SEATTLE — A year ago, when Amazon let a homeless shelter for families move into a former motel it owned, it was viewed as a nice but fleeting gesture. 
 
 The motel was on a chunk of downtown property where Amazon planned to eventually erect yet another set of sparkling buildings to meet its insatiable need for office space in this city, where it has come to embody both the region’s economic boom and its struggles with affordability. The hotel would be torn down and the shelter kicked out when that time came. 
 
 Instead, Amazon has decided to let the shelter stay. In an unusual arrangement, the company has agreed to give the shelter, Mary’s Place, a permanent home inside one of the new office buildings for which it will break ground in the fall. 
 
 Amazon will give roughly half of the six-story building to the shelter, providing it with 47,000 square feet of space with private rooms that can hold 65 families, or about 220 people and their pets. The facility, expected to open in early 2020, will have its own entrance and elevators. ||||| Amazon announced today that it will donate part of its new headquarters in downtown Seattle to a local homeless shelter that was facing the threat of closure. 
 
 The company said it would give 47,000 square feet to Mary’s Place Family Shelter, enough for 65 rooms and 200 homeless women, children, and families. 
 
 “To have a permanent downtown Seattle location within Amazon is a game-changer for Mary’s Place and the families we serve,” said Marty Hartman, executive director of Mary’s Place, in a press release. “We’ve loved being Amazon’s neighbor, and now the opportunity to move into their headquarters permanently is truly a dream come true. This unique, first-of-its-kind shelter will remind families that they matter and that their community wants to help them succeed.” 
 
 It’s hard to argue with the magnanimity of the gesture. So what makes it weird? 
 
 Well, the company chose to surprise Hartman in a highly staged setting, surrounded by camera equipment and a microphone designed to capture the emotional moment and then package it later as part of the press release: 
 
 A year ago, Amazon let Mary’s set up in an unused hotel that was located on the site of its headquarters. Amazon helped refurbish the building and maintain it. But with the Amazon campus expanding, the building needs to be torn down. The shelter will move into a temporary spot, and then back to the Amazon campus once the permanent facility is finished. 
 
 No doubt this upheaval created a lot of uncertainty for Hartman and the community she served. And Amazon’s work here goes far beyond anything I’m aware of being done directly by other major tech companies, though Salesforce, Apple, Facebook, and Google are all contributing to community programs in their own way. 
 
 What makes it uncomfortable for me is the Oprah-like surprise that seems obviously designed to create a viral video moment. I am not a particularly religious person at this point, but I do remember the Bible in Matthew 6:1 telling me: ||||| Mary’s Place will have a permanent home in six stories of a Seattle office tower that will be built in the heart of Amazon’s sprawling urban headquarters. 
 
 Mary’s Place, a nonprofit that temporarily converts unused buildings into shelters for women and families in need, will soon have a permanent home — embedded in the heart of Amazon.com’s burgeoning Seattle domain. 
 
 The nonprofit currently operates a shelter in an old Travelodge near the core of Amazon’s new downtown campus, a place where those who find themselves without a roof in an increasingly expensive city can get back on their feet, while staffers help them find jobs and housing. The average resident lives there for 86 days. 
 
 The e-commerce giant, which owns the property, has let Mary’s Place use it for free since April 2016. But come October, the hotel will be torn down to give way to two new Amazon office buildings. 
 
 As part of that construction, Amazon will devote half of one of the buildings to Mary’s Place — giving it a six-story, 47,000-square-foot shelter that will house more than 200 people in 65 rooms. The capacity is similar to the temporary shelter it will replace, but the space is about 10,000 square feet larger. 
 
 It will be rent-free, with utility bills paid. Forever. And right next to the office space where Amazon workers reinvent cloud computing and the retail world. 
 
 “We finally got the keys to our own place,” said Marty Hartman, executive director of the nonprofit, showing off a large, golden key that Amazon’s head of real estate, John Schoettler, gave her — inside an Amazon shipping box — as a memento of the donation. 
 
 In a meeting with reporters, Schoettler called the arrangement “permanent, until homelessness is solved.” 
 
 The move — which Schoettler says will cost the company “tens of tens of millions of dollars” — is the Seattle company’s biggest philanthropic venture to date. It’s a big step up for a company that until a few years ago was considered aloof vis-à-vis local civic matters. It also comes in the wake of other high-profile engagements, from a big donation to the University of Washington computer-science center to giving space on its campus to FareStart, another prominent local nonprofit. 
 
