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Comment by ufodino | Hacker News Reader

Does anybody actually want this to happen in their city? Living in Seattle, I wouldn't wish it on any city.

I'm going to go against the consensus here and agree with you. Sure it would be great if Amazon moved to your city and added jobs, but that's not what they are doing. They are trying to start a bidding war between cities so that in the end the city gets as little value as possible and Amazon gets the most. This is especially true if you end up in a situation where Amazon gets some tax break for X years and the city expects a return in X+5 years, but Amazon just moved again after the tax break is gone.

Cities do better when they set themselves up to be attractive to companies naturally, not when they try to bribe an company to come to them

Also where does that bribe money actually come from? The answer, local shops and companys- constantly threatened by amazon- pay the bribe to give there enemy a free lunch.

To me, this sounds like it's the perspective of a pampered person.

You really don't think Amazon opening a campus in a city with stagnating or negative job growth would be good for that city?

> To me, this sounds like it's the perspective of a pampered person.

It's called NIMBY.

Related reading: "..cries of Not In My Backyard are quietly costing the United States economy trillions. " => https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2015/07/30/ni...

It doesn't help the people currently there at all. The only people begging for it to come are those who can already afford to live in a place where rents are through the roof.

This only ends up helping the already wealthy.

> This only ends up helping the already wealthy

How? Care to elaborate?

Guessing they mean land-owners.

Even property owners can feel the effects.

In Austin Texas, the historical legacy of racial segregation meant that there have been areas of the city that were predominantly hispanic or black, for generations. The modest homes in these neighborhoods were paid off long ago and passed down through the families.

When the development boom hit Austin, even the parts of these neighborhoods that didn't undergo gentrification have seen a massive pressure on the folks who did live there in the form of explosive property taxes.

For many of these folks, this has pushed them out from their family homes because they can no longer afford the taxes on their properties, despite owning them outright. Of course there is an argument to be had about why these folks can't afford the taxes but heavily under-girding that is the same neglect and marginalization their populations have always faced.

So even owning property is not always enough to insulate someone from the whims of explosive development aimed at those with extremely large incomes.

How long have you been in Seattle? Because Seattle did NOT used to be a wealthy city (at least compared to Seattle now).

There is nothing to say that a city with a better handle of its zoning issues wouldn't improve from a business bump.

Sure it does. It benefits homeowners and businesses, and anyone who benefits from a broader tax base.

It DOESN'T help people who are on the margins, though, unless they can get a job at the new employer, or unless public services improve more quickly than housing costs go up.

I think it would depend on what you're defining as 'that city.' If you mean the legal entity that enjoys tax revenues then yes, but for the people already living there they won't be getting those $100,000 Amazon jobs. So that means a bunch of people from outside the area suddenly moving in with a lot of money to throw around.

Sure, there will also be network effects where service level jobs expand but having been priced out of their former neighborhoods, watching people with perhaps little respect for the local culture or history coming in and changing things, I don't think the prospect of Amazon's new HQ is really all that positive for a city struggling as you hypothesize.

Exactly. Most of America would love an employer to come in and bid up jobs. Most of America doesn't suffer from insane housing prices.

Most of America, or Americans?

Outside of a few major metro areas, real estate prices are still tame.

Right, but a huge amount of the population is concentrated in those areas,

Speaking for Chicago: f*ck yeah! I imagine your issues with Amazon evolve around traffic congestion and competition for housing... Chicago is a much larger city and one that experienced years of decline. Adding an Amazon will speed up the redevelopment of whatever part of the city they enter. Chicago is already second behind Seattle in construction cranes and building condos like crazy. Still, notwithstanding the tax breaks and cheap land coming Amazon’s way, there’s almost nothing but upside for this city, because the infrastructure here is that good. Perhaps some would argue against that notion, given that we have traffic too. I’d argue that past patterns of suburban development caused that. That’s why the city is sucking all the corporate jobs right back into the city (McDs, Motorola, et al).

Plus, Chicago's already got a rich tradition of luring Seattle companies.

Living in Chicago, I can say that at least the people I've talked to, and the feeling on r/chicago, is that people are really excited about it. Chicago isn't afraid to build big. There are already a few massive sites in former industrial wastelands close to downtown that have submitted bids. And there are currently tons of high capacity housing projects recently completed and soon to be competed, so no one is afraid the city is going to turn into SF. The only place you can't build big is in the park space by the lake.

What problems were associated with it?

Plenty of high paying jobs, prestige for the city, and the attraction of other high-tech companies to try to attract the same talent pool.

Very good problems for a city to have.

Luckily, if you'd like to avoid these things, there are plenty of US cities to choose from!

How many US cities have my family? just 1.

We could all move, but that's out of my control.

Unlike the condescending/facetious replies to your question that pretended people have a problem with progress and prosperity, I'll try to actually answer some of the concerns.

I live in Chicago, which is regarded as a strong candidate for AMZ HQ2. We have probably the second best public transport system in the country and an unsaturated housing market, amazing engineering and science schools, access to a good pool of candidates, and little competition from others in the industry.

However, the concerns we have are that Chicago would turn into another silicon valley with over inflated cost of living and insane real estate market inflation.

While Chicago wages are not comparable at face value to those on either the east or west coasts, once you take into account the price of housing, food, and travel, middle class Chicagoans don't have it bad at all.

The worry is that the SV effect will hit Chicago, and non-tech workers will be priced out of living downtown or in the Chicago metro area even. Also, Chicago has retained some of the qualities of the Midwest that Midwesterners tend to find desirable or endearing, such as few "celebrities" and a "salt of the earth" mentality. But overall, people are willing to give it a chance and hope for the best. Most everyone I know that expresses these sentiments would still appreciate the benefits of having AMZ in town, and the jobs and money it will bring along with the boost to the local economy (and maybe it'll put a damper on the growingly ridiculous efforts of Cook County and state Democrats st raising money from really dumb taxes disguised as social welfare projects as they try to tax their way out of decades of corruption and misspending, giving out ridiculous pensions to state and city employees whike passing the buck to the next generation).

Those are problems, but surely they're not purely caused by tech? As in, it should be possible for Chicago, being a fairly large city as is, to absorb new tech peoples without causing too much of a problem?

Probably not, most cities in the US purposefully restrict growth, and most of the affordable ones are only affordable through lack of demand and the slack from white flight, decades ago. Texas is the big exception, they have a ton of cheap land and very few rules.

If by some miracle it would come to Columbus, OH I would be thrilled. We definitely have an underutilized pool of talent here. And plenty of people graduating from Ohio State every year that would prefer not to move.

Columbus desperately needs some tech employers that are not in the healthcare, banking, or insurance sectors.

As a software developer, it would be nice to be able to get a job in the engineering group, rather than in a standard IT shop.

I visited Columbus on a business trip (from SV) last year, and really, really loved it. Stayed across the street from the conference center, so just on the southern edge of the Short North. Had lots of great nights wandering around to wonderful bars and restaurants, ran along the river at 7 every morning (when the weather was ALMOST tolerable!), and was really lucky that the baseball team was in town so I got to enjoy the perks of a really really nice intimate ballpark for bargain basement prices.

I was still shocked, though, when I looked at the prices of the new condos being built and almost all of them were > $1M. Yeah, I know, it's the very very upper end of what's being built, but it was still surprising :)

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