[zaroth]

I completely disagree with the “race to the bottom” framing of the idea that cities shouldn’t compete to provide the best services for the commercial enterprises which reside there.

At the 50-75 year timeframe we are talking about at least hundreds of billions of dollars of economic value, if not trillions. The clustering effect of becoming Silicon Valley 2 cannot be overstated.

My personal opinion is cities should be talking about the Billions they will be committing to supporting infrastructure improvements rather than the billions in tax cuts. HQ2 needs a fuck ton of support systems, akin to building an Olympic City which never shuts down.

Of course city governments should be working hard to bring this kind of value creation and massive economic engine to their constituents. Of course Amazon should be asking tough questions of cities akin to “and what are you going to do to support me” before spending $5 billion building a new campus.

Personally I think the cities that only have tax incentives to offer will not come out the winner. Amazon cares a lot more about the surrounding infrastructure and ecosystem than a short term $1 Billion.

It’s completely irrational anti-capitalistic knee jerking to whine that cities shouldn’t be working hard to support HQ2 in their backyard. We are watching capitalism at its finest here folks - and market efficiency driving negotiation and competition is creating significantly better outcomes than the “fuck Amazon they don’t need handouts” crowd would arrive at.

If someone came to your town and said, I want to build a $20m community arts center with a theater, coworking space, parks, gardens, and playground — would you want your town to say “good luck with that” or would you want them to say “that’s amazing what do you need from us to make that happen?!” Just because Amazon happens to be for-profit, their presence in your city is an extraordinary asset and it makes perfect sense to entice them to come.

In fact, you can’t even consider building at anywhere near HQ2 scale without an intimate partnership with the host city which is, in one form or another, going to require somewhere on the order of dollar-for-dollar public investment to match the private investment. We’ve proven that this public/private partnership is basically the most effective growth engine we’ve got. I certainly hope my city would do everything possible to roll out the red carpet. It’s the most effective dollars they could possibly spend, because it’s effectively corporate matching of public funds.

[maxsilver]

> Just because Amazon happens to be for-profit, their presence in your city is an extraordinary asset

It's not though. You purposefully used examples of public or non-profit groups to make it sound like a benefit. But it's not. A more fair comparison would read:

It's like someone came to your town and I said, "I want to build a $20m McDonalds, Mobile Gas Station, WalMart and a Best Buy". I would hope your town says "good luck with that" and not "that's amazing, how should we corrupt the local market to make it easier for you to do that". Amazon is no different in any way except scale.

In a sane world, Amazon HQ2 would terrify cities, who will need to ensure they have extra taxes in place for Amazon, to ensure the city can handle the massive pollutions Amazon HQ2 will generate in the local housing markets, local economy, and local infrastructure.

> We’ve proven that this public/private partnership is basically the most effective growth engine we’ve got

Proven? Can you cite some examples? I've only seen "Public/private partnerships" used as a label to mask corruption and theft; as a way to socialize any losses but privatize any gains.

[wmeredith]

> "Public/private partnerships" used as a label to mask corruption and theft; as a way to take socialize any losses but privatize any gains

I couldn't have said it better.

[twostoned]

This is exactly what it is. Agreed.

I got a bit excited and should add more detail: we're in a time when taxes are being shifted more and more away from those who have (rich & corporations) to those who have not. A public/private partnership seems insane to people because it is. The private companies have all the resources and need to leverage further their wealth from the public sector. They can easily front this by themselves and still be printing money without a care in the world. Didn't the corporate tax rate in the USA just get reduced from 35% to 21%? Private top-tier income tax was something like 96% during WWII and now it's down to what, half of that? So not only do you blatantly and overtly go out of your way to avoid contributing to the public fund but then also get politicians to give you deals and project-specific loans out of that exact same reduced, exhausted public purse? OOkay. Then you tell us that we should be thanking you because you're providing jobs... what kind of jobs and to whom?

I'm always skeptical of these things to say the least. Then to claim that there's proof... umm.... are you referencing Atlas Shrugged?

