7 ms·

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

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.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  >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... This. That's exactly why what's now going to happen in NYC is what should happen in all cases. Wish we could get this going in Wisconsin.
- jhall1468 8y ago
  > Whatever growth occurs in NY will be organic. Not government-subsidized hyper-growth which can throw things out of whack. It's not going to be organic. Instead, these same deals are going to be spread out to a bunch of other companies, most of which will pay less than Amazon on average and the "subsidies" will take longer to be a net positive. Again, people confuse bribes with standard deals. Any company is eligible to receive the tax breaks that Amazon was going to. So New Yorkers have really "won" here. Same subsidies paid out to lower paying companies at a significant slower scale and significantly less economic upside. There's no way to turn this into a positive here.
  - airstrike 8y ago
    > It's not going to be organic. Instead, these same deals are going to be spread out to a bunch of other companies, most of which will pay less than Amazon on average and the "subsidies" will take longer to be a net positive. Only if you assume those other companies collectively hold the same bargaining power that Amazon did, which is an assumption I can't agree with
specialp 8y ago
If it was primarily a deal to ease the regulatory burden of building such a big thing, I'd be all for it. Admittedly NY has an issue now with too many layers of bureaucracy. But this isn't entirely what it is about. It was also about large tax concessions when plenty of large companies are hiring tech in NYC without any of them. A skilled employee in NYC does not last very long at all on the job market. The 25k employee campus thing was a sham that was geared to an area like NY from the start. They could never move to a smaller area and still get who they need at that scale. The commodity these days is skilled workforce. Amazon will still be where they can get that commodity, economic incentives aren't needed. Cash is not the limiting factor it is the people they need. It was a smart business move to try to extract some cash too but they did not need that to expand in NY.
- jhall1468 8y ago
  Ugh... any company moving into NY can get these same large tax concessions. Amazon got nothing special outside of reduced regulatory burden. Why is this not understood? This same subsidy is now going to go to 15 companies who all probably pay less on average than Amazon. There are skilled workforces outside of NY, believe it or not. And they aren't going to go through the regulatory burdens to expand NY to a major campus, since that's really what this was about. To be clear, since this point is being missed by so many people: This wasn't a special deal outside of the reduced regulatory burden. Any company that meets the eligibility requirements will get these exact same "subsidies". What happened here is a bunch of local politicians and local people who are absolutely clueless about how corporate tax reductions work pushed against something that's still going to happen just, at least potentially, not with a high paying company like Amazon.
  - JohnFen 8y ago
    > since this point is being missed by so many people I'm not so sure that people are actually missing this point.
  - danenania 8y ago
    I see what you're saying, but Amazon pretty much did that to themselves by making the whole thing such a public spectacle. Whether or not they were offered a special deal, that's the impression everyone got, and it should have been predictable that they'd provoke a lot more political backlash with this approach.
spookybones 8y ago
You seem to have no understanding of local culture or the present state of Manhattan and Brooklyn as already massively gutted by wealthy transplants. Ask the majority of people who grew up in San Francisco and Seattle. This is a win. You also seem to have little understanding of the current situation of the NYC subway system infrastructure. You could argue Amazon’s workforce would have forced improvements, except this hasn’t happened in decades despite the increasing wealth and foreign investors here. Just read about Cuomo using $5mil of MTA to bail upstate ski resorts three years prior.
- anth_anm 8y ago
  As someone in Seattle, what excites me about this is Amazon hopefully thinking twice about trying to extort subsidies Boeing style.
YeahSureWhyNot 8y ago
Amazon is notorious for paying pennies. 25k jobs paying 150k on average is a pipe dream. ask whole foods delivery people for Amazon fresh or whatever its called. they are counting their pay including $5 mandatory tip they collect from customers.
- TimJRobinson 8y ago
  You're on hacker news and don't understand the difference between the salaries of software engineers and whole foods workers?
- jhall1468 8y ago
  So few sentences to be so wrong. First of all, these jobs were all white collar. Amazon's current new grad SDE's in NY and SF both have more than $150k in comp. New grads. Second, the food delivery people for Amazon Fresh are employees of Amazon. The Amazon Flex drivers is what you are talking about, and there is no "mandatory" tip for that service. What you're talking about is something Instacart and DoorDash was doing. Those are entirely different companies.
  - ctvo 8y ago
    Why is this getting downvoted? It's much more accurate than the parent comment. Down voting because you dislike Amazon isn't a valid reason.
    - nkurz 8y ago
