Atlanta 
Amazon to move it’s second headquarters to Queens.[update 2/14 : Amazon cancels its plans.
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Pretty sure they wanted to save small businesses since Walmart is notorious for killing small, local businesses.
Part of the deal before it fell through was Amazon was supposed to pay almost 3 billion towards infrastructure projects. I don't know if that included the items you mentioned, but let's say it didn't. Either way that's a stimulus package where a lot of folks besides Amazon employees would be eating. That's a lot of low skilled labor at that. The gentrification part is a bitter pill to swallow, but the question has to be asked would the city have been better off swallowing that pill? That's not Amazon's fault either. NY's cost of living and tax burden is ridiculous enough as is. Folks looking at Amazon like they're the bad guy, when the reality is NY created the current housing and infrastructure situation. They tried thirst trapping Amazon with a bait and switch, and Amazon called their bluff. Now NYC is looking to point the finger at Amazon when they need to look at themselves which De Blasio has already started doing on Ocasio Cortez.
The problem is Amazon was acting like it was a 5 star recruit or a superstar free agent, making cities put to get packages literally begging them to come.
But I look at it like this.
Why would a company that at one point had a $1 TRILLION DOLLAR valuation, need tax credits
Most of Amazon's delivery drivers are contractors so they're already saving in payroll taxes and benefits.
And after the recruiting process, they got rejected by the only city they were considering all along, do they just said "fukk it" to all the other cities they made compete in this sham. Why are they ignoring all these cities that are asking them to reopen negotiations?
Ethnic Vagina Finder
The Great Paper Chaser
Maybe because New York doesn't need Amazon
And she wasn't the main reason why Amazon pulled out. There were hundreds if not thousands of people that were against Amazon coming there.
Its funny how when Walmart tried to come to rural communities and people protested, nobody complained.
That martket doesn't need Amazon. Not to mention a lot of people wouldn't have even qualified for those high paying positions.
And it wasn't just the tax breaks that New York offered. You have to look at the details. they offered Bezos a publicly funded private helicopter.
Bloomberg - Are you a robot?
The Amazon-in-New York Lesson for Cities: Don’t Be Arrogant
Anti-corporate forces are gaining strength, and so supportive politicians need to be ready to fight back.
The thing I don’t understand, with all the finger-pointing that’s gone on since the announcement Thursday that Amazon.com Inc. was abandoning its plans to set up shop in New York City, is why so many of the fingers have been pointed at the least culpable party — i.e. Amazon itself.
Yes, the $3 billion in tax incentives the state and city dangled to lure Amazon to Queens was absurdly rich — and probably unjustified. But Amazon didn’t hold a gun to anyone’s head. There were 237 other cities offering their own unjustified tax breaks in the hope of landing the company. Indeed, compared to the insane deal Wisconsin gave Foxconn Technology Group, Amazon came cheap.
Amazon said its “HQ2” would create 25,000 jobs directly, and as many as 15,000 indirectly. The average pay for an Amazon New York City employee was going to be over $100,000. Even the janitors were likely to be well paid; I’m reliably told there was a decent chance they’d be union jobs.
Oh, and let’s not forget where HQ2 was going to be located: in a Queens neighborhood called Long Island City, near the largest public housing project in the Western Hemisphere, the Queensbridge Houses. Queensbridge consists of 26 buildings, and its largely black and Hispanic population has a medium family income of $15,843, according to the New York Times. (That’s $10,000 below the federal poverty line.)
After Amazon pulled out, there was a lot of boasting about all the jobs New York City has added without any tax giveaways (750,000 in the last decade, tweeted Nicole Gelinas, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute). The implication was that New York’s job-creation machine was so powerful it didn’t need those stinkin’ Amazon jobs. But a new job created on Wall Street or “Silicon Alley” isn’t much help to a resident of Queensbridge Houses.
Yet ever since the deal was announced in November, Amazon has been cast as the bad guy. It was arrogant, critics of the deal said. Greedy. Corporatist (whatever that means). 1 The $3 billion in tax breaks gnawed at the critics. “We got played,” complained city council Speaker Corey Johnson, as he and other council members berated several Amazon executives during a contentious hearing.
Meanwhile, as the backlashpallooza gained momentum, the officials who had lured Amazon to New York — particularly New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio — sat on their hands and let opponents like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and State Senator Michael Gianaris control the narrative. Talk about arrogance! Assuming they didn’t need to do anything further after cutting the deal itself, Cuomo and de Blasio made no effort to organize Amazon’s local supporters, who were actually in the majority.
