[asabjorn]

You are addressing the quote:

> You don't need to be the State's Budget Director to know that a nine to one return on your investment is a winner.

I think you are here making a moral argument of sorts. Why is it morally better to get 100% of nothing than to participate in a project with incentives that give you 9 times return plus create 24-40k jobs? I simply don't see a viable argument that this was morally right, and wonder what argument you have that the facts we know support this proposition.

So far the opponents have not provided a "morally better" alternative to provide Queens with 25-40k jobs, unionized secure jobs for vast amounts of families, and a tax base necessary to invest in Queens that has received very little investment in decades. They have "hopes and dreams", but destroy the only path we had to get there.

Due to this we can't improve the offerings of progressive government services for the people living in Queens. Real kids, families, elderly and youth seeking opportunity is affected by this. These facts seems to show conclusively that this what the activists achieved was morally wrong.

[icelancer]

> Why is it morally better to get 100% of nothing than to participate in a project with incentives that give you 9 times return plus create 24-40k jobs?

Because people who rail against deals like this take zero responsibility for any of the consequences. It's all of the fun moral policing and none of the downside. It's great to be an activist.

[bilbo0s]

In fairness, the real reason, at least in NYC...

is that they never end up in a situation where they get 100% of nothing. Google and Amazon have thousands of jobs in NYC, and they will move thousand more there in the future. For these people in NYC, they don't know the consequences of not having loads of places to work. For them, it really is a situation of "Heads we win! Tails we win slightly less!".

[afiori]

Well if Amazon could not find 25k employee in the given time they would not receive the 3 billions in tax relief

[speedplane]

> Well if Amazon could not find 25k employee in the given time they would not receive the 3 billions in tax relief

The problem of the deal wasn't the mechanics, it was how it was sold to the public. A competition putting cities against cities, negotiated without any public input, a large tax break to one of the richest companies in the world, choosing already popular cities rather than really investing in a newer one. Amazon could have definitely closed this deal if they pitched it properly.

[afiori]

Maybe, but as it is pointed out many times here and in the open letter this was basically a replay of Brexit. another commenter said that his mom believed the city would give amazon 3 billions up front. the public approved of the deal, the only demographic to disapprove was the internet.

70% of local residents approved of the deal. that is a lot.

[bobthepanda]

I'm skeptical of any polling for the issue, mostly because polls have huge issues with data collecting and getting a representative sample, particularly on things like local issues.

Depending on

* how the question was framed ("Do you think the second headquarters of Amazon will be a positive?" vs. "Do you think the deal with Amazon will be positive?" vs. "Do you think tax breaks for Amazon are good?")

* how informed the voter was required to be; people are notoriously uninformed and uninterested about anything that isn't a presidential election

* how residents were contacted (was it a landline poll? mail? survey on the street? online? because these all have different populations to be accounted for)

* who counts as a valid resident for the survey? someone who lives in Buffalo? someone who lives in Westchester? someone who lives in Manhattan? someone who lives in Flushing? etc.

Polls predicted that AOC would lose her race, and that clearly didn't happen.

[graycat]

Yup. To get attention the activists want their shocking stories told, and to get eyeballs and ad revenue the media wants shocking stories to tell.

See my more general response along these lines in

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19236564

[bobthepanda]

> and a tax base necessary to invest in Queens that has received very little investment in decades.

In what alternate universe is this? Queens is hardly Camden or Detroit. The neighborhood in question has 40+ story office and residential towers sprouting up like weeds. Queens is at a record low employment rate ever since this started getting tracked at the county level: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYQUEE1URN. And there are similar statistics for the metro area. It is unclear to me that New York City needs to throw any tax credits for jobs when we are running probably very close to full employment.

[asabjorn]

This is about diversifying the economy away from real estate and wall street. It is also about bringing high-paying jobs to Queens, and encourage the kind of investment that brings.

From what I understand developers started building in anticipation of Amazon coming there, and that investment is now in question.

[bobthepanda]

The area has been built up with skyscrapers over the past decade, well before HQ2 had even been announced. Development in New York is not so quick that you could shovel a project through in the four months after the announcement.

New York's economy is plenty diverse. There's real estate and Wall Street, sure, but there's also legal services, advertising, media, health, education (NYC has the largest student population in the country), hospitality, tourism, etc. This is no one company town like Gary.

[cjbprime]

I wouldn't describe LIC (or any part of Queens) as being "built up with skyscrapers" personally. I'd say there are a handful of tall apartment buildings.

[asabjorn]

So you are saying Queens is in a great place and we do not need to create much more opportunity there?

[bobthepanda]

There's certainly no need to beg for it.

[asabjorn]

It’s not begging to take 9 out of every ten tax dollars to attract an opportunity.

[Eridrus]

LIC does not have many commercial tenants, and none on the scale of Amazon.

It would be a good thing to not concentrate all jobs in Manhattan.

Also, if you walk around LIC, it's not as developed as you might think, sure there are huge buildings, but they're next to empty lots & industrial spaces. It's largely a desirable area because of it's proximity to Manhattan, not really anything intrinsic about the neighborhood.

[bobthepanda]

All of our transportation is Manhattan-centric. That's why all the jobs are in Manhattan.

Putting jobs in LIC will still force workers from the non-Queens sections of the metro area to go into Manhattan and then back out to Queens. Even the LIRR can't really serve LIC, because it's impossible to build a station that serves waterfront LIC that is on the way to Penn.

[Eridrus]

The Amazon proposal explicitly came with half a billion in funding for transportation in Queens.

And it's also ignoring the fact that a lot of people already live in Queens, and that LIC specifically is connected to Brooklyn via the G.

It's not an ideal situation, but it's a chicken & egg problem, there's no reason to build commuter transit there without employers and employers don't want to be there without that transit, so the Amazon deal would have done a good amount to break that stalemate.

[ec109685]

Amazon jobs aren’t unionized, nor secure.

[afiori]

it was required as part of the grant