9 ms·

1) Incentives are not given up front. They are given proportional to the results Amazon has achieved. Amazon must make a report each year detailing their progre

• DevKoala 8y ago
  Thank you, this is a good list of clear benefits. I have yet to see such a document that states in an objective manner the negative impact, it's all assumptions.
  • kodablah 8y ago
    To be fair, predicting unquantifiable future growing pains will always be presented as an assumption. Also, whether something is a negative impact or not is rarely objective. So asking for contrarian debate on negative impact to be objective is unfair. But yes, there are clear, quantifiable benefits to economic growth.
• ryanobjc 8y ago
  Ahem: https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/01/17/h-1b-foreign-citizens-make-up-nearly-three-quarters-of-silicon-valley-tech-workforce-report-says/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/01/17/h-1b-foreign-citizens... "About 71 percent of tech employees in the Valley are foreign born, compared to around 50 percent in the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward region, according to a new report based on 2016 census data."
  • ryanobjc 8y ago
    I think this is probably a net positive for NYC, so I don't see why the dig at silicon valley?
  • humanrebar 8y ago
    Yeah, the appeal to diversity is strange since if you're into quotas and metrics, it's south and east Asians who are overrepresented in tech, not "majorities". Implicit in the appeals to diversity is that women and non-Asian minorities are mostly the target as far as increased representation.
• Apocryphon 8y ago
  What about the externalities and expenses pointed out in a prior thread [0], specifically the ones not helped by federal funds in this post [1]? Will Amazon help to pay for the transit and housing required by their move? Because they're sure paying less than they would have if not for the incentives. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443624 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18445241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18445241
  • kodablah 8y ago
    Note, that first thread didn't point out any of the positive externalities GP did.
  • nine_k 8y ago
    > Will Amazon help to pay for the transit and housing required by their move In a sense, it will, in the form of the salaries it will pay to the employees using said housing and transit. One might say that MTA operates at a loss and is subsidized, but this is a known problem of MTA being anything but frugal. Realty prices in NYC / Brooklyn / Queens are not exactly low, and new construction is incessant everywhere (which is good). Paying renters or even buyers, the new Amazon employees, will finance their part of that.
• marricks 8y ago
  It’s really cool how Amazon has hundreds of cities up in arms bidding just to give Long Island such a great deal. /s I have little trust in city officials and corporations to be forthright about the deal. The bidding process is hidden and full details are slow to come out to protect the deal. Payouts to corporations has been a pattern and it should be fixed at the federal level. Companies don’t make a bidding war to help local communities, it’s for their own bottom line.
  • Apocryphon 8y ago
    > The bidding process is hidden and full details are slow to come out to protect the deal. This is a great point. Politicians obfuscate the legislative deal-making process and tech companies sneak all sorts of clauses into EULAs and employ dark patterns in their software. Why should we assume this deal, birthed from the intersection of politics and technology, be any better?
  • ericpearl 8y ago
    It’s not In Long Island. It’s Long Island City, which is in Queens, which is next to Long Island.
    • zonotope 8y ago
      Queens is a part of Long Island, in the north western corner of it. So is Brooklyn, which is in the south western corner. Long Island City is indeed a neighborhood within Queens though.
    • vobios 8y ago
      Technically, Queens is part of Long Island.
• fmmow 8y ago
  Tech hasn't been kind to Seattle or SF. Maybe to the people attracted likely to be filling this jobs, but not to the people in the surrounding areas. LIC was mostly warehouses at one point and you're right a lot of the new units are housing for people moving away from Manhattan. But the concern is not just about LIC; it's about Corona, Astoria, Jackson Heights. These are areas with a lot of immigrant communities, communities that'll start getting pushed out once the Amazonians move in.
