Amazon needs NYC because it has a metro area of 20 million people with more developers than Silicon Valley, and also many other skilled people in management and business. The days of someone moving to a company town to work for them are over as you have seen with GE moving to Boston and other corporate moves. Nobody is going to move to a small city to work for Amazon.

I'm very disappointed that NYC gave one of the largest companies in the world by valuation 3bn in tax breaks while the subway crumbles, although I don't think it was particularly a bad deal, but it's hard to accurately calculate when that will pay off by.

I'm just a bit disappointed that in a time of unprecedented wealth inequality and company concentration our nation's setup to reward the wealthiest individuals and largest corporations.

NYC should have said "here's what we decided a good offer would have been, we're going to invest it in startups, and infrastructure. Come here if you want to be around the great minds that will be attracted to a diverse and rich in ideas environment."

I also wouldn't be surprised if NYC does reward small companies and this is just another thing too.

Dropping it in Queens maximizes benefit to NY, as you're less likely to lose households to New Jersey or Connecticut.

How much, approximately?

Or do you just think it will be... "a lot"?

Ballpark property tax at $12K * 25K = $300M/yr

Ballpark state sales tax at 4% of $50K in spending * 25K = $50M/yr

Naturally, some of the property tax is displacing existing property tax payers and some of the income tax will be lost to other employers moving out of NYC area, but it seem quite reasonable to be OoM $500M per year at scale.

For one thing, they won’t all be engineers. Cost of living is also lower than SV.

It only takes a minute or two verify that $250K is a completely unrealistic estimate for the average salary of a likely HQ2 employee. In fact the state's own estimate is around $150k. The property tax estimate is similarly skewed -- on top of the fact that you're ignoring the additional cost of services to support all these people.

I'm not saying there's benefit-to-cost ratio argument to be made in favor of HQ2 (if everything were to boil down to those terms) -- just that you seem to be, well... pulling numbers out of the air.

NYC is big enough to have a healthy relationship with Amazon, and part of that is knowing is that you’re the seller, not the buyer.

The point is that the gain in revenue from income and property is being presented as basically just "free" money. It's not.

The usual costs per new resident (that property taxes are normally earmarked for) perhaps?

Giving the New York subway more funding is as bad as lighting it on fire: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

That said, it does definitely make sense to get a piece of the NY talent pie for a company with as much growth + turnover as Amazon. I understand that choice much better than the NoVa choice.

That’s a pretty big difference though! I suppose with NYC you don’t have the cost of owning and operating a car, though.

Rent is comparable, but the apartments would be very different. 1BD 10 min walk away from work in SLU can be found for $1500/mo with in-unit washer dryer, secured package room, etc. To get the same level of amenity would require going further out into the boroughs and being subject to the whims of the MTA.

Goods and eating out are more expensive, but that's because Seattle has its min wage at 16/hr already, and unlike New York businesses do actually pay their workers the minimum wage. (Paying under the table is rampant at minority-owned businesses; those cheap supermarkets in NY Chinatown didn't get there through mystic eastern business practices.)

I hear that prices have flatlined /fallen recently; let’s hope it stays that way.

Now I pay $2.6k...so

Everybody was offering not only cheaper rent, but concessions (1-3 months free). Supply has finally outpaced demand.

It's about to blow up.

And while the cost of living is less than NYC and SF, it ain't exactly cheap either.

Amazon's decision to come to Crystal City makes sense to me because there are a bunch of young college grads and no competition from the other FAANG companies.

If you're a young, ambitious, programmer trying to decide where to start your career though, I'd suggest going to SF/SV, NYC, Seattle, or Boston because those places provide more options.

As far as the traffic, it's the worst in the country just about, usually fluctuates between the worst or 2nd worst.

Most major tech companies have some presence in DC and those that don't are coming here everyday it seems.

In the Bay Area, that's a heck of a deal.

- The subway is crumbling with no tangible realistic plan to fix it.

