits.
We should have a beer some day; lets just say my experience is different enough that I’m really curious now. Not in a bad way but really curious. Agency hires were tried here our first couple years and were a real failure. Most didn’t make it through their first day let alone week and the behavioral issues were really bad. Now 100% are Amazon hires although most are “seasonal” (in our language blue-edged or white badges) rather then “full time part time” like me. The general rule is to convert some over the “blue” and shed the rest as volume dictates. Some bounce - I know a friend who has been at the Dpp, SC and XL over the last year - but more often you leave Amazon and return at some future date.
Our AMZL DCs — the volume is pretty steady and planned based on a lot of factors; the number of “me’s” not being much of a consideration. Peak and mini-Peak are the exception since the Great Brewhaha Christmas that started the whole SC experiment in the beginning. “We” will control our customer experience - end of discussion. Even with SCs things are pretty much stable throughout the year; its only the FCs that seem to get hit with sudden surges throughout the months.
There certainly are challenges with quality. During holiday and busy times, we pay bonuses if they will just show up each day for a full week. It’s amazing how many people would prefer to skip that extra money and just not show up. But we also get high quality people, so it’s a mixed bag.
Not sure how to do it without the temp agencies, it would be pretty difficult to adjust rapidly without a pool of people available.
Because we are much smaller than Amazon, our “DC” is not specialized, it’s a combo of traditional wholesale+retail distribution combined with e-commerce fulfillment. The different channels have slightly offset seasonal peaks (due to specifics of logistics, e.g. large retailers need holiday product earlier than ecommerce consumers order theirs), so that smooths it out a little but there are definitely spring and xmas peaks substantially larger than other times.