[refurb]

we're in a time when taxes are being shifted more and more away from those who have (rich & corporations)

Actually the exact opposite is happening. The top quintile is pay a bigger share of taxes than before.[1] In 1960, the top quintile paid 56.5% of all federal tax revenue. In 2005 it was 69%.

Care to revise your position based on that?

[1]http://www.nbcnews.com/id/29861648/ns/politics-capitol_hill/... (table on right)

[bhickey]

> Actually the exact opposite is happening.

You're mistaken and given your responses elsewhere I think you're either confused or arguing in bad faith.

The mean tax rate paid by the top 0.1% of earners in 1979 was just over 40%. This fell to about 25% in 2010.[1] Marginal rates followed a similar trend. Meanwhile the US Gini coefficient rose from .415 in 1979 to .476 in 2012.[2] This implies that the top quintile pays a greater share of Federal taxes because they're proportionally richer than the other quintiles. The poor don't pay much Federal tax because you can't get blood from a stone.

[1] http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/r42729_0917..., page 3

[2] https://www.citylab.com/life/2014/05/mapping-three-decades-i...

[refurb]

First off, the Gini coefficient has a shit ton wrong with it. A country would score better if everyone was poorer, but equal, rather than wealthier but unequal. I for one would choose the later, even if I'm not one of the top earners.

Second your graph shows rates for the top .1% and .01%. I was talking top quintile which you seemed to have forgotten plus you didn't challenge the data I provided.

[haikuginger]

The stat you cite is actually 1979, but if you look at the income proportions[1] at that time relative to current by-quintile income proportions, the growth in taxation of the top quintile between 1979 and 2005 is slightly greater than linear with that income growth.

[1] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-p...

[refurb]

Thanks for the correction on the year.

Income growth can definitely explain the increase in tax burden, but my point still stands, no? The tax burden is not shifting from the wealthy to the poor.

And if you look at the bottom quintile, their tax burden has fallen, even though income continues to rise.

[tinymollusk]

[that page may 404 if you have a bunch of anti-spyware on your browser. It worked when I popped open an incog window.]

How should I interpret that chart, considering things like wealth versus income? There's some sort of transition between those -- I would guess more wealth was held in non-taxed trusts or investments back then, compared to now? Does the estate tax change behavior?

I think the point is to look at how much of the government is paid for by the top quintile than the others, over time, compared to each group's wealth. Is that correct?

(I am not an economist, just have an amateur interest in complex systems.)

[dumbfounder]

Amazon workers are highly paid, thus bringing the average income up, and contributing to taxes, strengthening the housing market, and much more. That's interesting that you call it pollution. High paying tech jobs are pollution? That doesn't compute to me.

Companies that compete for talent will be pissed, but for lots of others it's a huge win. The only way I see it as a "bad" thing is if you are in a small city that wants to remain small.

It's absolutely nothing like building a McDonalds.

[pjc50]

> contributing to taxes

Well, not in the case of Chicago http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/amazon-hq2-c...

> strengthening the housing market

Like the strong SF housing market which nobody can afford?

[vvanders]

> strengthening the housing market, and much more. That's interesting that you call it pollution.

Talk to anyone who grew up in Seattle or SF pre-tech boom and you might find a different perspective. I think it's worth considering that while it's great for us in tech it's not like it's a net-win for everyone else.

If you work in an industry outside of tech(or a part of tech that doesn't track payscales like the game industry) you may get pushed out of a city/metro just by nature of the impact tech has.

[Johnny555]

But on the flip side, I can't imagine that people living in Detroit were thrilled by the decades of urban decay there.

I think I'd rather live in a city that's so popular that infrastructure can't keep up than to live in a city where entire neighborhoods are empty and are razed due to neglect and criminal activities.

[bohadi]

Good point, but is it not true Detroit was a biz and tech center last century?

[Chaebixi]

It's not a binary choice. The sweet spot is in the middle.

[Johnny555]

but sometimes it is a binary choice. Leaders can see their community dying after the former big industry left -- with lots of luck and years of a strong economy they may be able to attract some replacement industries that keep the town prosperous (but not not overly so).

