Amazon's HQ2 moving to Northern VA and NYC; 2/14: Amazon pulls out of NYC after public backlash!
Bloomberg - Are you a robot?
The Amazon-in-New York Lesson for Cities: Don’t Be Arrogant
Anti-corporate forces are gaining strength, and so supportive politicians need to be ready to fight back.
The thing I don’t understand, with all the finger-pointing that’s gone on since the announcement Thursday that Amazon.com Inc. was abandoning its plans to set up shop in New York City, is why so many of the fingers have been pointed at the least culpable party — i.e. Amazon itself.
Yes, the $3 billion in tax incentives the state and city dangled to lure Amazon to Queens was absurdly rich — and probably unjustified. But Amazon didn’t hold a gun to anyone’s head. There were 237 other cities offering their own unjustified tax breaks in the hope of landing the company. Indeed, compared to the insane deal Wisconsin gave Foxconn Technology Group, Amazon came cheap.
Amazon said its “HQ2” would create 25,000 jobs directly, and as many as 15,000 indirectly. The average pay for an Amazon New York City employee was going to be over $100,000. Even the janitors were likely to be well paid; I’m reliably told there was a decent chance they’d be union jobs.
Oh, and let’s not forget where HQ2 was going to be located: in a Queens neighborhood called Long Island City, near the largest public housing project in the Western Hemisphere, the Queensbridge Houses. Queensbridge consists of 26 buildings, and its largely black and Hispanic population has a medium family income of $15,843, according to the New York Times. (That’s $10,000 below the federal poverty line.)
After Amazon pulled out, there was a lot of boasting about all the jobs New York City has added without any tax giveaways (750,000 in the last decade, tweeted Nicole Gelinas, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute). The implication was that New York’s job-creation machine was so powerful it didn’t need those stinkin’ Amazon jobs. But a new job created on Wall Street or “Silicon Alley” isn’t much help to a resident of Queensbridge Houses.
Yet ever since the deal was announced in November, Amazon has been cast as the bad guy. It was arrogant, critics of the deal said. Greedy. Corporatist (whatever that means). 1 The $3 billion in tax breaks gnawed at the critics. “We got played,” complained city council Speaker Corey Johnson, as he and other council members berated several Amazon executives during a contentious hearing.
Meanwhile, as the backlashpallooza gained momentum, the officials who had lured Amazon to New York — particularly New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio — sat on their hands and let opponents like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and State Senator Michael Gianaris control the narrative. Talk about arrogance! Assuming they didn’t need to do anything further after cutting the deal itself, Cuomo and de Blasio made no effort to organize Amazon’s local supporters, who were actually in the majority.
They didn’t defend the tax breaks as necessary to bring good jobs to a poor neighborhood. They didn’t make hay with a Siena College Research Institute poll conducted in early February showing overwhelming local support for the Amazon deal. Cuomo is supposed to be a skilled and wily backroom pol. Yet he was unable to prevent the appointment of Gianaris to a board that had to approve the deal. Gianaris’s new role gave Amazon reason to believe that its deal might not be ultimately approved. That uncertainty was intolerable, as it would be for any company.
Most important, neither the mayor nor the governor anticipated the backlash. Thus they were utterly unprepared when it arrived. In addition to making a loud, sustained case that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for New York City, they should have put forth some tangible goodies designed to help the community.
Like what, you ask? One suggestion I heard was that Cuomo and de Blasio should have maneuvered to create a City University of New York computer science college in Long Island City — perhaps right on the Amazon campus. That would have sent the message that local residents were not going to be consigned forever to Amazon’s lowest-paying jobs. Smart, ambitious kids living in Queensbridge Houses would have a path to something better — right in the neighborhood.
The city could have announced that it was setting up pools of money for infrastructure improvements and job training. There were lots of things Cuomo and de Blasio could have done. But they couldn’t be bothered.
Now that Amazon has fled, the city and state are going to face a different kind of backlash: from the people who were counting on getting those jobs. Late Thursday night, I got a call from Billy Robinson, a community activist who lives in Queensbridge Houses.
He was furious. He knew that residents weren’t going to get many of the highest-paying Amazon jobs. But they were going to get more jobs than they had now.
