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Exactly. The whole HQ2 Willy Wonka show was never going to move to some area that really really needed it. NYC is currently a boom town, and I as a NYer am disa

Exactly. The whole HQ2 Willy Wonka show was never going to move to some area that really really needed it. NYC is currently a boom town, and I as a NYer am disappointed that we gave them such a huge amount of tax breaks. I support NY perhaps lifting some of its bureaucracy to make such a large move here possible, but do not support giving Amazon money. Amazon needs NYC because it has a metro area of 20 million people with more developers than Silicon Valley, and also many other skilled people in management and business. The days of someone moving to a company town to work for them are over as you have seen with GE moving to Boston and other corporate moves. Nobody is going to move to a small city to work for Amazon.

Alex3917 8y ago
> NYC is currently a boom town, and I as a NYer am disappointed that we gave them such a huge amount of tax breaks. If they want to put their HQ somewhere that doesn't have enough schools and public transportation to support it, why shouldn't they get a tax credit for spending money to improve the local infrastructure? The reason it's needed in the first place is that the local government can't be trusted to actually allocate public resources in a fair way.
- untog 8y ago
  Local government can't be trusted to allocate public resources in a fair way... so we defer that to a private company? That doesn't seem too smart. Where's the guarantee (or even suggestion) that Amazon would use their tax break to improve local infrastructure?
  - sieabahlpark 8y ago
    If you can't get your own employees to your office to work then you have a big issue operating.
    - untog 8y ago
      Yeah, and if you're anything like a Silicon Valley giant you clog up the roads with private buses to ship your employees around, community be damned.
      - emaginniss 8y ago
        Aren't private buses a more efficient way to move your employees rather than having them each drive their own car? If the local governments haven't done enough to solve the mass transit issue, it seems this is the best approach that a tech giant could implement.
        bobthepanda 8y ago
        It is, but businesses and businessmen used to be more civics minded. Nelson Rockefeller smashed heads to rid New York of Robert Moses' strangehold and fix the subways. The Carnegies and the Vanderbilts founded universities. After the '80s we haven't really seen this kind of behavior, save Microsoft's recent tiptoe into developing affordable housing. Google and Facebook have the weight to throw around to ask for things like the second Transbay Tube or Dumbarton Bridge rail service, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
        nerfhammer 8y ago
        New York was never as fanatically anti-growth as the bay area is today
        komali2 8y ago
        Google is building out some infrastructure around their Mountain View housing project, i.e. affordable housing available to the public, some parks, footpaths, bridges, etc, but definitely nothing like Rockefeller. It's fairly incomprehensible to me - these companies are working with a truly staggering amount of money, do they think they've found the upper limit of "Bay Area Coolness Factor?" Imagine if they eradicated the draw of Austin or New York or Portland by pushing for such a good Caltrain system that living in Mountain View was functionally equivalent to living in San Francisco because the trains were so fast and ran all night... or even further south or east, stretching transit out to areas where one might actually be able to afford a house.
  - Alex3917 8y ago
    > Local government can't be trusted to allocate public resources in a fair way... so we defer that to a private company? Public resources in NYC are already allocated by private companies; that's a big part of why local government can't be trusted in the first place. Amazon is just saying that if they build a huge building in NYC, then they want to control public resource allocation in the area of the building in place of whatever private company would already be doing this. > Where's the guarantee (or even suggestion) that Amazon would use their tax break to improve local infrastructure? That's literally that the deal is, or at least a substantial portion of it: https://www.bizjournals.com/newyork/news/2018/11/13/heres-what-amazon-stands-to-gain-in-nyc-incentives.html https://www.bizjournals.com/newyork/news/2018/11/13/heres-wh...
- zanny 8y ago
  If theres any level of government you as a citizen have influence over its your dang local government. If your local government is inept, organize to replace it. There is no local government in the country that serves over a couple million people. None of them are out of reach like most state and federal legislatures are from influence by an average person with passion to fix it, even if the extent of your influence is to just spread enough malcontent to foster replacement of the incumbent powers that be.
  - Alex3917 8y ago
    > If theres any level of government you as a citizen have influence over its your dang local government. But Amazon isn't a local citizen. Why would their employees relocate somewhere if there aren't schools and parks for their kids, given that Amazon can't even tell them that they will get built because it's not in their control? Whatever the downsides of this approach are, asking a corporation to invest billions of dollars moving somewhere without any guarantee from the government that there will be enough infrastructure to support their employees makes even less sense. How could you actually expect anyone to do that?