Or they can hit the "Amazon lottery", bringing in billions of dollars of investment and 50,000 high paid jobs (plus all of the ancillary jobs to support these high paid workers).

So a community could very well face a binary choice.

[aidenn0]

My in-laws sold their house in Saratoga for more than 10x what they paid for it, and are quite happy with that result.

[aeorgnoieang]

> strengthening the housing market

Which is a unmitigated benefit only to some current real estate property owners and an almost-entirely unmitigated cost to everyone else.

[bomb199]

Especially all the renters, which is almost the entire Millenial generation.

[s73ver_]

"Strengthening the housing market"

Other than code for "making everything much more unaffordable", what does this mean?

And yeah, it's pollution for those who don't have high paying tech jobs. There are more people living in those cities than Amazon employees; their interests and needs need to be taking into consideration as well.

[throwaway1748]

Unaffordable is relative. If HQ2 brings thousands of high-paying jobs with it, plus creates an ecosystem where tens of thousands of other good paying jobs are created, housing can become more affordable to more people while rising in price.

Owning a house has been a part of the post-WW2 American dream for good reason, and it should remain so. And people buying homes should want their property to retain value

[xg15]

> Unaffordable is relative. If HQ2 brings thousands of high-paying jobs with it, plus creates an ecosystem where tens of thousands of other good paying jobs are created, housing can become more affordable to more people while rising in price.

Shouldn't this have played out just like that in SF then?

[s73ver_]

Except none of that helps someone who doesn't have one of those Amazon jobs, and sees their rent soar anyway.

[dumbfounder]

I would rather live in a housing market that continues to increase rather than one that goes up and down with the wind.

[rspeer]

If the price of housing always increases, how is anyone who's younger than you (and not richer than you) supposed to be able to afford a house?

[joeax]

> At the 50-75 year timeframe we are talking about at least hundreds of billions of dollars of economic value, if not trillions. The clustering effect of becoming Silicon Valley 2 cannot be overstated.

Back in 2004 when I was working at Microsoft, I remember sitting in a bar in downtown Redmond and tossing back some local brew IPAs. This guy sitting next to me was an older dude and longtime fisherman. He was going on and on about how in the 80's, the eastside (the collective suburbs i.e. Redmond, Bellevue, etc) was just farmland, and that Seattle's main industries were fishing and logging. He was both lamenting and boasting how Microsoft came in and transformed Seattle and surrounding area into the tech mecca it is today.

So you are right. All it takes is one anchor company to totally transform an entire city. Too bad they chose cities with established infrastructures and talent pools, and not a city like Milwaukee or San Antonio that would have had the same dramatic transformation as 80's Seattle.

[Kalium]

Amazon doesn't want to spend ten years trying to remake a city into something that might serve its needs. I can see why. It's a huge investment with a very uncertain return.

But, let's turn it around. Why would Amazon want to go to San Antonio, instead of a city like Atlanta?

[joeax]

Take a city like San Antonio. Austin is 80 miles north. Amazon puts HQ2 in the northern suburbs and suddenly you have a major tech corridor along I-35 that will bring growth and investment along with it, bridging the two cities ala San Francisco-San Jose-Berkeley. You would have a similar effect with Milwaukee and Chicago. Sometimes a city becomes so outgrown and gentrified (like Seattle, hence the new HQ) it makes sense to set up shop nearby.

The next best thing is they set up HQ in southern Austin or northern Chicago (both shortlisted cities), and those cities benefit from residual investment.

[Kalium]

I can definitely think of worse places than San Marcos. Though being outside Austin proper means giving up anything remotely resembling usable public transit. And in all honesty, Austin could be reasonably characterized as outgrown and gentrified already.

Plus, SA has already played this game. It got them Rackspace. Which, uh, could maybe be going better.

[unethical_ban]

Rackspace is one example of that business, but Amazon is not going anywhere. And there is STILL a lot of space all around San Antonio (far west, anything east) as well as New Braunfels and even (if Amazon spent the $$$ to get land) plenty of space within a mile or two of downtown for a large campus.

