I get what he’s saying.

Now review the deal from the point of view of a guy with a family renting in Queens.

Way different.

quote:

Originally posted by Steve Miller:
I get what he’s saying.

Now review the deal from the point of view of a guy with a family renting in Queens.

Way different.

Does the guy have a job? Does his wife?

What kinds of jobs do they have? Would they benefit from an extra several thousand consumers in that area?

Do they have kids? Do you think the new Amazon employees might put pressure on the local government to upgrade the schools?

It’s nowhere near as clearcut as you want to make it sound.

Read through the demographics Here and let’s have a discussion.

Pay attention to renters vs. owners, median household income. Ethnicities. Housing stock.

Contrast that with Amazon’s proposal to include influx of singles and DINKs making maybe $150K/year. It’s a bogus number because of the number of employees making 5X that but it’s what we have. Read alongside the wretched performance of Manhattan public schools - and how little a well compensated populace improves public schools in dense urban areas. LA has the same problem which is why I don’t live there.

Reach out a bit and learn just how nasty a typical rental is in Queens. Amazon DINKs aren’t going to tolerate it (no air conditioning? Dicey heat? No parking?) and landlords will have to upgrade. Rents, already stupid high for what amounts to genteel squalor, will skyrocket. Joe Sixpack, a recent immigrant from somewhere, is hosed.

The city, and the guy who wrote the piece, love the idea. Queens uses an archaic property tax model based on annual appraisals. That’s where the $27 Bil. comes from. Rents go up, values go up. Little guys get forced out. City makes bank. Developers make bank. Amazon makes bank. Residents have to move out - to where?

Jon is a really progressive guy but is willing to campaign against rep over this. If he’s angry that the deal was not negotiated to benefit the people who live in Queens I hope he’ll tell me so I can send a check to her opponent. OTOH if this rep was genuinely looking out for people who actually live in Queens, then I think his anger is misplaced.

So Quirt, what are you thinking?

New, improved living quarters then - surely they create opportunities for the locals?

Nope, and I can cite any number of examples. What you get when you rapidly gentrify and urban area is high commercial rents. Small business can’t compete and bail. Big box stores, fast food franchises and other LCD business eases take over. Can’t blame them - DINKs like ‘em. Lots of minimum wage jobs for everyone! Stockholders - who don’t live in Queens - benefit. Everyone else gets hosed.

I’ve seen deals where everyone benefits but this Amazon deal was not one of them.

Well, this is what you get without Amazon. Fare increases and threats of service cuts for the subway system.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0...News&pgtype=Homepage

quote:

Originally posted by Steve Miller:
Read through the demographics Here and let’s have a discussion.

Pay attention to renters vs. owners, median household income. Ethnicities. Housing stock.

Contrast that with Amazon’s proposal to include influx of singles and DINKs making maybe $150K/year. It’s a bogus number because of the number of employees making 5X that but it’s what we have. Read alongside the wretched performance of Manhattan public schools - and how little a well compensated populace improves public schools in dense urban areas. LA has the same problem which is why I don’t live there.

Reach out a bit and learn just how nasty a typical rental is in Queens. Amazon DINKs aren’t going to tolerate it (no air conditioning? Dicey heat? No parking?) and landlords will have to upgrade. Rents, already stupid high for what amounts to genteel squalor, will skyrocket. Joe Sixpack, a recent immigrant from somewhere, is hosed.

The city, and the guy who wrote the piece, love the idea. Queens uses an archaic property tax model based on annual appraisals. That’s where the $27 Bil. comes from. Rents go up, values go up. Little guys get forced out. City makes bank. Developers make bank. Amazon makes bank. Residents have to move out - to where?

Jon is a really progressive guy but is willing to campaign against rep over this. If he’s angry that the deal was not negotiated to benefit the people who live in Queens I hope he’ll tell me so I can send a check to her opponent. OTOH if this rep was genuinely looking out for people who actually live in Queens, then I think his anger is misplaced.

So Quirt, what are you thinking?

What I'm thinking is that $30+ billion pays for a lot of infrastructure, and everyone benefits from that.

What I'm thinking is that Amazon wouldn't tolerate crappy subway service or subway service cuts for its employees, and so there'd be a major new player lobbying to get the subway's problems rectified. Except that major new player is gone now.