      The information in the second and third paragraphs is great, but it's being downvoted because the first sentence is unnecessarily antagonistic. HN has succeeded as a place for productive discussion for as long as it has because it still has an ethos of a joining together in a search for the truth. Prefacing a good comment with an insult (even one that might be true) damages the fragile ecosystem of cooperation. It's not that this particular insult is so bad on its own, but its presence encourages others to reply with escalated levels of confrontation. Downvotes help prevent the incivility from spiraling out of control.
_jal 8y ago
This is nonsense. I can't say that an enormous giveaway of public funds to attempt to buy jobs is categorically a bad idea in every situation, but if every one I can think of, and certainly this one, it is. It is also amusing that you consider Amazon's assertion about the job count an iron truth of what would have happened. While Amazon does not have Foxconn's long history of scamming municipalities, there is also no reason to weight their words any higher than other companies who have played this game in the past, and the odds look significantly worse than a sure thing viewed that way. Finally, the way you win these games is not to play, no different than the continual sports stadium scams or other "let's you and him fight" grifts.
siidooloo 8y ago
New York City has no current shortage of jobs or growth. Incentives aren’t needed. If they wanted to offer incentives for companies to move to Buffalo, it might be worth it. But NYC will be fine without it.
- jhall1468 8y ago
  Most companies are eligible for the same incentives. These tax deals will still happen, but they will be for lower paying jobs. Just read the press release at the very least. These are programs that existed before Amazon announced anything.
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  So why do you think people in NY government wanted to go for it?
dang 8y ago
Please don't get personally acidic in your comments to HN, regardless of how frustrated you feel with other posts. It corrodes discussion badly, and we're trying to stave off that decline here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dekhn 8y ago
  I think you misinterpreted his statement. "Cut off your nose to spite your face" is referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutting_off_the_nose_to_spite_the_face https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutting_off_the_nose_to_spite_... In this context, they're referring to the actions of NY (not the comment they're replying to), and TBH, there's nothing personally acidic; it's just a saying.
  - dang 8y ago
    I was referring to feel free to pat yourself on the back for not "falling for it", which was a gratuitous bit of personal sarcasm, just the sort of thing which acidifies online discourse. Also, arguably, the bit about an attempt to revise history is an uncharitable escalation (though not personal).
    - whoisjuan 8y ago
      I think you're reading too much into that phrase. It's a bit condescending but I don't see how it erodes the discussion.
      - dang 8y ago
        It erodes discussion by slowly acidifying it. It's not that the remark was so bad in itself—it's that these effects compound, and if we allow them to compound very much, the problem will no longer be fixable. That's why we often ask people not to do this, even when they only did it a little.
    - dekhn 8y ago
      enough people have chimed in response to you to say this is legitimate discourse within the HN rules.
jlarocco 8y ago
> This tax deal was all about Amazon expanding very quickly. Anybody who thinks that through should see why it's such a terrible idea. Not even NY can "very quickly" absorb 25k people in a small area without screwing up quality of life for the people who already live there. That's a great way to make real estate prices sky rocket and screw over the existing residents. And it'll completely screw up infrastructure and transportation, because there's not enough money to pay for them when the company causing the issues is getting a huge tax break and not paying their fair share, and they're not things that can be fixed quickly in any case. > 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. If the current residents are qualified for $150k a year jobs then they presumably already have one - it's not like there are 25k unemployed software devs waiting around for companies to move to NY. That whole competition was a shameful money grab by Amazon and I'm glad it didn't work out for them.
- ctvo 8y ago
  > "very quickly" This was over a 10 year period. New York City would have absorbed this just fine. Population projections for the city over that same time span is an additional 600,000 people. The "small area" that Amazon was relocating to (Queens) is expected to get 150,000 of those people. And we can ignore the assumption that people making 150k a year all want to live in Queens (or LIC) and not Manhattan.
- CPLX 8y ago
  > Not even NY can "very quickly" absorb 25k people in a small area without screwing up quality of life for the people who already live there. Of course it can. This is New York fucking City, there are literally single buildings with that many jobs in them here.
- CydeWeys 8y ago
  You're vastly overstating the effects of 25k people in a metro area that's >20M people strong. You're taking for granted that all of those people are going to live in a few blocks radius in LIC, and that's simply not close to what would've actually happened.
refurb 8y ago
Reminds me of NIMBY’s celebrating stopping new housing to “preserve the character of the neighborhood”.