  • xt00 8y ago
    Not sure why you would say that tech hasn’t been kind to Seattle — nearly the entire history of Seattle and surrounding areas has been based upon 2 things: resources and technology. Resources like trees and salmon and otherwise don’t actually employ that many people in the modern era.. one person can log huge areas and it takes many years for this trees to grow back so there is an upper limit to how many people can be supported by it. Technology companies like Microsoft and you could also call Boeing a tech company in many ways are basically the reason 90% of the people are in the Seattle area anyway — so amazon and others are part of the latest wave of tech happening in the Seattle area and brings in zillions or dollars from around the world. Many many many people in Seattle area have become very rich from that. If people making money is not what you like to see there are plenty of parts of the country that are full of struggling people who wish they could find a job that pays more than $10 and hour. Maybe people get pushed out in certain areas but often a lot of those people sell their houses at a profit so it’s not horrible for them. Anyway, I just think broadly stating that tech has not been kind to Seattle is a bit of a narrow view for an area that has more to be happy about than many places. By the way, construction workers basically can write their own ticket in Seattle right now.. huge demand and way too few workers. Same thing for trades. Where do they get the work? 95% from people who work for Microsoft, google, amazon, and many of the other tech companies in Seattle / Bellevue area.
  • zjaffee 8y ago
    Tech might not have been kind to the cities of SF and Seattle sure, but tech built the greater metropolitan regions of both of these areas, where Seattle metro's population has doubled as a result of the tech boom since 1980, and the bay area's population has grown by ~70% in the same time frame, for reference, this isn't that far off from the nominal growth seen in greater Los Angeles during the same period.
• jondubois 8y ago
  >> 1) Incentives are not given up front. They are given proportional to the results Amazon has achieved. Amazon must make a report each year detailing their progress before any award is given. What is progress? How do you measure progress? Many politicians claim that the past decade was progress. I don't see it. >> 2) The city-level incentives are available to any business. State-level incentives (I think 300m) are not. Any business? I bet that the average entrepreneur living in NYC would disagree. >> 3) Amazon has pledged to invest in the local community as part of the deal. There are plans for an elementary school and tech education center. Of course, because Amazon is such a generous corporation. Just ask politicians in Washington; they've also witnessed that incredible generosity first hand on many occasions. >> 4) The NYC tech sector is more diverse than SV. 47% of tech workers in NYC are immigrants [0]. Is there any evidence supporting the claim that Amazon will ship in majority groups to displace minorities or immigrants? This will affect real estate prices and will displace people who are living there right now who can already barely afford it. >> 5) There is direct investment in tech education for minority groups in the city [1]. Therefore it is reasonable to assume that they will receive a chunk of these jobs in the future. If you support increased diversity in tech, it is inconsistent in your beliefs to not support 25k more tech jobs in NYC. I don't buy these benevolent corporation arguments. Even if you assume that Jeff Bezos was a saint, I'm pretty sure that the many layers of selfish or apathetic middle-managers working under him will find a way to divert much of the funds back to themselves somehow. >> 6) LIC built almost 2.8k rental units last year. [2] I think they have built 6k this year so far. 28k units were built city-wide last year [3] Great in theory; but in practice, NYC is full of homeless people.
  • tylerhou 8y ago
    > How do you measure progress? For the past decade, we've severely deteriorated as a society - Yet politicians will call it progress. Citation? By most metrics we've improved as a society in the last 10 years.
    • jondubois 8y ago
      >> Citation? Donald Trump, Brexit, Facebook, opioids epidemic, cryptocurrencies, increased rents, soul-crushing corporate jobs for all.
• pasbesoin 8y ago
  Ameritech/SBC, now AT&T, received, IIRC, circa $750 million in incentives to deploy universal access to high speed Internet throughout Illinois. The ink was hardly dry when they turned around and lobbied the Illinois legislature to let them out of their side of the deal -- while keeping the incentives. The current Foxcon deal in Wisconsin is looking more and more like Foxcon won't be coming through on all their rosy prognostications. Meanwhile, the SE corner of Wisconsin is all torn up, being rebuilt to accommodate them. In addition to all the other incentives. And again, it will end up a struggle as to how much they get and what their ultimate deliverables will be. And often as not, the public side of the equation is far outgunned in terms of very expensive and specialized lawyers. I'd prefer my communities not even engage in this. Don't open that door. Focus on the people and businesses you already have, and on not screwing them for the sake of some outsider's "vision" -- especially when that "vision" is making said outside, and the local "development" talent they've recruited, very much richer.
  • rayiner 8y ago
    > Ameritech/SBC, now AT&T, received, IIRC, circa $750 million in incentives to deploy universal access to high speed Internet throughout Illinois. Are you talking about the Ameritech/SBC merger?
