7 ms·

The NIMBY Backlash Against Amazon’s HQ2

60 points by petethomas 8y ago

PDoyle 8y ago
Uh, that's not what NIMBY means. "NIMBY" means we all agree that something a Good Thing™, but I want it placed in someone else's neighborhood instead of mine. It doesn't apply to any possible objection to one's neighborhood.
- zjaffee 8y ago
  No this is exactly what nimby means, tons of people who would support HQ2 being in manhattan are opposed to HQ2 being in LIC.
  - goldfeld 8y ago
    WHO would support Seattlification? It's boring, it's numb and on top of that it's Amazon. Sorry about how offensive that is.
    - ummonk 8y ago
      > and on top of that it's Amazon. That's what amuses me about this whole saga. Out of the successful tech companies, Amazon has by far the worst reputation as an employer (mediocre pay compared to other top tech companies, and poor work-life balance for engineers - never mind work conditions for warehouse workers), yet all these cities were bending over backwards to entice Amazon to move to their cities.
      - mrep 8y ago
        Totally, I don't know why anyone these days would accept a pitiful $140,000 total compensation pay as a new grad software development engineer these days. That's practically slave labor... \s
        goldfeld 8y ago
        People can still be taken advantage of with a mighty sum of money, surprise surprise. Money doesn't make everything right always. It's all about opportunity cost (how long does one's 20s and early 30s last?), the value this young fresh labor provides, how much life is sucked out of their enthusiasm in the process (i.e. jaded expectations carry on for a long time, emotionally), and the naivete combined with ample time to devote to the Bezos cult that's exploited with perks and status that amount to, sincerely, working for the man, in the clearest sense possible (I mean you could up that game with something like Palantir.) If one's real happy working for Amazon though, I wish them luck and continued prosperity, and a bit of willful ignorance to carry on. For sure it looks real good on the resume for the next gig.
      - zjaffee 8y ago
        At least personally, based on what I've been hearing, Facebook seems to have taken the throne from Amazon on that one.
    - rayiner 8y ago
      Literally dozens of cities who pitched Amazon for HQ2.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
- ghaff 8y ago
  Exactly. NIMBY has become one of those largely meaningless cheap shots like "politically incorrect" that gets used to tar anyone who wants something different from what you do. It's much more properly applied to things that no one really wants next to them but that have to go somewhere.
- prestonbriggs 8y ago
  Perhaps Queens should offer Amazon a pile o' money to build their new HQ somewhere else, anywhere else!
  - snakeboy 8y ago
    "This is a nice neighborhood you've got here. Be a shame if anything happened to it..."
- harryh 8y ago
  An office for engineers and various other jobs isn't a Good Thing™?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
adamnemecek 8y ago
> Even factoring in the tax breaks, New York and Virginia will still benefit from Amazon’s expansion. I wonder if Bloomberg owns a stake in Amazon.
- favorited 8y ago
  What? Of course NY and VA will benefit. Otherwise they wouldn't give Amazon the tax breaks to attract them.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    I really don't think that follows. All you can tell from this is that politicians think it will benefit them, possibly (but far from guaranteed) because voters think it will benefit the region. (FWIW I think it will benefit both regions, although I don't like the race-to-the-bottom competition and special treatment that led to it.)
  - lotsofpulp 8y ago
    That is some specious reasoning. The politicians are betting that NY and VA will benefit more than the tax breaks cost, but those calculations involve a lot of assumptions such as the politicians using rosy numbers to get votes in the short term or indirectly benefiting from Amazon after their political career is over. There’s a million ways the process could be corrupted.
    - zdragnar 8y ago
      That's literally how all government budgeting works, because there's never an audit with consequences. Or, as is the case with pensions which assumed 8% no-risk annual returns, the consequences are decades down the road.
      - lotsofpulp 8y ago
        Exactly, that’s also a huge problem and it needs to change.
CoolGuySteve 8y ago
This random reddit comment describes the situation with NYC subsidies pretty well. It jives pretty well with what I saw locally when they built the Whole Foods near me in Gowanus. https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/9wploz/ocasiocortez_blasts_tax_breaks_for_amazon_says/e9mdind/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/9wploz/ocasiocortez_bl... Overall, a much better argument against these subsidies is that they shouldn't be needed at all. Everyone should be able to have the same streamlined permitting processes.
- marricks 8y ago
  This also jives really wel with the banking deregulation bill republicans and democrats want to pass. They used the excuse that small banks and credit unions got screwed a bit with Dodd-Frank so we need to pass a bill to fix that, and oh by the way we’ll roll back big player regulations along the way cause that’s all we actually cared about. My point is, small business get screwed all the time and it sucks and should be fixed, but for the love of god don’t use that as a justification for why Amazon should be able to shop around to dozens of cities to get a better deal than anyone else could (or why we should pass banking deregulation). Your framing of the argument, and that comment, seems like an intentional misdirection.