- Housing crisis is getting worse. New York is consistently at the top, or near the top of the "losing residents to other cities" list. NYPost recently reported on "The Exodus of New York's middle class"

- With some of the highest taxes in the country, Cuomo recently stated NY lost 2.3 billion in tax revenue, with NYC alone losing 1 billion of that, and now there is a looming showdown on the state budget coming up. Area corporations are seeking relocation to cheaper tax areas. As they say, "Every day is tax day in NYC"

1) Subway: yes, it needs major infrastructure investments. It isn't crumbling - isn't that a little melodramatic?

2) I call BS. Housing prices in most neighborhoods in NYC have deceased over the past year: https://www.businessinsider.com/nyc-housing-asking-sale-pric...

3) and yet, major tech companies are interested in starting or expanding their presence (exhibit Amazon, exhibit https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/17/google-...)

Responding to your points.

1.) Most online rags and news reports describe it as "crumbling" so these aren't my words. I have no interest in being melodramatic, I'm merely relaying the portrait painted by most people reporting on the subway.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gyk9m3/borough-hall-nyc-s... https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vbmmym/the-history-behind...

https://www.businessinsider.com/a-marijuana-tax-could-help-f...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/20/new-york-cit...

2. You call BS. I call that article proving my point. You are having a market correction due to the mass exodus.

3. Name other major tech companies besides Amazon which hosed over the city and held them hostage for sweet heart deal?

I don't know one person that has said "oh I know, I'll move to NYC for a tech job" San Fransisco maybe. Austin? Definitely.

I just don't know how you can paint a billion dollar loss in tax revenue (2.3 billion state wide), and falling housing prices due to decrease in demand as a "boom"

The mere fact that NYC bent over backwards so far to attract Amazon is actually telling to me.

Thanks for the response! I had misread your second point, thinking "housing crisis" was about prices being too high.

For tech companies: a huge number of major tech cos have offices in NYC. Most of them even have engineering offices. The ones that come to mind are Facebook, Google, Uber, Microsoft, eBay, Etsy, palantir, AppNexus, and yes, Amazon has offices here already.

I don't have any insight into the tax revenue issue, and I suspect that may be worse this year with the federal tax cuts. (I think there is some state-tax interaction, but I may be misremembering or misunderstanding)

If you're the sort of billionaire who wants to take a shot at developing a modern Utopia, by whatever metrics you personally care about, buy a few square miles somewhere, move your corporate headquarters and 25k jobs there, and go nuts playing sim city with real people.

Sure, not every potential employee is willing to uproot themselves and move to Bezosburg, but not every potential employer is willing to move to New York or Silicon Valley or Louisville. But between a good salary and the appealing amenities of Bezosburg, you should be able to attract plenty.

>[NY's] tech work force, according to most analyses, is less than half and perhaps one-third that of the Bay Area.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/new-york-tech-...

The people who don’t want Amazon in Queens don’t actually live there, all the protests are in Manhattan.

People are protesting the likely rise in rents that an Amazon HQ will cause. But the real problem is government regulation. If real estate developers could build housing without all the NIMBYs yelling to their city councils or if they could build without onerous regulation about fire escapes or whatnot, people would have housing.

All this regulation that is supposed to help consumers actually hurts them. It’s not like with regulation companies will do the same thing as if they didn’t exist. Many companies will just opt out.

I’m guessing I’m going to get downvoted, but I honestly believe that regulation is the root of all evil and most social ills (like healthcare costs, pharmaceutical prices, etc).

But instead of protesting the bad incentives government creates, people just blame the “greedy” corporations.

History education in America may have failed you - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...

Did you, er, believe fire escapes were stupid and unnecessary? I don't understand.

I’m sure many others would to. Maybe you wouldn’t, but then you don’t have to live there if you think the risks are too high, right? I would just like to choose the risks myself, instead of other people deciding for me.

That’s not unreasonable, don’t you think?

1) Fires tend to spread. Fire codes are not just for your own benefit, they're for the benefit of everyone around you.

2) If you live in a fire trap and it eventually catches on fire, firefighters will run unnecessary risks when they rush in to try to save you. It's not fair to them to put them in that situation.