    • pasbesoin 8y ago
      It was around that time; I no longer remember what name they were carrying at what points during that process. They subsequently acquired the remains of AT&T; a few other things, and the name with which they subsequently rebranded themselves. My point was more the "money for nothing" aspect; I merely don't remember off the cuff what exact name/branding they had at that point in time. Ameritech got bought out by ("merged with") SBC. Then the "merged" SBC bought the remaining piece of AT&T that included the name. A lot of the tech stuff, that had ended up in Lucent, went instead to Alcatel, IIRC (making a hole in the Omaha tech scene, among other things). P.S. That's how I remember it, now. I wasn't involved -- well, other than being rather thoroughly shafted by then Ameritech/SBC (and now I seem to recall their carrying such a combined name, during the transition) on a home DSL deployment. I ended up learning from their own rather thoroughly demoralized tech support that almost all of that was outsourced: Installations, IT, etc. One actual Ameritech/SBC employee (or was it before the SBC "merger"?... sigh) told me that all they could do was file tickets. Those went to third parties, and they couldn't do a damned thing about following up on them. Doing a tracert showed over ten hops -- sometimes well over, before your packets even left their "network" to the wider world. And that was the least of the customer's problems...
• jowiar 8y ago
  Re: 3/5. We already have ways to turn corporate money into community services. They're called taxes. I'd much rather we as as a community take Amazon's money and build our own schools rather than have Amazon build an Amazon Education Facility and thank them for their time.
  • longerthoughts 8y ago
    Yes. I've been trying very hard to figure out what purpose it serves aside from good PR. On the bright side, I suspect Amazon's standard for facilities they're willing to associate with their brand is higher than that of the NY government.
• gorbachev 8y ago
  "Please tell me what about this is bad." A trillion dollar company does not need subsidies.
  • kodablah 8y ago
    It does if you want their business. You made a statement, you didn't say why it was bad.
    • hnmonkey 8y ago
      You know, I was going to respond to you by saying that there will always be Amazon business without a new HQ in a place. However, I thought about it and it is certainly possible that they would test new and interesting things in markets around their HQs, potentially providing unforeseen benefits for the residents around them and markets around them. While the whole package deal still seems like a net negative and shady to me, that certainly does fall into a potential (though very not proven) positive category.
      • _pmf_ 8y ago
        Queens becoming a playground for social experiments of a billionaire is guaranteed to be good, right?
    • gorbachev 8y ago
      You need to be explained why $1.5B in public assistance to a trillion dollar ($700B+ today it seems) company is bad? I'll try. It distorts the competition, ESPECIALLY in the case of Amazon which more or less competes with every retailer everywhere. It sets a bad precedent (yes, yes, water under the bridge) of big corporations expecting these benefits any time they feel like moving around. NYC has better uses for the money. It doesn't need the goddamn money, because it's one of the most successful companies in the entire world, ever. It can finance its operations by itself with absolutely no problem whatsoever. It's ridiculous they're even asking for public assistance. This is a race to the bottom. Sports stadium construction incentives are good examples of this.
• rorykoehler 8y ago
  3) why is this left to Amazon or am I misunderstanding how this is managed?
  • longerthoughts 8y ago
    They're using a Payment in Lieu of Tax (PILOT) program [0]. I've been trying to understand why these programs exist for corporations but having trouble finding definitive answers. My hunch is that it's a marketing trick to help people stomach the tax breaks and go "oh, well at least they're building a school". Possible that it also allows for legal negotiation of terms like amount and payment schedule that can't be applied directly to property taxes. [0] https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/amazon-selects-new-york-city-and-northern-virginia-for-new-headquarters https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/amazon-selects-new...
    • rorykoehler 8y ago
      So basically a miniscule one time payment that would easily and continuously be covered by taxation.
• brownbat 8y ago
  > Please tell me what about this is bad. Opportunity costs? You list several benefits, but benefits don't tell us where a choice ranks in the list of possible alternatives. For example, the alternative where we get all those benefits, but where there weren't any incentives at all, seems strictly better. Why not that? You'd probably protest that it's not realistic. We can't get there in the current system, where powerful companies can play states and municipalities off of each other and require the best incentives before they are willing to make any useful choices. But a lot of us think that system sucks. When the powerful have opportunities to rewrite local policies on the fly, it doesn't feel right. Doesn't matter how many benefits there are. This isn't a new or irrational ideal. Much of the Western canon on governance obsesses about the importance of the rule of law: the idea that the laws should apply to commoners and kings (or powerful companies) equally. It's a principle a lot of people hold very dearly, and are unwilling to sacrifice for a few temporary benefits that we might have been able to achieve anyway, if we just had a better system in place in advance.