  - CoolGuySteve 8y ago
    That's some nice whataboutism concerning Dodd-Frank. With regards to uneven enforcement, you would have to be delusional to think that these same tax incentives aren't being extended to every other large development, be it Google NYC, Goldman's 200 West, or Jared Kushner's DUMBO mall. You can even download a list of NYC property tax refunds here: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/finance/taxes/property-refunds-2018.page https://www1.nyc.gov/site/finance/taxes/property-refunds-201... The only reason you're hearing about this one is because of Amazon's unconventional bidding stunt and its publicity. The process is outrageous and benefits large developers the most. But it's naive to think these companies won't always lobby for lower taxes, and cynical to think that the same benefits can't be extended to smaller firms.
- pytester 8y ago
timr 8y ago
Nonsense. I'm in tech, and I think it's a ridiculous waste of money to give Amazon billions of dollars in tax incentives to do something that they were likely going to do anyway. It isn't a "NIMBY backlash" to acknowledge that this was a sweetheart deal for Amazon, and that it doesn't make a lot of economic sense. Moreover, at least in Queens, there's very little chance that it actually benefits the people who live in the neighborhood today.
- mattnewton 8y ago
  Absolutely agreed. It’s not like NYC had to issue large tax breaks to woo any of the other large tech companies with a presence there; the talent pool and allure of the city to new talent is something NYC already has in abundance.
- CoolGuySteve 8y ago
  > here's very little chance that it actually benefits the people who live in the neighborhood today. If we make the assumption that everyone who lives in the neighbourhood rents instead of owns, then yeah, probably. But why are we attaching any value to the needs of renters? Economically, if your only concern is the benefit of renters then it never makes sense to enrich property values in an area because rent will rise. I understand it's not compassionate as renters are typically much poorer, but this line of thinking that we should coddle renters leads to a lot of completely regressive policy decisions like rent control that leads landlords to poorly maintain property and public housing projects that tend to cluster crime altogether.
  - timr 8y ago
    But why are we attaching any value to the needs of renters? Right. Screw those losers. If you don't own property, you don't matter.
    - CoolGuySteve 8y ago
      Exactly my fucking point, you're not being rational.
maxxxxx 8y ago
I don't really understand that even booming areas like Northern VA and NYC have to give a company subsidies to settle there. I can see this as a tool to help disadvantaged areas but I don't think we should subsidize wealthy companies to settle in already wealthy areas. As an ex-small business owner I would much prefer if little companies got more incentives.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  >I don't really understand that even booming areas like Northern VA and NYC have to give a company subsidies to settle there. Corruption has become so ingrained in the state that it has become part of the official duties of the state.
- xienze 8y ago
  > I don't really understand that even booming areas like Northern VA and NYC have to give a company subsidies to settle there. Politicians see the chance for tens of thousands of high paying jobs to be a net positive for their city -> politicians compete to bring said jobs to their city. I don’t understand why this is so controversial. Even absent Amazon’s explicit RFP process, which was a bit tacky, you were always going to have cities falling all over themselves trying to gain Amazon’s favor. It’s no different than if you were buying a car and trying to play multiple dealers off each other, just on a larger scale. To think that NYC and DC don’t have to compete to attract business is naive.
  - slededit 8y ago
    Because it’s an unfair playing field. Government is supposed to be a check on corporate power - not guaranteeing it with unfair advantages. On the non business side our tax dollars are going to support billionaires. At the national level this is pretty close to zero sum. Every dollar Amazon doesn’t pay is a dollar someone else has to. Discrepancies between regions would be solved more efficiently with transfer/equalization payments.
    - cannonedhamster 8y ago
bradneuberg 8y ago
I'm actually a YIMBY but I don't consider the Queens backlash against the Amazon's HQ2 NIMBYism. Instead its a valid argument against why Amazon should get billions in subsidies to essentially gentrify Queens -- what will the actual inhabitants there see, other than landlords mostly getting higher rents as they push existing tenants out? These kind of 'race to the bottom' economic subsidies that states and cities compete on should be eliminated IMHO.
- wernercd 8y ago
  Maybe the cities should work towards building more housing in the areas affected?
- djrobstep 8y ago
  What's clear is that Amazon is an unstoppable force, the only question is, how to handle that force. Their business model is here to stay, because online retailing turns out to be a natural monopoly due to network effects and economies of scale. The best solution is to nationalize it. Instead of squeezing the public to boost private profits, all profits would be returned to the public.
  - aerovistae 8y ago
    could not agree more. amazon and google need to be nationalized. neither is going away as long as the web exists in its current form, which is probably indefinitely. i can't imagine anything other than brain-machine interfaces disrupting the web.
