Exactly. The whole HQ2 Willy Wonka show was never going to move to some area that really really needed it. NYC is currently a boom town, and I as a NYer am disappointed that we gave them such a huge amount of tax breaks. I support NY perhaps lifting some of its bureaucracy to make such a large move here possible, but do not support giving Amazon money.
Amazon needs NYC because it has a metro area of 20 million people with more developers than Silicon Valley, and also many other skilled people in management and business. The days of someone moving to a company town to work for them are over as you have seen with GE moving to Boston and other corporate moves. Nobody is going to move to a small city to work for Amazon.
Yea, if you need 25,000 employees in a sector your choices are pretty limited to the areas where there are tons of those employees already living it seems to me unless you want a difficult hiring process. I know I wouldn't really want to live in an area where the jobs in my field were Amazon and very little else.
I'm very disappointed that NYC gave one of the largest companies in the world by valuation 3bn in tax breaks while the subway crumbles, although I don't think it was particularly a bad deal, but it's hard to accurately calculate when that will pay off by.
I'm just a bit disappointed that in a time of unprecedented wealth inequality and company concentration our nation's setup to reward the wealthiest individuals and largest corporations.
NYC should have said "here's what we decided a good offer would have been, we're going to invest it in startups, and infrastructure. Come here if you want to be around the great minds that will be attracted to a diverse and rich in ideas environment."
I also wouldn't be surprised if NYC does reward small companies and this is just another thing too.
NYS likes personal income tax. 25,000 high-paid employees who aren't in financial services yield revenue and diversification. NYC likes property tax. Raising property values in Queens makes the city significant amount of revenue.
Dropping it in Queens maximizes benefit to NY, as you're less likely to lose households to New Jersey or Connecticut.
But NYC cares about tax revenue just like you or I care about income. In one move, HQ2 will bring NYC/NY State a very attractive amount of tax revenue. It is the most logical thing for city officials, who constantly want more funding, to do what exactly what will bring more funding the quickest.
Ballpark state income tax at 6.5% of $250K * 25K = $406M/yr, with city tax on top.
Ballpark property tax at $12K * 25K = $300M/yr
Ballpark state sales tax at 4% of $50K in spending * 25K = $50M/yr
Naturally, some of the property tax is displacing existing property tax payers and some of the income tax will be lost to other employers moving out of NYC area, but it seem quite reasonable to be OoM $500M per year at scale.
It only takes a minute or two verify that $250K is a completely unrealistic estimate for the average salary of a likely HQ2 employee. In fact the state's own estimate is around $150k. The property tax estimate is similarly skewed -- on top of the fact that you're ignoring the additional cost of services to support all these people.
I'm not saying there's benefit-to-cost ratio argument to be made in favor of HQ2 (if everything were to boil down to those terms) -- just that you seem to be, well... pulling numbers out of the air.
What services will cost more for the city? Public transportation will have a ridership subscription boost, property values will go up for local owners, service businesses will have ~25k more potential customers...
I understand your concern about pulling the numbers out of the air, but I think the commenter above made a stronger case for those numbers than you have with the "cost" numbers. Just a thought to consider
> I'm very disappointed that NYC gave one of the largest companies in the world by valuation 3bn in tax breaks while the subway crumbles, although I don't think it was particularly a bad deal, but it's hard to accurately calculate when that will pay off by.
I'm not so sure about that. I actually know two people who moved from NY to SEA for Amazon, in part b/c NY is so incredibly expensive. Both were actually disappointed that neither HQ2 announcements were for places with significantly lower COL than SEA. These were millenials starting their career + families though, not people who had established NYC salaries and a condo or co-op.
That said, it does definitely make sense to get a piece of the NY talent pie for a company with as much growth + turnover as Amazon. I understand that choice much better than the NoVa choice.
Apart from the state/city taxes, there’s little difference in NYC and Seattle any more. My rent has barely moved in the last three years; my friends in Seattle are complaining about ridiculous rent increases. I visited a year ago and did not see a massive difference in prices for every day goods and services. Unsure about housing market though.
You can live car free in Seattle. It depends on who you work for and where they are, but it is doable. People carpool and such to go hiking and to events, and Lyft/Uber is pretty good.
Rent is comparable, but the apartments would be very different. 1BD 10 min walk away from work in SLU can be found for $1500/mo with in-unit washer dryer, secured package room, etc. To get the same level of amenity would require going further out into the boroughs and being subject to the whims of the MTA.
