‘It’s obscene and wrong’: Amazon HQ2 gets typically warm New York welcome

More than 200 cities across North America spent a year competing for Amazon’s affections, lavishing tax breaks and other goodies for the chance to host the tech giant’s HQ2.

Now, New York has won at least part of the prize – with Amazon splitting its second headquarters in two, and putting one of the new offices in Long Island City, Queens.

But not everyone in the city is rolling out the welcome mat. A backlash developed even before Amazon made the move official with an announcement on Tuesday. Detractors denounced public subsidies for a corporate juggernaut and pointed to the potential for rising rents and overcrowded subways in a city that already has plenty of both.

“To provide a billion dollars in taxpayer money at a time of scarce resources to one of the richest corporations in the world, that’s run by literally the richest man in the world – it’s obscene and it’s wrong,” Jimmy Van Bramer, who represents Long Island City on the city council, told the Guardian.

Long Island City sits just across the East River from Manhattan. Decades past its industrial heyday, warehouses have given way to new residential and office towers – adding apartments at a pace that makes it the fastest-growingneighborhood in the city, and by some measures, in the entire country.

To this mix, Amazon could add 25,000 workers on a large waterfront parcel. It’s set to receive more than $1.5bn in cash subsidies and tax breaks.

New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, is bullish on the plan – so much so that he offered to take on a new name to gain the tech giant’s favor.

“I’ll change my name to Amazon Cuomo if that’s what it takes, because it would be a great economic boost,” he told reporters last week. “We put together a very strong incentive package.”

FacebookTwitterPinterest

Riders who get off the subway at Long Island City’s Court Square stop are greeted by the sound of hammering, with new buildings rising to join the glass towers already beckoning incoming residents with catchphrases like “artful living” and “live at the center of it all”.

“There’s a crane on every corner,” said state senator Michael Gianaris. “It’s a historically working-class and middle-class neighborhood that’s changing rapidly, and people are being displaced by the day – already.”

Stretching east from Long Island City along the 7 train line – plagued, like the rest of the city’s crumbling subways, with frequent shutdowns and delays – are diverse immigrant neighborhoods such as Woodside, Jackson Heights and Elmhurst, which could all feel ripples from Amazon.

Gianaris said he might have welcomed the Seattle-based behemoth to his backyard under other circumstances.

“Ask not what we can do for Amazon – ask what Amazon can do for us,” he said. “I want the jobs, but what are you, Amazon, doing to make sure the mass transit system can handle it and there are enough school seats? … They should be talking about how they’re going to be good corporate citizens and help improve infrastructure, not wringing as much as they can out of us.”

Neighborhood residents had mixed feelings. “It’s good and bad. It’s going to be good for local businesses, good for the local economy,” said Michael Giardina, 42.

“It’s probably going to make the neighborhood get even more expensive than it already is,” he said. “Will it just become a neighborhood for wealthy professionals, or will it still be a neighborhood for everybody?”

Other tech companies have made moves in New York with less fanfare, and less blowback.

Google and Facebook are both expanding in the city, with Google planning a major expansion that could bring it’s workforce here up to a total of 20,000 jobs. The city has nurtured its tech sector, opening the new Cornell Tech school on Roosevelt Island, which sits just off Long Island City.

Julie Samuels, executive director of Tech:NYC, hailed the addition of Amazon, saying that besides its own presence the talent it will draw could spur more tech startups around the city.

“I can’t understand why you would want them anywhere but here,” she said. “In the short term, there might be some growing pains but that’s inevitable. And the truth is that in the long term the whole city and Long Island City in particular only stand to gain.”

But critics find it hard to believe that Amazon conducted its year-long contest across the whole of America in good faith only to settle on New York and a suburb of Washington DC.

Jersey City’s mayor, Steven Fulop, called the process “a big joke just to end up exactly where everyone guessed at the start”.

“New York City is a winner on the merits, and the whole idea that Amazon would go through this charade of accepting 238 bids from places like Virginia Beach and Frisco, Texas, and places that never had a prayer, and then end up locating in the financial capital of the country and the political capital of the country has created justifiable blowback,” said Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First.

To get around the brewing political fight, the state is looking to use an economic development agency to approve the project without the city zoning approval that is usually required, the local officials said.

New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, like his political rival Cuomo, supports the Amazon project. De Blasio, however, has said he opposes city-level tax subsidies for corporations like Amazon. .

De Blasio nodded to the attitude among some residents that New York, as big and successful as it is, simply doesn’t need Amazon in the way some cities do.

“Because we’re New Yorkers, we get a little bit … jaded. Our perspective’s a little funny – you know, we have almost 4.5m jobs so someone comes along talking about 25,000 or 50,000 new jobs and we’re like – a lot of New Yorkers are kind of like, that’s nice. Anywhere else that would be front page for a month, right? It’s just a seismic number of jobs,” he said. “Yeah, there will be hassles, there will be challenges, but I think we can accommodate them.”