    - nikkwong 8y ago
      > other than brain-machine interfaces disrupting the web these are probably coming sooner than we'd expect (neuralink supposedly has an 'exciting' update coming within the next few months), so, i wouldn't personally expect the way we interact with or even define the web to remain constant even, say, 10 years from now.
  - zorga 8y ago
detcader 8y ago
Assistant professor from Long Island, now writing from LA, thinks we should not reconsider entrusting billions in taxpayer's money to the richest man in the world. He should debate David Sirota, or Nathan Robinson.
morpheuskafka 8y ago
Very disingenuous for Rep-elect Ocasio-Cortez to ask "Are there benefits? Can people collectively bargain?" Virtually every full-time job in the nation has benefits, and collective bargaining is enshrined for virtually all private sector employees since 1935 with the New Deal Era NLRB. This is the world (second) headquarters of a multinational corporation--do you think they are going to somehow staff it with world class engineers at low-wage, hourly, part time, no benefits...?
- jimmy1 8y ago
  I don't mean this to side with any particular party or another and mean this in purely objective fashion: She really seems to have no clue about economics. She's had quite a few Gary Johnson "What Is Aleppo" moments when asked economy-related questions.
- hcg 8y ago
  How is that disingenuous? Amazon is as aggressively anti-union as any company out there. This is exactly in line with the platform she was elected on and the things she is saying are exactly what the people in her district voted for. The NLRB is as much a corporate tool as anything else. Collective bargaining happens through unions and actual collective action. Not by hoping regulators do enough to keep the company at bay.
ummonk 8y ago
As a YIMBY, I think it's unfair to label the backlash against Amazon HQ2 as a NIMBY backlash. Not wanting to dole out arbitrary tax breaks doesn't make you a NIMBY. Same for being concerned about the extent to which it will create well-paying stable jobs. The concerns about rent and displacement are really the only NIMBY complaint (particularly the idea that building luxury condos for new workers would shuffle out existing residents from existing apts / condos).
draw_down 8y ago
That's not what NIMBY is.
pascalxus 8y ago
You'd think the US was big enough to find a city or location where Amazon HQ2 would be welcome. But no, it has to be some impractical location that's neigther wants nor needs HQ2, according to locals.
rayiner 8y ago
To folks saying this isn't NIMBY: a lot of backlash to HQ2 is not the tax breaks (most of which are coming from NYS), but Amazon's failure to engage with local power brokers in Queens (i.e. failure to give them the opportunity to extract concessions based on hold-out value). That is classic NIMBY-ism.
hcg 8y ago
A yes, it's the NIMBY's. Got nothing to do with billion dollar giveaways to trillion dollar corporations. Amazon is just such a benevolent force that they deserve, and Jeff is a philanthropist now. Got nothing to do with the corporate rule and oligarchy that controls America. That this is perhaps the most blatant example of the casual corruption that we accept, and to be fair it is just capitalism in action. Got nothing to do with the absolute farce of a process. I'm sure that the biggest tech hub on the east coach and Washington DC put in the best bids. I'm extremely convinced of that. It's all just a bunch of uptight people who don't want Amazon so close.
shay_ker 8y ago
Clearly there's a lot of deep, financial analysis that's done in determining whether giving Amazon financial incentives is a good idea (i.e. bring enough jobs & tax revenue to compensate for the tax breaks). It's probably not done by all cities, but certainly the bigger ones. I'm curious why we don't see those analyses in news stories about HQ2. It's possible that governments don't publish them, but why? Some sort of NDA agreement with Amazon? It feels like those numbers would make people more favorable to HQ2 coming to their city. EDIT - Found this NYT article, but it's light on the numbers: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/nyregion/amazon-long-island-city.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/nyregion/amazon-long-isla...
ConcernedCoder 8y ago
1st of all, these sort of tax incentives are quite common, who wouldn't want a giant company moving into their area and creating 10k's of jobs... it's worth it to the local economies... Just look at Wisconsin and [foxconn](https://money.cnn.com/2018/06/28/technology/foxconn-wisconsin-plant/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2018/06/28/technology/foxconn-wisconsi...) a taiwanese company getting 4 billion in incentives Amazon will create 10k's of jobs paying on average above 100k/year and by proxy of these wages the workers will then inject millions into the local economies of these places right? ... it's win-win.
- samfisher83 8y ago
  https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/did-scott-walker-and-donald-trump-deal-away-the-governors-race-to-foxconn https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/did-scott-walker-and... It was a pretty bad deal for Wisconsin.
trhway 8y ago
it was reported that condo buying shark frenzy has started in Queens several days ago when the location of HQ2 became known.
purplezooey 8y ago
I agree the tax breaks are absolutely laughable. We no longer have the collective wherewithal to break up large monopolies, and sooner or later won't be able to collect taxes from them either. Where's the line? We'll know when the Congress starts to hack away at entitlements. Then everyone will feel it and wonder wtf happened.