3) You talk about choosing the risks yourself, but your life is connected to other peoples lives in countless ways. Your choice of how much risk to take on affects many more people than just you. That's why it's totally fine for society to insist on fire escapes.

If you take your line of reasoning to its natural conclusion, you end up in a society without any personal freedom or choice.

The problem isn't that fire escapes are bad. It's that regulation slowly and surely just inches forward, consuming everything in its path.

If your first assumption about people is that they are too stupid to make choices for themselves, the natural conclusion is despotism. Do you think you're too stupid to make decisions yourself as well?

Would you be fine with someone telling you that maybe you are too stupid to have kids? Or maybe too stupid to drive a car? Or too stupid to decide what profession you want in life (you would write terrible code, so it's in the public interest that you become a janitor where your stupidity can't hurt anyone else)? Or maybe you're so stupid that we should just take you off the street?

OR, maybe, just maybe, you and the market should decide these things for yourself.

Edit: In regard to the fire fighter thing. Individuals could just pay insurance for fire protection. It naturally would be cheaper in places with fire escapes. There's no reason why public services like fire fighters or ambulances have to be public, they would probably just function more efficiently as private entities.

I'm skeptical of the notion that regulation "slowly and surely just inches forward" naturally. Maybe you could explain a bit?

Your entire argument hinges on slippery slope fallacy. Implementation of a thing in a restricted doesn't necessarily lead to an unrestricted implementation of it.

Nobody is saying "you are too stupid to decide fire safety for yourself." We are saying "it is cheaper (more efficient) to have specialists decide fire safety guidelines and implement them universally, than it is to guarantee equal knowledge of fire safety for all citizens."

Because, a free market isn't free if it's unfair. Your libertarian argument requires perfect fairness, or it's immoral. And obviously, perfect fairness in a free market system is... a high barrier to cross.

So, regulation. Efficient, fair. Flawed, but not broken, and not nearly as exploitable as "the free market."

By the way - what happened before the fire safety regulations? People died, horribly, tragically. If you believe they deserved to die because they didn't educate themselves on fire safety, your expectations are far too high. Do you know how planes, electricity, your car, roads, clean water, sewer treatment, food safety (at the source, not cooking), radiological and chemical safety systems work? Do you know how to use a tomahawk missile to enforce your sovereign borders? No? Maybe you don't deserve the protections they offer then.

You, personally, may be a fire inspector, but you in the royal sense are not - the general population. Any given individual. It is far more burdensome to guarantee that everyone has enough knowledge about the risks and functions of fire, to make a fair and reasoned decision about fire safety in their buildings, than it is to just enforce a fire code.

Regulations are there because companies will do whatever gives them more money, damn the impact on the environment/people/anything else.

As an aside, regulation is necessary, the trick is finding a balance. Regulation is very necessary, it's why if someone has wronged you, you're able to take them to court. It's why your medicine is likely to actually be what you purchased and reasonably effective (look at historic curealls for the alternatives) and why fires are relatively small nowadays (ie a house or two are burning down, not the whole district or city. Regulation has probably added 20 years to the average life. On a semi-related note, http://confreaks.tv/videos/devopsdaysnyc2018-the-history-of-... is extremely worth watching.

The huge increases in life expectancy happened in the 19th century, not the 20th. There hasn't been much increase since the advent of heavy regulation.

Well we can just end the conversation here then. "Regulations" are what prevent child labor. They're what help curb pollution. They're how we kept plaster of paris out of milk. The fact that you're somehow assuming that ALL regulation is evil shows a willful ignorance to the evils committed when they weren't in place.

There is good and bad regulation, just as there are all kinds of good and bad laws. You're going with a whole LOT of really terrible generalizations here.

So, what's your alternative solution to regulation, that both prevents plaster of paris in milk but also regulatory capture?

Chinese companies made a bad product (in this case poisoned baby formula)... And so now there's a thriving market in buying formula in countries that have all the regulation and shipping it in at an even higher markup.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-11/abc-investigation-unc...

1. With what piece of hardware will you write this post? What assurance do you have that the manufacturer will allow you to write negative blog posts about them or their partners?