- admax88q 8y ago
  > why shouldn't they get a tax credit for spending money to improve the local infrastructure Amazon isn't going to be building public schools, roads, or transportation. Their presence will increase demand for those things
  - ConcernedCoder 8y ago
    I disagree, 25,000 employees being taxed on avg. pay of 150k/year will most certainly be "building public schools, roads, or transportation"
    - admax88q 8y ago
      Those people are going to be working anyways, there is a labour shortage. NYC got played.
misiti3780 8y ago
I'm from buffalo but live in nyc now and feel the same way, but I noticed a lot of people I know in buffalo seem to think they could pull the same level of talent in smaller cities.
- humanrebar 8y ago
  If you paid the NYC level salaries, you could.
  - saalweachter 8y ago
    Once you start talking 25k jobs, you can build a new city out of that. If you're the sort of billionaire who wants to take a shot at developing a modern Utopia, by whatever metrics you personally care about, buy a few square miles somewhere, move your corporate headquarters and 25k jobs there, and go nuts playing sim city with real people. Sure, not every potential employee is willing to uproot themselves and move to Bezosburg, but not every potential employer is willing to move to New York or Silicon Valley or Louisville. But between a good salary and the appealing amenities of Bezosburg, you should be able to attract plenty.
sudosteph 8y ago
I'm not so sure about that. I actually know two people who moved from NY to SEA for Amazon, in part b/c NY is so incredibly expensive. Both were actually disappointed that neither HQ2 announcements were for places with significantly lower COL than SEA. These were millenials starting their career + families though, not people who had established NYC salaries and a condo or co-op. That said, it does definitely make sense to get a piece of the NY talent pie for a company with as much growth + turnover as Amazon. I understand that choice much better than the NoVa choice.
- olcor 8y ago
  Apart from the state/city taxes, there’s little difference in NYC and Seattle any more. My rent has barely moved in the last three years; my friends in Seattle are complaining about ridiculous rent increases. I visited a year ago and did not see a massive difference in prices for every day goods and services. Unsure about housing market though.
  - electricslpnsld 8y ago
    > Apart from the state/city taxes That’s a pretty big difference though! I suppose with NYC you don’t have the cost of owning and operating a car, though.
    - bobthepanda 8y ago
      You can live car free in Seattle. It depends on who you work for and where they are, but it is doable. People carpool and such to go hiking and to events, and Lyft/Uber is pretty good.
      - lenocinor 8y ago
        I second this, as someone actually doing this thing. :) And with light rail extensions and transit expansions it's getting better all the time.
  - bobthepanda 8y ago
mruts 8y ago
What’s wrong with tax breaks? It’s like people are under the impression that the government is actually paying Amazon. If Amazon didn’t get any tax breaks, they would have gone somewhere else. The people who don’t want Amazon in Queens don’t actually live there, all the protests are in Manhattan. People are protesting the likely rise in rents that an Amazon HQ will cause. But the real problem is government regulation. If real estate developers could build housing without all the NIMBYs yelling to their city councils or if they could build without onerous regulation about fire escapes or whatnot, people would have housing. All this regulation that is supposed to help consumers actually hurts them. It’s not like with regulation companies will do the same thing as if they didn’t exist. Many companies will just opt out. I’m guessing I’m going to get downvoted, but I honestly believe that regulation is the root of all evil and most social ills (like healthcare costs, pharmaceutical prices, etc). But instead of protesting the bad incentives government creates, people just blame the “greedy” corporations.
- kevindqc 8y ago
  I don't understand what is the uproar about regulation. Regulations are there because companies will do whatever gives them more money, damn the impact on the environment/people/anything else.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    That's the upside of regulation, yes. The downside of regulation is that it makes everything terrible in different ways. FRA regulations is why the U.S. can't buy ready-made trainsets from Europe for a fraction of the cost. Housing regulations increase prices and become a vehicle for propping up property values. A lot of the things hipster millennials care about (e.g. walkable cities dense neighborhoods, fiber internet, affordable housing, public transit) are directly prohibited by regulations.
- adamson 8y ago
  I’ve never really heard a claim like this. What regulations lead to higher prescription drug costs and higher healthcare costs generally?
jimmy1 8y ago