60 points by petethomas 8y ago

Uh, that's not what NIMBY means. "NIMBY" means we all agree that something a Good Thing™, but I want it placed in someone else's neighborhood instead of mine. It doesn't apply to any possible objection to one's neighborhood.

zjaffee 8y ago
No this is exactly what nimby means, tons of people who would support HQ2 being in manhattan are opposed to HQ2 being in LIC.
- goldfeld 8y ago
  WHO would support Seattlification? It's boring, it's numb and on top of that it's Amazon. Sorry about how offensive that is.
  - ummonk 8y ago
    > and on top of that it's Amazon. That's what amuses me about this whole saga. Out of the successful tech companies, Amazon has by far the worst reputation as an employer (mediocre pay compared to other top tech companies, and poor work-life balance for engineers - never mind work conditions for warehouse workers), yet all these cities were bending over backwards to entice Amazon to move to their cities.
    - mrep 8y ago
      Totally, I don't know why anyone these days would accept a pitiful $140,000 total compensation pay as a new grad software development engineer these days. That's practically slave labor... \s
      - goldfeld 8y ago
        People can still be taken advantage of with a mighty sum of money, surprise surprise. Money doesn't make everything right always. It's all about opportunity cost (how long does one's 20s and early 30s last?), the value this young fresh labor provides, how much life is sucked out of their enthusiasm in the process (i.e. jaded expectations carry on for a long time, emotionally), and the naivete combined with ample time to devote to the Bezos cult that's exploited with perks and status that amount to, sincerely, working for the man, in the clearest sense possible (I mean you could up that game with something like Palantir.) If one's real happy working for Amazon though, I wish them luck and continued prosperity, and a bit of willful ignorance to carry on. For sure it looks real good on the resume for the next gig.
    - zjaffee 8y ago
      At least personally, based on what I've been hearing, Facebook seems to have taken the throne from Amazon on that one.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    Literally dozens of cities who pitched Amazon for HQ2.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
ghaff 8y ago
Exactly. NIMBY has become one of those largely meaningless cheap shots like "politically incorrect" that gets used to tar anyone who wants something different from what you do. It's much more properly applied to things that no one really wants next to them but that have to go somewhere.
prestonbriggs 8y ago
Perhaps Queens should offer Amazon a pile o' money to build their new HQ somewhere else, anywhere else!
- snakeboy 8y ago
  "This is a nice neighborhood you've got here. Be a shame if anything happened to it..."
harryh 8y ago
An office for engineers and various other jobs isn't a Good Thing™?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

