NY Gov. Cuomo, NYC Mayor DiBlasio run a full page ad in the New York Times begging Amazon to come back to Long Island City
- Thread starter Invisible Cities
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Didn't they always have NYC offices? I think that's a separate expansion from the Long Island City plan.
Government officials begging a corporation to come to their purview and not pay taxes. Fuck right off.
Yep but jobs are jobs (maybe not the 10,000 mentioned jobs) and Amazon appears to be expanding.
Yes, this is them expanding their Manhattan location and jobs.
Also, I'm terrified NYC is going to suffer like the West thanks to the tech sector :(
Amazon was always likely to come to NYC without incentives. Difference that Amazon moved into Manhattan, not Queens. That won't do anything for AOC's constituents in the form of economic stimulus. All that juicy growth, increased neighborhood economic activity and tax receipts will flow through to Manhattan for the most part, not other parts of the city that could have needed it, further increasing the imbalance between boroughs.
AOC spinning it off as a "win" is rather misleading if you ask me.
Yup. This is fine.
Keep expanding in Manhattan, no one making under 6 figures is trying to earnestly live in downtown.
But yea, how fucking embarrassing for Cuomo that Amazon was going to expand regardless.
It sure seems like a win to people in my bracket.
Amazon was always in NYC. They've always been hiring in Manhattan. This seems like a reach to spin a win. We wont be getting the amount of jobs and growth we would have gotten with HQ2.
And yet Long Island City has been growing at a rapid pace with a real estate rush and the lowest unemployment rate on record. It's just as attractive to businesses with or without Amazon, who did the legwork for everyone else by targeting them as their preferred location.
Amazon's former HQ2 location is doing just fine without Amazon (Vox)
Based on the responses to her tweet, and people in this thread, people are under the impression that Amazon is now coming to NYC in the same fashion without any of the tax benefits. That's completely false. Amazon was shopping for office space in Manhattan for the past 3 years, long before HQ2 was decided on. Also, Amazon is already here and have consistently been expanding. This simply isn't the same thing as HQ2 and would have happened regardless.
Any company that isn't trash will come to NYC anyway to benefit from the superior density and high concentration of qualified, diverse potential hirees...and functional public transportation/infrastructure and proximity to shipping/ports and the fact that people continue to want to be there.
Someone will be smart and make use of that space in Long Island City, even if it's not Amazon - and they'll pay the taxes to do it, too.
Someone will be smart and make use of that space in Long Island City, even if it's not Amazon - and they'll pay the taxes to do it, too.
Yep LIC is trucking along just fine without giving Amazon hand outs. All they did was give their spot to someone who was willing to pay.
Don't be so sure about that. The Amazon HQ2 thing was only unique because it had a lot of publicity, but tech companies in NYC get all kinds of tax incentives to hire here, including Amazon in their Manhattan locations. This was part of Bloomberg's initiative to lure tech companies into the city. Almost every major tech company (among many others in large industries) skimp on paying the tax rates they should be paying.
LOTS of companies get tax incentives to set up shop and hire here, in every possible industry. The issue isn't the incentives, it's "how much" and "to which companies". It'd be one thing if you were giving sweetheart breaks and helipads to the *next* Amazon in a new groundbreaking industry to establish NYC as the flagship city for that industry...but it's Amazon, who already is here, already likely received incentives for their existing placement here, and already makes insane revenue/profit while also accelerating certain socioeconomic issues in the areas it is in (when on its own).
I'm not worried about LIC or NYC attracting any company ever. It's NYC.
AOC's constituents were more concerned with the rapid rise (even faster than they're already going up) in rental prices that would have occurred.
Exactly
Its a bad deal that strengthens the power of an already dominate corporation instead of boosting new industry and growth
This kind of shit should be outlawed for publicly owned companies honestly
Yup. Sadly prices went up by a lot due to the speculation and didn't drop by that much even after HQ2 was scrapped.
