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For someone who "had nothing to do with" (in your words) destroying the Amazon deal in Queens, she still seems to think she had everything to do with it.
Here she is, grinning like a Cheshire cat, so happy with herself for destroying the Amazon deal in Queens.
Still a better deal for NYC overall. It makes sense that she’d want to at least try to take credit it for it even if her role in it was exaggerated. She’s probably trying to feed into that sentiment and make it sound like she was more prominent in the process than she was.
1,500 is for one new office while Amazon’s corporate headcount in NYC now is already in the thousands. The 25k headcount was over an extended period of a decade once HQ2 is created.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 12-07-2019 at 01:30 PM..
Amazon should have made more concessions. I don't need any study to tell me that Amazon was being offered too many tax benefits. I used to do reviews/certifications for NYC developers applying for various tax benefits as a Big 4 CPA and these people are taking advantage of the system because of stupid government policies. With that being said, I'm not for AOC and I wish she loses next year.
And alongside, Cuomo should have offered less in the first place. It seems odd to place blame on Amazon for taking the concessions that Cuomo offered. Best case scenario would have probably been to have no special dispensations for Amazon in the deal—the as-of-right incentives for LIC were already generous enough and then the argument could have been that there was no real special treatment for Amazon compared to any other company. There still would have been pushback and arguments in regards to whether or not the as-of-right incentives were overly generous or should have some kind of reform, but that would have been a very different discussion.
And alongside, Cuomo should have offered less in the first place. It seems odd to place blame on Amazon for taking the concessions that Cuomo offered. Best case scenario would have probably been to have no special dispensations for Amazon in the deal—the as-of-right incentives for LIC were already generous enough and then the argument could have been that there was no real special treatment for Amazon compared to any other company. There still would have been pushback and arguments in regards to whether or not the as-of-right incentives were overly generous or should have some kind of reform, but that would have been a very different discussion.
This deal was guaranteed to be beneficial to both Amazon and Cuomo and DeBlasio but the impacts on NYC are at best unknown. For Amazon, the subsidies guarantee they will come out ahead. For the politicians, getting Amazon to move HQ2 to NYC is quantifiable feathers in their caps that can be touted endlessly in future election campaigns. It's likely Amazon would have chosen NYC anyway with far smaller subsidies but the spectacle Amazon created with their location search meant that all these hapless politicians with their self serving goals overbid.
Guaranteed winners for Amazon HQ2 in Queens:
Amazon
Cuomo and DeBlasio
Queens LIC homeowners who will see their property values skyrocket
Union construction workers
LIC businesses
Potential winners
NYC tech workers who may see increased salaries due to competition for talent
Other companies lured to NYC because of Amazon and the pool of tech talent they would attract
(See how Jamie Dimon from Chase is saying he wants to move out of NYC because Amazon HQ2 isn't coming)
Losers
People in the neighborhood who rent and who could never get a tech job.
This deal was guaranteed to be beneficial to both Amazon and Cuomo and DeBlasio but the impacts on NYC are at best unknown. For Amazon, the subsidies guarantee they will come out ahead. For the politicians, getting Amazon to move HQ2 to NYC is quantifiable feathers in their caps that can be touted endlessly in future election campaigns. It's likely Amazon would have chosen NYC anyway with far smaller subsidies but the spectacle Amazon created with their location search meant that all these hapless politicians with their self serving goals overbid.
Guaranteed winners for Amazon HQ2 in Queens:
Amazon
Cuomo and DeBlasio
Queens LIC homeowners who will see their property values skyrocket
Union construction workers
LIC businesses
Potential winners
NYC tech workers who may see increased salaries due to competition for talent
Other companies lured to NYC because of Amazon and the pool of tech talent they would attract
(See how Jamie Dimon from Chase is saying he wants to move out of NYC because Amazon HQ2 isn't coming)
Losers
People in the neighborhood who rent and who could never get a tech job.
They should have dropped the tax breaks, but in the end NYC/NYS lost 27 Billion dollars and 25k jobs with this deal. People keep forgetting that the incentives were based off of the job numbers. If Amazon failed to deliver then they didn't get the breaks.
Look at it from this perspective: If Amazon choose a state like Texas or NC they'd be getting an even bigger tax break due to just being in a lower tax environment in general. Plus they'd be contributing even more to climate change since anywhere outside NYC is not going to be as dense or as transit oriented.
LIC hasn't been affordable in decades. If we're going to stop economic progress in the name of "affordability" then why are people in NYC at all?
They should have dropped the tax breaks, but in the end NYC/NYS lost 27 Billion dollars and 25k jobs with this deal. People keep forgetting that the incentives were based off of the job numbers. If Amazon failed to deliver then they didn't get the breaks.
Look at it from this perspective: If Amazon choose a state like Texas or NC they'd be getting an even bigger tax break due to just being in a lower tax environment in general. Plus they'd be contributing even more to climate change since anywhere outside NYC is not going to be as dense or as transit oriented.
LIC hasn't been affordable in decades. If we're going to stop economic progress in the name of "affordability" then why are people in NYC at all?