adamnemecek 8y ago

> Even factoring in the tax breaks, New York and Virginia will still benefit from Amazon’s expansion. I wonder if Bloomberg owns a stake in Amazon.

favorited 8y ago
What? Of course NY and VA will benefit. Otherwise they wouldn't give Amazon the tax breaks to attract them.
- mikeash 8y ago
  I really don't think that follows. All you can tell from this is that politicians think it will benefit them, possibly (but far from guaranteed) because voters think it will benefit the region. (FWIW I think it will benefit both regions, although I don't like the race-to-the-bottom competition and special treatment that led to it.)
- lotsofpulp 8y ago
  That is some specious reasoning. The politicians are betting that NY and VA will benefit more than the tax breaks cost, but those calculations involve a lot of assumptions such as the politicians using rosy numbers to get votes in the short term or indirectly benefiting from Amazon after their political career is over. There’s a million ways the process could be corrupted.
  - zdragnar 8y ago
    That's literally how all government budgeting works, because there's never an audit with consequences. Or, as is the case with pensions which assumed 8% no-risk annual returns, the consequences are decades down the road.
    - lotsofpulp 8y ago
      Exactly, that’s also a huge problem and it needs to change.

CoolGuySteve 8y ago

This random reddit comment describes the situation with NYC subsidies pretty well. It jives pretty well with what I saw locally when they built the Whole Foods near me in Gowanus. https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/9wploz/ocasiocortez_blasts_tax_breaks_for_amazon_says/e9mdind/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/9wploz/ocasiocortez_bl... Overall, a much better argument against these subsidies is that they shouldn't be needed at all. Everyone should be able to have the same streamlined permitting processes.

marricks 8y ago
This also jives really wel with the banking deregulation bill republicans and democrats want to pass. They used the excuse that small banks and credit unions got screwed a bit with Dodd-Frank so we need to pass a bill to fix that, and oh by the way we’ll roll back big player regulations along the way cause that’s all we actually cared about. My point is, small business get screwed all the time and it sucks and should be fixed, but for the love of god don’t use that as a justification for why Amazon should be able to shop around to dozens of cities to get a better deal than anyone else could (or why we should pass banking deregulation). Your framing of the argument, and that comment, seems like an intentional misdirection.
- CoolGuySteve 8y ago
  That's some nice whataboutism concerning Dodd-Frank. With regards to uneven enforcement, you would have to be delusional to think that these same tax incentives aren't being extended to every other large development, be it Google NYC, Goldman's 200 West, or Jared Kushner's DUMBO mall. You can even download a list of NYC property tax refunds here: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/finance/taxes/property-refunds-2018.page https://www1.nyc.gov/site/finance/taxes/property-refunds-201... The only reason you're hearing about this one is because of Amazon's unconventional bidding stunt and its publicity. The process is outrageous and benefits large developers the most. But it's naive to think these companies won't always lobby for lower taxes, and cynical to think that the same benefits can't be extended to smaller firms.
pytester 8y ago

timr 8y ago

Nonsense. I'm in tech, and I think it's a ridiculous waste of money to give Amazon billions of dollars in tax incentives to do something that they were likely going to do anyway. It isn't a "NIMBY backlash" to acknowledge that this was a sweetheart deal for Amazon, and that it doesn't make a lot of economic sense. Moreover, at least in Queens, there's very little chance that it actually benefits the people who live in the neighborhood today.