 The idea also addresses a critical issue for the city — homelessness — that some say is aggravated by the breakneck growth spurred in large part by Amazon’s own expansion. 
 
 It comes as the number of families waiting for shelter increases, a phenomenon that stems from the city’s changing economics, as well as domestic violence and the high cost of health care, according to Hartman. 
 
 At the same time — by sheltering those left out of Seattle’s boom right at the center of Amazon’s $4 billion urban campus, teeming with tech gentry— the new high-rise facility for Mary’s Place will also highlight the yawning income-equality gap. 
 
 But Mary’s Place residents and Amazon’s Schoettler downplay any perceived tensions, pointing to the current friendly coexistence between the 63-room shelter that has operated on 8th Avenue for a year and its tony neighbors. 
 
 “We blend in,” said Patricia Abbott, who has been in Mary’s Place with her 9-year-old son for about nine months. “We like the neighborhood and the neighborhood likes us.” 
 
 Amazon employees volunteer at Mary’s Place, and last August they threw a summer barbecue for families living there. At the kitchen where meals are prepared, there’s a fridge with a sign that says “Amazon Go” — containing donated meals that come from the highly automated experimental convenience store Amazon opened last December. 
 
 The new buildings, and the shelter within, will be completed in early 2020. The shelter will be separate from Amazon’s office space, with its own entrance, stairs and elevators. 
 
 Schoettler said his team had been discussing ways to permanently harbor Mary’s Place inside an Amazon building for about a year. On Jan. 12, he took the idea to senior management. 
 
 According to Schoettler, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos pushed back his chair and said: “I love this. This is great.” 
 
 Schoettler said Bezos “loved the fact that it was unique, and that it was inclusive, within our campus, and thought that was very unusual and would allow us to do something different.” 
 
 In addition to the cost of constructing the new shelter, Amazon will have to find space somewhere else for the 300 employees that it had originally planned to put in the part of the building now allotted to Mary’s Place. 
 
 Amazon broke the news to Hartman, the Mary’s Place executive, last Thursday. It was a surprise — caught on videotape. She says she later got a call from Bezos. “He said: ‘Thank you for all you do,’ ” Hartman said. 
 
 While construction on the block that Mary’s Place currently occupies won’t start until October, the nonprofit will start in late May or early June to move its operations to a neighboring former Days Inn, also owned by Amazon, where it will have an additional 26 rooms. New people arriving will go to the new shelter, Hartman said. 
 
 Amazon’s gift is prompting Mary’s Place to boost its staff: Currently it employs about 160 across various shelters, including 66 full-time staff, and that is poised to double next year, Hartman said. Staffing costs are covered by other donations. 
 
 Hartman said Amazon’s gift has allowed the nonprofit the unique benefit of giving families their own rooms at its shelters systemwide, which helps them deal with the emotional and physical challenges of homelessness. 
 
 “Individual rooms are an incredible gift to families to maintain their individual dignity,” she said. It also lets multigenerational families and those with pets stay together under a roof. 
 
 Gricelda Torres moved to the Seattle area about three years ago from South Texas. After losing her apartment last year she couldn’t find a shelter for her family of eight, which includes her husband and six children. But at Mary’s Place, where the family has been since December, they have space. ”We have two rooms here,” she said.
– Amazon has announced what the Seattle Times is calling its "biggest philanthropic venture to date." Inside an office building at its new Seattle headquarters will be 47,000 square feet of space dedicated to a homeless shelter known as Mary's Place. Since April 2016, Amazon has allowed Mary's Place to occupy an old hotel it owns without charge, but the building will now be torn down to make way for new construction. But in a YouTube video published Tuesday—"obviously designed to create a viral video moment," observes Chris O'Brien at VentureBeat—Amazon tells the non-profit's executive director, Marty Hartman, that six floors of an Amazon building will be set aside as a permanent rent-free home for the shelter, allowing it to house more than 200 people. Amazon's head of real estate, John Schoettler, says Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos loved the idea when Schoettler first suggested it in January. He adds Amazon will cover the "tens of millions of dollars" in construction costs, plus all future utility bills "until homelessness is solved." Hartman says it's a "huge gift," though the New York Times reports it comes at a time when Amazon, Seattle's largest private employer, is shouldering some of the blame for the city's rising housing costs, which gave the area the third-largest homeless population in the country in 2016. Mary's Place, which hosts women and families until they can find permanent housing, will be located in another former hotel owned by Amazon until its new home is completed in early 2020. (In other Amazon real estate news, Bezos has purchased a former museum.)