Btw, don't get it twisted - I wanted to see HQ2 get built in the area (ideally Newark), and I'd have lived if it came to Queens because I want to see NYC get everything always, lol...but the concerns and problems being cited here which stopped it are clear and valid ones full-stop.
Watching Amazon and similar companies still expanding out here without additional super-special deals on top of whatever they may already have or loopholes they already exploit is exactly as expected. Once again...it's NYC. The only reason you don't come here is if your industry doesn't make sense to be HQd here (like if you're a big agriculture firm).
Watching Amazon and similar companies still expanding out here without additional super-special deals on top of whatever they may already have or loopholes they already exploit is exactly as expected. Once again...it's NYC. The only reason you don't come here is if your industry doesn't make sense to be HQd here (like if you're a big agriculture firm).
The irony is that the "reliable" transportation will get worse with congestion and continued maintenance because it isn't being updated significantly fast enough to match the number of occupants growing in the city.
We NYers should band together and buy a full page ad to tell Diblasio and Cuomo to fuck right the fuck off.
Yeah, even Staten Island has better highway infrastructure than LIC. BQE is basically LA level of congestion.
They want to lease out the reminding half of Governor's Island and build their fancy HQ? I got no problem with it.
The shitty state of the MTA is entirely the fault of the state government and their management of the MTA and its employees.
The MTA IS NOT at peak ridership Peak ridership and much better operations happened in 1946 before the city bankrupted the private companies by refusing to allow a fare increase for three decades.
I can't tell if you're in agreement or disagreement with what I said.
While the MTA is doomed to fail at this point because of a intentionally obfuscated governance and labor structure, the presumption that NYC is growing in population or the subway is beyond its capacity is incorrect.
When did I say it's beyond capacity? You went off on a tangent in response to something I didn't say. I said the number of occupants in the city continues to grow and, in other words, outweigh the maintenance of the MTA system, which isn't wrong. It'll grow increasingly strained. It'll function, but it gets more and more uncomfortable as the trains are a) just as slow as ever and continue to have delays and b) more people continue riding them. I never said it reached maximum occupancy.
Because that's how you attract business. See: Atlanta/Georgia with the movie industry, Foxconn's factory in Wisconsin (not a resounding success though), Las Vegas attracting the Raiders, etc.
At what point did we as a nation start paying for business to expand ? They are growing and need to expand so why cant that just do it organically rather than through bidding wars. They would open new facilities if they didn't need them so it isn't like they are being altruistic.
Exactly. The natural expansion into the city is the point. It's why handing out corporate welfare is bullshit and should be made illegal at the federal level.
It should be either everyone gets access to the incentive or no one does. None of this targeted incentive nonsense to the existing incumbents of power.
If this country could do one good thing, it would be to knock the rich off their pedestals.
Yes, obviouslty they're not building a giant HQ in LIC anymore. The point is that they claimed they felt unwelcomed and they would take jobs elsewhere. They're still expanding here without taking over a whole neighborhood and getting special treatment to do so.
Yes this is true. If your city needs to lure a company for jobs then subsidies absolutely make sense. Problem is NYC isn't exactly hurting for tech jobs, there wasn't anything in place about them seriously having to hire local (if you're going to mention cities that subsidize the movie industry, you're arguing in bad faith or just outright ill informed for not mentioning that) and the amount of subsidies provided was ridiculous and was made behind closed doors with no input from actual local people/govt.
Yes this is true. If your city needs to lure a company for jobs then subsidies absolutely make sense. Problem is NYC isn't exactly hurting for tech jobs, there wasn't anything in place about them seriously having to hire local (if you're going to mention cities that subsidize the movie industry, you're arguing in bad faith or just outright ill informed for not mentioning that) and the amount of subsidies provided was ridiculous and was made behind closed doors with no input from actual local people/govt.
EDIT: oops, somehow double posted
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yeah although it's really hard to prove the counter factual exactly because New York has these tax incentives and subsidies. But my guess is that they have such a large amount of human capital that probably, they don't need as much subsidies from the government as in some other states.
