> The backlash was mostly about the tax breaks and government subsidies that would have been given. The argument was that New York is New York and doesn’t need to bribe companies to put big offices here.

If that is the case, where are the calls to end the Industrial & Commercial Abatement Program[1], the Relocation and Employment Assistance Program[2], and the Excelsior Jobs Program[3]? That is where the vast majority of the credits came from. The backlash was because it was Amazon that wanted to take advantage of those programs, and do so after that ridiculous and condescending dog-and-pony show they called a search.

Now, some subset of opposition surely is from people who think no company that wants to build a large complex in LIC with 25,000 employees deserves billions in subsidies. If that is the case, those people need to work against the root causes and stop acting like this $3B package was some special deal for Amazon.

[1] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/finance/benefits/benefits-industri...

[2] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/finance/benefits/business-reap.pag...

[3] https://esd.ny.gov/excelsior-jobs-program

This argument is obvious nonsense.

There was no outcry to prevent Amazon from using general programs that were open to all applicants, the problem was with the special extras they negotiated.

There's no reason to think that Amazon would have been facing opposition if they'd just announced a new project in LIC and applied for the normal programs.

They didn't do that.

> This argument is obvious nonsense.

No, it isn't.

> There was no outcry to prevent Amazon from using general programs that were open to all applicants, the problem was with the special extras they negotiated.

People were outraged over the $3B. Less than 20% of that was special extras for Amazon. I don't think anyone would have been any less outraged if the number was $2.5B instead. Particularly since most of the arguments boil down to "billion-dollar corporations don't need tax breaks from NYC/NYS".

> There's no reason to think that Amazon would have been facing opposition if they'd just announced a new project in LIC and applied for the normal programs.

Yeah, because nobody would have known. Look at all the people who assume other large companies in NYC don't get any tax breaks simply based on not hearing about said tax breaks.

> I don't think anyone would have been any less outraged if the number was $2.5B instead

I don't think Coldplay is very good. We all have opinions. If they wanted to see what would have happened in that scenario they should have tried it.

> Yeah, because nobody would have known. Look at all the people who assume other large companies in NYC don't get any tax breaks simply based on not hearing about said tax breaks.

Well yeah. They launched a massive national PR campaign to showcase that they were demanding the highest level of special treatment. They literally engineered an auction where they were asking cities to compete to see who could give them the most taxpayer dollars. A lot of New Yorkers weren't interested in "winning" that competition.

Not only could they still take advantage of the existing programs, it's almost certain that they actually still will to some extent. And as you'll see when it happens few will protest that because it wasn't the thing people were protesting against.

They were protesting special treatment.

Many New Yorkers felt, justifiably, like the richest man in the world and the most valuable company in the world should play by the same fucking rules as everyone else. I live here and I'm one of them.

Let's say that the special treatment for Amazon were eliminated. That is, only about ~%80 of the tax breaks were in effect. So now Amazon only receives ~$2.4 billion in tax breaks through the pre-existing incentive programs.

This is pure speculation, but I suspect the opponents wouldn't have altered their tone. At any rate -- I agree with you that Amazon shouldn't have received the special tax cut, and they didn't need it, and it was foolish of the State/city leadership to offer it.

I wanted AMZN to come here to NYC, but that whole charade they put on was a turn off. meh.

> This is pure speculation, but I suspect the opponents wouldn't have altered their tone.

There’s literally no evidence of this. Dozens of companies, including evil empires like Google and Goldman Sachs, have taken advantage of Empire State grants and EDC programs and whatever else without all that much drama.

Amazon literally shot themselves in the face with their arrogant, entitled attitude here. Consider placing the blame where it belongs.

I think plenty of people don't actually like the pre-existing incentive programs either. I certainly don't. And the mutual race to the bottom across jurisdictions that makes them a requirement to compete doesn't justify them either.

Even if this wasn't over the extras, this would still be an obvious indicator that _maybe we're giving away too much money with these programs_.

I don't think it's all that surprising that individuals are more motivated to protest something specific rather than the economic development programs that allow it to happen.

I (and many others I've spoken to) don't have a problem with the idea of economic subsidy to support businesses moving to NYC, but objected to a company the size (and success) of Amazon doing so. I can imagine there would be widespread support for a move to limit these programs to smaller startup companies, and maybe we'll even see some local politicians propose that.

But there's a city/state issue here. Few people would object to Amazon creating a massive HQ and 25k jobs in Albany, even if they would in NYC. So any answer would have to take that into account too.