mattnewton 8y ago
Absolutely agreed. It’s not like NYC had to issue large tax breaks to woo any of the other large tech companies with a presence there; the talent pool and allure of the city to new talent is something NYC already has in abundance.
CoolGuySteve 8y ago
> here's very little chance that it actually benefits the people who live in the neighborhood today. If we make the assumption that everyone who lives in the neighbourhood rents instead of owns, then yeah, probably. But why are we attaching any value to the needs of renters? Economically, if your only concern is the benefit of renters then it never makes sense to enrich property values in an area because rent will rise. I understand it's not compassionate as renters are typically much poorer, but this line of thinking that we should coddle renters leads to a lot of completely regressive policy decisions like rent control that leads landlords to poorly maintain property and public housing projects that tend to cluster crime altogether.
- timr 8y ago
  But why are we attaching any value to the needs of renters? Right. Screw those losers. If you don't own property, you don't matter.
  - CoolGuySteve 8y ago
    Exactly my fucking point, you're not being rational.

maxxxxx 8y ago

I don't really understand that even booming areas like Northern VA and NYC have to give a company subsidies to settle there. I can see this as a tool to help disadvantaged areas but I don't think we should subsidize wealthy companies to settle in already wealthy areas. As an ex-small business owner I would much prefer if little companies got more incentives.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
>I don't really understand that even booming areas like Northern VA and NYC have to give a company subsidies to settle there. Corruption has become so ingrained in the state that it has become part of the official duties of the state.
xienze 8y ago
> I don't really understand that even booming areas like Northern VA and NYC have to give a company subsidies to settle there. Politicians see the chance for tens of thousands of high paying jobs to be a net positive for their city -> politicians compete to bring said jobs to their city. I don’t understand why this is so controversial. Even absent Amazon’s explicit RFP process, which was a bit tacky, you were always going to have cities falling all over themselves trying to gain Amazon’s favor. It’s no different than if you were buying a car and trying to play multiple dealers off each other, just on a larger scale. To think that NYC and DC don’t have to compete to attract business is naive.
- slededit 8y ago
  Because it’s an unfair playing field. Government is supposed to be a check on corporate power - not guaranteeing it with unfair advantages. On the non business side our tax dollars are going to support billionaires. At the national level this is pretty close to zero sum. Every dollar Amazon doesn’t pay is a dollar someone else has to. Discrepancies between regions would be solved more efficiently with transfer/equalization payments.
  - cannonedhamster 8y ago

bradneuberg 8y ago

I'm actually a YIMBY but I don't consider the Queens backlash against the Amazon's HQ2 NIMBYism. Instead its a valid argument against why Amazon should get billions in subsidies to essentially gentrify Queens -- what will the actual inhabitants there see, other than landlords mostly getting higher rents as they push existing tenants out? These kind of 'race to the bottom' economic subsidies that states and cities compete on should be eliminated IMHO.

wernercd 8y ago
Maybe the cities should work towards building more housing in the areas affected?
djrobstep 8y ago
What's clear is that Amazon is an unstoppable force, the only question is, how to handle that force. Their business model is here to stay, because online retailing turns out to be a natural monopoly due to network effects and economies of scale. The best solution is to nationalize it. Instead of squeezing the public to boost private profits, all profits would be returned to the public.
- aerovistae 8y ago
  could not agree more. amazon and google need to be nationalized. neither is going away as long as the web exists in its current form, which is probably indefinitely. i can't imagine anything other than brain-machine interfaces disrupting the web.
  - nikkwong 8y ago
    > other than brain-machine interfaces disrupting the web these are probably coming sooner than we'd expect (neuralink supposedly has an 'exciting' update coming within the next few months), so, i wouldn't personally expect the way we interact with or even define the web to remain constant even, say, 10 years from now.
- zorga 8y ago

detcader 8y ago

Assistant professor from Long Island, now writing from LA, thinks we should not reconsider entrusting billions in taxpayer's money to the richest man in the world. He should debate David Sirota, or Nathan Robinson.

morpheuskafka 8y ago

Very disingenuous for Rep-elect Ocasio-Cortez to ask "Are there benefits? Can people collectively bargain?" Virtually every full-time job in the nation has benefits, and collective bargaining is enshrined for virtually all private sector employees since 1935 with the New Deal Era NLRB. This is the world (second) headquarters of a multinational corporation--do you think they are going to somehow staff it with world class engineers at low-wage, hourly, part time, no benefits...?

