5 ms·

The backlash was mostly about the tax breaks and government subsidies that would have been given. The argument was that New York is New York and doesn’t need to

The backlash was mostly about the tax breaks and government subsidies that would have been given. The argument was that New York is New York and doesn’t need to bribe companies to put big offices here.

arcanus 8y ago
Given the withdrawal of Amazon, didn't that invalidate the argument?
- code4tee 8y ago
  Amazon didn’t withdraw from NYC. They still have around 5k employees here. Meanwhile Google is significantly expanding their NYC offices and nobody had to bribe them to do it.
  - aetherson 8y ago
    Are you sure about that? Giving tax breaks to large employers is pretty standard practice. What was unusual about the Amazon debacle was how public it was.
  - graeme 8y ago
    Amazon's still expanding in nyc too. But....not 25,000 employees. Does Google have 25,000 employees in NYC?
    - DelaneyM 8y ago
      At its current rate of growth it will by the time Amazon would have.
  - coredog64 8y ago
    Pretty sure Google is eligible for the same Empire State development grants that made up $2.5B of the $3B that Amazon was going to get.
    - vonmoltke 8y ago
      Actually, the city credits (which constituted about $1.3B) are not available for businesses in Manhattan south of 96th St. That said, Lower Manhattan has its own incentive programs. That said, I'm really getting annoyed at the people who are both ignorant of how Amazon was going to get its $3B in credits and assuming that other companies, like Google, are getting none simply because nobody talks about it.
- lmm 8y ago
  See what happens to the lots Amazon was going to build on. If they're sitting empty in a year or two, sure. If another company (or dozens of smaller companies) snaps them up and builds similar amounts of offices to what Amazon was planning, nah. I'm betting on the latter.
  - avbanks 8y ago
    Well you might be wrong, the land will now be redeveloped for condos 1,000 total. " Patchett did toss out a scrap of news about what’s next for Long Island City. He said city land that had been slated for the tech giant’s corporate towers will instead become a mix of homes and businesses. That, after all, had been the original plan before New York decided to drop it and go a-courtin’ for the company. The new-old project will consist of a thousand residential units—two hundred and fifty of which will be affordable. The neighborhood will also gain 100,000 square feet of light manufacturing and industrial space, ground floor retail, a cultural center, a 600-seat middle school, and a one-acre park." http://gothamist.com/2019/02/22/amazon_blame_game_patchett.php http://gothamist.com/2019/02/22/amazon_blame_game_patchett.p...
    - untog 8y ago
      Given the state of housing in NYC that sounds like a far more desirable outcome than Amazon taking up all that space.
    - CPLX 8y ago
      > a thousand residential units—two hundred and fifty of which will be affordable. The neighborhood will also gain 100,000 square feet of light manufacturing and industrial space, ground floor retail, a cultural center, a 600-seat middle school, and a one-acre park. Those things sound like a much better addition to the area than one Amazon.
TuringNYC 8y ago
They definitely didn't need to bribe Amazon. There was a time to argue against that. True leadership would have been to have these protests when the incentives package was put together, not later when we already bagged the win and would lose everything.
- neom 8y ago
  I don't think any leadership in the world could have made it so that Corey Johnson didn't try to prove a point to Blasio and Cuomo. I went to both council hearings and it didn't seem to me like any incentives or tax breaks would be acceptable for big business, even the very same current tax breaks any company of that scale could apply for and get in new york state.
- maxsilver 8y ago
  > True leadership would have been to have these protests when the incentives package was put together, Which is hard to do, since Amazon convinced most city leaders across the country to keep the majority of the incentives secret, and therefore no one could know how bad it was until it was already too late. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/05/technology/amazon-headquarters-hq2.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/05/technology/amazon-headqua... There's a strong argument here that the protesters were the only people involved in this whole ordeal that actually did their job properly.
  - pboutros 8y ago
    To add to this -- even when it was a secret, they were still protesting the idea of providing those incentives.
- pgodzin 8y ago
  Except they weren't given a chance to be part of that negotiation process, it was done in secret with minimal public input
- mandevil 8y ago
  Amazon figured this out already and took steps to prevent a backlash while the packages were being put together. This was why Amazon required NDA's from every single bid team, to prevent anyone outside from knowing what the package looked like when it was being put together. So they reaped exactly what they sowed: they look terrible and ineffective, because they tried to keep it all secret and present the public with a fait acompli.
umanwizard 8y ago
That was one reason for the backlash, but it wasn't "mostly" about that. I guarantee that people like AOC would have been against Amazon HQ2, subsidy or not. Edit to explain further: much of the backlash was about concerns like gentrification, or the inability of local infrastructure to handle 25k new residents.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- CPLX 8y ago
  No it wasn't. It was about giving them taxpayer money to do it. Not that many people here care much about limiting development in general, especially in dense center city areas like the East River waterfront. People were pissed that we were considering giving money to the richest guy in the world to do something that nearly every company seems desperately interested in doing anyways, namely locating businesses within a half mile radius of midtown manhattan.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
vonmoltke 8y ago
> The backlash was mostly about the tax breaks and government subsidies that would have been given. The argument was that New York is New York and doesn’t need to bribe companies to put big offices here. If that is the case, where are the calls to end the Industrial & Commercial Abatement Program[1], the Relocation and Employment Assistance Program[2], and the Excelsior Jobs Program[3]? That is where the vast majority of the credits came from. The backlash was because it was Amazon that wanted to take advantage of those programs, and do so after that ridiculous and condescending dog-and-pony show they called a search. Now, some subset of opposition surely is from people who think no company that wants to build a large complex in LIC with 25,000 employees deserves billions in subsidies. If that is the case, those people need to work against the root causes and stop acting like this $3B package was some special deal for Amazon. [1] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/finance/benefits/benefits-industrial-and-commercial-abatement-program-icap.page https://www1.nyc.gov/site/finance/benefits/benefits-industri... [2] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/finance/benefits/business-reap.page https://www1.nyc.gov/site/finance/benefits/business-reap.pag... [3] https://esd.ny.gov/excelsior-jobs-program https://esd.ny.gov/excelsior-jobs-program
- untog 8y ago
  I don't think it's all that surprising that individuals are more motivated to protest something specific rather than the economic development programs that allow it to happen. I (and many others I've spoken to) don't have a problem with the idea of economic subsidy to support businesses moving to NYC, but objected to a company the size (and success) of Amazon doing so. I can imagine there would be widespread support for a move to limit these programs to smaller startup companies, and maybe we'll even see some local politicians propose that. But there's a city/state issue here. Few people would object to Amazon creating a massive HQ and 25k jobs in Albany, even if they would in NYC. So any answer would have to take that into account too.
  - vonmoltke 8y ago
    See, that's the thing. Talking about the $3B in credits like it was all a special deal for Amazon hides the scope of these programs and blocks those conversations on what limits (if any) they should have. You won't see widespread support for limiting these programs arise at all if the people who would support it don't realize that they are hanging out waiting for the next huge corporation to come along and take advantage of them without the self-important bullshit Amazon pulled.