25k at the end of the 10 year period after building HQ2. I wouldn’t be surprised if the NYC corporate headcount gets to around that number anyhow.
Agreed that they should have dropped the tax breaks—at least the portion that wasn’t as-of-right.
This deal was guaranteed to be beneficial to both Amazon and Cuomo and DeBlasio but the impacts on NYC are at best unknown. For Amazon, the subsidies guarantee they will come out ahead. For the politicians, getting Amazon to move HQ2 to NYC is quantifiable feathers in their caps that can be touted endlessly in future election campaigns. It's likely Amazon would have chosen NYC anyway with far smaller subsidies but the spectacle Amazon created with their location search meant that all these hapless politicians with their self serving goals overbid.
Guaranteed winners for Amazon HQ2 in Queens:
Amazon
Cuomo and DeBlasio
Queens LIC homeowners who will see their property values skyrocket
Union construction workers
LIC businesses
Potential winners
NYC tech workers who may see increased salaries due to competition for talent
Other companies lured to NYC because of Amazon and the pool of tech talent they would attract
(See how Jamie Dimon from Chase is saying he wants to move out of NYC because Amazon HQ2 isn't coming)
Losers
People in the neighborhood who rent and who could never get a tech job.
NYC isn't some dump in TX or NC. NYC is the nation's financial capital and a world business capital.
All major companies want a NYC presence and a significant one at that.
Companies don't come to NYC for tax credits. Industrial companies go to Southern states that have to compete on tax credits.
This is also not the 70s or 80s, during the height of the white flight era.
I'd rather they were in LIC though. Manhattan is already job rich it's time to spread the wealth to the other boroughs.
Placing it in LIC isn't much different from having it in Midtown due to its proximity and the infrastructure that serves it except that it's actually more accessible in Midtown with current and near-future infrastructure. Without a firm commitment to a through-running LIRR/NJT line with a station in LIC, this was sort of an odd choice. The only large difference it immediately makes is that there's a less pronounced spike in property values for property owners in the fairly immediate vicinity. Now if the location was out in Jamaica or Broadway Junction, then the ramifications of it are very different as it'd actually be taking up the slack capacity of services going opposite to peak direction.
In the end, I think there's a lot of misinformation or lack of reasonable discourse about what happened. The people who are saying that NYC/NYS were paying Amazon are dumb because those were tax breaks from hitting certain job guidelines--don't hit it, then you don't get the breaks (or the jobs for that matter). That's still a net benefit unless something ridiculous like state and city income taxes going way down happens. However, the terms set were pretty stupid in that they were not necessary as evidenced by competing bids both from the winner and the many other bids that were not selected. This conversation about the addition of "just 1,500 jobs" is also misleading and you'd have to be either dumb or purposefully trying to misdirect in order to believe that's anything more than just the jobs of one specific location in NYC in a narrow span of time when Amazon has evidently been on a corporate hiring spree in NYC and the comparison to HQ2 was 25K jobs over a decade period upon creation. Like, if you compared one person's annual salary to what another person makes over the course of a decade as raw numbers, there's a little bit of mismatch on that basis of a comparison.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 12-10-2019 at 10:29 AM..
Let's get the facts right on Amazon's new jobs in Manhattan.
Leasing 335,000 square feet is not equivalent to developing 4 million square feet of new commercial and office space.
A one-time gain of 1,500 jobs on Manhattan's West Side by 2021 is not the same as creating at least 25,000 jobs in Long Island City over time, 5,900 of which would have come by 2021.
Amazon's new plans won't transform the Queens waterfront. They won't improve infrastructure, transit or schools, or provide other community benefits.
No one — not State Sen. Michael Gianaris, nor Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — saved taxpayers $3 billion when they destroyed Amazon's headquarters plans in February. Tax incentives aren't a blank check and wouldn't have been paid unless jobs and revenue promises came true.
Let's get the facts right on Amazon's new jobs in Manhattan.
Leasing 335,000 square feet is not equivalent to developing 4 million square feet of new commercial and office space.
A one-time gain of 1,500 jobs on Manhattan's West Side by 2021 is not the same as creating at least 25,000 jobs in Long Island City over time, 5,900 of which would have come by 2021.
Amazon's new plans won't transform the Queens waterfront. They won't improve infrastructure, transit or schools, or provide other community benefits.
No one — not State Sen. Michael Gianaris, nor Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — saved taxpayers $3 billion when they destroyed Amazon's headquarters plans in February. Tax incentives aren't a blank check and wouldn't have been paid unless jobs and revenue promises came true.
Those are accurate except the second one's a bit weird. That's a one-time gain in one spot--the headcount for NYC corporate jobs at Amazon is already in the thousands currently and this spot is unlikely to be the only spot they expand into, so it's odd to boil the comparison down to just this one spot versus the combined HQ2 development over a decade span of time. The third point is technically correct in that Amazon's new plans won't transform the Queens waterfront--instead, it's transforming as it has already with more new developments from multiple entities. The Queens East River waterfront is a lot different from what it was in previous years and it's still undergoing intensive changes.
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