2. Via what infrastructure will you connect to what network, upon which to publish? What assurance do you have that you will be allowed to use that infrastructure to publish negative content about that infrastructure owner or their partners? What about the owners of the network?

3. Upon what websites or domains will you publish these? How will you share them? What assurances do you have that they will remain visible and accessible?

>then capitalism will figure it out

"Hand wave" fallacy. There's no substance to your argument. This is a meaningless statement.

> After all, without the government, only corporations that are providing value will continue to exist.

Evidence for your claim? Supporting argument?

> The reason why many corporations today aren't providing real value is because of rent-seeking.

Evidence for your claim? Supporting argument?

Based on what you've said, why should I believe you have a better solution that regulatory status quo? Enacting change requires solid evidence, arguments, logic, and reasoning. Wouldn't you agree it would be foolish to undertake a new endeavor without a majority of the above?

We live in a society. Societies have rules. One of the rules of our society is we don't move people into dangerous tenements where they're likely to burn to death because they're trapped and can't get out.

First, I want to define "you" as follows:

Multi-usage identifier. "You" functions as stand-in for a hyper rich financier, an immigrant single mother of 2, a college kid working to fund education, a middle aged janitor, etc etc. Any given person existing in the USA.

I'll use "fire safety regulations" as the example.

Your argument is untenable:

1. Individually, you do not have the experience or education to make an informed decision regarding fire safety (be it, determining whether you want to work in a location given the fire safety mechanisms they have chosen, or, choosing to eat in a location given the fire safety mechanisms they have chosen, etc).

2. You probably don't have a choice in the fire safety mechanism implementations of where you eat, work, live. You more than likely are forced to make those decisions based on factors such as the need to have money to eat (place of employment), the need for a heated place to live in the winter (place of residence) that is within your budget, etc. Therefore, there is no "government choosing for you," there is no "you choosing for you," it is whoever owns the building.

3. As evidenced in rapidly developing nations, those that do have the power to make decisions regarding fire safety mechanisms will, deliberately or otherwise, make bad ones, without government regulation and enforcement.

http://iafss.org/publications/fss/8/353/view/fss_8-353.pdf

Don't forget that regulations aren't just an enforcement mechanism, they're a standards one. The government pooled our resources to find "the best" standard way to make fire safety in buildings acceptable. That allows builders and parts manufacturers to efficiently develop a standard set of fittings and equipment. It literally saves everyone money, while saving lives.

Anyway the most telling point is if OP gets his wish, then next time a bunch of people burn to death the public will clamor again for mandatory fire escapes, inevitably. We aren't the sort of people he wishes we were.

Could you explain to me how you would draw the line? People can't and shouldn't be protected from themselves.

A good example is that I got addicted to heroin. It was terrible, yet, I believe that drugs should be legal and that people need to make their own choices, regardless of the consequences.

Quantity discounts are normal and commonplace, and do not result in single item prices being forced down to match.

Businessmen aren't fools.

https://mises.org/wire/how-government-regulations-made-healt...

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-ame...

What do you think a tax break is?

>If Amazon didn’t get any tax breaks, they would have gone somewhere else.

If the cost of upgrading the city infrastructure to handle the new influx of people (and other associated costs) is higher than the income from Amazon, it's a bad deal for the city.

No. No they wouldn't. The tax breaks are only part of the equation. If it was only about money, other locations offered more. New York is arguable one of the 3 most important cities on the planet, and pretending that multinational business scoff at it unless they get paid to bring their businesses into town is laughable.

You don’t know this to be true, at all. If the tax breaks didn’t matter and it was always going to be NYC, Amazon likely wouldn’t have conducted the whole dog and pony show in the first place. In reality, NYC has a huge talent base which is enticing to Amazon; they also offered significant tax incentives, which is enticing to Amazon. Both can be true.

It's entirely possible the tax breaks or lack there of would have affected their decision, but because NYC offers things very few other cities on the planet can offer in regards to both human capital as well as other amenities it's also possible that it was a cherry on top and not the sundae itself.