Goods and eating out are more expensive, but that's because Seattle has its min wage at 16/hr already, and unlike New York businesses do actually pay their workers the minimum wage. (Paying under the table is rampant at minority-owned businesses; those cheap supermarkets in NY Chinatown didn't get there through mystic eastern business practices.)
Oh definitely you do get much more for the same amount in Seattle today, but it was ~1200 three years ago. Meanwhile rents in NY have pretty much stayed the same (except for minor increases) for me and my peers.
I hear that prices have flatlined /fallen recently; let’s hope it stays that way.
Amazonian who has lived in Manhattan the past decade. The two neighborhoods I've lived in over the past 5 years have seen 20-30% increases: Chelsea and Upper East Side. Not sure that folks are seeing minor in Brooklyn either.
A lot of apartment buildings have opened on Dexter. I used to live there and got a renewal for significantly cheaper after paying $2200. (I ended up moving anyways because SLU is a giant dead zone.)
Everybody was offering not only cheaper rent, but concessions (1-3 months free). Supply has finally outpaced demand.
Absolutely - this seems to have been the biggest driver in this decision. If you're mere steps from the Department of Defense and the alphabet soup of agencies, you're well positioned to lobby them on your products and services. Crystal City is akin to MV and San Francisco 30 years ago.
DC has a stronger IT job market than possibly Silicon Valley and New York. DC has been a top city for IT talent and is probably the best of the three due a significantly lower cost of living.
Unfortunately, all of the programming jobs here are either in publishing (low pay) or government contracting (bureaucratic headaches).
And while the cost of living is less than NYC and SF, it ain't exactly cheap either.
Amazon's decision to come to Crystal City makes sense to me because there are a bunch of young college grads and no competition from the other FAANG companies.
If you're a young, ambitious, programmer trying to decide where to start your career though, I'd suggest going to SF/SV, NYC, Seattle, or Boston because those places provide more options.
Interesting, I always heard the nice parts of DC are about as expensive as Seattle, and the traffic is even worse. I've known a few people to take software gigs for government contractors in that area, but none of them stayed around very long - said the salaries were not great and that they weren't getting any of the perks of tech culture that are common elsewhere (no casual dress code, were micro-managed, lots of lazy coworkers). I imagine it was just the specific body shops that hired them that were the problem though.
Maybe, but salaries around DC are WAY below SV or NYC. The pay and perqs of gov't/DoD contracting can never compete with SV startups or NYC finance; not even close.
Yeah, I live in SEA and have at a job with a little bit of mobility. When my rent in SEA became comparable to NYC, I seriously thought about just doing NYC instead. But then I realized I would probably still be renting forever without much savings if I wanted to live to my standards of comfort, and I probably wouldn't actually use many of the cool things NYC offers - so I decided to move to Raleigh instead.
Hah, small world. I lived there for a while before Seattle and only left b/c I wanted faster career growth. But now I've got FAANG creds that let me work remote for the same salary, so it's a game changer. I will be so happy to have Bojangles and Cookout back in my life.
Took me 4 years since graduating from the same school you went to, but I've received multiple offers now for remote work that pays doubles my new-grad salary in Raleigh (which was actually pretty decent as far as Raleigh salaries goes). So don't undersell yourself, seems like you're on a good path. Hit me up (this username at gmail) if you seriously think about coming back to Raleigh in the future or switching to remote work, the place I work is usually hiring.
- The subway is crumbling with no tangible realistic plan to fix it.
- Housing crisis is getting worse. New York is consistently at the top, or near the top of the "losing residents to other cities" list. NYPost recently reported on "The Exodus of New York's middle class"
- With some of the highest taxes in the country, Cuomo recently stated NY lost 2.3 billion in tax revenue, with NYC alone losing 1 billion of that, and now there is a looming showdown on the state budget coming up. Area corporations are seeking relocation to cheaper tax areas. As they say, "Every day is tax day in NYC"
It's only ridiculous if you view NYC through some rose tinted glasses, most the rest of the country are staying away
Responding to your points.
1.) Most online rags and news reports describe it as "crumbling" so these aren't my words. I have no interest in being melodramatic, I'm merely relaying the portrait painted by most people reporting on the subway.
2. You call BS. I call that article proving my point. You are having a market correction due to the mass exodus.
3. Name other major tech companies besides Amazon which hosed over the city and held them hostage for sweet heart deal?
I don't know one person that has said "oh I know, I'll move to NYC for a tech job" San Fransisco maybe. Austin? Definitely.