What I'm thinking is that service cuts on the subway won't hurt the investment bankers and the lawyers and the CEOs and all the other people who can afford to take car services. I'm thinking that the people who actually need the subway to get back and forth will get hurt more than anyone else. Joe Sixpack.

What I'm thinking is that you don't find the money to increase teacher pay and garbage collector pay and other public services unless you increase the tax base or increase taxes. If you increase taxes, you either hurt the middle class, or you concentrate the new taxes on the upper class, which is just going to encourage people to work from home on a full-time basis. I can't speak to investment bankers, just lawyers, but lawyers really don't need to show up at the office any more. They can set up home offices in Westchester or New Jersey or Connecticut. If you stop showing up at your NYC office, NYC will lose its claim to income taxes on those high-paying salaries. The world is changing, working remotely isn't just feasible now, it's actually pretty damned easy. What isn't easy is for NY to give up those income taxes.

And really, that's a very NYC-specific problem, because NYC relies more on local income taxes than most places. And, except for DC, I'm guessing more people commute into NYC from other states than just about any place else. (Chicago isn't quite as close to Wisconsin or Indiana; LA and SF and SD and Dallas and Houston and Atlanta and Cleveland and Miami and Orlando are too far from just about any other state; Boston can support some commuters from NH and maybe Maine, but not to the same extent; Philadelphia can support commuters from NJ but is surrounded on three sides by Pennsylvania; etc.

So really the best option is to increase the tax base, unless you call out the torches and pitchforks and chase away the largest potential employer in years.

What I'm thinking is that the reflexive liberal reaction to Amazon was penny wise and pound foolish. And that the people who will pay the cost of that foolishness are the schoolteachers and garbage collectors and Joe Sixpacks. But, five or ten years from now, Joe Sixpack won't draw a direct line from the Amazon decision to his worsening problems. There'll be too many intervening events, and his attention span isn't that long.

That's what I'm thinking.

Come back, Shane! New York loves you!

quote:

The executives also learned of an open letter being arranged for publication in The New York Times on Friday, also urging Mr. Bezos, the company’s chief executive, to reverse course again and build the campus in Long Island City, Queens.

The letter was signed by more than 70 supportive unions including the AFL-CIO, local businesses and business leaders, community groups and elected officials including Representatives Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn, a top Democrat, Max Rose, a first-term Democrat from Staten Island, and Carolyn Maloney, whose district encompasses the Amazon site, and the former mayor David N. Dinkins.

The letter said that Mr. Cuomo “will take personal responsibility for the project’s state approval,” and Mayor Bill de Blasio “will work together with the governor to manage the community development process.”

* * * *

One thing that has changed in the last two weeks: Ms. Stewart-Cousins, the State Senate majority leader, withdrew her nomination of Senator Michael Gianaris to the obscure Public Authorities Control Board. The position would have given Mr. Gianaris, who represents Long Island City, the ability to vote down the development project for Amazon when it came before the board in about a year’s time.

But Mr. Cuomo refused to appoint Mr. Gianaris, who declined to comment on the governor’s efforts, or to formally reject him. And so last week, Ms. Stewart-Cousins selected another Queens representative, Leroy Comrie, to sit on the board, a person who would be more likely to get the governor’s approval.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0.../amazon-hq2-nyc.html

quote:

That's what I'm thinking.

Metoo...

Three words:

Homeless.

In.

Seattle.


Joe Sixpack has either been pushed so far out into the outer suburbs that living anywhere near Amazonia is out of the question... now he's in a different city, school district, and tax base. And he probably found a new job that didn't include a 30 or 50 mile commute each way. Of course, his job probably moved, too, since all of the industrial businesses around South Lake Union have been displaced by luxury high-rises to house the Amazonians.

Or, Joe and his family are living in an RV on a side street without electricity or water and having to move every five days because he is an eyesore. That's if he's lucky. Not so lucky is in a tent.

Having good, healthy businesses with long-term growth potential in your city is good. Great, even. But Amazon has proven time and again that they are not a good neighbor to have and their impact on the existing economy, infrastructure, and culture isn't just disruptive, it's devastating.

Many of us here were delighted to see Amazon look elsewhere to build HQ2 to ease the pressure on Seattle. But we're not surprised that they are not being welcomed with open arms.