They didn’t defend the tax breaks as necessary to bring good jobs to a poor neighborhood. They didn’t make hay with a Siena College Research Institute poll conducted in early February showing overwhelming local support for the Amazon deal. Cuomo is supposed to be a skilled and wily backroom pol. Yet he was unable to prevent the appointment of Gianaris to a board that had to approve the deal. Gianaris’s new role gave Amazon reason to believe that its deal might not be ultimately approved. That uncertainty was intolerable, as it would be for any company.
Most important, neither the mayor nor the governor anticipated the backlash. Thus they were utterly unprepared when it arrived. In addition to making a loud, sustained case that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for New York City, they should have put forth some tangible goodies designed to help the community.
Like what, you ask? One suggestion I heard was that Cuomo and de Blasio should have maneuvered to create a City University of New York computer science college in Long Island City — perhaps right on the Amazon campus. That would have sent the message that local residents were not going to be consigned forever to Amazon’s lowest-paying jobs. Smart, ambitious kids living in Queensbridge Houses would have a path to something better — right in the neighborhood.
The city could have announced that it was setting up pools of money for infrastructure improvements and job training. There were lots of things Cuomo and de Blasio could have done. But they couldn’t be bothered.
Now that Amazon has fled, the city and state are going to face a different kind of backlash: from the people who were counting on getting those jobs. Late Thursday night, I got a call from Billy Robinson, a community activist who lives in Queensbridge Houses.
He was furious. He knew that residents weren’t going to get many of the highest-paying Amazon jobs. But they were going to get more jobs than they had now.
“I want to know what plans do they have to replace the 1,500 jobs our community was going to get from the Amazon deal,” Robinson said. “Hell, I’d take half that — what plans do they have to create 750 jobs? What is the backup plan? You kicked the big bad company to the curb,” he said. “So now what are you going to do?”
After complaining that most of the opponents never bothered to ask Queensbridge residents how they felt about Amazon, Robinson added, “We are organizing even as we speak. We will see them at the polls.”
Although what happened with Amazon in New York City was a first, it’s not going to be the last. The left has become increasingly anti-corporation, with billionaire founders like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos serving as a proxy for everything they view as wrong with wealth distribution in the U.S. And as companies — like Foxconn — go back on their word after landing rich government subsidies, those subsidies have become a target of corporate critics like Ocasio-Cortez.
Among many other things, Amazon was blamed for failing to engage with the community and disarming the critics. But that wasn’t Amazon’s job. That was what de Blasio and Cuomo were supposed to do. They utterly failed. Given the mood of the country, government leaders using tax incentives to land corporate facilities will need to roll up their sleeves and sell the deal to the public. Being able to trumpet significant job creation was once enough to justify government deal-making with a corporation. But it’s not anymore.
In perhaps the most contemptible statement of all, de Blasio said, after the deal collapsed, “We gave Amazon the opportunity to be a good neighbor and do business in the greatest city in the world. Instead of working with the community, Amazon threw away that opportunity.”
Amazon did nothing of the sort. De Blasio threw the opportunity away. Cuomo threw the opportunity away. That should be the lesson for any city or state official hoping to land a corporate expansion for the foreseeable future. Too bad New York couldn’t have learned it a few months earlier.
The Amazon-in-New York Lesson for Cities: Don’t Be Arrogant
Anti-corporate forces are gaining strength, and so supportive politicians need to be ready to fight back.
The thing I don’t understand, with all the finger-pointing that’s gone on since the announcement Thursday that Amazon.com Inc. was abandoning its plans to set up shop in New York City, is why so many of the fingers have been pointed at the least culpable party — i.e. Amazon itself.
Yes, the $3 billion in tax incentives the state and city dangled to lure Amazon to Queens was absurdly rich — and probably unjustified. But Amazon didn’t hold a gun to anyone’s head. There were 237 other cities offering their own unjustified tax breaks in the hope of landing the company. Indeed, compared to the insane deal Wisconsin gave Foxconn Technology Group, Amazon came cheap.
Amazon said its “HQ2” would create 25,000 jobs directly, and as many as 15,000 indirectly. The average pay for an Amazon New York City employee was going to be over $100,000. Even the janitors were likely to be well paid; I’m reliably told there was a decent chance they’d be union jobs.
Oh, and let’s not forget where HQ2 was going to be located: in a Queens neighborhood called Long Island City, near the largest public housing project in the Western Hemisphere, the Queensbridge Houses. Queensbridge consists of 26 buildings, and its largely black and Hispanic population has a medium family income of $15,843, according to the New York Times. (That’s $10,000 below the federal poverty line.)