I just don't know how you can paint a billion dollar loss in tax revenue (2.3 billion state wide), and falling housing prices due to decrease in demand as a "boom"
The mere fact that NYC bent over backwards so far to attract Amazon is actually telling to me.
Thanks for the response! I had misread your second point, thinking "housing crisis" was about prices being too high.
For tech companies: a huge number of major tech cos have offices in NYC. Most of them even have engineering offices. The ones that come to mind are Facebook, Google, Uber, Microsoft, eBay, Etsy, palantir, AppNexus, and yes, Amazon has offices here already.
I don't have any insight into the tax revenue issue, and I suspect that may be worse this year with the federal tax cuts. (I think there is some state-tax interaction, but I may be misremembering or misunderstanding)
I'm from buffalo but live in nyc now and feel the same way, but I noticed a lot of people I know in buffalo seem to think they could pull the same level of talent in smaller cities.
Once you start talking 25k jobs, you can build a new city out of that.
If you're the sort of billionaire who wants to take a shot at developing a modern Utopia, by whatever metrics you personally care about, buy a few square miles somewhere, move your corporate headquarters and 25k jobs there, and go nuts playing sim city with real people.
Sure, not every potential employee is willing to uproot themselves and move to Bezosburg, but not every potential employer is willing to move to New York or Silicon Valley or Louisville. But between a good salary and the appealing amenities of Bezosburg, you should be able to attract plenty.
Do you have a source for the claim that NYC has more devs than silicon valley? The only source I could find was about tech jobs, not just devs. It says
>[NY's] tech work force, according to most analyses, is less than half and perhaps one-third that of the Bay Area.
What’s wrong with tax breaks? It’s like people are under the impression that the government is actually paying Amazon. If Amazon didn’t get any tax breaks, they would have gone somewhere else.
The people who don’t want Amazon in Queens don’t actually live there, all the protests are in Manhattan.
People are protesting the likely rise in rents that an Amazon HQ will cause. But the real problem is government regulation. If real estate developers could build housing without all the NIMBYs yelling to their city councils or if they could build without onerous regulation about fire escapes or whatnot, people would have housing.
All this regulation that is supposed to help consumers actually hurts them. It’s not like with regulation companies will do the same thing as if they didn’t exist. Many companies will just opt out.
I’m guessing I’m going to get downvoted, but I honestly believe that regulation is the root of all evil and most social ills (like healthcare costs, pharmaceutical prices, etc).
But instead of protesting the bad incentives government creates, people just blame the “greedy” corporations.
I mean, I would personally decide to live in a building in NYC without a fire escape if I could get, say, 50% cheaper rents.
I’m sure many others would to. Maybe you wouldn’t, but then you don’t have to live there if you think the risks are too high, right? I would just like to choose the risks myself, instead of other people deciding for me.
1) Fires tend to spread. Fire codes are not just for your own benefit, they're for the benefit of everyone around you.
2) If you live in a fire trap and it eventually catches on fire, firefighters will run unnecessary risks when they rush in to try to save you. It's not fair to them to put them in that situation.
3) You talk about choosing the risks yourself, but your life is connected to other peoples lives in countless ways. Your choice of how much risk to take on affects many more people than just you. That's why it's totally fine for society to insist on fire escapes.
But where is the line drawn? Clearly drinking or smoking or doing drugs has the same problem, should all those things really be illegal? How about abortion? Or deciding to name your child "Dick Head Jr."? Or having kids?
If you take your line of reasoning to its natural conclusion, you end up in a society without any personal freedom or choice.
The problem isn't that fire escapes are bad. It's that regulation slowly and surely just inches forward, consuming everything in its path.
If your first assumption about people is that they are too stupid to make choices for themselves, the natural conclusion is despotism. Do you think you're too stupid to make decisions yourself as well?
Would you be fine with someone telling you that maybe you are too stupid to have kids? Or maybe too stupid to drive a car? Or too stupid to decide what profession you want in life (you would write terrible code, so it's in the public interest that you become a janitor where your stupidity can't hurt anyone else)? Or maybe you're so stupid that we should just take you off the street?
OR, maybe, just maybe, you and the market should decide these things for yourself.
Edit: In regard to the fire fighter thing. Individuals could just pay insurance for fire protection. It naturally would be cheaper in places with fire escapes. There's no reason why public services like fire fighters or ambulances have to be public, they would probably just function more efficiently as private entities.