> NYC is currently a boom town, - The subway is crumbling with no tangible realistic plan to fix it. - Housing crisis is getting worse. New York is consistently at the top, or near the top of the "losing residents to other cities" list. NYPost recently reported on "The Exodus of New York's middle class" - With some of the highest taxes in the country, Cuomo recently stated NY lost 2.3 billion in tax revenue, with NYC alone losing 1 billion of that, and now there is a looming showdown on the state budget coming up. Area corporations are seeking relocation to cheaper tax areas. As they say, "Every day is tax day in NYC"
- wrsh07 8y ago
  This is a little ridiculous. 1) Subway: yes, it needs major infrastructure investments. It isn't crumbling - isn't that a little melodramatic? 2) I call BS. Housing prices in most neighborhoods in NYC have deceased over the past year: https://www.businessinsider.com/nyc-housing-asking-sale-prices-cut-at-pace-unseen-since-financial-crisis-streeteasy-2018-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/nyc-housing-asking-sale-pric... 3) and yet, major tech companies are interested in starting or expanding their presence (exhibit Amazon, exhibit https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/17/google-announces-billion-expansion-new-york-city/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/17/google-...)
  - jimmy1 8y ago
    It's only ridiculous if you view NYC through some rose tinted glasses, most the rest of the country are staying away Responding to your points. 1.) Most online rags and news reports describe it as "crumbling" so these aren't my words. I have no interest in being melodramatic, I'm merely relaying the portrait painted by most people reporting on the subway. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gyk9m3/borough-hall-nyc-subway-ceiling-collapse-vgtrn https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gyk9m3/borough-hall-nyc-s... https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vbmmym/the-history-behind-new-york-citys-crumbling-subway https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vbmmym/the-history-behind... https://www.businessinsider.com/a-marijuana-tax-could-help-fix-new-yorks-crumbling-subway-system-2018-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/a-marijuana-tax-could-help-f... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/20/new-york-city-subway-bus-death-spiral-mta-fares https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/20/new-york-cit... 2. You call BS. I call that article proving my point. You are having a market correction due to the mass exodus. 3. Name other major tech companies besides Amazon which hosed over the city and held them hostage for sweet heart deal? I don't know one person that has said "oh I know, I'll move to NYC for a tech job" San Fransisco maybe. Austin? Definitely. I just don't know how you can paint a billion dollar loss in tax revenue (2.3 billion state wide), and falling housing prices due to decrease in demand as a "boom" The mere fact that NYC bent over backwards so far to attract Amazon is actually telling to me.
codyb 8y ago
Yea, if you need 25,000 employees in a sector your choices are pretty limited to the areas where there are tons of those employees already living it seems to me unless you want a difficult hiring process. I know I wouldn't really want to live in an area where the jobs in my field were Amazon and very little else. I'm very disappointed that NYC gave one of the largest companies in the world by valuation 3bn in tax breaks while the subway crumbles, although I don't think it was particularly a bad deal, but it's hard to accurately calculate when that will pay off by. I'm just a bit disappointed that in a time of unprecedented wealth inequality and company concentration our nation's setup to reward the wealthiest individuals and largest corporations. NYC should have said "here's what we decided a good offer would have been, we're going to invest it in startups, and infrastructure. Come here if you want to be around the great minds that will be attracted to a diverse and rich in ideas environment." I also wouldn't be surprised if NYC does reward small companies and this is just another thing too.
- elamje 8y ago
  But NYC cares about tax revenue just like you or I care about income. In one move, HQ2 will bring NYC/NY State a very attractive amount of tax revenue. It is the most logical thing for city officials, who constantly want more funding, to do what exactly what will bring more funding the quickest.
  - drugme 8y ago
    In one move, HQ2 will bring NYC/NY State a very attractive amount of tax revenue. How much, approximately? Or do you just think it will be... "a lot"?
    - sokoloff 8y ago
      Ballpark state income tax at 6.5% of $250K * 25K = $406M/yr, with city tax on top. Ballpark property tax at $12K * 25K = $300M/yr Ballpark state sales tax at 4% of $50K in spending * 25K = $50M/yr Naturally, some of the property tax is displacing existing property tax payers and some of the income tax will be lost to other employers moving out of NYC area, but it seem quite reasonable to be OoM $500M per year at scale.
imh 8y ago
Do you have a source for the claim that NYC has more devs than silicon valley? The only source I could find was about tech jobs, not just devs. It says >[NY's] tech work force, according to most analyses, is less than half and perhaps one-third that of the Bay Area. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/new-york-tech-jobs-amazon-hq2.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/new-york-tech-...