“I want to know what plans do they have to replace the 1,500 jobs our community was going to get from the Amazon deal,” Robinson said. “Hell, I’d take half that — what plans do they have to create 750 jobs? What is the backup plan? You kicked the big bad company to the curb,” he said. “So now what are you going to do?”
After complaining that most of the opponents never bothered to ask Queensbridge residents how they felt about Amazon, Robinson added, “We are organizing even as we speak. We will see them at the polls.”
Although what happened with Amazon in New York City was a first, it’s not going to be the last. The left has become increasingly anti-corporation, with billionaire founders like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos serving as a proxy for everything they view as wrong with wealth distribution in the U.S. And as companies — like Foxconn — go back on their word after landing rich government subsidies, those subsidies have become a target of corporate critics like Ocasio-Cortez.
Among many other things, Amazon was blamed for failing to engage with the community and disarming the critics. But that wasn’t Amazon’s job. That was what de Blasio and Cuomo were supposed to do. They utterly failed. Given the mood of the country, government leaders using tax incentives to land corporate facilities will need to roll up their sleeves and sell the deal to the public. Being able to trumpet significant job creation was once enough to justify government deal-making with a corporation. But it’s not anymore.
In perhaps the most contemptible statement of all, de Blasio said, after the deal collapsed, “We gave Amazon the opportunity to be a good neighbor and do business in the greatest city in the world. Instead of working with the community, Amazon threw away that opportunity.”
Amazon did nothing of the sort. De Blasio threw the opportunity away. Cuomo threw the opportunity away. That should be the lesson for any city or state official hoping to land a corporate expansion for the foreseeable future. Too bad New York couldn’t have learned it a few months earlier.
The Amazon-in-New York Lesson for Cities: Don’t Be Arrogant
Anti-corporate forces are gaining strength, and so supportive politicians need to be ready to fight back.
The thing I don’t understand, with all the finger-pointing that’s gone on since the announcement Thursday that Amazon.com Inc. was abandoning its plans to set up shop in New York City, is why so many of the fingers have been pointed at the least culpable party — i.e. Amazon itself.
Yes, the $3 billion in tax incentives the state and city dangled to lure Amazon to Queens was absurdly rich — and probably unjustified. But Amazon didn’t hold a gun to anyone’s head. There were 237 other cities offering their own unjustified tax breaks in the hope of landing the company. Indeed, compared to the insane deal Wisconsin gave Foxconn Technology Group, Amazon came cheap.
Amazon said its “HQ2” would create 25,000 jobs directly, and as many as 15,000 indirectly. The average pay for an Amazon New York City employee was going to be over $100,000. Even the janitors were likely to be well paid; I’m reliably told there was a decent chance they’d be union jobs.
Oh, and let’s not forget where HQ2 was going to be located: in a Queens neighborhood called Long Island City, near the largest public housing project in the Western Hemisphere, the Queensbridge Houses. Queensbridge consists of 26 buildings, and its largely black and Hispanic population has a medium family income of $15,843, according to the New York Times. (That’s $10,000 below the federal poverty line.)
After Amazon pulled out, there was a lot of boasting about all the jobs New York City has added without any tax giveaways (750,000 in the last decade, tweeted Nicole Gelinas, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute). The implication was that New York’s job-creation machine was so powerful it didn’t need those stinkin’ Amazon jobs. But a new job created on Wall Street or “Silicon Alley” isn’t much help to a resident of Queensbridge Houses.
Yet ever since the deal was announced in November, Amazon has been cast as the bad guy. It was arrogant, critics of the deal said. Greedy. Corporatist (whatever that means). 1 The $3 billion in tax breaks gnawed at the critics. “We got played,” complained city council Speaker Corey Johnson, as he and other council members berated several Amazon executives during a contentious hearing.
Meanwhile, as the backlashpallooza gained momentum, the officials who had lured Amazon to New York — particularly New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio — sat on their hands and let opponents like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and State Senator Michael Gianaris control the narrative. Talk about arrogance! Assuming they didn’t need to do anything further after cutting the deal itself, Cuomo and de Blasio made no effort to organize Amazon’s local supporters, who were actually in the majority.
They didn’t defend the tax breaks as necessary to bring good jobs to a poor neighborhood. They didn’t make hay with a Siena College Research Institute poll conducted in early February showing overwhelming local support for the Amazon deal. Cuomo is supposed to be a skilled and wily backroom pol. Yet he was unable to prevent the appointment of Gianaris to a board that had to approve the deal. Gianaris’s new role gave Amazon reason to believe that its deal might not be ultimately approved. That uncertainty was intolerable, as it would be for any company.