After Amazon pulled out, there was a lot of boasting about all the jobs New York City has added without any tax giveaways (750,000 in the last decade, tweeted Nicole Gelinas, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute). The implication was that New York’s job-creation machine was so powerful it didn’t need those stinkin’ Amazon jobs. But a new job created on Wall Street or “Silicon Alley” isn’t much help to a resident of Queensbridge Houses.
Yet ever since the deal was announced in November, Amazon has been cast as the bad guy. It was arrogant, critics of the deal said. Greedy. Corporatist (whatever that means). 1 The $3 billion in tax breaks gnawed at the critics. “We got played,” complained city council Speaker Corey Johnson, as he and other council members berated several Amazon executives during a contentious hearing.
Meanwhile, as the backlashpallooza gained momentum, the officials who had lured Amazon to New York — particularly New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio — sat on their hands and let opponents like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and State Senator Michael Gianaris control the narrative. Talk about arrogance! Assuming they didn’t need to do anything further after cutting the deal itself, Cuomo and de Blasio made no effort to organize Amazon’s local supporters, who were actually in the majority.
They didn’t defend the tax breaks as necessary to bring good jobs to a poor neighborhood. They didn’t make hay with a Siena College Research Institute poll conducted in early February showing overwhelming local support for the Amazon deal. Cuomo is supposed to be a skilled and wily backroom pol. Yet he was unable to prevent the appointment of Gianaris to a board that had to approve the deal. Gianaris’s new role gave Amazon reason to believe that its deal might not be ultimately approved. That uncertainty was intolerable, as it would be for any company.
Most important, neither the mayor nor the governor anticipated the backlash. Thus they were utterly unprepared when it arrived. In addition to making a loud, sustained case that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for New York City, they should have put forth some tangible goodies designed to help the community.
Like what, you ask? One suggestion I heard was that Cuomo and de Blasio should have maneuvered to create a City University of New York computer science college in Long Island City — perhaps right on the Amazon campus. That would have sent the message that local residents were not going to be consigned forever to Amazon’s lowest-paying jobs. Smart, ambitious kids living in Queensbridge Houses would have a path to something better — right in the neighborhood.
The city could have announced that it was setting up pools of money for infrastructure improvements and job training. There were lots of things Cuomo and de Blasio could have done. But they couldn’t be bothered.
Now that Amazon has fled, the city and state are going to face a different kind of backlash: from the people who were counting on getting those jobs. Late Thursday night, I got a call from Billy Robinson, a community activist who lives in Queensbridge Houses.
He was furious. He knew that residents weren’t going to get many of the highest-paying Amazon jobs. But they were going to get more jobs than they had now.
“I want to know what plans do they have to replace the 1,500 jobs our community was going to get from the Amazon deal,” Robinson said. “Hell, I’d take half that — what plans do they have to create 750 jobs? What is the backup plan? You kicked the big bad company to the curb,” he said. “So now what are you going to do?”
After complaining that most of the opponents never bothered to ask Queensbridge residents how they felt about Amazon, Robinson added, “We are organizing even as we speak. We will see them at the polls.”
Although what happened with Amazon in New York City was a first, it’s not going to be the last. The left has become increasingly anti-corporation, with billionaire founders like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos serving as a proxy for everything they view as wrong with wealth distribution in the U.S. And as companies — like Foxconn — go back on their word after landing rich government subsidies, those subsidies have become a target of corporate critics like Ocasio-Cortez.
Among many other things, Amazon was blamed for failing to engage with the community and disarming the critics. But that wasn’t Amazon’s job. That was what de Blasio and Cuomo were supposed to do. They utterly failed. Given the mood of the country, government leaders using tax incentives to land corporate facilities will need to roll up their sleeves and sell the deal to the public. Being able to trumpet significant job creation was once enough to justify government deal-making with a corporation. But it’s not anymore.
In perhaps the most contemptible statement of all, de Blasio said, after the deal collapsed, “We gave Amazon the opportunity to be a good neighbor and do business in the greatest city in the world. Instead of working with the community, Amazon threw away that opportunity.”
Amazon did nothing of the sort. De Blasio threw the opportunity away. Cuomo threw the opportunity away. That should be the lesson for any city or state official hoping to land a corporate expansion for the foreseeable future. Too bad New York couldn’t have learned it a few months earlier.
