Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/02/14/amazon-drops-new-york-hq2-plan.html
Amazon will instead focus on Northern Virginia and Nashville, after an organized effort by New Yorkers to hold the company and lawmakers accountable for sneaky dealmaking.
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I’ll bet there are some seriously pissed off realtors in Long Island City today.
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Oh I know there are.
That the best part.
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Stay the f’ away from San Diego, last thing we need is a land grab war.
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I’m wondering what the odds are that Amazon will end up in New York, when all is said and done, anyways. There are obviously a certain, quite limited number of cities that have exactly what they need (in terms of infrastructure, workforce, etc.) so they’ll end up in one of them, regardless of the deal offered.
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“While polls show that 70% of New Yorkers support our plans…”
Did they just make Trump look like less narcissistic? 
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New York’s loss is Northern Virginia’s ga… uh, loss.
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I’m thinking they might be trying to renegotiate the deal, á la Darth Vader.
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Good for NYC and Long Island City for rejecting what obviously became a crappy deal for them. If only Wisconsin could do the same with Foxconn.
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They’ll be back. NYC was all but preselected to begin with, and didn’t offer nearly as much as some places did. So all that “lack of support” Amazon complains about is just people asking why the deal is so one sided when it clearly didn’t need to be. Plus unions.
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Northern VA is already lost.
This is the story of the bottomless well of state officials Amazon needed to pay off in order to make the deal work, and the trouble some of them caused when the pay off was too long in coming.
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Wait…you can actually resist extortion?
Good to know. Next up - sports complexes.
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I assume they picked NY because after Seattle, where else could they find the sort of traffic snarl that they know and love? I can only assume that without the constant gridlock that Seattleites enjoy and that Amazon has made significantly worse, they can barely even work or consider it a headquarters.
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I would love to live in a city that doesn’t want 25K more good-paying white collar jobs…
Yeah, it feels like a negotiation tactic. “We’ve puts lots of time and money into this plan to locate in a city that’s always clearly been top of our list. You’re having second thoughts about details? That’s it, we’re out!” doesn’t quite ring true.
Yeah, even if this negotiation tactic doesn’t work out for them, I expect they’ll still at least be considering moving there.
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Especially since they’re saying they won’t be selecting a new location. Or moving those expected hires and expansion anywhere else.
Amazon apparently already has multiple offices and facilities in the NY metro area, and employs more than 5000 city residents. They’re probably not even planning to cut new hires in NYC, they’ll just put them in their existing offices.
Given the size of NYC and the number of jobs they’ve been adding monthly what Amazon was bringing was a drop in the bucket. Radio news was saying a couple precent in added jobs growth. And the 25k was predicted, and long term. Apparently they only planned on adding 700 jobs over the next couple of years.
Meanwhile they’ve been quietly but agressively undermining labor protections and trying to break unions. Pressuring the state to allow it. And property values in LIC spiked 30% in something like six months due to real estate speculation. Units that haven’t even been built yet we’re being sold at a premium. So there’s already been a one two punch of those jobs clearly not being good ones, and the city around it becoming too expensive for the people with those bad jobs. Exactly the concerns people had about this move.
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Now if we could only get Google out of Toronto that would be great.
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