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.

bilbo0s 8y ago
>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... This. That's exactly why what's now going to happen in NYC is what should happen in all cases. Wish we could get this going in Wisconsin.
jhall1468 8y ago
> Whatever growth occurs in NY will be organic. Not government-subsidized hyper-growth which can throw things out of whack. It's not going to be organic. Instead, these same deals are going to be spread out to a bunch of other companies, most of which will pay less than Amazon on average and the "subsidies" will take longer to be a net positive. Again, people confuse bribes with standard deals. Any company is eligible to receive the tax breaks that Amazon was going to. So New Yorkers have really "won" here. Same subsidies paid out to lower paying companies at a significant slower scale and significantly less economic upside. There's no way to turn this into a positive here.
- airstrike 8y ago
  > It's not going to be organic. Instead, these same deals are going to be spread out to a bunch of other companies, most of which will pay less than Amazon on average and the "subsidies" will take longer to be a net positive. Only if you assume those other companies collectively hold the same bargaining power that Amazon did, which is an assumption I can't agree with

specialp 8y ago

If it was primarily a deal to ease the regulatory burden of building such a big thing, I'd be all for it. Admittedly NY has an issue now with too many layers of bureaucracy. But this isn't entirely what it is about. It was also about large tax concessions when plenty of large companies are hiring tech in NYC without any of them. A skilled employee in NYC does not last very long at all on the job market. The 25k employee campus thing was a sham that was geared to an area like NY from the start. They could never move to a smaller area and still get who they need at that scale. The commodity these days is skilled workforce. Amazon will still be where they can get that commodity, economic incentives aren't needed. Cash is not the limiting factor it is the people they need. It was a smart business move to try to extract some cash too but they did not need that to expand in NY.

jhall1468 8y ago
Ugh... any company moving into NY can get these same large tax concessions. Amazon got nothing special outside of reduced regulatory burden. Why is this not understood? This same subsidy is now going to go to 15 companies who all probably pay less on average than Amazon. There are skilled workforces outside of NY, believe it or not. And they aren't going to go through the regulatory burdens to expand NY to a major campus, since that's really what this was about. To be clear, since this point is being missed by so many people: This wasn't a special deal outside of the reduced regulatory burden. Any company that meets the eligibility requirements will get these exact same "subsidies". What happened here is a bunch of local politicians and local people who are absolutely clueless about how corporate tax reductions work pushed against something that's still going to happen just, at least potentially, not with a high paying company like Amazon.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  > since this point is being missed by so many people I'm not so sure that people are actually missing this point.
- danenania 8y ago
  I see what you're saying, but Amazon pretty much did that to themselves by making the whole thing such a public spectacle. Whether or not they were offered a special deal, that's the impression everyone got, and it should have been predictable that they'd provoke a lot more political backlash with this approach.

spookybones 8y ago

You seem to have no understanding of local culture or the present state of Manhattan and Brooklyn as already massively gutted by wealthy transplants. Ask the majority of people who grew up in San Francisco and Seattle. This is a win. You also seem to have little understanding of the current situation of the NYC subway system infrastructure. You could argue Amazon’s workforce would have forced improvements, except this hasn’t happened in decades despite the increasing wealth and foreign investors here. Just read about Cuomo using $5mil of MTA to bail upstate ski resorts three years prior.

anth_anm 8y ago
As someone in Seattle, what excites me about this is Amazon hopefully thinking twice about trying to extort subsidies Boeing style.

YeahSureWhyNot 8y ago

Amazon is notorious for paying pennies. 25k jobs paying 150k on average is a pipe dream. ask whole foods delivery people for Amazon fresh or whatever its called. they are counting their pay including $5 mandatory tip they collect from customers.

TimJRobinson 8y ago
You're on hacker news and don't understand the difference between the salaries of software engineers and whole foods workers?
jhall1468 8y ago
So few sentences to be so wrong. First of all, these jobs were all white collar. Amazon's current new grad SDE's in NY and SF both have more than $150k in comp. New grads. Second, the food delivery people for Amazon Fresh are employees of Amazon. The Amazon Flex drivers is what you are talking about, and there is no "mandatory" tip for that service. What you're talking about is something Instacart and DoorDash was doing. Those are entirely different companies.
- ctvo 8y ago
  Why is this getting downvoted? It's much more accurate than the parent comment. Down voting because you dislike Amazon isn't a valid reason.
  - nkurz 8y ago
    The information in the second and third paragraphs is great, but it's being downvoted because the first sentence is unnecessarily antagonistic. HN has succeeded as a place for productive discussion for as long as it has because it still has an ethos of a joining together in a search for the truth. Prefacing a good comment with an insult (even one that might be true) damages the fragile ecosystem of cooperation. It's not that this particular insult is so bad on its own, but its presence encourages others to reply with escalated levels of confrontation. Downvotes help prevent the incivility from spiraling out of control.

