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Comment by lccarrasco | Hacker News Reader

All new employees would've paid income and sales taxes.

At least one of the following would have to be true for that to follow: new people would have to move to NYC specifically for Amazon (or to fill vacancies created by people leaving other companies to work at Amazon), or otherwise-unemployed people would have to become employed because of Amazon, or the people taking Amazon jobs would have to be paid more than they otherwise would. None of these would be guaranteed, though. Unemployment in NYC is already low, and there are significant impediments to moving to NYC unrelated to hiring (high cost and limited availability of housing, for instance). It might well be that the same people would end up employed regardless, just at Amazon instead of elsewhere, and other employers would just have higher vacancy rates. These same people would then produce less total revenue for the city/state because more of the taxes they would have been paying regardless would go to subsidizing Amazon.

How much increase in tax revenues will NYC get now that they’ve scared off their expansion? NYC is not responsible for Amazon’s success and is not entitled to a share in their revenue via taxes.

Claiming that they are simply because they want to expand and hire into their market does not result in successful outcomes for either party.

> new people would have to move to NYC specifically for Amazon (or to fill vacancies created by people leaving other companies to work at Amazon)

This has certainly been true for Seattle, fwiw.

It has, but is almost undoubtedly slowing as Seattle becomes more expensive and housing becomes more scarce (in other words, as it becomes New York-like). Massive inbound migration was possible because pre-Amazon, housing in Seattle was comparatively plentiful and cheap.

Seattle has a housing crisis because it has large amounts of the city with extremely restrictive residential zoning and refuses to compromise. They have large areas where multi-tenancy housing can't exists. Additionally, in the US everyone believes housing is not a depreciating asset. There is a reason Tokyo is the largest city in the world while being significantly cheaper to live in then similar cities.

Of course. This is true of New York as well, especially outside of Manhattan. I, too, would prefer a regulatory environment that allows for denser construction. None of that changes the fact that the regulatory environment is what it is, and as a practical matter it limits the extent to which people are able to move to either city to work for Amazon.

At least NYC has New Jersey next door, the densest state in the union: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/most-densely-populated-u... But I hope NYC will still work to fix this problem.

But it's also not the case that the increase of "income and sales tax payers" for NY would be zero without Amazon, so the benefit would have to take that baseline into account. It's not an easy calculation, and there are reasons beyond pure money as to why you wouldn't want an Amazon HQ.

all people who would qualify to work at Amazon getting 150k per year are already working somewhere making something close to that. this was not going to change employment rate or boost income taxes. this was going to drive housing prices, especially rent thru the roof though.

> all people who would qualify to work at Amazon getting 150k per year are already working somewhere making something close to that. this was not going to change employment rate or boost income taxes. this was going to drive housing prices, especially rent thru the roof though.

Those people might not currently be in NYC, and they might have moved to NYC to work for Amazon. NYC would have received more income tax revenue if high earners moved there from somewhere else.

All of that wouldn't cover what Amazon would end up costing the area.

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