They said that the search for a HQ2 will not continue and instead they are focusing on increasing presence in NY, VA, and I think TN. Not sure if the increased presence is 25,000 jobs worth.
Which makes this whole episode so bizarre - they suddenly changed their mind on the value of having a HQ2 (and 25k jobs in a HQ) completely, after such a long and public buildup? Something is fishy here.
Yes, something strikes me as strange about the withdrawl announcment.
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the incentives and subsidies were coming from the state, not the city. Cuomo and many majority Democrats in the state Senate were on board. The mayor, DeBlasio was on board.
The opposition was driven locally by councilpeople and community activists. Some in state government opposed but I doubt it would have been enough to derail it, especially considering upstate cities have had similar blockbuster subsidy deals given to them (Albany with IBM/nanotech, Buffalo with Tesla/Solar City).
It seems like Amazon would be driven to withstand some (likely temporary) public criticism in order to get billions of dollars of incentives. After all, they already faced the same criticism during the HQ2 spectacle and have a lot of same type of backlash in their hometown to begin with.
Makes me wonder if there's another story playing out that the public has not heard yet.
It's my understanding that Amazon had a lot of difficulty working with the city's unions, owing to the latter's opposition to Amazon's anti-union stance. The unions had a lot of support from the local councilpersons and community activists you spoke of.
Right before the Amazon pull out, there were several meetings between Amazon, labour/union reps, and government officials (according to NPR). It's all a black box, but my guess is that either the unions or Amazon wanted some sort of contractual guarantee the other was unwilling to budge on, and the local governance sided with the unions.
Because it's not as if they didn't already have a public backlash against the HQ2 search, against their labor practices globally, and even in their hometown Seattle where they dominate.
Seeing as the state controls the incentives and the governor and mayor were on board, there was a decent chance they would have gotten the incentives no matter what local opposition was, and eventually the issue would have been dropped. For incentives totaling billions, it's difficult to imagine them dropping the whole thing over some heated meetings with councilpeople and union leaders.