arcanus 8y ago

Given the withdrawal of Amazon, didn't that invalidate the argument?

code4tee 8y ago
Amazon didn’t withdraw from NYC. They still have around 5k employees here. Meanwhile Google is significantly expanding their NYC offices and nobody had to bribe them to do it.
- aetherson 8y ago
  Are you sure about that? Giving tax breaks to large employers is pretty standard practice. What was unusual about the Amazon debacle was how public it was.
- graeme 8y ago
  Amazon's still expanding in nyc too. But....not 25,000 employees. Does Google have 25,000 employees in NYC?
  - DelaneyM 8y ago
    At its current rate of growth it will by the time Amazon would have.
- coredog64 8y ago
  Pretty sure Google is eligible for the same Empire State development grants that made up $2.5B of the $3B that Amazon was going to get.
  - vonmoltke 8y ago
    Actually, the city credits (which constituted about $1.3B) are not available for businesses in Manhattan south of 96th St. That said, Lower Manhattan has its own incentive programs. That said, I'm really getting annoyed at the people who are both ignorant of how Amazon was going to get its $3B in credits and assuming that other companies, like Google, are getting none simply because nobody talks about it.
lmm 8y ago
See what happens to the lots Amazon was going to build on. If they're sitting empty in a year or two, sure. If another company (or dozens of smaller companies) snaps them up and builds similar amounts of offices to what Amazon was planning, nah. I'm betting on the latter.
- avbanks 8y ago
  Well you might be wrong, the land will now be redeveloped for condos 1,000 total. " Patchett did toss out a scrap of news about what’s next for Long Island City. He said city land that had been slated for the tech giant’s corporate towers will instead become a mix of homes and businesses. That, after all, had been the original plan before New York decided to drop it and go a-courtin’ for the company. The new-old project will consist of a thousand residential units—two hundred and fifty of which will be affordable. The neighborhood will also gain 100,000 square feet of light manufacturing and industrial space, ground floor retail, a cultural center, a 600-seat middle school, and a one-acre park." http://gothamist.com/2019/02/22/amazon_blame_game_patchett.php http://gothamist.com/2019/02/22/amazon_blame_game_patchett.p...
  - untog 8y ago
    Given the state of housing in NYC that sounds like a far more desirable outcome than Amazon taking up all that space.
  - CPLX 8y ago
    > a thousand residential units—two hundred and fifty of which will be affordable. The neighborhood will also gain 100,000 square feet of light manufacturing and industrial space, ground floor retail, a cultural center, a 600-seat middle school, and a one-acre park. Those things sound like a much better addition to the area than one Amazon.