I think there's a big difference between "a society without any personal freedom or choice" and one where there are certain regulations for the public good. Some examples might be hate speech laws or food safety. Those do put concrete limits on the behaviours of individuals and corporate entities, but help guide society to grow and operate in a way considered healthier than if left alone.
I'm skeptical of the notion that regulation "slowly and surely just inches forward" naturally. Maybe you could explain a bit?
>If you take your line of reasoning to its natural conclusion, you end up in a society without any personal freedom or choice.
Your entire argument hinges on slippery slope fallacy. Implementation of a thing in a restricted doesn't necessarily lead to an unrestricted implementation of it.
Nobody is saying "you are too stupid to decide fire safety for yourself." We are saying "it is cheaper (more efficient) to have specialists decide fire safety guidelines and implement them universally, than it is to guarantee equal knowledge of fire safety for all citizens."
Because, a free market isn't free if it's unfair. Your libertarian argument requires perfect fairness, or it's immoral. And obviously, perfect fairness in a free market system is... a high barrier to cross.
So, regulation. Efficient, fair. Flawed, but not broken, and not nearly as exploitable as "the free market."
By the way - what happened before the fire safety regulations? People died, horribly, tragically. If you believe they deserved to die because they didn't educate themselves on fire safety, your expectations are far too high. Do you know how planes, electricity, your car, roads, clean water, sewer treatment, food safety (at the source, not cooking), radiological and chemical safety systems work? Do you know how to use a tomahawk missile to enforce your sovereign borders? No? Maybe you don't deserve the protections they offer then.
Along with the other stated reasons, this is in line with one of my original points: you don't have the sufficient education on fire safety to be making that decision in an informed way.
You, personally, may be a fire inspector, but you in the royal sense are not - the general population. Any given individual. It is far more burdensome to guarantee that everyone has enough knowledge about the risks and functions of fire, to make a fair and reasoned decision about fire safety in their buildings, than it is to just enforce a fire code.
That's the upside of regulation, yes. The downside of regulation is that it makes everything terrible in different ways. FRA regulations is why the U.S. can't buy ready-made trainsets from Europe for a fraction of the cost. Housing regulations increase prices and become a vehicle for propping up property values. A lot of the things hipster millennials care about (e.g. walkable cities dense neighborhoods, fiber internet, affordable housing, public transit) are directly prohibited by regulations.
There's actually a decent-sized group of people in queens that oppose Amazon moving in. Anecdotally I've known some people in queens who've had rents raised mid-lease and more that are looking for new places to move to. There's also concern about what's going to happen to the public housing in LIC.
As an aside, regulation is necessary, the trick is finding a balance. Regulation is very necessary, it's why if someone has wronged you, you're able to take them to court. It's why your medicine is likely to actually be what you purchased and reasonably effective (look at historic curealls for the alternatives) and why fires are relatively small nowadays (ie a house or two are burning down, not the whole district or city. Regulation has probably added 20 years to the average life. On a semi-related note, http://confreaks.tv/videos/devopsdaysnyc2018-the-history-of-... is extremely worth watching.
> Regulation has probably added 20 years to the average life.
The huge increases in life expectancy happened in the 19th century, not the 20th. There hasn't been much increase since the advent of heavy regulation.
>> I honestly believe that regulation is the root of all evil and most social ills
Well we can just end the conversation here then. "Regulations" are what prevent child labor. They're what help curb pollution. They're how we kept plaster of paris out of milk. The fact that you're somehow assuming that ALL regulation is evil shows a willful ignorance to the evils committed when they weren't in place.
There is good and bad regulation, just as there are all kinds of good and bad laws. You're going with a whole LOT of really terrible generalizations here.
It’s not that in the absence of regulation, companies are going to be scrupulous, it’s that the cure is worse than the disease in the first place. After all, many regulations are actually lobbied for by the big corporations themselves, to prevent small companies from competiting with them.
I say we should publish blogs or whatnot about bad products, and then capitalism will figure it out. After all, without the government, only corporations that are providing value will continue to exist. The reason why many corporations today aren't providing real value is because of rent-seeking.
So the best example of a free market here is from China...
Chinese companies made a bad product (in this case poisoned baby formula)... And so now there's a thriving market in buying formula in countries that have all the regulation and shipping it in at an even higher markup.
>I say we should publish blogs or whatnot about bad products,
1. With what piece of hardware will you write this post? What assurance do you have that the manufacturer will allow you to write negative blog posts about them or their partners?
2. Via what infrastructure will you connect to what network, upon which to publish? What assurance do you have that you will be allowed to use that infrastructure to publish negative content about that infrastructure owner or their partners? What about the owners of the network?