Most important, neither the mayor nor the governor anticipated the backlash. Thus they were utterly unprepared when it arrived. In addition to making a loud, sustained case that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for New York City, they should have put forth some tangible goodies designed to help the community.
Like what, you ask? One suggestion I heard was that Cuomo and de Blasio should have maneuvered to create a City University of New York computer science college in Long Island City — perhaps right on the Amazon campus. That would have sent the message that local residents were not going to be consigned forever to Amazon’s lowest-paying jobs. Smart, ambitious kids living in Queensbridge Houses would have a path to something better — right in the neighborhood.
The city could have announced that it was setting up pools of money for infrastructure improvements and job training. There were lots of things Cuomo and de Blasio could have done. But they couldn’t be bothered.
Now that Amazon has fled, the city and state are going to face a different kind of backlash: from the people who were counting on getting those jobs. Late Thursday night, I got a call from Billy Robinson, a community activist who lives in Queensbridge Houses.
He was furious. He knew that residents weren’t going to get many of the highest-paying Amazon jobs. But they were going to get more jobs than they had now.
“I want to know what plans do they have to replace the 1,500 jobs our community was going to get from the Amazon deal,” Robinson said. “Hell, I’d take half that — what plans do they have to create 750 jobs? What is the backup plan? You kicked the big bad company to the curb,” he said. “So now what are you going to do?”
After complaining that most of the opponents never bothered to ask Queensbridge residents how they felt about Amazon, Robinson added, “We are organizing even as we speak. We will see them at the polls.”
Although what happened with Amazon in New York City was a first, it’s not going to be the last. The left has become increasingly anti-corporation, with billionaire founders like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos serving as a proxy for everything they view as wrong with wealth distribution in the U.S. And as companies — like Foxconn — go back on their word after landing rich government subsidies, those subsidies have become a target of corporate critics like Ocasio-Cortez.
Among many other things, Amazon was blamed for failing to engage with the community and disarming the critics. But that wasn’t Amazon’s job. That was what de Blasio and Cuomo were supposed to do. They utterly failed. Given the mood of the country, government leaders using tax incentives to land corporate facilities will need to roll up their sleeves and sell the deal to the public. Being able to trumpet significant job creation was once enough to justify government deal-making with a corporation. But it’s not anymore.
In perhaps the most contemptible statement of all, de Blasio said, after the deal collapsed, “We gave Amazon the opportunity to be a good neighbor and do business in the greatest city in the world. Instead of working with the community, Amazon threw away that opportunity.”
Amazon did nothing of the sort. De Blasio threw the opportunity away. Cuomo threw the opportunity away. That should be the lesson for any city or state official hoping to land a corporate expansion for the foreseeable future. Too bad New York couldn’t have learned it a few months earlier.
This article is so full of shyt on so many levels.
Since Foxconn deal was a straight up daylight robbery Amazon deal should be considered good? There's a decent chance janitorial jobs would be union
Wall Street jobs and "Silicon Alley" are not helping residents of Queensbridge Houses that have a family income of $15,843 but $125,000 Amazon jobs will?Again you don't need to be Nostradamus to see what would happen, just look at Seattle.
Is Bezos holding Seattle hostage? The cost of being Amazon's home
And when Seattle passed a $275 per employee tax on companies making more than $20 million Amazon stopped construction on it's headquarters building and held the city hostage.
Perfectson
Banned
there's a difference between using tax loop holes that favor the rich and negotiating with a business that potentially could be coming to your city and providing them an enviornment in which to do business successfully. If you can't segregate the two....
Big businesses don’t hold public sweepstakes like it’s the Hunger Games to pit cities against each other and squeeze the most tax breaks possible. That’s not normal. General Electric moved from Connecticut to Boston and that was it. Boston had favorable terms and they moved. Google moved a HQ to New York. No pomp and circumstance. They just came. They didn’t put out a country wide press release and tell everyone to come with their best offer or else
or else what? they either want amazon or they don't - you act like amazon held cities hostage. It was very smart business tactic for them to do...if cities didn't want amazon they didn't have to make a proposal. Google barely pays any taxes as it is, of course they moved without any pomp and circumstance...stop being ridiculous.
