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Exactly. The 25k number was just to make a splash and notice they aren't doing that again. Because there aren't really any other areas that could give them 25k

Exactly. The 25k number was just to make a splash and notice they aren't doing that again. Because there aren't really any other areas that could give them 25k skilled employees. They will scale up in Nashville which is expected since it is a growing area, and they will still be in NY due to the talent. The "HQ2" show was primarily to extract large concessions which almost worked. My initial reaction as a NY'er was "well that didn't go well" but now I think it was great that we did not fall for it.

bilbo0s 8y ago
I don't even think they're really gonna scale up in Nashville. At least not in any meaningful way. 10 years from now, both Amazon and Google will have right around 25 thousand workers each in NYC. The reality is that NYC is not Wisconsin, they don't need to give out money. EDIT: I'd even go a step further, and predict that both Amazon and Google will also have ludicrously large presences in the DC-NOVA area in 10 years as well. In fact, Amazon's presence in the DC-NOVA area will be even bigger than they initially said it would.
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  Wisconsin doesn't need to give out money, either. If anything, they need to not give out money. The story of the Foxconn factory, for example, is one of Wisconsin acting as if you can give a bunch of money to a company that smells of technology, and they will plunk a bunch of jobs for highly educated and skilled people in the middle of a region with relatively few highly educated and skilled workers. Which, it never worked that way. It never will work that way. Companies go to places that can fill their staffing needs. Wisconsin, which has been systematically defunding its education system in order to re-route that money toward corporate subsidies, is undercutting its own ability to fill those staffing needs. I don't know that everyone in the state realizes it, but Wisconsin is stumbling all over itself to become the darling dumping ground for companies that are founded[1] in cities and states with the kinds of intellectual and entrepreneurial ferments you get around well-run and well-funded university systems to put their call centers, distribution centers, big boxes mostly full of robots, and other things they don't want to waste money putting in a more affluent area. [1] I think "founded" is a key word, here, too. Supporting local entrepreneurship is the key to prosperity. Which mostly means getting out of the way of your entrepreneurs. If you get into a bidding wars to acquire the office where a company puts all their jobs that didn't merit being located at HQ, not only do you end up overspending - the people deciding what to bid aren't playing with their own money, so what else did you expect? - but you're also draining the talent pool that supports their growth. tl;dr: The cart goes behind the horse.
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    It depends on the business. If you’re capitalizing a big facility, even things like sales tax exemptions are big value adds. As long as some places in strategic areas do the incentive thing, it’s hard not to.
    - taurath 8y ago
      If you keep participating in the race to the bottom, you eventually end up on the bottom. The belief that any price in tax cuts will benefit your citizens in the form of "jobs" is a particularly toxic form of economic fundamentalism, and its hollowing whole states out.
      - Spooky23 8y ago
        Totally agree. In my neck of the woods one county nearly bankrupted a neighboring one by offering an existing business a deal that led them to move a few miles away. The old county was stuck with sewer bonds and other costs while the revenue vaporized. It’s difficult though as it’s a prisoner’s dilemma type situation.
        taurath 8y ago
        It sounds like the county that was bankrupted left themselves at the mercy of the business.
        Spooky23 8y ago
        Yes and no. I believe in this case they had an obligation to provide the sewer, and water/sewer ratepayers are responsible for costs. You can’t make an individual ratepayer responsible for the sewer. Definitely a bad situation and a story told a thousand times in the US
  - Justsignedup 8y ago
    Kentucky was a perfect example of this. They gave the best corporate welfare money can buy. And everyone left. There were no decent roads, schools, police. So there were no decent workers. The companies were basically given the best deal in a place with no workers. If anything the workers left even more because there was even less attractiveness to be there.
- hguant 8y ago
  Living in the DC-NOVA area, Amazon coming here seemed rather inevitable. There's a confluence of infrastructure, cheap office/datacenter space, and a stealthily growing engineering talent pool that Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon and the general smorgasbord of government contractors have built up over the years. Additionally,it wouldn't surprise me if Amazon has seen the obscene amounts of money Microsoft is making pitching cloud security and general technical support to the government, and wants in on it.
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    Yep. Agree with all that, I suspect DC-NOVA will be a whole lot bigger than 25k workers now for Amazon.
- bryan2 8y ago
  I work in middle Tn and the Amazon job postings have already started. I really have no interest in them though. Primarily remote work is the best.
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    They've already started in NYC and DC-NOVA as well. I'm just saying that the smart money is clearly on DC-NOVA in the long term with NYC as the next big winner there.
- JauntTrooper 8y ago