3. Upon what websites or domains will you publish these? How will you share them? What assurances do you have that they will remain visible and accessible?
>then capitalism will figure it out
"Hand wave" fallacy. There's no substance to your argument. This is a meaningless statement.
> After all, without the government, only corporations that are providing value will continue to exist.
Evidence for your claim? Supporting argument?
> The reason why many corporations today aren't providing real value is because of rent-seeking.
Evidence for your claim? Supporting argument?
Based on what you've said, why should I believe you have a better solution that regulatory status quo? Enacting change requires solid evidence, arguments, logic, and reasoning. Wouldn't you agree it would be foolish to undertake a new endeavor without a majority of the above?
We live in a society. Societies have rules. One of the rules of our society is we don't move people into dangerous tenements where they're likely to burn to death because they're trapped and can't get out.
That's an untenable position, for the following reasons.
First, I want to define "you" as follows:
Multi-usage identifier. "You" functions as stand-in for a hyper rich financier, an immigrant single mother of 2, a college kid working to fund education, a middle aged janitor, etc etc. Any given person existing in the USA.
I'll use "fire safety regulations" as the example.
Your argument is untenable:
1. Individually, you do not have the experience or education to make an informed decision regarding fire safety (be it, determining whether you want to work in a location given the fire safety mechanisms they have chosen, or, choosing to eat in a location given the fire safety mechanisms they have chosen, etc).
2. You probably don't have a choice in the fire safety mechanism implementations of where you eat, work, live. You more than likely are forced to make those decisions based on factors such as the need to have money to eat (place of employment), the need for a heated place to live in the winter (place of residence) that is within your budget, etc. Therefore, there is no "government choosing for you," there is no "you choosing for you," it is whoever owns the building.
3. As evidenced in rapidly developing nations, those that do have the power to make decisions regarding fire safety mechanisms will, deliberately or otherwise, make bad ones, without government regulation and enforcement.
Don't forget that regulations aren't just an enforcement mechanism, they're a standards one. The government pooled our resources to find "the best" standard way to make fire safety in buildings acceptable. That allows builders and parts manufacturers to efficiently develop a standard set of fittings and equipment. It literally saves everyone money, while saving lives.
'You probably don't have a choice ...' is a reach. The rest is well-argued.
Anyway the most telling point is if OP gets his wish, then next time a bunch of people burn to death the public will clamor again for mandatory fire escapes, inevitably. We aren't the sort of people he wishes we were.
The implication that you are competent enough to accurately assess that threat and all others like it is so ridiculous that nobody should take you seriously.
You could say the same thing about having children, or deciding what to eat in the morning. Or deciding what to do with your life.
Could you explain to me how you would draw the line? People can't and shouldn't be protected from themselves.
A good example is that I got addicted to heroin. It was terrible, yet, I believe that drugs should be legal and that people need to make their own choices, regardless of the consequences.
Suppose you had a car dealership. Cars were flying off the lot. No discounts or rebates needed. Google comes in and buys 10, Facebook takes another 10. Amazon then comes in and asks for 25 and wants a $5000 rebate for each car. You give it to them. That rebate was still in the margin of what you were making, but now all your other loyal customers that had no problem buying your product for the quality of what you sell now want concessions too. Yes you still "made money" but you devalued a premium product that was selling well for no good reason. The better move business wise would be to tell the person that wants a discount to go to someone willing to offer it. Amazon needs NYC as well.
FDA approval process requires a ton of upfront R&D resources with zero guarantees. This is mostly a good thing but it's not black and white. Malpractice law is another example of regulations driving the price up, we can't get rid of malpractice law but the structure matters.
I don't agree with the poster above, but one common cited example is that emergency rooms are required to treat all patents regardless of their ability to pay. So they have to raise prices for everyone else in order to manage the risk that someone won't pay.
I always thought the high prices in the US was because of not having universal healthcare - when you are buying for millions of people, you can have lower prices? It's not like the US is the only country that regulates drugs?
For higher drug costs, see "Regulation and Pharmaceutical Innovation" by Peltzman, which shows through statistics that the 1962 FDA regulations have resulted in a large increase in drug costs with no net increase in safety. (While more bad drugs have been blocked, this is counterbalanced by good drugs taking much longer to be approved. Unknown is what drugs were never developed because of the much increased cost of the regulations.)
>What’s wrong with tax breaks? It’s like people are under the impression that the government is actually paying Amazon.
What do you think a tax break is?