Alex3917 8y ago

> NYC is currently a boom town, and I as a NYer am disappointed that we gave them such a huge amount of tax breaks. If they want to put their HQ somewhere that doesn't have enough schools and public transportation to support it, why shouldn't they get a tax credit for spending money to improve the local infrastructure? The reason it's needed in the first place is that the local government can't be trusted to actually allocate public resources in a fair way.

untog 8y ago
Local government can't be trusted to allocate public resources in a fair way... so we defer that to a private company? That doesn't seem too smart. Where's the guarantee (or even suggestion) that Amazon would use their tax break to improve local infrastructure?
- sieabahlpark 8y ago
  If you can't get your own employees to your office to work then you have a big issue operating.
  - untog 8y ago
    Yeah, and if you're anything like a Silicon Valley giant you clog up the roads with private buses to ship your employees around, community be damned.
    - emaginniss 8y ago
      Aren't private buses a more efficient way to move your employees rather than having them each drive their own car? If the local governments haven't done enough to solve the mass transit issue, it seems this is the best approach that a tech giant could implement.
      - bobthepanda 8y ago
        It is, but businesses and businessmen used to be more civics minded. Nelson Rockefeller smashed heads to rid New York of Robert Moses' strangehold and fix the subways. The Carnegies and the Vanderbilts founded universities. After the '80s we haven't really seen this kind of behavior, save Microsoft's recent tiptoe into developing affordable housing. Google and Facebook have the weight to throw around to ask for things like the second Transbay Tube or Dumbarton Bridge rail service, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
        nerfhammer 8y ago
        New York was never as fanatically anti-growth as the bay area is today
        komali2 8y ago
        Google is building out some infrastructure around their Mountain View housing project, i.e. affordable housing available to the public, some parks, footpaths, bridges, etc, but definitely nothing like Rockefeller. It's fairly incomprehensible to me - these companies are working with a truly staggering amount of money, do they think they've found the upper limit of "Bay Area Coolness Factor?" Imagine if they eradicated the draw of Austin or New York or Portland by pushing for such a good Caltrain system that living in Mountain View was functionally equivalent to living in San Francisco because the trains were so fast and ran all night... or even further south or east, stretching transit out to areas where one might actually be able to afford a house.
- Alex3917 8y ago
  > Local government can't be trusted to allocate public resources in a fair way... so we defer that to a private company? Public resources in NYC are already allocated by private companies; that's a big part of why local government can't be trusted in the first place. Amazon is just saying that if they build a huge building in NYC, then they want to control public resource allocation in the area of the building in place of whatever private company would already be doing this. > Where's the guarantee (or even suggestion) that Amazon would use their tax break to improve local infrastructure? That's literally that the deal is, or at least a substantial portion of it: https://www.bizjournals.com/newyork/news/2018/11/13/heres-what-amazon-stands-to-gain-in-nyc-incentives.html https://www.bizjournals.com/newyork/news/2018/11/13/heres-wh...
zanny 8y ago
If theres any level of government you as a citizen have influence over its your dang local government. If your local government is inept, organize to replace it. There is no local government in the country that serves over a couple million people. None of them are out of reach like most state and federal legislatures are from influence by an average person with passion to fix it, even if the extent of your influence is to just spread enough malcontent to foster replacement of the incumbent powers that be.
- Alex3917 8y ago
  > If theres any level of government you as a citizen have influence over its your dang local government. But Amazon isn't a local citizen. Why would their employees relocate somewhere if there aren't schools and parks for their kids, given that Amazon can't even tell them that they will get built because it's not in their control? Whatever the downsides of this approach are, asking a corporation to invest billions of dollars moving somewhere without any guarantee from the government that there will be enough infrastructure to support their employees makes even less sense. How could you actually expect anyone to do that?
admax88q 8y ago
> why shouldn't they get a tax credit for spending money to improve the local infrastructure Amazon isn't going to be building public schools, roads, or transportation. Their presence will increase demand for those things
- ConcernedCoder 8y ago
  I disagree, 25,000 employees being taxed on avg. pay of 150k/year will most certainly be "building public schools, roads, or transportation"
  - admax88q 8y ago
    Those people are going to be working anyways, there is a labour shortage. NYC got played.