I've thought for a while that commuter rail lines:

Along the freeways: 35, 10, 281, 151

Between big retail spots: Downtown, Quarry, Rim, Stone Oak, 1604/Bandera, Forum

Big Business: Rackspace, USAA, Downtown (again), Amazon, Lackland AFB, Kelly AFB, Brooks

And new parking areas near big residential centers: Bandera/Tezel, Helotes, Boerne, Stone Oak, Great Northwest, Brooks City Base

Along with parks renovation, school improvements on the South Side and small business incentives would make San Antonio the best place to live in the country.

There's a lot of potential here.

[Kalium]

San Antonio can't even build a street-level rail line for the densest areas without politics getting in the way and halting it. Until that changes, San Antonio is likely to be Our City Of Lots Of Potential for decades to come.

Personally, I wouldn't move back without massive densification of the "urban" core. Right now the place is a massive suburb where getting by without a car is impossible.

[joeax]

I had Dell in mind (being located north in Round Rock) in mind. I have friends in Austin and most enjoy living closer to downtown, and I guess commuting sucks there going north, so heading south seems like a logical choice to build a HQ.

Besides Rackspace they have a bunch of defense contractors and USAA, but little else I believe.

[Kalium]

That's a fairly accurate characterization of San Antonio. The talent pool is somewhat limited and often very specialized. The city is sprawling, so public transit is a bit lacking. SAT isn't really a major international airport, so most major destinations require changing planes at a bigger airport.

It could be argued that UTSA is starting to count as a major university, with recent expansion and investments. But the CS program has yet to really prove itself.

[busterarm]

They also don't want to do what the auto manufacturers did and make the host city completely dependent on them for the local economy.

Shreveport suffered quite a bit after the GM plant closure and drop in oil prices -- being so aligned to one sector was not in Shreveport's best interests.

[Kalium]

Funny story. By coincidence, San Antonio is really proud of its Toyota plant.

[HaloZero]

I think some of it Amazon doesn't work outside a vacuum of other tech companies. It has to compete against San Francisco and other major tech hubs now so having a developed city is a selling point for Amazon HQ2.

[walshemj]

That's only if you ignore Boeing

[rflrob]

> I completely disagree with the “race to the bottom” framing of the idea that cities shouldn’t compete to provide the best services for the commercial enterprises which reside there.

I think the idea is that cities definitely should compete to provide the best services for the commercial enterprises, but that those service should not include breaks on taxes or land giveaways. If building a new transit station, boosting spending on public schools that the Amazon engineers would want, and restructuring building and zoning codes to increase the housing supply will make your city more attractive to Amazon, by all means go ahead, since those should redound to everyone, regardless of whether they work for Amazon. But Amazon seems rich enough to me that they would be just fine even without tax breaks on construction materials or payroll taxes.

[the_gastropod]

> I completely disagree with the “race to the bottom” framing of the idea that cities shouldn’t compete to provide the best services for the commercial enterprises which reside there.

Part of the problem here is the people negotiating don't really have much skin in the game. It's easy to negotiate with other people's money. There's virtually no recourse for their poor decisions. See: suburbia.

> At the 50-75 year timeframe we are talking about at least hundreds of billions of dollars of economic value, if not trillions

We're projecting what a theoretical second campus of a 23 year old company will be 50 and 75 years out? Please. Did we learn nothing from the nearly homogeneous business cities like Detroit and "coal country" today? Cities built around one industry or one company will fail.

> Of course city governments should be working hard to bring this kind of value creation and massive economic engine to their constituents

Amazon developed out of an existing city. Cities should invest their efforts to nurture their own businesses that one day may grow and provide jobs. Importing an existing business is a rather short-sighted proposition akin to a get rich quick scheme.

> Personally I think the cities that only have tax incentives to offer will not come out the winner. Amazon cares a lot more about the surrounding infrastructure and ecosystem than a short term $1 Billion.

Agreed. Amazon is going to go where they're going to go. Cities should stop clamoring over themselves to give bigger tax breaks to one of the biggest businesses on the planet.