  • linkmotif 8y ago
    Do you buy things on Amazon?
    • brownbat 8y ago
      Who cares? Amazon is a great company in a lot of ways, not great in some other ways, and none of that has anything to do with my opinions on local governance. Or as Yogi Berra might have put it, this Amazon story isn't really about Amazon anyway.
      • linkmotif 8y ago
        Because the reason you buy things on Amazon is because they get you the best deal and they get you the best deal because they get the best deals. They get the best deal by exploiting workers in American warehouses, exploiting workers in Chinese factories or exploiting the citizens of New York. Either way, exploitation gets you that deal. Those guys who aren’t as effective at exploitation as Amazon? Well, you don’t shop with them, do you? Now if you weren’t a price or convenience-sensitive consumer who didn’t shop on Amazon out of moral conviction, I would at least respect your perspective. But if you shop on Amazon, I’m not sure you get to quote Yogi Berra.
• grecy 8y ago
  > Please tell me what about this is bad. A trillion dollar company is getting subsidies, when they should be helping to build and grow the society that created them. Healthcare in America is disgraceful. Absolutely the worst in the developed world. Tens of millions of people in your country live on food stamps. Tens of millions work multiple jobs and are still considered "in poverty". Higher education is so expensive it's prohibitive or puts people in crushing debt for a very long time. General infrastructure is horrendously bad. The whole point of a society is that everyone contributes to make it better for everyone. When a trillion dollar company gets to pay less that they're supposed to, it makes society worse, not better. The goal of the society should be to make life better for everyone living in it NOT to raise the stock price of what is already one of the biggest companies in existence.
  • smsm42 8y ago
    Most of your screed about how US sucks has nothing to do with Amazon or why Amazon deal is bad. > When a trillion dollar company gets to pay less that they're supposed to, it makes society worse, not better. That's where you went wrong. A trillion dollar company is not supposed to pay anything to New York. The minimum NY was getting is $0. That's the starting point. Amazon is free to locate HQ in any other place and NY gets $0 from it. Now, NY can negotiate and get more than $0 - or not, and get $0. It's not like Amazon has already build headquarters and paid taxes and then NY decided to give them back a lot of money just out of the blue. It's like Amazon said "I can bring this much money to the table, but what you can do for us so that we choose you? Lower taxes? Better regulations? Something else?" and NYC considered how much Amazon brings to the table and how much they can do to make NYC their choice and they negotiated. Now you may want to say "if lower taxes makes the city or state competitive and improves outcomes, how comes not everybody gets low taxes?" Good question. Probably the same reason not everybody gets paid six-figure salaries. Some companies (or people) have more economic clout than others and can demand better compensation in exchange for good their bring to the table. If the city (or employer) doesn't want the goods, they are free to refuse the deal.
    • grecy 8y ago
      > A trillion dollar company is not supposed to pay anything to New York. The minimum NY was getting is $0. That's the starting point. Your entire post just described, by definition, a race to the bottom. Obviously the US is winning that race relative to other developed countries, but I'm staggered you think it's a good thing. It's absurd to think Amazon is doing NY a favor by bringing more than $0. That's like if I walk into McDonald's looking for a job and they say to me "Well, you currently earn nothing, so you should be mighty thankful we'll pay you even $1/hr". There are laws against paying people $1/hr for a very good reason - because if they could corporations would do that to maximize profits. All the employees would suffer. The corporation would make more money. Which is exactly what's happening with Amazon/NY. You are right that NY will get more money now that if Amazon had not come, but that's also true that my life would be better getting $1/hr than $0/hr. But is that a good thing? Do we want people to get paid $1/hr? Does that make for a happy and healthy society? Of course it doesn't, and letting Amazon pay less than they should is exactly the same, and has the same outcomes.
• Ataraxy 8y ago
  The best argument I've seen is that it was inevitable AMZ would enter NYC to remain competitive in the multi faceted tech sectors flourishing there (as you point out in #4). There was no need to pay them to do it.
• ForHackernews 8y ago
  > 3) Amazon has pledged to invest in the local community as part of the deal. There are plans for an elementary school and tech education center. If you believe this, I hear Amazon also has a bridge they'd like to sell you...