Michael Gianaris probably deserves majority of the creditBut of course couple of trolls and a mentally deranged poster are trying to make this all about AOC.
Still have to give props to AOC and other local politicians for standing by their principles and doing what's right even though polls show majority of people supporting the deal and of course corporate media dikkriding Amazon regardless.
'Amazon isn't bigger than New York': meet the man who killed the deal
AOC raised this into a bigger issue and has continually attacked businesses, Micahel Gianaris is a nobody for all intent purposes.
no one is stating that, congratulations for making your own arguement just to make AOC look better. The state negotiated a tax credit - that has nothing to do with anything you're talking about. Amazon will still need to pay taxes (corporate) for every country they operate in. There is a totally seperate issue of taxes paid in the US and that has to do with cleaning up the tax code federally.
Perfectson
Banned
why do you need to be informed about the pros of the deal? This is the socialist mindset that the government and citizens should control companies. If you were opening a hamburger restaurant and you used a government program to get a SB loan and PETA came and started picketing in front of your restuarant and demanding you to stop serving hamburgers, you would tell them to go fukk themselves. It shouldn't be anybodies business what you choose to do - as long as it's not harming the environment or anything else.
Perfectson
Banned
This article is so full of shyt on so many levels.
Since Foxconn deal was a straight up daylight robbery Amazon deal should be considered good? There's a decent chance janitorial jobs would be union
Again you don't need to be Nostradamus to see what would happen, just look at Seattle.
Is Bezos holding Seattle hostage? The cost of being Amazon's home
And when Seattle passed a $275 per employee tax on companies making more than $20 million Amazon stopped construction on it's headquarters building and held the city hostage.
no they aren't holding seattle hostage
and yes they were right in boycotting that tax (if they were paying wAshington state income taxes).
Because I live near long island City, my wife works in Long island City, im concerned about the effects on our quality of life
Perfectson
Banned
Because I live near long island City, my wife works in Long island City, im concerned about the effects on our quality of life
there is no direct effects on the quality of life...they aren't opening up a nuclear plant.
it's really none of your business - if amazon wants to move to queens, they don't need peoples permissions. , people goign to townhalls complaining about traffic and shyt - but dismissing all the actual good this deal does.
don't use that "not in district" argument...its basically next to it. Its her city...
like I said, the tax incentives were bullshyt but amazon jumping ship is a bad look.
and she could have framed the argument better honestly...saying "this is good" isn't how you fix that.
You should focus on corporate greed, not gloating over the loss of jobs.
I agree with you...but she needs to control this BEFORE the fall out. Thats the issue. People are reacting to her initial comment and she's wasting time retracing steps to clarify why amazon Is fukked up...she should have preempted that by focusing on corporate greed in tax incentives and not investing in the city.
Perfectson
Banned
i found a good article outlining the pros of the deal
I've stated this before, current New Yorkers are dumb fukks - so I'm actually happy the current residents lost this. Hopefully Amazon reconsiders smaller cities to help diversify the IQ hubs in America.
I've stated this before, current New Yorkers are dumb fukks - so I'm actually happy the current residents lost this. Hopefully Amazon reconsiders smaller cities to help diversify the IQ hubs in America.
thats also the fukked up thing. Google just announces things quietly and Amazon ALREADY has an NYC presence and they're going to expand anyways.Big businesses don’t hold public sweepstakes like it’s the Hunger Games to pit cities against each other and squeeze the most tax breaks possible. That’s not normal. General Electric moved from Connecticut to Boston and that was it. Boston had favorable terms and they moved. Google moved a HQ to New York. No pomp and circumstance. They just came. They didn’t put out a country wide press release and tell everyone to come with their best offer or else
Perfectson
Banned
her intent was dishonest
she was going to use amazon as a punching bag annually. Just like Trump does. Amazon said fukk you and fukk this. Now she's left holding the bag. Amazon outsmarted her in a big way,
except this isn't about corporate greed...has nothing to do with it. NYC would have profitted at least 9 fold
Perfectson
Banned
you know as well as I do, each borough is different. This is about investing in Queens...Brooklyn and Manhatten have been getting lots of investments and have improved quality of life and have given an avenue for educated workers to get quality jobs in a top tech industrial companies. What does Queens have?