That’s a pretty big distinction, don’t you think?

If they want to put their HQ somewhere that doesn't have enough schools and public transportation to support it, why shouldn't they get a tax credit for spending money to improve the local infrastructure? The reason it's needed in the first place is that the local government can't be trusted to actually allocate public resources in a fair way.

Public resources in NYC are already allocated by private companies; that's a big part of why local government can't be trusted in the first place. Amazon is just saying that if they build a huge building in NYC, then they want to control public resource allocation in the area of the building in place of whatever private company would already be doing this.

> Where's the guarantee (or even suggestion) that Amazon would use their tax break to improve local infrastructure?

That's literally that the deal is, or at least a substantial portion of it:

https://www.bizjournals.com/newyork/news/2018/11/13/heres-wh...

Nelson Rockefeller smashed heads to rid New York of Robert Moses' strangehold and fix the subways. The Carnegies and the Vanderbilts founded universities. After the '80s we haven't really seen this kind of behavior, save Microsoft's recent tiptoe into developing affordable housing.

Google and Facebook have the weight to throw around to ask for things like the second Transbay Tube or Dumbarton Bridge rail service, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

It's fairly incomprehensible to me - these companies are working with a truly staggering amount of money, do they think they've found the upper limit of "Bay Area Coolness Factor?" Imagine if they eradicated the draw of Austin or New York or Portland by pushing for such a good Caltrain system that living in Mountain View was functionally equivalent to living in San Francisco because the trains were so fast and ran all night... or even further south or east, stretching transit out to areas where one might actually be able to afford a house.

If your local government is inept, organize to replace it. There is no local government in the country that serves over a couple million people. None of them are out of reach like most state and federal legislatures are from influence by an average person with passion to fix it, even if the extent of your influence is to just spread enough malcontent to foster replacement of the incumbent powers that be.

But Amazon isn't a local citizen. Why would their employees relocate somewhere if there aren't schools and parks for their kids, given that Amazon can't even tell them that they will get built because it's not in their control?

Whatever the downsides of this approach are, asking a corporation to invest billions of dollars moving somewhere without any guarantee from the government that there will be enough infrastructure to support their employees makes even less sense. How could you actually expect anyone to do that?

Amazon isn't going to be building public schools, roads, or transportation. Their presence will increase demand for those things

https://harrisx.com/2019/02/new-poll-shows-overwhelming-supp... ------

Other key findings from the poll include:

    85% of New York voters believe that its very or somewhat likely that Amazon’s HQ2 will create good jobs for New Yorkers and Queens residents
    77% of New York voters believe that its very or somewhat likely that Amazon’s HQ2 will improve the economy of New York City
    70% of New York voters believe that its very or somewhat likely that Amazon’s HQ2 will raise New York City property values
    68% of New York voters believe that its very or somewhat likely that Amazon’s HQ2 will help make New York City an East Coast tech hub
    58% of New York voters believe that its very or somewhat likely that Amazon’s HQ2 will raise the tax revenues New York needs for education, transportation, and other vital services
    55% of New York voters believe that its very or somewhat likely that Amazon’s HQ2 will create new opportunities for local and small businesses

This is not helping your case. The point the parent poster is making is that the WaPo is funded by Amazon money. Citing another Amazon funded source doesn't add any credibility.

There is a desperation from NYC urban planners for LIC to be the backbone of future growth for the city, people are only upset about this because it's tied to the big name rather than the thousands of other small actions that have been done to try and bring life to LIC.

At the end of the day, our reps job is to negotiate on our behalf. That said, we all know the mass of resources that Amazon can throw around. It would frankly be irresponsible government to preemptively compromise, or not seek the absolute best deal for their constituents.

You make quite serious accusations en passant without much basis, other than that you find the tone of the article to be serving as a threat.

I wouldn't say I'm very comfortable with the article, but I'd think members of the editor staff – which by design should be shielded somewhat from the influence of their owner – would have a hard time themselves to figure out which tone to cling to.

The quote you included seems very factual otherwise.