BG9 said:

als4532 said:
Good riddance. There is a reason it is illegal for companies to make cities compete for their presence in Europe. 

 Is it? I know that London Docklands Development Corporation has so far been given over 7 billion pounds in public subsidies.
Germany has incentives:

 EU passed rules not long ago so businesses wouldn't make countries compete like this.

newstead77 said:
Simple moral of this story - if you make it too difficult for a business to do business (political opposition, onerous taxes etc.) they will just go elsewhere.

 and the reverse is true too. If you try to bully the residents of a city into handing you a lot of goodies and offering nothing to the neighborhood in return, they'll tell you to take a hike. NY really doesn't need HQ2. 

ml1

That’s a fair point as the value has to be to both sides.  Just that the addition of 25,000 jobs plus 80,000 ancillary jobs plus lic becoming a tech hub - seemed like a good reciprocal deal for lic

there are plenty of other tech companies that want to move to NYC, big and small. There is only one NYC. 

Yeah.  Who needs AMZN.  Crap company.

I was on the fence. Yesterday I read this on the Times editorial page and was somewhat moved by it. 

New York Needs Amazon

History is clear: A city that rejects economic opportunity will lose its status as the center of the business world.

Oh, and this just now appeared on the Times site Opinion page

(Thurs, Feb-14, 6pm):

New York Doesn’t Need Amazon’s Sweetheart Deal

Huge incentive packages are a burden for taxpayers. Other cities should follow New York’s lead.

Robert_Casotto said:
Yeah.  Who needs AMZN.  Crap company.

 for once you got it right. 

The_Soulful_Mr_T said:
I was on the fence. Yesterday I read this on the Times editorial page and was somewhat moved by it. 

New York Needs Amazon

History is clear: A city that rejects economic opportunity will lose its status as the center of the business world.


Oh, and this just now appeared on the Times site Opinion page

(Thurs, Feb-14, 6pm):

New York Doesn’t Need Amazon’s Sweetheart Deal

Huge incentive packages are a burden for taxpayers. Other cities should follow New York’s lead.

 Responding to the first article - despite his hemming and hawing about all the loss of industry, NYC is still here no? Still a major city. Still attracting people from all over the world. Still a major player. 

NYC will be fine without Amazon. Until Jeff Bezos owns everything. Then Amazon will be back.

Facebook and Google seem to think NYC is a good place to locate. 

and this little company has made a commitment to NY 

Disney purchases Hudson Square site for $650M to build new campus

Just curious, so a "little" company purchases a small block of real estate in lower Manhattan, which upon completion will consolidate already existing Manhattan locations (according to the article) and this is far better than Amazon opening up a brand new second headquarters in a section of Queens that has struggled ever since Citgroup bailed on the tower it built 20 plus years ago. 

This coming on the heels of NY's own Governor announcing a 2.3B (with a B) tax receipt shortfall which he blamed on the 10,000 SALT deduction.  Well, guess what?  Rich guys will take their income tax payments elsewhere and some state somewhere will reap the benefits.

NYS and its government is laughable sometimes.  NJ is headed down the same path.

my point wasn't that it's better or worse. It's that the Disney commitment, along with commitments by other companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon itself committing to other NYC locations -- is that NY is an attractive place to do business even without giving tremendous giveaways. 

I'm not rigidly against incentives. I think the package offered to Amazon for Newark made sense. But NY, not so much. 

als4532 said:
 Yeah, they use all those tax breaks to give their employees huge pay raises! All glory to Globochem and our corporate overlords!

 Absolutely. My great great great grandfather started this company from a rickety, leaky, handcrafted...oh forget it. 

Also, increasingly people want to work and/or live in urban areas such as LIC and the primary criterion for choosing a location is attracting an educated workforce. Decades ago, some companies left NYC, Chicago and other large cities for the suburbs. That trend is reversing. To locate to a popular city and expect huge incentives is ridiculous - it's where much of the workforce that you need wants to be. In Philly, the area around University City and 30th St. Station (below) is going to see a lot of development, likely to include a lot of tech companies. I'm sure they would have liked to have had Amazon, but it's not essential.

mikescott said:


 NYC was a different story and LIC and the area will be fine with or without Amazon.  

