[andosteinmetz]

What New York City do you live in? I have never been offered, nor do I know anybody who's been offered a month's free rent on signing a lease. Places that do this are overcharging and driving up rents. Your comment may just be emphasizing the fact that there are multiple "New Yorks." And I suspect the New York that Amazon HQ2 would benefit would be the New York that pays too much to live in a glass tower and gets offered a month's free rent.

[chucksmash]

Not a landlord, but I imagine there are oodles of benefits to it from their perspective. If I can rent you an apartment for $4000.00 a month but tell you "$3666.67 (net rent w/ first month free)", then:

- Come next year, the default position is "you get a 10% rent hike by just paying the number on the lease."

- if you leave after a year, I've got price history at $4000 a month and can use that as an anchor for negotiations with the next tenant

There's nothing that says I have to start from fair market value and take a month off either. Say I call the apartment price 12/11ths of market value, but then advertise the net number and each month your great deal lets you pay only 11/11ths of FMV.

Bloomberg had something about this today[1] - something like 45% of leases in NYC have similar concessions.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-14/manhattan...

[NathanKP]

I live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn which is obviously a significantly gentrified area. Not just the "glass towers" but most of the older brownstones I looked at over the past month while searching for a new place also offer one month's free rent. I can't argue with the fact that Amazon would contribute to gentrification because that is true. But I can also say that Amazon pulling out of the plans isn't going to stop gentrification.

[CoolGuySteve]

What is the point of this comment? It combines some smug self-satisfaction about "Your New York" with your ridiculously insulated anecdata about the first month discount many apartments give.

A 5 second Google search shows hundreds of results for 1 month free rent in apartment listings.

What exactly are you contributing to the discussion?

[TuringNYC]

@andosteinmetz I'll offer anecdata also as a born-and-raised New Yorker (FYI - I finally moved out because the job market did not support the living costs given personal constraints.)

NY is a shell of what it was in 2005/2006. Yes, there are more tech firms, but the 500,000 or so jobs lost after the financial collapse in 2008 have not been made up for. I welcome Amazon bringing in well-paid positions, because as a New Yorker, I'd like the city to support a middle class, not just wealthy foreigners parking money into LLCd condos staying empty.

Much of the gentrification could be due to the free money and ZIRP policy in the US -- it is cheap to borrow and thus people, especially wealthy people/corps, borrow heavily and raise prices and rents. There is little correlation between actual income and rents in NYC because of this external booster.

Wouldn't it be better if the source of rent increases in NYC be the presence of lots of well paying jobs?

[andosteinmetz]

@TuringNYC I agree that the role real estate investment is playing in driving rent increases is important to address - through regulation - and I’m all for bringing good jobs to the city.

However, I think we can do better than giving massive tax breaks to megacorporations with bad records on labor relations and what has seemed to be an adversarial relationship to government and public services. I have no interest in seeing a replay of what’s happened to SF in NYC.

I think it’s important for cities to stand up for the interests of all their citizens, not just software developers and product managers (etc) in negotiations with increasingly powerful tech companies.

[andosteinmetz]

That's a fair criticism, and I regret my tone and making the discussion personal. But as a life-long New Yorker, I do feel a personal stake in all this.

I believe OP is right that the month's free rent offered on an apartment is recouped by the landlord: in the form higher rents, which have become a real problem for many people born and raised in the city and which would likely only be exacerbated by Amazon's setting up shop here, especially under the conditions offered by the city.

Over the past 20 years New York has experienced an influx of wealth without commensurate investment in public services. The MTA is dying, urban blight is spreading and many of the new professional class moving here don't seem bothered by it.

Another piece of "anecdata": walking down Bedford Ave. in Williamsburg a few years back, I heard one wealthy newcomer say to another that she couldn't wait for the local pharmacy across the street from the new Duane Reade to close. Maybe this anecdote doesn't have the force of a "real data" but it may help some people on here understand why New Yorkers aren't thrilled by the prospect of a building a big Amazon campus and welcoming them with a handout.

https://harpers.org/archive/2018/07/the-death-of-new-york-ci... Unlike the author of this article, I'm not averse to my city changing, but I'd like to imagine something other than the change we've been seeing...

[NathanKP]

I agree with you. Just in the last five years of living in Williamsburg I've seen the neighborhood change a lot. I remember that local pharmacy you are referring to before it got turned into an Apple store, and before the Whole Foods got built on the same block.

I'm not gonna lie, I'm part of the gentrification problem over the last five years, but to be fair New York gentrified me at the same time that I helped gentrify the neighborhood. I only made about 30k a year before I moved to New York and I lived in a trailer home back then. After moving to New York I got a few different tech jobs and now I live in one of those over-priced one month free buildings.

I share my story just to say that in my perspective gentrification is a complicated system, and like you I also have a personal stake in all this. In my experience working in tech in New York has been a huge opportunity to improve my life. Amazon would have offered roughly another 25k people such an opportunity, some of them would have been newcomers, and some hopefully long term NYC residents. I can't lie, some people might not have benefited as much as others, but at least those 25k would have been able to get the same opportunity I did when I moved here.

[JohnFen]

> I can't lie, some people might not have benefited as much as others

You should also recognize that many people would be actively harmed by it, not just "not benefiting as much as others".

Whether the benefits outweigh the harm is a question I can't answer, but even if they do, it's still true that people are hurt.

None of these issues are easy or clear.

[pesmhey]

The point is pretty clear: there are people out there who don’t even know what 1-month free rent is. The contribution to the conversation is an illumination of the divide between some generalized types of people in New York. The relevance to the OP is that there may be some wildly different opinions on Amazon’s perceived actions based on which generalized type of New Yorker you are.

[anth_anm]

The part where it's mostly overpaid software devs living in a bubble.

I live in that part of Seattle. It's the same part where people want to ban all cars because they never have to go anywhere that isn't walking distance, and their dog loves walking.