It absolutely would've been smarter for amazon to remain in midtown like they currently are since it would be much easier to recruit from the suburbs many existing tech workers live in, but they would've lost over a billion of the incentive dollars they got in the process.
Wouldn't it be nice if your options for working in tech didn't consist of a handful of large banks and hedge funds?
This potentially puts NYC on top for retail again. I think incentives and payments for this purpose is a meh idea, it if you’re going to do it, bet on a winner.
The beauty of NYC is that it is not singularly focused like SF is. Media, Fashion, Finance, Tech all call NYC their home.
I think most of the hate is fueled by emotional anger at the rich due to increasing inequality in the USA, even though this investment in NYC is a positive for it when you look at it rationally.
He's saying the tax breaks provide create no gain for the city, but he's not disputing they're valuable to Amazon.
They're also not valuable to taxpayers, who are being forced to subsidize one company without the opportunity to voice their opinion a priori.
Finally, there's the incremental point that countless other entrepreneurs are not enjoying these same benefits. Not the biggest issue with it, but an important one nonetheless.
Why don't you use your leverage as a job creator to go to a town and get similar benefits since clearly you will bring the same level of benefits to that town? Or do you recognize your lack of mobility and limited investment in your town may result in a less favorable negotiating position. It's like wondering why a used car dealer gave a better deal to someone w/ a better trade in.
So true. The rent in NYC is already very high. What kind of lifestyle can a blue collar worker afford in NYC? Obviously the only winners here are corrupt politicians and greedy Amazon execs. They should all be jailed.
You can dislike tax incentives if you want to, but the hyperbole is so over the top it becomes radical, divisive, noise.
We need less of this in these discussions.
Calling for a blanket incarceration of legislators and Amazon executives is not.
Amazon and Google are not regular employers: your startup pays outlets in taxes and mooches off infrastructure. The big companies find that with real profits.
Finally, $48k/employee is peanuts to a big city startup, and typically that kind of money is available from accelerator/etc programs.
As it happens I don't have a Silicon Valley venture backed profitless startup, I have a company that gets paid money to do work and makes a healthy profit. I've paid very considerable taxes in NYC for 20 years.
Now, literally, they are handing them to Jeff Bezos in exchange for nothing. That area of LIC would just be something else instead. We don't need these guys to bring "talent" this is literally New York City, a giant magnet that has drawn the most talented people on the planet for at least a hundred years.
Cuomo is an obvious crook and has been since conception, and this deal sucks. I see no reason not to point that out.
This is a shocking display. What they are calling a government-private partnership is nothing of the sort. It's a public subsidy to Amazon. The New York Times reported $5 billion in this project will be invested by Amazon. $5.5 billion dollars will be invested by New York and Virginia. That is a subsidy of over 50% of the cost of this project. We the taxpayers will be either paying higher taxes to fund this private company, among the richest in the world, or, if we don't get our taxes raised, the government will deliver fewer services to us because it has given this enormous subsidy to a company. $5 billion from Virginia and New York where Mr. Bezos, the owner of Amazon, is himself the owner of $160 billion. He didn't need it, the company doesn't need it. We are being asked to subsidize. All of the profits will go to the private companies and their shareholders. We, the public, will be funding more than half of this project. Shame is what Mr. DeBlasio ought to feel rather than posing in the PR as if he has delivered something. [...]
The projected number of jobs in the New York area from this is 2,500. That's a very small number and will have no effect on the unemployment problem of this city [New York City] it's just too small and that's not a surprise [...] because the kind of work Amazon does is highly automated; it uses machines for 90% of what it does. And half of the people it's likely to have working in New York will be brought in from other parts of the Amazon empire.
They must be really serious about drone delivery...
I don't take Amazon's numbers seriously until they show that they will live up to their own hype. If Wisconsin's Scott Walker was elected on making 250,000 new jobs in 2010 he has fallen far short of that. One of his job-creating deals was Foxconn, something he used to tout heavily but tried to shy away from when he last ran. Foxconn's 13,000 (I'm assuming human) job figure for Wisconsin hasn't been met. I'll believe it when I see it but I still don't see how New York is getting a fair deal in this; it seems like they have no problem attracting businesses to their city and don't need to give nearly as much as they are.
Transcript should arrive here eventually: https://therealnews.com/stories/amazon-gets-3-billion-in-ny-...
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlECXGQfVyY
Some of the highlights of the jobs points that makes it clear the exact figure of the promised number of jobs is virtually irrelevant precisely because so little is asked of Amazon here:
- Ben Norton says that in 2017 NYC gained over 72,000 new jobs. Therefore the money NYC is giving Amazon with virtually no strings attached effectively buys them about 4 months of job growth. That's a remarkably low number of jobs for such a large amount of money.
- It's not even clear if the 25,000 jobs are new jobs or if Amazon will shift workers from one location to HQ2. This means New Yorkers are subsidizing job movement for extant employees.
- There are no performance guarantees for Amazon in this -- if Amazon doesn't add the promised number of jobs, or if those jobs turn out to be significantly less attractive (perhaps near minimum-wage jobs, it takes Amazon a decade to add these jobs, or the jobs are done remotely thus pitting New Yorkers against the rest of the world) there's no penalty for Amazon to pay. No Amazon profit-sharing to NYC.
Yes it brings talent. But that doesn't mean such people are startup talent.
It's also going to drive up demand for housing (read: the cost of housing). So for those __not__ employed by one of these, the question becomes: how much __startup-centric__ talent are they driving __out__ of your area?
Long to short, the market is being manipulated, and it's being manipulated by the government. The gov created the house bubble and the student loan bubble. If there are examples of the gov manipulating the market and that ending well for taxpayers, I'd like to read about it.
New York City doesn't have a problem attracting jobs. Like not even a little bit. The idea that this is actually incremental revenue for the city is extremely debatable.
New York City is a really big place. Midtown is the largest central business district in the country, and Lower Manhattan is the third largest, after Chicago. There are 1,700,000 jobs in Manhattan alone and 3,900,000 in New York City. We're supposed to all bow down before a sixth of a percent change, spread out over 5-10 years? Really?
There are single buildings in New York City that employ as many as 25,000 people. Back when the twin towers were around they contained 55,000 employees between them.
JP Morgan Chase is putting about 15,000 employees in their new HQ building, without a breathless 13 months of coverage. This shit happens all the time. You could pick any number of random single city blocks in Manhattan with way over 25,000 jobs.
Amazon needs New York way more than New York needs Amazon. It's the global center of media, fashion, advertising, finance, and many other categories of Amazon's business.
This giveaway is a goddamm travesty. How about instead, Cuomo gives me and any other startup founder who's been in Brooklyn or Queens for decades $48,000 for every job we've created, and we tell Amazon to go fuck themselves.