jimmy1 8y ago
I don't mean this to side with any particular party or another and mean this in purely objective fashion: She really seems to have no clue about economics. She's had quite a few Gary Johnson "What Is Aleppo" moments when asked economy-related questions.
hcg 8y ago
How is that disingenuous? Amazon is as aggressively anti-union as any company out there. This is exactly in line with the platform she was elected on and the things she is saying are exactly what the people in her district voted for. The NLRB is as much a corporate tool as anything else. Collective bargaining happens through unions and actual collective action. Not by hoping regulators do enough to keep the company at bay.

ummonk 8y ago

As a YIMBY, I think it's unfair to label the backlash against Amazon HQ2 as a NIMBY backlash. Not wanting to dole out arbitrary tax breaks doesn't make you a NIMBY. Same for being concerned about the extent to which it will create well-paying stable jobs. The concerns about rent and displacement are really the only NIMBY complaint (particularly the idea that building luxury condos for new workers would shuffle out existing residents from existing apts / condos).

draw_down 8y ago

That's not what NIMBY is.

pascalxus 8y ago

You'd think the US was big enough to find a city or location where Amazon HQ2 would be welcome. But no, it has to be some impractical location that's neigther wants nor needs HQ2, according to locals.

rayiner 8y ago

To folks saying this isn't NIMBY: a lot of backlash to HQ2 is not the tax breaks (most of which are coming from NYS), but Amazon's failure to engage with local power brokers in Queens (i.e. failure to give them the opportunity to extract concessions based on hold-out value). That is classic NIMBY-ism.

hcg 8y ago

A yes, it's the NIMBY's. Got nothing to do with billion dollar giveaways to trillion dollar corporations. Amazon is just such a benevolent force that they deserve, and Jeff is a philanthropist now. Got nothing to do with the corporate rule and oligarchy that controls America. That this is perhaps the most blatant example of the casual corruption that we accept, and to be fair it is just capitalism in action. Got nothing to do with the absolute farce of a process. I'm sure that the biggest tech hub on the east coach and Washington DC put in the best bids. I'm extremely convinced of that. It's all just a bunch of uptight people who don't want Amazon so close.

shay_ker 8y ago

Clearly there's a lot of deep, financial analysis that's done in determining whether giving Amazon financial incentives is a good idea (i.e. bring enough jobs & tax revenue to compensate for the tax breaks). It's probably not done by all cities, but certainly the bigger ones. I'm curious why we don't see those analyses in news stories about HQ2. It's possible that governments don't publish them, but why? Some sort of NDA agreement with Amazon? It feels like those numbers would make people more favorable to HQ2 coming to their city. EDIT - Found this NYT article, but it's light on the numbers: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/nyregion/amazon-long-island-city.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/nyregion/amazon-long-isla...

ConcernedCoder 8y ago

1st of all, these sort of tax incentives are quite common, who wouldn't want a giant company moving into their area and creating 10k's of jobs... it's worth it to the local economies... Just look at Wisconsin and [foxconn](https://money.cnn.com/2018/06/28/technology/foxconn-wisconsin-plant/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2018/06/28/technology/foxconn-wisconsi...) a taiwanese company getting 4 billion in incentives Amazon will create 10k's of jobs paying on average above 100k/year and by proxy of these wages the workers will then inject millions into the local economies of these places right? ... it's win-win.

samfisher83 8y ago
https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/did-scott-walker-and-donald-trump-deal-away-the-governors-race-to-foxconn https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/did-scott-walker-and... It was a pretty bad deal for Wisconsin.

trhway 8y ago

it was reported that condo buying shark frenzy has started in Queens several days ago when the location of HQ2 became known.

purplezooey 8y ago

I agree the tax breaks are absolutely laughable. We no longer have the collective wherewithal to break up large monopolies, and sooner or later won't be able to collect taxes from them either. Where's the line? We'll know when the Congress starts to hack away at entitlements. Then everyone will feel it and wonder wtf happened.