The New York Times editorial board wants the deal back.

quote:

Those opposed to the New York project — a distinct minority of people in the city and the state — were not without cause for rage. The subways are rickety, the schools are dysfunctional, the rent is too damn high and getting higher. And the deal included $3 billion in tax benefits for a trillion-dollar corporation.

But progressives shouldn’t stand athwart progress, yelling stop. It’s not like that $3 billion can now be applied to city needs, as some seemed to think; it vanished along with the $27 billion in tax revenue that could, in fact, have helped address city needs. If the New York has any hope of remedying its problems, it will need a robust tax base spread across many sectors. Real-world progressive governance requires revenue.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0...nion&pgtype=Homepage

quote:

Originally posted by QuirtEvans:
The New York Times editorial board wants the deal back.

quote:

Those opposed to the New York project — a distinct minority of people in the city and the state — were not without cause for rage. The subways are rickety, the schools are dysfunctional, the rent is too damn high and getting higher. And the deal included $3 billion in tax benefits for a trillion-dollar corporation.

But progressives shouldn’t stand athwart progress, yelling stop. It’s not like that $3 billion can now be applied to city needs, as some seemed to think; it vanished along with the $27 billion in tax revenue that could, in fact, have helped address city needs. If the New York has any hope of remedying its problems, it will need a robust tax base spread across many sectors. Real-world progressive governance requires revenue.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0...nion&pgtype=Homepage

**** them.

quote:

Originally posted by Daniel:

quote:

Originally posted by QuirtEvans:
The New York Times editorial board wants the deal back.

quote:

Those opposed to the New York project — a distinct minority of people in the city and the state — were not without cause for rage. The subways are rickety, the schools are dysfunctional, the rent is too damn high and getting higher. And the deal included $3 billion in tax benefits for a trillion-dollar corporation.

But progressives shouldn’t stand athwart progress, yelling stop. It’s not like that $3 billion can now be applied to city needs, as some seemed to think; it vanished along with the $27 billion in tax revenue that could, in fact, have helped address city needs. If the New York has any hope of remedying its problems, it will need a robust tax base spread across many sectors. Real-world progressive governance requires revenue.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0...nion&pgtype=Homepage

**** them.

And, apparently, the 70% of New Yorkers who want the Amazon deal.

PJ, how much of Seattle's problem is due to Amazon, and how much is part of the general issue with housing costs in cities up and down the Pacific coastline (Vancouver, BC, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco)?

I am in total agreement with you regarding the gentrification of Seattle and the spiraling cost of housing. However, homelessness has been an issue there (and in Portland) since the 1980s (when I lived there) if not earlier. Many of the homeless are there because of friendly laws, and a desire to be homeless by choice. This does not apply to everyone, of course, and most particularly doesn't apply to those who are mentally ill.

But the housing shortage can also be attributed to Asian speculative purchases, as many of the apartments, condominiums and houses are owned by non-US residents and are vacant.

It's not an easy problem to solve.

Amazon's hard bargain extends past NY

quote:

And last year in Seattle, the company’s hometown, Amazon halted plans to build one tower and threatened to lease out one under construction when local officials pushed a tax on large employers. The City Council passed a smaller version of the tax, but the company helped finance a successful opposition to repeal it. Now, Amazon plans to lease out its space in the tower under construction anyway.

quote:

Originally posted by QuirtEvans:

quote:

Originally posted by Daniel:

quote:

Originally posted by QuirtEvans:
The New York Times editorial board wants the deal back.

quote:

Those opposed to the New York project — a distinct minority of people in the city and the state — were not without cause for rage. The subways are rickety, the schools are dysfunctional, the rent is too damn high and getting higher. And the deal included $3 billion in tax benefits for a trillion-dollar corporation.

But progressives shouldn’t stand athwart progress, yelling stop. It’s not like that $3 billion can now be applied to city needs, as some seemed to think; it vanished along with the $27 billion in tax revenue that could, in fact, have helped address city needs. If the New York has any hope of remedying its problems, it will need a robust tax base spread across many sectors. Real-world progressive governance requires revenue.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0...nion&pgtype=Homepage

**** them.

And, apparently, the 70% of New Yorkers who want the Amazon deal.

I read the press release.