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Comment by nkozyra | Hacker News Reader

I know in the technical sense, calling it Amazons rejection is accurate, but in reality this was a power play of a different kind from the people of the city.

While I've not found a consistent stance among people I talked to almost everyone found it at least troubling how Amazon could wield this kind of power. The people who opposed it were vocal and diligent. I'd argue NYC rejected Amazon.

More importantly, while cities compete for companies or industries all the time, it seems this really highlighted the kind of leverage a big company can hold over even a huge metropolis.

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> I'd argue NYC rejected Amazon.

Over 60% of NYC residents who had an opinion supported Amazon. Over 70% of Long Island residents supported them. This is a victory for some well organised political activists but to cast it as a victory for NYC is a bit much.

At the very least it makes NYC a less likely competitor to the Bay Area.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/02/am...

> The Bay Area: NYC is no longer such a fierce competitor at the macro level, with the potential to become the new center of gravity for the tech world. The Bay Area can breathe a bit more easily now, at least as long as clustering remains the name of the game. Yet this one is double-edged, because it also means the Bay Area has less incentive to solve its rather pressing problems and dysfunctions.

https://twitter.com/jbarro/status/1096137477188976646?s=21

> The most prominent voices of opposition to the Amazon deal have been local pols in Queens, but that doesn't align with public opinion. The Quinnipiac poll showed strongest support for the subsidy package in Queens (55-39) and the Bronx (54-37).

https://poll.qu.edu/new-york-city/release-detail?ReleaseID=2...

> Support for the Amazon relocation in general ranges from 51 - 29 percent in Manhattan to 64 - 21 percent in The Bronx.

> Queens voters support 55 - 39 percent the $3 billion incentive package to attract Amazon.

>At the very least it makes NYC a less likely competitor to the Bay Area.

Nonsense. If the bay area were a competitor, that's where Amazon would have wanted put their new HQ, not New York. Amazon doesn't have an HQ in San Francisco.

Nevermind the fact that New York has been experiencing a tech boom for the last decade or more, with Apple, Facebook, and Google all buying campuses similar in scale to Amazon's proposed one, and without demanding bribes from the state before doing so.

The point was that NYC was potentially a competitor to Amazon if they could get a major “tech” company as a kind of anchor tenant bringing tens of thousands of (rich from salary and stock) people to NYC. It has already surpassed Boston as the second city in the US and world if you want to raise VC or hire people who have experience in startups, companies that aim for super high growth for multiple years. The fact that NYC doesn’t have it together enough to keep Amazon after it won it means that while it may be better run than the Bay Area there’s room for somewhere else to come from behind and overtake NYC, maybe even the Bay though that would be the work of decades probably. Boston pissing away it’s advantage to Silicon Valley took decades.

> with Apple, Facebook, and Google all buying campuses similar in scale to Amazon's proposed one, and without demanding bribes from the state before doing so.

All of those companies are orders of magnitude smaller than Amazon.

Also for the record Amazon has a pretty big presence in SFBA (Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, SF proper).

Apple, Facebook, and Google all meet the requirements for the Excelsior Jobs Program ( https://esd.ny.gov/excelsior-jobs-program ) which is where 2.5 billion of the 3 came from for the Amazon deal.

I have no personal knowledge of whether or not the three are utilizing it, but it would seem unlikely to me that three smart businesses would not be taking advantage of some easy to quality for tax credits, which means it's likely they are taking 5/6ths of the same amount of tax breaks that Amazon was planning to.

Yes I thought it was "machine" politics at work looking at it from the outside.

That's machine in the American political sense BTW

    > Over 60% of NYC residents who had an opinion supported Amazon.

Well, now might be the time to remember that we don't have democracy by referendum. We elect representatives who listen and make decisions.

If enough of that 60% got up off their asses and did the legwork, the result might have been different. Instead all they had was just an "opinion". Sorry, but that's not enough.

> Over 60% of NYC residents who had an opinion supported Amazon. Over 70% of Long Island residents supported them. This is a victory for some well organised political activists but to cast it as a victory for NYC is a bit much.

Its a bad idea to be dismissive of the rejection levels.

While support for Amazon was 57% overall in NYC, rejection of the financing ranged from 52-37%, support for NYC being more involved was at 79%.

Those are sizeable numbers, even more so if a percentage of those people felt like they had much to lose.

NYC doesn't need to compete with the Bay Area. That is a Bay Area obsession. NYC needs to compete with London, Paris, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, and other Alpha++/Alpha+ cities. Those cities are much more than tech hubs. NYC is doing just fine.

    > this really highlighted the kind of leverage a big company can hold over even a huge metropolis.

Agree, it was a gross display of cynical power. Amazon played a dozen large cities off each other, forcing each to bend over backward to offer up as much freebies as possible. In exchange for what? A tentative fungible "promise" to deliver 50000 high-pay jobs to the lucky city? In response, even poor cities like Philadelphia strived (in secret) to come up with "proposals" to one of the richest and most ascendant companies on the globe.

And what ultimately happened? Oh, turns out, it wasn't an HQ2 after all, it is now an HQ2 AND HQ3 in TWO cities with half the number of jobs each.

I sort of expect such behavior from a greedy American corporation, but what makes me sad is the pathetic appeasement from the cities courting this.

Good for the people of NYC, who finally opened their eyes to the bullshit.

Well, no, actually it turns out there’s only going to be one HQ2 after all. NYC got complacent.

By the original definition of the size, magnitude, there will be 0 "HQ2s" until Amazon announces that it's Crystal City location is going to be twice as large.

NYC didn't fall for a Foxconn style bait and switch.

Yeah but it was clear when they announced "two winners" that this was all an exercise for Amazon's benefit at the expense of the cities.

And what is an HQ2 anyway? How many "headquarters" does one need? And what's up with the curious round number of 50k? Was that just pulled out of thin air by some PR dude? Is there any accountability at all for throwing around numbers like that and then reneging on the deal?

This whole thing seems fishy to me.

The Governor of NY and Mayor of NYC were in alignment (highly unusual) and are profoundly powerful people.

Amazon doesn’t typically give a hoot about activist opinion. And honestly, the professional activists in NY give zero shits about Queens and would have been bought off with something else. This was a thing that was going to happen.

Who are these “professional activists who don’t give a shit about Queens”? The two most vocal opponents of the deal were a state senator and a congresswoman who represent Queens.

I was looking forward to those jobs tbh. Like the majority of nyers...

Sure. Amazon being here would have been good for a lot of reasons. It's a mutually beneficial situation. Amazon should want to be here either way.

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