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Comment by Cyclone_ | Hacker News Reader

Can't believe how many subsidies they got, to me it's a question of fairness, why should we subsidize them, but not others? I get that they are doing the community a service by creating high paying jobs, but there certainly have been negative sides to what they've done (gentrification, poor working conditions for many employees in their warehouses).

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They're doing the community a service by creating high paying jobs? The people will be shipped in from all around the world and displace the current communities. This destroys communities. This segregates poor & lower income people out. Only already rich people get to experience the benefits of this.

The subsidies and tax cuts they got are an embarrassment to our system and a wonderful look into how this country isn't working for lower classes and small local business that actually build communities. Amazon doesn't need subsidies, this is just a race to the bottom.

There aren’t any poor people living in crystal city.

That's partially true. Not sure where you are from, but as opposed to places like San Francisco, NYC has a functioning real estate private sector that reacts rationally to increases in demand by increasing supply. This is not to say gentrification is not a thing, but it's not like in San Francisco where there's basically a set housing stock and new people completely displace the old people. Instead new people displace some of the old residents, but they also rent or buy newly built housing. In the long run Amazon's choice is probably good for nyc. It could be very good if nyc manages to get its act together regarding subway and infrastructure.

In case you didn't know SF has been building more housing/per capita than New York City for a while now..

Where is this housing you speak of???

https://sf.curbed.com/2016/8/10/12430444/sf-apartment-constr...

And San Francisco? Our 4,100 new apartments is just one per 204 persons. Only three cities managed to do less: San Diego (225), Chicago (324), and New York City (396).

And yet NYC still has some of the highest rent in the country. For someone making 60k or less it doesn't matter much if the rent is 2k or 3k a month, it's all totally unaffordable anyway and those people are either pushed further out from where they work, or if they're young they split the rent amongst 2-4 people.

Those are Manhattan prices. If you travel more than 10 minutes outside Manhattan the rent drops. This normally means long commutes, but with the new HQ in queens, workers could commute from the cheaper parts of queens.

Maybe six or seven years ago. Any neighborhood close to Manhattan is already dealing with the issue of high rent.

This mentality that we should be thankful for "job creators" is incredibly toxic. Amazon hiring people because it benefits their bottom line, its not a charity, skip the "community service" crap.

A big company wants to bring some high paying jobs to a large, prosperous metro area that’s doing just fine without them: shower them with money!

Someone is on the verge of literally starving to death: make them pee in a cup before you give them any food to make sure they’re not an addict.

The Feds ought to use their interstate commerce power to put a stop to these races to the bottom to court individual projects. If some locality wants to be low-tax and business-friendly then go for it, but do it for everyone.

New York's Excelsior program has pretty low bars for it's tax credits:

https://esd.ny.gov/excelsior-jobs-program#eligibility

https://esd.ny.gov/sites/default/files/Excelsior_Overview_20...

You say gentrification like its a pejorative term.

Maybe its your recurring assumption that fairness has anything to do with this. Just excise the prosperity preaching from your brain and you'll see that none of this is related.

They provide a perceived dollar benefit to the governing institution, the governing institution has the authority to catalyze that, the end.

>You say gentrification like its a pejorative term.

I mean, it kind of is. It not only refers to 'improvements' but also the displacement of anyone below the middle class as a result of those improvements.

Displacement is a fact of life. Nobody is entitled to live in a certain area for a certain amount of money.

What ever happened to living within your means?

>Nobody is entitled to live in a certain area for a certain amount of money.

Not inherently, no. But legally speaking there are concepts like "rent control" and "adverse possession" that were created to assert on some level that people do, in fact, have a right to continue living in a space that they've occupied for a reasonable duration.

Accelerating pushing the price up of the non-rent controlled units in the finite landspace, making only the most extreme examples of gentrifiers possible and out of reach for more individuals and businesses

But then subsidizing one business to do it anyway is the problem.

Got ittttttttt

Economies are ecosystems.

Moving is a substantial expense. Should people be forced to consider the likelihood that housing costs that are currently within their means might rise outside of them at some unknown point in the future, and to some unknown degree, when choosing housing? How exactly should that be considered?

It seems regressive, socially, to force this consideration on the people least able to afford it. After all, people who "choose" low-quality housing tend to do so because their choice is necessarily limited, by their lack of access to wealth and financing, to housing that is more attractive for redevelopment.

...Yes?

This has been happening for hundreds of years. Part of being a responsible adult is managing your finances and being prepared. It is crazy to me that so much attention these days is basically advocating for the babysitting of adults.

It is not as if this will happen overnight, either. If we allow people to stay in subsidized housing we remove the biggest carrot for self-motivation.

Your perspective seems narrow. What you view as “babysitting” is an effort to sustain communities.

What are the effects on a kid’s development if they have to change schools and friend groups because their family is displaced due to rising rent? What if people have to move away from family because they can’t afford to stay? How does it impact businesses if their long term employees are suddenly moving away?

Rapidly removing people from communities causes damage to the social fabric of a community, it’s not just about economic effects.

this comment assumes people are poor because they lack self motivation or "grit to pull themselves up by the bootstraps", which in general i believe to be false.

That carrot is unobtainable for most people. Janitors, teachers, deli workers, city park employees, dog walkers, babysitters, waiters, waitresses, contractors. Doesn't matter how well you "manage your finances" if your salary basically has a cap on it.

The only ones benefitting are overpaid tech workers supplanting people that do actual tangible work that makes the city tick.

Funny that a tech worker posting on the HN playground is addressing people who deal with real life struggles (raising a family, making increasing rent) how to be a "responsible adult."

In a society where each individual plays an increasingly specialized role, socially-responsible institutions that step in and cover common needs sounds less like babysitting and more like welcome encapsulation of complex functions. This is also a society where class stratification is rooted heavily in educational disparities. It doesn't seem... rational?... to expect people with little savvy or control over their circumstances to exhibit more savvy or exert more control than those with access to more of both.

Approaching gentrification as some sort of just-world force of nature, and those thrown up in the turmoil of it as willing-by-way-of-neglect, is backwards.

>What ever happened to living within your means?

You mean like they were before the area became gentrified? It's not an intrinsic property of neighborhoods to become gentrified - it's an external process forced upon a populace by governments and corporations and landlords

How is gentrification negative?

If you rent.

Drives up rent.

Breaks up existing, stable (if often impoverished) communities.

Increased, concentrated development can have a negative environmental impact.

Nobody is entitled to live in a certain area for a certain price. Such things lead to distorted markets and tons of other issues.

So do the developer incentives that have driven urban redevelopment for the last 2 decades. Hence, in part, the glut of luxury apartments and the ever-tightening affordable housing market.

Nothing wrong with luxury apartments. Today's luxury is tomorrow's regular housing.

If I may be glib in kind:

Narrator: He immediately found something wrong with luxury apartments.

http://fortune.com/2016/08/16/recession-risk-luxury-apartmen...

Is avoiding a distorted market more important than avoiding disrupting the lives of people?

“Nobody is entitled to live in a certain area for a certain price.” isn’t really true if they were there first and have established a family or a community.

Maintaining a functioning free market is not inherently a moral goal, although many seem to think it is.

There will always be disruption. Disruption is part of being human. How long do I have to live in a place to declare that I am no longer responsible for maintaining my financial stability and I get to demand free rent from the city? 2 years? 10 years?

That's the justification for indigenous genocide everywhere.

Concentrated development is exactly what you want for the environment. Urban living is way more environmentally friendly than non-urban living.

https://www.citylab.com/life/2012/04/why-bigger-cities-are-g...

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