Because people who rail against deals like this take zero responsibility for any of the consequences. It's all of the fun moral policing and none of the downside. It's great to be an activist.
is that they never end up in a situation where they get 100% of nothing. Google and Amazon have thousands of jobs in NYC, and they will move thousand more there in the future. For these people in NYC, they don't know the consequences of not having loads of places to work. For them, it really is a situation of "Heads we win! Tails we win slightly less!".
The problem of the deal wasn't the mechanics, it was how it was sold to the public. A competition putting cities against cities, negotiated without any public input, a large tax break to one of the richest companies in the world, choosing already popular cities rather than really investing in a newer one. Amazon could have definitely closed this deal if they pitched it properly.
70% of local residents approved of the deal. that is a lot.
Depending on
* how the question was framed ("Do you think the second headquarters of Amazon will be a positive?" vs. "Do you think the deal with Amazon will be positive?" vs. "Do you think tax breaks for Amazon are good?")
* how informed the voter was required to be; people are notoriously uninformed and uninterested about anything that isn't a presidential election
* how residents were contacted (was it a landline poll? mail? survey on the street? online? because these all have different populations to be accounted for)
* who counts as a valid resident for the survey? someone who lives in Buffalo? someone who lives in Westchester? someone who lives in Manhattan? someone who lives in Flushing? etc.
Polls predicted that AOC would lose her race, and that clearly didn't happen.
See my more general response along these lines in
In what alternate universe is this? Queens is hardly Camden or Detroit. The neighborhood in question has 40+ story office and residential towers sprouting up like weeds. Queens is at a record low employment rate ever since this started getting tracked at the county level: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYQUEE1URN. And there are similar statistics for the metro area. It is unclear to me that New York City needs to throw any tax credits for jobs when we are running probably very close to full employment.
From what I understand developers started building in anticipation of Amazon coming there, and that investment is now in question.
New York's economy is plenty diverse. There's real estate and Wall Street, sure, but there's also legal services, advertising, media, health, education (NYC has the largest student population in the country), hospitality, tourism, etc. This is no one company town like Gary.
It would be a good thing to not concentrate all jobs in Manhattan.
Also, if you walk around LIC, it's not as developed as you might think, sure there are huge buildings, but they're next to empty lots & industrial spaces. It's largely a desirable area because of it's proximity to Manhattan, not really anything intrinsic about the neighborhood.
Putting jobs in LIC will still force workers from the non-Queens sections of the metro area to go into Manhattan and then back out to Queens. Even the LIRR can't really serve LIC, because it's impossible to build a station that serves waterfront LIC that is on the way to Penn.
And it's also ignoring the fact that a lot of people already live in Queens, and that LIC specifically is connected to Brooklyn via the G.
It's not an ideal situation, but it's a chicken & egg problem, there's no reason to build commuter transit there without employers and employers don't want to be there without that transit, so the Amazon deal would have done a good amount to break that stalemate.
> You don't need to be the State's Budget Director to know that a nine to one return on your investment is a winner.
I think you are here making a moral argument of sorts. Why is it morally better to get 100% of nothing than to participate in a project with incentives that give you 9 times return plus create 24-40k jobs? I simply don't see a viable argument that this was morally right, and wonder what argument you have that the facts we know support this proposition.
So far the opponents have not provided a "morally better" alternative to provide Queens with 25-40k jobs, unionized secure jobs for vast amounts of families, and a tax base necessary to invest in Queens that has received very little investment in decades. They have "hopes and dreams", but destroy the only path we had to get there.
Due to this we can't improve the offerings of progressive government services for the people living in Queens. Real kids, families, elderly and youth seeking opportunity is affected by this. These facts seems to show conclusively that this what the activists achieved was morally wrong.