  I don’t know, cities rise and fall at lot more quickly than it feels like at the time. New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy in 1975, less than 50 years ago. Detroit’s population started declining as early as the 1950s as companies moved to the suburbs. New York has a world-class, diverse economy, and I expect it to continue to be a central engine of the American and world economy for our lifetimes, but it does require good stewardship to nurture the economy. We may be on the cusp of a reversal of the great urban migration of the last several decades, with populations moving into suburban satellite cities as remote work gains acceptance, driverless cars allow for easier commutes, logistics companies and drones allow for easy delivery of goods to your doorstep, and urban housing prices continue to relentlessly outpace wage growth.
  - Kinnard 8y ago
    And millennials make babies.
jhall1468 8y ago
There's absolutely no way they are scaling up NY to the same degree they would have with the subsidies. There's no reason to. The value proposition is gone, so now Amazon will slow-roll growth in NY like they will any other office. The fact that you (and many others) consider this a win is an attempt to revise history. This tax deal was all about Amazon expanding very quickly. That deal is gone. But feel free to pat yourself on the back for not "falling for it". Maybe it works out great as other companies will lease those buildings and hire a combined ~20k employees averaging $150,000 in compensation, but that's likely not going to happen. Cut off your nose to spite your face.
- bogomipz 8y ago
  >"The value proposition is gone, so now Amazon will slow-roll growth in NY like they will any other office." So the "value proposition" had nothing to do with access to a talent pool of qualified candidates to fill those 25K jobs? Because that would be odds with the reasons Google, FB et al have set up shop in NYC. >"This tax deal was all about Amazon expanding very quickly." Yet there was never any specifics of when Amazon would arrive at that mythical 25K job number. The closest you can find to any time qualification is the phrase "within a decade." I guess you have a very different idea of "quickly." >"The fact that you (and many others) consider this a win is an attempt to revise history." No the "win" here is not giving out corporate subsidies, more especially to a company that absolutely does not need it. NYC will be just fine without Amazon. There is no shortage of tech jobs in NYC these days. It been that way for over 10 years now.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > There's absolutely no way they are scaling up NY to the same degree they would have with the subsidies. There's no reason to. There's now way to. Campus expansions are blocked by layers and layers of NIMBYs. The big selling point of the deal was the state government ensuring Amazon would have a campus that could hold 25,000 people.
- function_seven 8y ago
  While parent (and others) may be attempting to revise history, I think this outcome is probably for the best. Whatever growth occurs in NY will be organic. Not government-subsidized hyper-growth which can throw things out of whack. Real growth brings with it real increases in public funding, that can be used to fund real increases in infrastructure demands and demands on other public services. When a local government has to bribe their way into increasing local business, they tip the scales in favor of one thing (i.e. jobs) while burdening other things (tax base, transit support, etc.) When companies choose to do business in your area—because it's naturally the best place for them—it functions as a market verification that you're doing something right.
supermw 8y ago
What if another state gave the concessions, and then it worked out spectacularly for them, completely reviving a city and building up a new ecosystem that funnels in new wealth and new money. Would NY be kicking itself then?
- erentz 8y ago
  No because NYC doesn't need Amazon to be a large, thriving city with all the agglomeration benefits large cities have. Because it already has all those things. Amazon arguably needed NYC more than NYC needed Amazon. On the other hand, smaller, not thriving cities may have indeed benefited from attracting an Amazon. But it's a bigger debate whether they would benefit more than the cost they might've had to pay to attract an Amazon. Do we even have an example on record of a state or city making huge concessions to attract a company and it "completely reviving a city and building up a new ecosystem that funnels in new wealth and new money"?
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  ??? You're suggesting that another city will generate money and wealth to rival NYC by getting a few Amazon jobs? Frankly, that would not happen. Maybe if that other city was DC? But, yeah, probably not even then.
  - _grep_ 8y ago
    Per capita, Northern Virginia is already the wealthiest area in the United States. Amazon will probably nudge it a little further into the lead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_counties_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_countie...
    - bilbo0s 8y ago
      That's income per capita, which is a little bit different than wealth. There is no place, in the US, that rivals the wealth and power of NYC. Now internationally, that's where you start to get your Beijing's, and your London's, and your Tokyo's, and your Monte Carlo's, and your Paris, and Shanghai's etc. But in the US it's NYC at the center of the preponderance of wealth and power. Only place in a position to make a run at NYC is DC, and they'll need a lot more than Amazon to do it. (There's also LA and Chicago, but those cities are not as "powerful", nowhere near as wealthy, and to be frank, making a run at NYC is not their ambition.)