 I saw that movie starring Citi and their fabulous LIC building in 1990. Worked out okay. I’m sure it’s no loss. 

But, but, but Amazon needed the money so they could build in Queens. They are struggling and should be helped. Not.

http://fortune.com/2019/02/14/amazon-doesnt-pay-federal-taxes-2019/

The_Soulful_Mr_T said:
I was on the fence. Yesterday I read this on the Times editorial page and was somewhat moved by it. 

New York Needs Amazon

History is clear: A city that rejects economic opportunity will lose its status as the center of the business world.


Oh, and this just now appeared on the Times site Opinion page

(Thurs, Feb-14, 6pm):

New York Doesn’t Need Amazon’s Sweetheart Deal

Huge incentive packages are a burden for taxpayers. Other cities should follow New York’s lead.

I'm not sure what's going on with the NYT editorial board.  Maybe it had complete turnover in the past few months.

NYT Editorial this morning:  

New York Returns 25,000 Jobs to Amazon As the company cancels its plans for a major Queens campus, anti-corporate activists got what they wanted at a great cost.

NYT Editorial on Nov. 1, 2018:

New York’s Amazon Deal Is a Bad Bargain The city has what the company wants, talent. Why pay them $1.5 billion to come?

say what?

ml1 said:

say what?

Editorial A: The deal’s got problems. Editorial B: That ain’t how you try to fix them.

Just one reader’s take.

Robert_Casotto said:
AOC’s rap name should be Ghostface Jobkillah.

 Your rap name should be Racist Whitetroll.

DaveSchmidt said:

ml1 said:

say what?

Editorial A: The deal’s got problems. Editorial B: That ain’t how you try to fix them.
Just one reader’s take.

wasn't it Amazon who walked away from any discussion of addressing the bad stuff in editorial A?

ml1 said:

wasn't it Amazon who walked away from any discussion of addressing the bad stuff in editorial A?

I was looking at whether the logic of the two editorials was contradictory. “Is it right?” is another question.

Not commenting on merits of the Amazon deal. I don't even feel competent to do so.  But I'm quite skeptical of this "hey its New Yawk everyone wants to be there anyway" rationalization.  The fortunes of cities (and everything and everyone else) rise and fall, with good and bad decision making having a lot to do with it.  The NYC of the 60s did not envision the broke decaying NYC of the 70s.  Conversely, those of us who came of age in the NYC of the 70s did not have the slightest glimmer of the massive renewal and gentrification waves to come in subsequent decades.  Things change.  

This Amazon thing on top of the half-baked Green New Deal factsheet underscores that Pelosi and the Democratic leadership need to rein in AOC. Yes she's a fresh new voice with a bright future and she is an important ambassador for millennials but in my view she is NOT ready for prime time in the sense of being a face of the Democratic Party. And that indeed is what she is becoming , or has already become, to the delight of the GOP. 

Pelosi needs to sit down with AOC and tell her to lower her profile. Or else we're probably looking at a second term for OAC (orange a--clown).   

newstead77 said:
Simple moral of this story - if you make it too difficult for a business to do business (political opposition, onerous taxes etc.) they will just go elsewhere.

Onerous taxes?  NY offered $3 billion in tax breaks. How is this onerous?

Poor little Jeff didn't get his way so he took his toys and went home.  Amazon didn't like getting bullied after they bullied multiple cities for corporate welfare.

We see this corporate welfare play out in SOMA on a micro level each time a new building is proposed.  PILOTs, zoning exceptions, new sewer lines, etc.  