misiti3780 8y ago

I'm from buffalo but live in nyc now and feel the same way, but I noticed a lot of people I know in buffalo seem to think they could pull the same level of talent in smaller cities.

humanrebar 8y ago
If you paid the NYC level salaries, you could.
- saalweachter 8y ago
  Once you start talking 25k jobs, you can build a new city out of that. If you're the sort of billionaire who wants to take a shot at developing a modern Utopia, by whatever metrics you personally care about, buy a few square miles somewhere, move your corporate headquarters and 25k jobs there, and go nuts playing sim city with real people. Sure, not every potential employee is willing to uproot themselves and move to Bezosburg, but not every potential employer is willing to move to New York or Silicon Valley or Louisville. But between a good salary and the appealing amenities of Bezosburg, you should be able to attract plenty.

sudosteph 8y ago

I'm not so sure about that. I actually know two people who moved from NY to SEA for Amazon, in part b/c NY is so incredibly expensive. Both were actually disappointed that neither HQ2 announcements were for places with significantly lower COL than SEA. These were millenials starting their career + families though, not people who had established NYC salaries and a condo or co-op. That said, it does definitely make sense to get a piece of the NY talent pie for a company with as much growth + turnover as Amazon. I understand that choice much better than the NoVa choice.

olcor 8y ago
Apart from the state/city taxes, there’s little difference in NYC and Seattle any more. My rent has barely moved in the last three years; my friends in Seattle are complaining about ridiculous rent increases. I visited a year ago and did not see a massive difference in prices for every day goods and services. Unsure about housing market though.
- electricslpnsld 8y ago
  > Apart from the state/city taxes That’s a pretty big difference though! I suppose with NYC you don’t have the cost of owning and operating a car, though.
  - bobthepanda 8y ago
    You can live car free in Seattle. It depends on who you work for and where they are, but it is doable. People carpool and such to go hiking and to events, and Lyft/Uber is pretty good.
    - lenocinor 8y ago
      I second this, as someone actually doing this thing. :) And with light rail extensions and transit expansions it's getting better all the time.
- bobthepanda 8y ago

mruts 8y ago

What’s wrong with tax breaks? It’s like people are under the impression that the government is actually paying Amazon. If Amazon didn’t get any tax breaks, they would have gone somewhere else. The people who don’t want Amazon in Queens don’t actually live there, all the protests are in Manhattan. People are protesting the likely rise in rents that an Amazon HQ will cause. But the real problem is government regulation. If real estate developers could build housing without all the NIMBYs yelling to their city councils or if they could build without onerous regulation about fire escapes or whatnot, people would have housing. All this regulation that is supposed to help consumers actually hurts them. It’s not like with regulation companies will do the same thing as if they didn’t exist. Many companies will just opt out. I’m guessing I’m going to get downvoted, but I honestly believe that regulation is the root of all evil and most social ills (like healthcare costs, pharmaceutical prices, etc). But instead of protesting the bad incentives government creates, people just blame the “greedy” corporations.

kevindqc 8y ago
I don't understand what is the uproar about regulation. Regulations are there because companies will do whatever gives them more money, damn the impact on the environment/people/anything else.
- rayiner 8y ago
  That's the upside of regulation, yes. The downside of regulation is that it makes everything terrible in different ways. FRA regulations is why the U.S. can't buy ready-made trainsets from Europe for a fraction of the cost. Housing regulations increase prices and become a vehicle for propping up property values. A lot of the things hipster millennials care about (e.g. walkable cities dense neighborhoods, fiber internet, affordable housing, public transit) are directly prohibited by regulations.
adamson 8y ago
I’ve never really heard a claim like this. What regulations lead to higher prescription drug costs and higher healthcare costs generally?