>If Amazon didn’t get any tax breaks, they would have gone somewhere else.
If the cost of upgrading the city infrastructure to handle the new influx of people (and other associated costs) is higher than the income from Amazon, it's a bad deal for the city.
Also:
>If Amazon didn’t get any tax breaks, they would have gone somewhere else.
No. No they wouldn't. The tax breaks are only part of the equation. If it was only about money, other locations offered more. New York is arguable one of the 3 most important cities on the planet, and pretending that multinational business scoff at it unless they get paid to bring their businesses into town is laughable.
You don’t know this to be true, at all. If the tax breaks didn’t matter and it was always going to be NYC, Amazon likely wouldn’t have conducted the whole dog and pony show in the first place. In reality, NYC has a huge talent base which is enticing to Amazon; they also offered significant tax incentives, which is enticing to Amazon. Both can be true.
Or one can be true and not the other. I will agree that neither of us know WTF was going on in the Amazon meetings that decided where to go. I will concede that I jumped the gun in speaking in an absolute.
It's entirely possible the tax breaks or lack there of would have affected their decision, but because NYC offers things very few other cities on the planet can offer in regards to both human capital as well as other amenities it's also possible that it was a cherry on top and not the sundae itself.
> NYC is currently a boom town, and I as a NYer am disappointed that we gave them such a huge amount of tax breaks.
If they want to put their HQ somewhere that doesn't have enough schools and public transportation to support it, why shouldn't they get a tax credit for spending money to improve the local infrastructure? The reason it's needed in the first place is that the local government can't be trusted to actually allocate public resources in a fair way.
Local government can't be trusted to allocate public resources in a fair way... so we defer that to a private company? That doesn't seem too smart. Where's the guarantee (or even suggestion) that Amazon would use their tax break to improve local infrastructure?
> Local government can't be trusted to allocate public resources in a fair way... so we defer that to a private company?
Public resources in NYC are already allocated by private companies; that's a big part of why local government can't be trusted in the first place. Amazon is just saying that if they build a huge building in NYC, then they want to control public resource allocation in the area of the building in place of whatever private company would already be doing this.
> Where's the guarantee (or even suggestion) that Amazon would use their tax break to improve local infrastructure?
That's literally that the deal is, or at least a substantial portion of it:
Aren't private buses a more efficient way to move your employees rather than having them each drive their own car? If the local governments haven't done enough to solve the mass transit issue, it seems this is the best approach that a tech giant could implement.
It is, but businesses and businessmen used to be more civics minded.
Nelson Rockefeller smashed heads to rid New York of Robert Moses' strangehold and fix the subways. The Carnegies and the Vanderbilts founded universities. After the '80s we haven't really seen this kind of behavior, save Microsoft's recent tiptoe into developing affordable housing.
Google and Facebook have the weight to throw around to ask for things like the second Transbay Tube or Dumbarton Bridge rail service, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Google is building out some infrastructure around their Mountain View housing project, i.e. affordable housing available to the public, some parks, footpaths, bridges, etc, but definitely nothing like Rockefeller.
It's fairly incomprehensible to me - these companies are working with a truly staggering amount of money, do they think they've found the upper limit of "Bay Area Coolness Factor?" Imagine if they eradicated the draw of Austin or New York or Portland by pushing for such a good Caltrain system that living in Mountain View was functionally equivalent to living in San Francisco because the trains were so fast and ran all night... or even further south or east, stretching transit out to areas where one might actually be able to afford a house.
If theres any level of government you as a citizen have influence over its your dang local government.
If your local government is inept, organize to replace it. There is no local government in the country that serves over a couple million people. None of them are out of reach like most state and federal legislatures are from influence by an average person with passion to fix it, even if the extent of your influence is to just spread enough malcontent to foster replacement of the incumbent powers that be.
> If theres any level of government you as a citizen have influence over its your dang local government.
But Amazon isn't a local citizen. Why would their employees relocate somewhere if there aren't schools and parks for their kids, given that Amazon can't even tell them that they will get built because it's not in their control?
Whatever the downsides of this approach are, asking a corporation to invest billions of dollars moving somewhere without any guarantee from the government that there will be enough infrastructure to support their employees makes even less sense. How could you actually expect anyone to do that?
Amazon needs NYC because it has a metro area of 20 million people with more developers than Silicon Valley, and also many other skilled people in management and business. The days of someone moving to a company town to work for them are over as you have seen with GE moving to Boston and other corporate moves. Nobody is going to move to a small city to work for Amazon.