See, that's the thing. Talking about the $3B in credits like it was all a special deal for Amazon hides the scope of these programs and blocks those conversations on what limits (if any) they should have. You won't see widespread support for limiting these programs arise at all if the people who would support it don't realize that they are hanging out waiting for the next huge corporation to come along and take advantage of them without the self-important bullshit Amazon pulled.

They definitely didn't need to bribe Amazon. There was a time to argue against that. True leadership would have been to have these protests when the incentives package was put together, not later when we already bagged the win and would lose everything.

> True leadership would have been to have these protests when the incentives package was put together,

Which is hard to do, since Amazon convinced most city leaders across the country to keep the majority of the incentives secret, and therefore no one could know how bad it was until it was already too late.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/05/technology/amazon-headqua...

There's a strong argument here that the protesters were the only people involved in this whole ordeal that actually did their job properly.

To add to this -- even when it was a secret, they were still protesting the idea of providing those incentives.

Amazon figured this out already and took steps to prevent a backlash while the packages were being put together. This was why Amazon required NDA's from every single bid team, to prevent anyone outside from knowing what the package looked like when it was being put together. So they reaped exactly what they sowed: they look terrible and ineffective, because they tried to keep it all secret and present the public with a fait acompli.

I don't think any leadership in the world could have made it so that Corey Johnson didn't try to prove a point to Blasio and Cuomo. I went to both council hearings and it didn't seem to me like any incentives or tax breaks would be acceptable for big business, even the very same current tax breaks any company of that scale could apply for and get in new york state.

Except they weren't given a chance to be part of that negotiation process, it was done in secret with minimal public input

Yes, true leadership by Cuomo and De Blasio would have involved local politicians and the people they represent from the start. But they didn't. They negotiated the deal in secret then presented it to citizens as a done deal whether they liked it or not.

Really, can anyone be surprised that this was not met with enthusiasm? IMO the blame lies at the feet of Cuomo, who is used to getting his own way and dictating to others. This is one of very few times that it came back to bite him.

Given the withdrawal of Amazon, didn't that invalidate the argument?

See what happens to the lots Amazon was going to build on. If they're sitting empty in a year or two, sure. If another company (or dozens of smaller companies) snaps them up and builds similar amounts of offices to what Amazon was planning, nah. I'm betting on the latter.

Well you might be wrong, the land will now be redeveloped for condos 1,000 total.

" Patchett did toss out a scrap of news about what’s next for Long Island City. He said city land that had been slated for the tech giant’s corporate towers will instead become a mix of homes and businesses. That, after all, had been the original plan before New York decided to drop it and go a-courtin’ for the company. The new-old project will consist of a thousand residential units—two hundred and fifty of which will be affordable. The neighborhood will also gain 100,000 square feet of light manufacturing and industrial space, ground floor retail, a cultural center, a 600-seat middle school, and a one-acre park."

http://gothamist.com/2019/02/22/amazon_blame_game_patchett.p...

> a thousand residential units—two hundred and fifty of which will be affordable. The neighborhood will also gain 100,000 square feet of light manufacturing and industrial space, ground floor retail, a cultural center, a 600-seat middle school, and a one-acre park.

Those things sound like a much better addition to the area than one Amazon.

Given the state of housing in NYC that sounds like a far more desirable outcome than Amazon taking up all that space.

Amazon didn’t withdraw from NYC. They still have around 5k employees here. Meanwhile Google is significantly expanding their NYC offices and nobody had to bribe them to do it.

Are you sure about that? Giving tax breaks to large employers is pretty standard practice. What was unusual about the Amazon debacle was how public it was.

Pretty sure Google is eligible for the same Empire State development grants that made up $2.5B of the $3B that Amazon was going to get.

Actually, the city credits (which constituted about $1.3B) are not available for businesses in Manhattan south of 96th St. That said, Lower Manhattan has its own incentive programs.

That said, I'm really getting annoyed at the people who are both ignorant of how Amazon was going to get its $3B in credits and assuming that other companies, like Google, are getting none simply because nobody talks about it.

Amazon's still expanding in nyc too. But....not 25,000 employees. Does Google have 25,000 employees in NYC?

At its current rate of growth it will by the time Amazon would have.

That was one reason for the backlash, but it wasn't "mostly" about that. I guarantee that people like AOC would have been against Amazon HQ2, subsidy or not.

Edit to explain further: much of the backlash was about concerns like gentrification, or the inability of local infrastructure to handle 25k new residents.

No it wasn't. It was about giving them taxpayer money to do it.

Not that many people here care much about limiting development in general, especially in dense center city areas like the East River waterfront.

People were pissed that we were considering giving money to the richest guy in the world to do something that nearly every company seems desperately interested in doing anyways, namely locating businesses within a half mile radius of midtown manhattan.