TuringNYC 8y ago

They definitely didn't need to bribe Amazon. There was a time to argue against that. True leadership would have been to have these protests when the incentives package was put together, not later when we already bagged the win and would lose everything.

neom 8y ago
I don't think any leadership in the world could have made it so that Corey Johnson didn't try to prove a point to Blasio and Cuomo. I went to both council hearings and it didn't seem to me like any incentives or tax breaks would be acceptable for big business, even the very same current tax breaks any company of that scale could apply for and get in new york state.
maxsilver 8y ago
> True leadership would have been to have these protests when the incentives package was put together, Which is hard to do, since Amazon convinced most city leaders across the country to keep the majority of the incentives secret, and therefore no one could know how bad it was until it was already too late. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/05/technology/amazon-headquarters-hq2.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/05/technology/amazon-headqua... There's a strong argument here that the protesters were the only people involved in this whole ordeal that actually did their job properly.
- pboutros 8y ago
  To add to this -- even when it was a secret, they were still protesting the idea of providing those incentives.
pgodzin 8y ago
Except they weren't given a chance to be part of that negotiation process, it was done in secret with minimal public input
mandevil 8y ago
Amazon figured this out already and took steps to prevent a backlash while the packages were being put together. This was why Amazon required NDA's from every single bid team, to prevent anyone outside from knowing what the package looked like when it was being put together. So they reaped exactly what they sowed: they look terrible and ineffective, because they tried to keep it all secret and present the public with a fait acompli.

umanwizard 8y ago

That was one reason for the backlash, but it wasn't "mostly" about that. I guarantee that people like AOC would have been against Amazon HQ2, subsidy or not. Edit to explain further: much of the backlash was about concerns like gentrification, or the inability of local infrastructure to handle 25k new residents.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
CPLX 8y ago
No it wasn't. It was about giving them taxpayer money to do it. Not that many people here care much about limiting development in general, especially in dense center city areas like the East River waterfront. People were pissed that we were considering giving money to the richest guy in the world to do something that nearly every company seems desperately interested in doing anyways, namely locating businesses within a half mile radius of midtown manhattan.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

vonmoltke 8y ago

> The backlash was mostly about the tax breaks and government subsidies that would have been given. The argument was that New York is New York and doesn’t need to bribe companies to put big offices here. If that is the case, where are the calls to end the Industrial & Commercial Abatement Program[1], the Relocation and Employment Assistance Program[2], and the Excelsior Jobs Program[3]? That is where the vast majority of the credits came from. The backlash was because it was Amazon that wanted to take advantage of those programs, and do so after that ridiculous and condescending dog-and-pony show they called a search. Now, some subset of opposition surely is from people who think no company that wants to build a large complex in LIC with 25,000 employees deserves billions in subsidies. If that is the case, those people need to work against the root causes and stop acting like this $3B package was some special deal for Amazon. [1] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/finance/benefits/benefits-industrial-and-commercial-abatement-program-icap.page https://www1.nyc.gov/site/finance/benefits/benefits-industri... [2] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/finance/benefits/business-reap.page https://www1.nyc.gov/site/finance/benefits/business-reap.pag... [3] https://esd.ny.gov/excelsior-jobs-program https://esd.ny.gov/excelsior-jobs-program

untog 8y ago
I don't think it's all that surprising that individuals are more motivated to protest something specific rather than the economic development programs that allow it to happen. I (and many others I've spoken to) don't have a problem with the idea of economic subsidy to support businesses moving to NYC, but objected to a company the size (and success) of Amazon doing so. I can imagine there would be widespread support for a move to limit these programs to smaller startup companies, and maybe we'll even see some local politicians propose that. But there's a city/state issue here. Few people would object to Amazon creating a massive HQ and 25k jobs in Albany, even if they would in NYC. So any answer would have to take that into account too.
- vonmoltke 8y ago
  See, that's the thing. Talking about the $3B in credits like it was all a special deal for Amazon hides the scope of these programs and blocks those conversations on what limits (if any) they should have. You won't see widespread support for limiting these programs arise at all if the people who would support it don't realize that they are hanging out waiting for the next huge corporation to come along and take advantage of them without the self-important bullshit Amazon pulled.