I dunno if that's accurate. "Lots of development + Amazon" is more than "lots of development." Amazon not being there doesn't necessarily mean there will be more of something else.
I don't know man?
In most places I might agree with you, but in places like NYC and Silicon Valley?
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it means more of something else. Sometimes it can be easy to underestimate the size and dynamism of those two economic engines.
The usual way of solving this problem and continuing to scale a city is that you use tax revenue from new jobs to build additional public infrastructure. But the HQ2 deal made a point of giving up that tax revenue....
But the subsidies will largely still be available to the next people to move in right? Meaning, you’ve effectively accomplished nothing, right?
(If you just mean "Amazon proved it's negotiable," I think Amazon pulling out equally proves that it's a political quagmire to try to negotiate it.)
So a pile of 'something else' jobs would be replaced with shotty Amazon jobs - and the stories from their corporate offices and from their warehouses have been harrowing.
Economics isn’t a zero-sum game, but neither is it a completely uncorrelated bag of stuff.