FYI... op-ed by Walter Fields on Amazon, NYC, and Newark.

https://www.nj.com/opinion/2019/02/if-not-ny-then-heres-why-amazon-should-give-newark-another-shot-opinion.html

bub said:
Not commenting on merits of the Amazon deal. I don't even feel competent to do so.  But I'm quite skeptical of this "hey its New Yawk everyone wants to be there anyway" rationalization.  The fortunes of cities (and everything and everyone else) rise and fall, with good and bad decision making having a lot to do with it.  The NYC of the 60s did not envision the broke decaying NYC of the 70s.  Conversely, those of us who came of age in the NYC of the 70s did not have the slightest glimmer of the massive renewal and gentrification waves to come in subsequent decades.  Things change.  

 certainly.  But the broader context is that NYC is and has been a destination for tech firms for quite some time.  The decline of the 60s and 70s was because of broader trends in manufacturing and shipping that meant those businesses were not just leaving NY, but leaving the U.S.

Unless the technology sector itself declines, it's not likely that companies are going to abandon NY because Amazon walked away.  It has one of the largest technology talent pools in the world.  Amazon walked because they didn't want to make any concessions to labor or to the residents of Queens.  That's not the kind of corporate neighbor that other tech companies should be aspiring to be and expect to just walk into NYC without facing objections.

DaveSchmidt said:

ml1 said:

wasn't it Amazon who walked away from any discussion of addressing the bad stuff in editorial A?

I was looking at whether the logic of the two editorials was contradictory. “Is it right?” is another question.

it still seems inconsistent to me.  The editorial board writes an editorial in November strongly condemning the deal, then local politicians and residents raise many of the same objections and Amazon kills the deal.  Then the NYT complains about the resistance leading to the cancellation of the deal.  Was the editorial board's intent in November to just vent about how bad the deal was, but expect no one to raise those issues to Amazon?

yahooyahoo said:

Poor little Jeff didn't get his way so he took his toys and went home.  Amazon didn't like getting bullied after they bullied multiple cities for corporate welfare.
 

 this seems to be a very accurate description of what played out.

On Wednesday, Mr. Cuomo had even brokered a meeting between Amazon executives and union leaders who had been resistant to the deal — including from the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store union and the Teamsters.  

“Amazon and the governor and everybody agreed yesterday on a way to move forward,” said Stuart Appelbaum of the retail union, who was part of the meeting. “Shame on them. The arrogance of saying ‘do it my way or not at all.”’  
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/nyregion/amazon-hq2-queens.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

ml1 said:

Unless the technology sector itself declines, it's not likely that companies are going to abandon NY because Amazon walked away.  

Along those lines:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/15/business/economy/nyc-tech-startups-amazon.html

Was the editorial board's intent in November to just vent about how bad the deal was, but expect no one to raise those issues to Amazon?

This reads to me like an answer to your question:

Politicians and activists had good reason to criticize the size of the tax breaks and the secrecy of the negotiations. After years of rapid development in New York that has come with soaring real estate prices, many rightly feared Amazon’s arrival could accelerate already costly gentrification. 

Things quickly got out of hand, though, and reasonable criticism of the deal was overwhelmed by opposition to the company itself, even as polls showed wide support for Amazon’s move to Queens. Elected officials who identify as progressive painted Amazon as a rapacious engine of inequality. It seemed that few were interested in having a constructive conversation about how to improve the deal and make it work for the tech giant and the city.

DaveSchmidt said:

ml1 said:

Unless the technology sector itself declines, it's not likely that companies are going to abandon NY because Amazon walked away.  

Along those lines:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/15/business/economy/nyc-tech-startups-amazon.html

Was the editorial board's intent in November to just vent about how bad the deal was, but expect no one to raise those issues to Amazon?

This reads to me like an answer to your question:
Politicians and activists had good reason to criticize the size of the tax breaks and the secrecy of the negotiations. After years of rapid development in New York that has come with soaring real estate prices, many rightly feared Amazon’s arrival could accelerate already costly gentrification. 
Things quickly got out of hand, though, and reasonable criticism of the deal was overwhelmed by opposition to the company itself, even as polls showed wide support for Amazon’s move to Queens. Elected officials who identify as progressive painted Amazon as a rapacious engine of inequality. It seemed that few were interested in having a constructive conversation about how to improve the deal and make it work for the tech giant and the city.

I re-read the editorial and I was wrong.  I do think the headline is more negative than the full editorial, which acknowledges all that was wrong with the deal.