jimmy1 8y ago

> NYC is currently a boom town, - The subway is crumbling with no tangible realistic plan to fix it. - Housing crisis is getting worse. New York is consistently at the top, or near the top of the "losing residents to other cities" list. NYPost recently reported on "The Exodus of New York's middle class" - With some of the highest taxes in the country, Cuomo recently stated NY lost 2.3 billion in tax revenue, with NYC alone losing 1 billion of that, and now there is a looming showdown on the state budget coming up. Area corporations are seeking relocation to cheaper tax areas. As they say, "Every day is tax day in NYC"

wrsh07 8y ago
This is a little ridiculous. 1) Subway: yes, it needs major infrastructure investments. It isn't crumbling - isn't that a little melodramatic? 2) I call BS. Housing prices in most neighborhoods in NYC have deceased over the past year: https://www.businessinsider.com/nyc-housing-asking-sale-prices-cut-at-pace-unseen-since-financial-crisis-streeteasy-2018-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/nyc-housing-asking-sale-pric... 3) and yet, major tech companies are interested in starting or expanding their presence (exhibit Amazon, exhibit https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/17/google-announces-billion-expansion-new-york-city/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/17/google-...)
- jimmy1 8y ago
  It's only ridiculous if you view NYC through some rose tinted glasses, most the rest of the country are staying away Responding to your points. 1.) Most online rags and news reports describe it as "crumbling" so these aren't my words. I have no interest in being melodramatic, I'm merely relaying the portrait painted by most people reporting on the subway. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gyk9m3/borough-hall-nyc-subway-ceiling-collapse-vgtrn https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gyk9m3/borough-hall-nyc-s... https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vbmmym/the-history-behind-new-york-citys-crumbling-subway https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vbmmym/the-history-behind... https://www.businessinsider.com/a-marijuana-tax-could-help-fix-new-yorks-crumbling-subway-system-2018-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/a-marijuana-tax-could-help-f... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/20/new-york-city-subway-bus-death-spiral-mta-fares https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/20/new-york-cit... 2. You call BS. I call that article proving my point. You are having a market correction due to the mass exodus. 3. Name other major tech companies besides Amazon which hosed over the city and held them hostage for sweet heart deal? I don't know one person that has said "oh I know, I'll move to NYC for a tech job" San Fransisco maybe. Austin? Definitely. I just don't know how you can paint a billion dollar loss in tax revenue (2.3 billion state wide), and falling housing prices due to decrease in demand as a "boom" The mere fact that NYC bent over backwards so far to attract Amazon is actually telling to me.

codyb 8y ago

Yea, if you need 25,000 employees in a sector your choices are pretty limited to the areas where there are tons of those employees already living it seems to me unless you want a difficult hiring process. I know I wouldn't really want to live in an area where the jobs in my field were Amazon and very little else. I'm very disappointed that NYC gave one of the largest companies in the world by valuation 3bn in tax breaks while the subway crumbles, although I don't think it was particularly a bad deal, but it's hard to accurately calculate when that will pay off by. I'm just a bit disappointed that in a time of unprecedented wealth inequality and company concentration our nation's setup to reward the wealthiest individuals and largest corporations. NYC should have said "here's what we decided a good offer would have been, we're going to invest it in startups, and infrastructure. Come here if you want to be around the great minds that will be attracted to a diverse and rich in ideas environment." I also wouldn't be surprised if NYC does reward small companies and this is just another thing too.

elamje 8y ago
But NYC cares about tax revenue just like you or I care about income. In one move, HQ2 will bring NYC/NY State a very attractive amount of tax revenue. It is the most logical thing for city officials, who constantly want more funding, to do what exactly what will bring more funding the quickest.
- drugme 8y ago
  In one move, HQ2 will bring NYC/NY State a very attractive amount of tax revenue. How much, approximately? Or do you just think it will be... "a lot"?
  - sokoloff 8y ago
    Ballpark state income tax at 6.5% of $250K * 25K = $406M/yr, with city tax on top. Ballpark property tax at $12K * 25K = $300M/yr Ballpark state sales tax at 4% of $50K in spending * 25K = $50M/yr Naturally, some of the property tax is displacing existing property tax payers and some of the income tax will be lost to other employers moving out of NYC area, but it seem quite reasonable to be OoM $500M per year at scale.

imh 8y ago

Do you have a source for the claim that NYC has more devs than silicon valley? The only source I could find was about tech jobs, not just devs. It says >[NY's] tech work force, according to most analyses, is less than half and perhaps one-third that of the Bay Area. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/new-york-tech-jobs-amazon-hq2.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/new-york-tech-...