[logfromblammo]

> Of course Amazon should be asking tough questions of cities akin to “and what are you going to do to support me” before spending $5 billion building a new campus.

Nothing. We exist to support our tax-paying residents and local businesses, and so you will have to work with everyone that's already here if you want something in particular. You can probably expect a new bus line, an extension of the road, sewer, and water system, one new police station, one new firehouse, two new elementary schools, half a middle school, and a new wing of classrooms at the nearest high school. The quality of all that will depend on how much your company improves the local tax base, so don't get too stingy, or the local news will have no problem airing all the dirty laundry for Amazontown a couple years down the road. The zoning board will be busy changing colors on their map so that your people can eventually spend money on drive-through coffee and dog-walkers without having to go all the way downtown.

Amazon needs to come to the table with the attitude "We're going to increase your tax base by $X. What's your plan for spending it?" The ideal city just has to blow the dust off the growth plan they already have and write new names and dates in all the blanks.

Any city that says, "we're going to give you a tax discount" is basically saying "we would rather you send your money off to Wall Street than actually spend it to improve the community that you intend to join here."

I suppose a city could also offer a bureaucrat dedicated to expediting issues related to the new HQ, like building permits and inspections and NIMBY lawsuits, if they wanted to pay the cost of that person's salary as a donation to the city. I just never quite understood the concept of offering discounts to rich people.

[cirgue]

> We’ve proven that this public/private partnership is basically the most effective growth engine we’ve got.

No one has proven this. There is plenty of evidence pointing to the opposite conclusion.

> It’s completely irrational anti-capitalistic knee jerking to whine that cities shouldn’t be working hard to support HQ2 in their backyard.

On the contrary, it is 100% rational for cities to want to get HQ2 and give away absolutely nothing, and possibly even get some concessions from Amazon itself.

They have to have another headquarters, and there are less than twenty cities that make any degree of sense for them to move to. I would bet that there are only two or three serious contenders, and the only way they're not going to go with whatever first choice they have currently would be a truly enormous handout. The whole bidding war going on here is, in my opinion, to try to get a sweeter deal from whoever they've already picked.

[nindalf]

You make great points. There is a concern that not all of the incentives will be in terms of infrastructure improvements. Look at Wisconsin's deal with Foxconn - they're literally paying Foxconn money and giving them a license to pollute wetlands and waterways in exchange for 13,000 jobs.

[jonknee]

And it will be amazing if there are actually 13,000 jobs. These things have a magical way of never materializing. The jobs turn out to be temp construction or count jobs created in the "economic impact" of having the company there. It's very rare for these deals to come out with the city on top or even equal.

[mark-r]

This is my fear. The cities are offering up fantastic deals so that their politicians can get credit for those mythical benefits that never materialize. By the time the results can be evaluated that politician will be long gone. It's completely impossible to evaluate a proposal like this on the time scale of 50 years.

[apercu]

Devils advocate:

It's possible that Amazon will be a drain on a region.

The cost of housing goes up for everyone.

The best and the brightest of the region get sucked back to HQ1

The startup ecosystem in the region gets drained to work at/for Amazon

[Robotbeat]

Cost of housing going up also increases the wealth of homeowners in the area. This is not purely bad.

[bufordsharkley]

When something is good for the landed and bad for the landless... it's generally bad.

Now, we could reform our policies so that the landless get a fair shot, but realistically, what are the chances of this happening?

[throwaway1748]

Yes, but Amazon and the companies that spring up around HQ2 will enable many landless people to become landed.

And if that happens to an extreme degree where it becomes unsustainable, maybe an HQ3 would be in order?

[deong]

If you're already landless, Amazon coming in isn't going to help you become landed, outside of a handful of the earliest people to get in before the speculators hit. They'll create high paying jobs, but they'll create equally (or likely more) expensive houses.

Anyone wanting to live in Nashville (just to pick one city from the list) who's capable of working for Amazon is also capable of working for someone in Nashville today. And generally, the economics of being tech talent outside these hotbed markets like SV and Seattle are vastly favorable.

