Amazon said Wednesday that it plans to offer a portion of its Seattle headquarters as a homeless shelter.
The tech company said it will donate more than 47,000 square feet of space at its headquarters building to people who are homeless and in need of shelter, according to CNN.
The company will team up with Mary’s Place, a transitional shelter that helps people find permanent homes, The New York Times noted.
CNN reported that Mary’s Place will assist Amazon in creating 65 rooms with the capacity to house more than 200 homeless people on a nightly basis.
"Mary’s Place does incredible, life-saving work every day for women, children, and families experiencing homelessness in the Seattle community," Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement, according to CNN. "We are lucky to count them as neighbors and thrilled to offer them a permanent home within our downtown Seattle headquarters."
This comes a year after Amazon let a homeless shelter move into a former motel that it owns – a property that the company planned to tear down to build more office buildings, The New York Times noted.
At the time, it was understood that the shelter would have to move out of the space once construction for the new office space began. However, that’s no longer the case. Amazon told the shelter to stay put, giving it roughly half of the six-story building.
"I see it as this huge gift because everywhere we go, we end up leaving," said Marty Hartman, the executive director of Mary’s Place, according to the Times. "You come in and become a fabric of the neighborhood you’re in, and then you say goodbye. That’s a hard thing for a lot of people to do."
Nan Roman, the president of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said it’s not typical for a company of this magnitude to share its space with a homeless shelter.
"Too often, homelessness gets pushed to the other side of the tracks," Roman said, according to the Times. "Keeping them as neighbors is nice."
On top of providing a permanent home for the homeless shelter, the company has also donated $10 million to the construction of the University of Washington’s new computer science building.
"Its reputation in Seattle has certainly suffered," said Alan Durning, executive director of Sightline Institute, according to the Times. "Doing things like this may be in its enlightened self-interest, right on site for the world to see."
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