Local government can't be trusted to allocate public resources in a fair way... so we defer that to a private company? That doesn't seem too smart. Where's the guarantee (or even suggestion) that Amazon would use their tax break to improve local infrastructure?

> Local government can't be trusted to allocate public resources in a fair way... so we defer that to a private company?

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...

If you can't get your own employees to your office to work then you have a big issue operating.

Yeah, and if you're anything like a Silicon Valley giant you clog up the roads with private buses to ship your employees around, community be damned.

Aren't private buses a more efficient way to move your employees rather than having them each drive their own car? If the local governments haven't done enough to solve the mass transit issue, it seems this is the best approach that a tech giant could implement.

It is, but businesses and businessmen used to be more civics minded.

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.

Google is building out some infrastructure around their Mountain View housing project, i.e. affordable housing available to the public, some parks, footpaths, bridges, etc, but definitely nothing like Rockefeller.

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.

New York was never as fanatically anti-growth as the bay area is today

If theres any level of government you as a citizen have influence over its your dang local government.

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.

> If theres any level of government you as a citizen have influence over its your dang local government.

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?

> why shouldn't they get a tax credit for spending money to improve the local infrastructure

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

I disagree, 25,000 employees being taxed on avg. pay of 150k/year will most certainly be "building public schools, roads, or transportation"

Those people are going to be working anyways, there is a labour shortage. NYC got played.