De Blasio slams Amazon as ‘disrespectful’ for abandoning HQ2 plans
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“It’s over and it’s astounding and it’s disappointing,” the mayor said
By Caroline Spivack Feb 15, 2019, 2:40pm ESTSHARE
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/63060795/GettyImages_971704914.0.jpg)
An incredulous Mayor Bill de Blasio slammed Amazon and opponents to HQ2 on WNYC Friday.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
A furious Mayor Bill de Blasio blasted Amazon and opponents Friday for pulling out of a $3 billion deal that would have brought Amazon’s second North American headquarters to Long Island City.
“It’s over and it’s astounding and it’s disappointing,” de Blasio said on WNYC’s The The Brian Lehrer Show. “It’s disrespectful to the people of NYC to get a call after months of attempting to build a productive partnership on behalf of this city, to get a call out of the blue saying, ‘See ya, we’re taking our ball and we’re going home.’”
Amazon announced the abrupt about face in a Thursday blog post after months of relentless opposition waged by some elected officials and skeptical residents who felt the deal lacked transparency and gave away too much in a $3 billion incentive package.
The mayor and Gov. Andrew Cuomo championed the deal—which was slated to bring at least 25,000 jobs to the city, some $27 billion in tax revenue, and other commitments. Amazon’s retreat is a major blow to the Mayor’s efforts to make New York City an attractive destination for the technology industry and he wasn’t shy about lashing out at the company and those who opposed the deal.
“I have a lot of frustration with the opponents because I do not think they represented what their constituents fully needed,” he told Brian Lehrer. “I think they did a disservice, but I have much more frustration with Amazon for just pulling out in the dead of night and not even attempting a dialogue.”
The Mayor had discussed HQ2 details with Amazon executives as recently as Monday night and some 24 hours before union leaders met with the company to hash out ground rules for how Amazon would respond to workers’ efforts to unionize.
De Blasio went on the defensive when asked if he bungled the deal by negotiating in private and bypassing the typical Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) that requires a New York City Council vote.
“If I had said, ‘Hey Amazon, you’re going to have to wait a year and a half for the full land use process.’ I guarantee, I GUAR-AN-TEE they would have said we’re going to Virginia, we’re going to Dallas, we’re going somewhere else,” said de Blasio.
An incredulous de Blasio continued his onslaught of anger at critics of how he handled and pushed for the Queens campus.
“For everyone who said, and they said it with such self-assurance, so many wonderful experts who didn’t know what the hell they were talking about, ‘Oh, Amazon has to be here. Amazon has to be here,’” de Blasio fumed. “Well, guess what, this morning it’s quite clear that Amazon did not have to be here.”
De Blasio slams Amazon as ‘disrespectful’ for abandoning HQ2 plans
Ethnic Vagina Finder
The Great Paper Chaser
Amazon didn't really offer anything either.
Bezos and Amazon corporate execs thought they was gonna come into queens like King Joffey Joffer
At the end of the day, Long Island City isn't poor overall. The average income between the 24 - 44 age group is over $70,000 a year. It's been gentrified steadily for years. Amazon setting up shop would've been gentrified atomic bomb.
the poor/blue collar minorities voices were head the loudest while the white collar majority was
This whole episode is as overblown as Amazon treating their plans like they were pimps with cities and states acting like hoes lining up to be turned out.
@ the yahoo comments section bashing AOC. Anyway, only a matter of time before more crazy laws hit NY now that Google setting up more shop there. Similar to laws that was passed in Cali. This will probably fly over the heads of many.
So brehs, QUESTION : y'all think this fiasco wi cause Ocasio-Cortez To be voted out of office? Or are the majority of her voters behind her 100% on this? 
Speaking to different people I get different vibes about this and I was hopping Amazon would come to Atlanta at first up until that f@ggot Kemp won the election to be governor.
Some NYers are arguing it's too big a tax break and raising coat of housing blah blah blah. Others saying there would have been decent jobs available available.
Speaking to different people I get different vibes about this and I was hopping Amazon would come to Atlanta at first up until that f@ggot Kemp won the election to be governor.
Some NYers are arguing it's too big a tax break and raising coat of housing blah blah blah. Others saying there would have been decent jobs available available.
AOC is all bluster
I read her reply to critics talmbout
Use the $3 Billion to fix roads instead
But there is no pile of cash waiting to be used. It was a tax break.
So that's metaphysically impossible
I read her reply to critics talmbout
Use the $3 Billion to fix roads instead
But there is no pile of cash waiting to be used. It was a tax break.
So that's metaphysically impossible
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