Outside the spheres, the city is a colder place. In the nearby neighborhood of Wallingford, a newly erected outpost of small wooden shacks offer shelter for 22 of Seattle’s homeless residents. This is a “tiny house village,” sanctioned by the city as a kind of middle ground between living at a street address and on the street. The buildings sit in the corner of a parking lot across from a seafood restaurant, shielded from view by a metal fence. Each shack, painted with one of the bold colors of a Crayola starter pack, offers electricity and a roof sturdier than the tents in Seattle’s increasingly common homeless encampments. Every resident is issued a window fan for the occasional hot day, and the people here hope to receive heaters before winter. But the small collections of potted petunias and pothos that sit in front of their temporary homes are unlikely to survive the city’s harshest months.

Seattle, like a lot of American cities, has become a boomtown split between haves and have-nots. Here, though, many of the haves can be ID’d from afar by the blue lanyards hanging from their necks as they swarm fast-casual restaurants during lunch hour. Amazon is Seattle’s largest employer, its greatest occupier of office space, and its most prized economic engine. The company is also one of the reasons the city has endured skyrocketing housing prices, ever-expanding waves of gentrification, and a huge spike in homelessness over the past several years. 

By reaching a level of success that outpaced even its own ambitious projections, Amazon has detonated what some critics call a “prosperity bomb” in Seattle, ....