That is to say, you're probably better off buying the cheap house in a smaller market on the salary you can command in that market than you are buying a very expensive house on the salary that the very expensive market offers you. Google would pay me more than my current job, but my cost of living would go up by more than my salary -- massively so.

[bomb199]

Against local companies (like for in Seattle), it also creates an issue of competition for employment. In Seattle, every job I'm applying to is also being applied to by ex-Microsoft and ex-Amazon employees. It's a much harder competition to land jobs, but in the smaller markets you could find work much more easily.

[badlucklottery]

Their property taxes also go up as well so their actual financial situation might be worse unless their non-tech wages keep pace with the market or they just sell and leave.

But you can only sell a house once so it's the rising tide isn't really raising their boat like it is for the tech workers. It's more akin to winning a scratch ticket that also forces you to move and maybe get a new job.

[dylan604]

House prices going up is only a good thing when you are selling your house. Otherwise, it's just a larger tax payment the owner endures. I know several people that lost their house because values went up in the neighborhood, but their salaries did not increase to match the new monthly tax allotment requirements.

[xienze]

> House prices going up is only a good thing when you are selling your house. Otherwise, it's just a larger tax payment the owner endures.

Well then you just pass something like Prop 13. Oh wait...

[apercu]

I guess. I live in an expensive area. My house has gone up hundreds of thousands of dollars in value in the last 2 years.

So what? My taxes go up and so do the costs of all the other houses nearby, so I don't net any more if I sell and buy a new house.

[Chaebixi]

> Cost of housing going up also increases the wealth of homeowners in the area. This is not purely bad.

The local government represents the current residents, not future ones. Raising house prices could be a windfall for current homeowners, but it could negative for the broader group of local residents, which will likely have a lot of renters.

Heavily inflated house prices could also be bad for the current homeowners, who may get stuck in their current home because they could no longer afford the price difference for a needed upgrade. Their kids may be forced to move away because they can't find homes.

[walshemj]

Or it creates its own mini environment of tech companies form by alumni of amazon - one large company tends to do that.

Take games workshop in nottingham there is now a large number of spinoff games and mini companies formed by ex GW alumni

[Angostura]

> If someone came to your town and said, I want to build a $20m community arts center with a theater, coworking space, parks, gardens, and playground — would you want your town to say “good luck with that” or would you want them to say “that’s amazing what do you need from us to make that happen?!”

This sounds very similar to the Garden Bridge project in London. It was eventually canned because it was going to take huge amounts of public funds and provide not a lot of benefit.

[Cyberdog]

> It’s completely irrational anti-capitalistic knee jerking to whine that cities shouldn’t be working hard to support HQ2 in their backyard. We are watching capitalism at its finest here folks - and market efficiency driving negotiation and competition is creating significantly better outcomes than the “fuck Amazon they don’t need handouts” crowd would arrive at.

When the incentives cross the line from tax breaks to free stuff, it's capitalism, all right - crony capitalism. Not the type I and other libertarians care to see.

Never thought I'd see the day where I'd be nodding along to a Keith Ellison tweet.

[peterwwillis]

Nobody is arguing that.

They're arguing that the states are giving away money. Not that they aren't providing services.

And nobody thinks Amazon moving to their town will create a silicon valley 2. Plenty of cities host huge employers. They don't become magnets for that industry. They just get fat tax breaks.

Many cities actually get worse with these giant companies throwing their weight around. Under Armor is single handedly reshaping southeast Baltimore, which of course is not only upsetting neighborhoods but pushing people out, not to mention small businesses replaced by national chains.

Finally Amazon has hundreds of billions. They do not need a handout from a poor city.

[refurb]

They're arguing that the states are giving away money.

What money are they giving away? If Amazon never comes, then there is no Amazon taxes and thus no tax breaks.

Right now those towns are starting out at zero. If they are smart, they structure the incentives to make sure they are net positive. If they screw that up, well that's on them.

[peterwwillis]

> If they screw that up, well that's on them.