bilbo0s 8y ago

I don't even think they're really gonna scale up in Nashville. At least not in any meaningful way. 10 years from now, both Amazon and Google will have right around 25 thousand workers each in NYC. The reality is that NYC is not Wisconsin, they don't need to give out money. EDIT: I'd even go a step further, and predict that both Amazon and Google will also have ludicrously large presences in the DC-NOVA area in 10 years as well. In fact, Amazon's presence in the DC-NOVA area will be even bigger than they initially said it would.

bunderbunder 8y ago
Wisconsin doesn't need to give out money, either. If anything, they need to not give out money. The story of the Foxconn factory, for example, is one of Wisconsin acting as if you can give a bunch of money to a company that smells of technology, and they will plunk a bunch of jobs for highly educated and skilled people in the middle of a region with relatively few highly educated and skilled workers. Which, it never worked that way. It never will work that way. Companies go to places that can fill their staffing needs. Wisconsin, which has been systematically defunding its education system in order to re-route that money toward corporate subsidies, is undercutting its own ability to fill those staffing needs. I don't know that everyone in the state realizes it, but Wisconsin is stumbling all over itself to become the darling dumping ground for companies that are founded[1] in cities and states with the kinds of intellectual and entrepreneurial ferments you get around well-run and well-funded university systems to put their call centers, distribution centers, big boxes mostly full of robots, and other things they don't want to waste money putting in a more affluent area. [1] I think "founded" is a key word, here, too. Supporting local entrepreneurship is the key to prosperity. Which mostly means getting out of the way of your entrepreneurs. If you get into a bidding wars to acquire the office where a company puts all their jobs that didn't merit being located at HQ, not only do you end up overspending - the people deciding what to bid aren't playing with their own money, so what else did you expect? - but you're also draining the talent pool that supports their growth. tl;dr: The cart goes behind the horse.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  It depends on the business. If you’re capitalizing a big facility, even things like sales tax exemptions are big value adds. As long as some places in strategic areas do the incentive thing, it’s hard not to.
  - taurath 8y ago
    If you keep participating in the race to the bottom, you eventually end up on the bottom. The belief that any price in tax cuts will benefit your citizens in the form of "jobs" is a particularly toxic form of economic fundamentalism, and its hollowing whole states out.
    - Spooky23 8y ago
      Totally agree. In my neck of the woods one county nearly bankrupted a neighboring one by offering an existing business a deal that led them to move a few miles away. The old county was stuck with sewer bonds and other costs while the revenue vaporized. It’s difficult though as it’s a prisoner’s dilemma type situation.
      - taurath 8y ago
        It sounds like the county that was bankrupted left themselves at the mercy of the business.
        Spooky23 8y ago
        Yes and no. I believe in this case they had an obligation to provide the sewer, and water/sewer ratepayers are responsible for costs. You can’t make an individual ratepayer responsible for the sewer. Definitely a bad situation and a story told a thousand times in the US
- Justsignedup 8y ago
  Kentucky was a perfect example of this. They gave the best corporate welfare money can buy. And everyone left. There were no decent roads, schools, police. So there were no decent workers. The companies were basically given the best deal in a place with no workers. If anything the workers left even more because there was even less attractiveness to be there.
hguant 8y ago
Living in the DC-NOVA area, Amazon coming here seemed rather inevitable. There's a confluence of infrastructure, cheap office/datacenter space, and a stealthily growing engineering talent pool that Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon and the general smorgasbord of government contractors have built up over the years. Additionally,it wouldn't surprise me if Amazon has seen the obscene amounts of money Microsoft is making pitching cloud security and general technical support to the government, and wants in on it.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  Yep. Agree with all that, I suspect DC-NOVA will be a whole lot bigger than 25k workers now for Amazon.
bryan2 8y ago
I work in middle Tn and the Amazon job postings have already started. I really have no interest in them though. Primarily remote work is the best.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  They've already started in NYC and DC-NOVA as well. I'm just saying that the smart money is clearly on DC-NOVA in the long term with NYC as the next big winner there.
JauntTrooper 8y ago
I don’t know, cities rise and fall at lot more quickly than it feels like at the time. New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy in 1975, less than 50 years ago. Detroit’s population started declining as early as the 1950s as companies moved to the suburbs. New York has a world-class, diverse economy, and I expect it to continue to be a central engine of the American and world economy for our lifetimes, but it does require good stewardship to nurture the economy. We may be on the cusp of a reversal of the great urban migration of the last several decades, with populations moving into suburban satellite cities as remote work gains acceptance, driverless cars allow for easier commutes, logistics companies and drones allow for easy delivery of goods to your doorstep, and urban housing prices continue to relentlessly outpace wage growth.
- Kinnard 8y ago
  And millennials make babies.