_jal 8y ago

This is nonsense. I can't say that an enormous giveaway of public funds to attempt to buy jobs is categorically a bad idea in every situation, but if every one I can think of, and certainly this one, it is. It is also amusing that you consider Amazon's assertion about the job count an iron truth of what would have happened. While Amazon does not have Foxconn's long history of scamming municipalities, there is also no reason to weight their words any higher than other companies who have played this game in the past, and the odds look significantly worse than a sure thing viewed that way. Finally, the way you win these games is not to play, no different than the continual sports stadium scams or other "let's you and him fight" grifts.

siidooloo 8y ago

New York City has no current shortage of jobs or growth. Incentives aren’t needed. If they wanted to offer incentives for companies to move to Buffalo, it might be worth it. But NYC will be fine without it.

jhall1468 8y ago
Most companies are eligible for the same incentives. These tax deals will still happen, but they will be for lower paying jobs. Just read the press release at the very least. These are programs that existed before Amazon announced anything.
chrisseaton 8y ago
So why do you think people in NY government wanted to go for it?

dang 8y ago

Please don't get personally acidic in your comments to HN, regardless of how frustrated you feel with other posts. It corrodes discussion badly, and we're trying to stave off that decline here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

dekhn 8y ago
I think you misinterpreted his statement. "Cut off your nose to spite your face" is referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutting_off_the_nose_to_spite_the_face https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutting_off_the_nose_to_spite_... In this context, they're referring to the actions of NY (not the comment they're replying to), and TBH, there's nothing personally acidic; it's just a saying.
- dang 8y ago
  I was referring to feel free to pat yourself on the back for not "falling for it", which was a gratuitous bit of personal sarcasm, just the sort of thing which acidifies online discourse. Also, arguably, the bit about an attempt to revise history is an uncharitable escalation (though not personal).
  - whoisjuan 8y ago
    I think you're reading too much into that phrase. It's a bit condescending but I don't see how it erodes the discussion.
    - dang 8y ago
      It erodes discussion by slowly acidifying it. It's not that the remark was so bad in itself—it's that these effects compound, and if we allow them to compound very much, the problem will no longer be fixable. That's why we often ask people not to do this, even when they only did it a little.
  - dekhn 8y ago
    enough people have chimed in response to you to say this is legitimate discourse within the HN rules.

jlarocco 8y ago

> This tax deal was all about Amazon expanding very quickly. Anybody who thinks that through should see why it's such a terrible idea. Not even NY can "very quickly" absorb 25k people in a small area without screwing up quality of life for the people who already live there. That's a great way to make real estate prices sky rocket and screw over the existing residents. And it'll completely screw up infrastructure and transportation, because there's not enough money to pay for them when the company causing the issues is getting a huge tax break and not paying their fair share, and they're not things that can be fixed quickly in any case. > 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. If the current residents are qualified for $150k a year jobs then they presumably already have one - it's not like there are 25k unemployed software devs waiting around for companies to move to NY. That whole competition was a shameful money grab by Amazon and I'm glad it didn't work out for them.

ctvo 8y ago
> "very quickly" This was over a 10 year period. New York City would have absorbed this just fine. Population projections for the city over that same time span is an additional 600,000 people. The "small area" that Amazon was relocating to (Queens) is expected to get 150,000 of those people. And we can ignore the assumption that people making 150k a year all want to live in Queens (or LIC) and not Manhattan.
CPLX 8y ago
> Not even NY can "very quickly" absorb 25k people in a small area without screwing up quality of life for the people who already live there. Of course it can. This is New York fucking City, there are literally single buildings with that many jobs in them here.
CydeWeys 8y ago
You're vastly overstating the effects of 25k people in a metro area that's >20M people strong. You're taking for granted that all of those people are going to live in a few blocks radius in LIC, and that's simply not close to what would've actually happened.

refurb 8y ago

Reminds me of NIMBY’s celebrating stopping new housing to “preserve the character of the neighborhood”.