Giving the incentives is the screw up. Not how they implement it. Even though they often implement stupid policies and ignore the things they actually need to pay for. In many cases, states and local governments lose hundreds of millions, if not billions, trying to attract investment which doesn't pay off.

Kansas City lost 331 million in tax revenue due to horrible policies that incentivized moving jobs a mile across a river to a different state. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/05/04/476799218/epis... http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article183014956.html (video embedded, pls 2 watch)

Kentucky gave tens of millions in tax breaks to build a Noah's Ark theme park. http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/07/us/noahs-ark-kentucky/index.ht...

New Jersey wants to give Amazon $7 Billion in tax breaks. It still has not invested money in fixing its broken public transit system. https://www.wsj.com/articles/newark-offers-7-billion-in-ince...

[aeorgnoieang]

Why aren't cities and towns already doing this then? Every new business or new resident, of any size or wealth or income, is a potential new "net positive" contributor to their tax base.

[PKop]

What on Earth makes you think they aren't doing this? There's no single corp announcing a possible move to anywhere as big as Amazon to illustrate the incentive to compete, at almost any price.

In other words, construct a hypothetical move for a hypothetical corporation to some example town, and I'm sure that town could come up with an incentive package that would be beneficial to its citizens in place of having the company not move there. Do you disagree?

[aeorgnoieang]

I am almost perfectly certain that they're not doing this because I was referring to all of the organizations, and individuals, that are not as big as Amazon.

I'm claiming your argument is suspicious because it seems to only really apply to organizations of Amazon's size. Maybe you disagree, but it sure doesn't seem like any cities or towns are interested in luring an Amazons worth of businesses and tax-payers that aren't a single organization. The argument seems pretty agnostic; why is no one else?

[nugget]

New York State offers to waive all state income taxes for something like 10 years if you move there and start a new business in one of their special economic zones. There are more of these programs out there than people realize.

https://esd.ny.gov/startup-ny-program

[walshemj]

Actually they do motor plants support a vast number of JIT subcontractors - only Tesla seems to have gone back to vertical integration.

[unethical_ban]

>It’s completely irrational anti-capitalistic knee jerking to whine that cities shouldn’t be working hard to support HQ2 in their backyard.

It's completely capitalist loyalty to business above community to dismiss every concern about selling the farm to Amazon as "whining".

[refurb]

Completely agree. The reason why we have ever-more-powerful and continuously-cheaper electronics is because of the "race to the bottom".

Doing things better and cheaper is the reason why our standard of living keeps increasing.

I for one would love to live in a city that said "we need to do more with the money we currently have."

[s73ver_]

So how does Amazon coming in help a city get more affordable housing?

[refurb]

Why is that on Amazon? If the city supports building more housing for incoming employees, then housing prices don't sky rocket and construction works make out like bandits.

I'm trying to understand why when a company like Amazon decides to create jobs in a city, suddenly they are to blame for everything wrong (homelessness, high housing prices, etc). It's absurd.

[s73ver_]

Arguably they're trying to divert tax monies to be spent on themselves instead of the other problems the city faces, so it is on Amazon.

And they're blamed because they are largely a cause of exacerbating those problems. It's not just a pure good for them to come. Like I said, they cause housing prices to skyrocket. That's on them, and the increased homelessness that would result would be on them, too.

[refurb]

Sorry to say, but if a city gives away so much to Amazon that it's a net negative, it's their own dam fault. Maybe they should take some negotiations or financial modeling classes.

Amazon doesn't control the zoning laws, the city does. If housing prices increase, it's the city's fault.

People act like Amazon is some all-powerful entity that can railroad an entity like a city council that has the power to change laws.

[telchar]

Your opinion here goes beyond "caveat emptor" right to "vae victus". Although you seem to support the idea of cities bargaining with Amazon here, your statements make a good argument for cities to decline.

[s73ver_]

Yes, the city would be to blame. But so would Amazon. Amazon is run by people who know right from wrong, and are fully capable of taking responsibility for their actions.