jhall1468 8y ago

There's absolutely no way they are scaling up NY to the same degree they would have with the subsidies. There's no reason to. The value proposition is gone, so now Amazon will slow-roll growth in NY like they will any other office. The fact that you (and many others) consider this a win is an attempt to revise history. This tax deal was all about Amazon expanding very quickly. That deal is gone. But feel free to pat yourself on the back for not "falling for it". Maybe it works out great as other companies will lease those buildings and hire a combined ~20k employees averaging $150,000 in compensation, but that's likely not going to happen. Cut off your nose to spite your face.

bogomipz 8y ago
>"The value proposition is gone, so now Amazon will slow-roll growth in NY like they will any other office." So the "value proposition" had nothing to do with access to a talent pool of qualified candidates to fill those 25K jobs? Because that would be odds with the reasons Google, FB et al have set up shop in NYC. >"This tax deal was all about Amazon expanding very quickly." Yet there was never any specifics of when Amazon would arrive at that mythical 25K job number. The closest you can find to any time qualification is the phrase "within a decade." I guess you have a very different idea of "quickly." >"The fact that you (and many others) consider this a win is an attempt to revise history." No the "win" here is not giving out corporate subsidies, more especially to a company that absolutely does not need it. NYC will be just fine without Amazon. There is no shortage of tech jobs in NYC these days. It been that way for over 10 years now.
JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> There's absolutely no way they are scaling up NY to the same degree they would have with the subsidies. There's no reason to. There's now way to. Campus expansions are blocked by layers and layers of NIMBYs. The big selling point of the deal was the state government ensuring Amazon would have a campus that could hold 25,000 people.
function_seven 8y ago
While parent (and others) may be attempting to revise history, I think this outcome is probably for the best. Whatever growth occurs in NY will be organic. Not government-subsidized hyper-growth which can throw things out of whack. Real growth brings with it real increases in public funding, that can be used to fund real increases in infrastructure demands and demands on other public services. When a local government has to bribe their way into increasing local business, they tip the scales in favor of one thing (i.e. jobs) while burdening other things (tax base, transit support, etc.) When companies choose to do business in your area—because it's naturally the best place for them—it functions as a market verification that you're doing something right.

supermw 8y ago

What if another state gave the concessions, and then it worked out spectacularly for them, completely reviving a city and building up a new ecosystem that funnels in new wealth and new money. Would NY be kicking itself then?

erentz 8y ago
No because NYC doesn't need Amazon to be a large, thriving city with all the agglomeration benefits large cities have. Because it already has all those things. Amazon arguably needed NYC more than NYC needed Amazon. On the other hand, smaller, not thriving cities may have indeed benefited from attracting an Amazon. But it's a bigger debate whether they would benefit more than the cost they might've had to pay to attract an Amazon. Do we even have an example on record of a state or city making huge concessions to attract a company and it "completely reviving a city and building up a new ecosystem that funnels in new wealth and new money"?
bilbo0s 8y ago
??? You're suggesting that another city will generate money and wealth to rival NYC by getting a few Amazon jobs? Frankly, that would not happen. Maybe if that other city was DC? But, yeah, probably not even then.
- _grep_ 8y ago
  Per capita, Northern Virginia is already the wealthiest area in the United States. Amazon will probably nudge it a little further into the lead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_counties_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_countie...
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    That's income per capita, which is a little bit different than wealth. There is no place, in the US, that rivals the wealth and power of NYC. Now internationally, that's where you start to get your Beijing's, and your London's, and your Tokyo's, and your Monte Carlo's, and your Paris, and Shanghai's etc. But in the US it's NYC at the center of the preponderance of wealth and power. Only place in a position to make a run at NYC is DC, and they'll need a lot more than Amazon to do it. (There's also LA and Chicago, but those cities are not as "powerful", nowhere near as wealthy, and to be frank, making a run at NYC is not their ambition.)