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Comment by CoolGuySteve | Hacker News Reader

The "subsidies" in this case in NYC were a tax rebate over 10 years tied directly to the number of positions created. The Empire program itself was meant to incentivize new offices to open in boroughs other than Manhattan to help distribute the load on transit and other services. Any company opening new office space was eligible, not just Amazon.

The only real "subsidy" in the NYC deal was a land grant where an old plastics factory used to be that required significant environmental clean up. The land is also next to the notorious Queensbridge projects.

Really considering we mostly work in this industry, the amount of ignorance surrounding the deal, its incentive structure, and how it went up in flames is staggering.

Even the talking point about how Amazon opened up new NYC offices anyways is completely innumerate, so far they've created about 1/5th of the positions that they were projected to create under the HQ2 proposal.

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So the original proposal was to create 25K jobs over 15+ years, and the fact that they have created "only" 1/5 the jobs in ~5 years with zero subsidies is supposed to be a negative? Especially considering that they are in the middle of layoffs and not even hitting their committed HQ2 goals.

Still innumerate I see. 1/5th of the projected rate.

Besides, the program is structured such that they wouldn't get the rebate if they didn't hire so what does it matter?

Spot on. This article is just click bait then and doesn’t mention the subsidy is strictly job based. This article goes into detail:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/04/13/amazon-hq...

Overall, Amazon did request $152M in April 2023 for the 6939 jobs it created. They didn’t request any money thru COVID and that $152M will be paid late 2026. Amazon has also paused building due to WFH and maybe realizing they don’t need another HQ. Overall, I would say this thing will stall for the next few years. There is an opportunity cost related to other businesses being offered those same subsidies and are growing. Alas, that can’t be measured.

> Amazon has also paused building due to WFH and maybe realizing they don’t need another HQ

Working at AWS I had teammates hired as remote for a team that was distributed across various regions, and we were given a mandate to either "return" to an office (including potentially having to move if one of the ones assigned to the team) or "voluntarily" leave (with no severance). I'm not saying that they didn't realize they didn't need as much real estate overall, but WFH is not the reason because it largely doesn't exist anymore at Amazon.

What happens if you just decided not to move? That voluntarily leave would need to become a firing with notice pay and severance.

you would have the opportunity to argue whether you were fired for cause (which determines eligibility for unemployment insurance). in general that's hard to win if you just don't show up to your assigned work location, but there may be grounds to argue that mandatory relocation beyond a certain distance constitutes constructive dismissal.

but notice pay and severance are not mandatory for at will employees. the company basically gets to decide whether it's worth paying you not to sue them.

I imagine they'd just stop paying you and not give you any severance, putting the ball in your court to initiate any legal actions to try to force them to pay severance.

I think you are both right? amazon did pause or at least slow building due to WFH, during the pandemic. now WFH is over, but they are still doing layoffs. obviously both are sensitive subjects, but it doesn't make sense to immediately resume large construction projects while headcount is trending downward.

there's one more factor being missed here. obviously they won't say so publicly, but there's a case to be made that the entire HQ2 was as much about calling Seattle's bluff as it was about establishing a second company HQ for its own sake. now that that particular piece of legislation has been repealed, there's not as much reason to follow through on the original plan for HQ2. see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_head_tax

>> So the original proposal was to create 25K jobs over 15+ years, and the fact that they have created "only" 1/5 the jobs in ~5 years with zero subsidies is supposed to be a negative?

How is this obviously not bad!? Arent most of us technologists here? How is creating 1 job better than creating 5 high paying jobs? Can anyone currently unemployed chime in on whether you prefer having high paying jobs available vs not having them available?

> tax rebate

Why are you putting subsidiy in quote if they got a tax rebate?

Because the rebate was conditional on sustained hiring and not a grant like the political rhetoric would have most believe.

Essentially the state was rebating the corporate tax they would have received in lieu of the income tax revenue obtained from the new positions along with the increased competition for high paying tech roles in the city.

The program was deliberately structured to be revenue neutral in terms of absolute tax revenue while increasing overall tax revenue by increasing state GDP

I'm not sure what you mean by political rhetoric. Are you saying calling it a subsidy would be misleading (?) because it was given on a condition? That seems a bid odd because subsidies often comes with conditions attached.

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