Amazon absolutely shares some blame with all of those. You cannot condemn one entity for not having "personal responsibility" and ignore the responsibility the other entities have in contributing to the situation.

[bookbinder]

Are you not familiar with lobbying (aka bribery)?

[frgtpsswrdlame]

>At the 50-75 year timeframe we are talking about at least hundreds of billions of dollars of economic value, if not trillions. The clustering effect of becoming Silicon Valley 2 cannot be overstated.

What are you talking about? Put those numbers back where they came from - your ass.

>Personally I think the cities that only have tax incentives to offer will not come out the winner. Amazon cares a lot more about the surrounding infrastructure and ecosystem than a short term $1 Billion.

Agree but that's not the point. Amazon isn't really considering twenty cities, they're considering maybe three but they really want these cities to think they're on even ground so they can extract as much tax breaks as possible from one of the cities they would choose regardless. It's about maximum short-term extraction from their existing long-term choice.

>It’s completely irrational anti-capitalistic knee jerking to whine that cities shouldn’t be working hard to support HQ2 in their backyard. We are watching capitalism at its finest here folks

Let's not use 'irrational' this way, it's perfectly rational to be against this but...

You're right, this is exemplar of capitalism, it's also why I lot of people are turning their noses up at it. HQ2 really illustrates we've moved from seeing markets as a tool which are sometimes useful and sometimes not to being a market society which sees markets as the outsourcing of morality. No ideas have to be considered, the market will decide (and it's always right), it's a strange faith.

>and market efficiency driving negotiation and competition is creating significantly better outcomes than the “fuck Amazon they don’t need handouts” crowd would arrive at.

What is that outcome? That Amazon locates where it would have located regardless but with enough tax concessions that it's benefit to the community is substantially reduced? That Amazon's size allows it to pit cities against each other to lower costs, achieving economies of scale that upstarts just won't be able to match and further entrenching it? That Amazon shareholders get a nice dividend next year, funded directly from the concessions that Toronto or Atlanta gives them?

>If someone came to your town and said, I want to build a $20m community arts center with a theater, coworking space, parks, gardens, and playground — would you want your town to say “good luck with that” or would you want them to say “that’s amazing what do you need from us to make that happen?!”

If someone came to your town and said, I want to build a $20m sports stadium — would you want your town to say “good luck with that” or would you want them to say “that’s amazing what do you need from us to make that happen?!” Just because Amazon happens to be for-profit, their presence in your city is an extraordinary asset and it makes perfect sense to entice them to come.

Giving a bunch of concessions to Amazon isn't going to benefit the average Atlantan. Lots more people but without the corresponding taxes to keep public services up. Just like stadiums, this isn't a company working to benefit the surrounding community in the best way possible like some PR might tell you, it's Amazon trying to save as much money as possible, nothing else. Benefits to the surrounding community is a side-effect, a leakage and Amazon has every incentive to plug that leak wherever possible, here it happens to be taxes.

>In fact, you can’t even consider building at anywhere near HQ2 scale without an intimate partnership with the host city which is, in one form or another, going to require somewhere on the order of dollar-for-dollar public investment to match the private investment.

This is just sick, it's corporate welfare. If I'm paying for Amazon, then I want part of the profit.

>We’ve proven that this public/private partnership is basically the most effective growth engine we’ve got.

It's also a significant contributor to our inequality problem. Growth at all costs isn't the answer so neither is making Amazon's costs public but allowing it's profit to remain private.

[dang]

> What are you talking about? Put those numbers back where they came from - your ass.

Whoa. That kind of thing will get you banned here, as you're surely aware. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[RangerScience]

> We’ve proven that this public/private partnership is basically the most effective growth engine we’ve got

I believe you and would like to learn more. Do you have some sources I can look into?

[zaroth]

There’s a technical term for PPP - Public Private Partnership which isn’t exactly what’s happening with HQ2 but the effects are similar. In other words, even though HQ2 isn’t literally a train station, a campus that size functions in many ways like public infrastructure.

Maybe a good place to start;

https://pppknowledgelab.org/guide/sections/83-what-is-the-pp...