The problem is that Amazon's end of the deal involved a lot of ill-defined promises, and their obvious unwillingness to negotiate was a sign of intent to strongarm the city into further concessions. Even if, on paper, it was a financial loss to have Amazon pull out, it sets a strong and positive precedent for New York and other cities across the country.
For example?
2. We don't know actual the distribution of salaries
3. Beyond the existing Future Engineer program, there is no specific commitment to training and hiring from within NYC (instead of importing talent), beyond a $5 million promise to do.. something? in the Queensbridge Houses.
4. We don't have any specific commitments to infrastructure development, again, beyond than a rough dollar amount.
5. Absolutely no word on handling externalities and market distortions imposed on housing markets in nearby neighborhoods.
There is no other deal even approximating this one in scale, and so there is no way to do this analysis. The alternative is much, much slower jobs, and thus tax revenue, growth.
"In my 23 years in the State Capitol, three as Budget Director, Amazon was the single greatest economic development opportunity we have had...For a sense of scale, the next largest economic development project the state has completed was for approximately 1,000 jobs."
> 2. We don't know actual the distribution of salaries
Honestly, I don't really think this is a legitimate issue. We know that they are overwhelmingly white collar technology jobs at an average of $150,000. It is extremely unlikely we'd get any surprises here and it's hard to understand what they'd even look like (5000 managers and 20,000 janitors?).
> 3. Beyond the existing Future Engineer program, there is no specific commitment to training and hiring from within NYC (instead of importing talent), beyond a $5 million promise to do.. something? in the Queensbridge Houses.
These aren't requirements we put on any other company going through the Excelsior Jobs Program. New York City is a melting pot city. What makes us great is that we have people from all around the world here. One of the prime things we want to do as a city to make it a great place to live is make it a place people want to move to work. If people aren't moving here to work than New York City is in bad shape.
> 4. We don't have any specific commitments to infrastructure development, again, beyond than a rough dollar amount.
Beyond $27 billion dollars in additional tax revenue. If we can't deploy that money to adequately fix our infrastructure problems it's difficult to see how that is Amazon's fault, or how any other company would do better. In fact: assuming we were able to get anything close to the level of scale we'd get from the Amazon deal from smaller companies we wouldn't be able to get any additional commitments from them beyond the discounted tax revenue, so it's difficult to understand where this expectation comes from. They make no contribution to infrastructure other than the massive one that the law already says they have to make.
> 5. Absolutely no word on handling externalities and market distortions imposed on housing markets in nearby neighborhoods.
Again, it's difficult to imagine the alternate reality you want to live in here, but it seems to be not growing the city.