Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/11/17/amazons-nyc-digs-being-built.html
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You won’t have a home to live in, but you’ll have a job? What a concept!
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Just wait till Bezos’ NYC Balls drop.
edit: Spheres would have been a better choice of words
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And a high-paying job* at that:
[* the kind that NYC is starving for, unlike its cheap and plentiful housing /s]
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From the Department of Meaningless Mathematics:
$4.5 billion in subsidies, divided by
1,500 low-cost houses equals
6 million dollars per “low cost” residence.
Which, the way New York is going, may be mid-priced after all.
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I am happy to say I have never bought anything from Amazon.
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Well it’s still low-income housing, except now it’s for Amazon (corporations being people and all).
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Wrong Politico link.
As someone born and raised in the Seattle area and has seen what Amazon does to the housing market, good luck NYC.
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I’m wondering how close to the top we are regarding these awful corporate welfare deals. Large components of the left and the right are puking in their mouths over this latest insult. The only people who seemed thrilled with this are Bezos and Coumo. At some point only a handful of people will support this shite and everyone will be screaming…right?
Almost. Only a handful will support it but the rest don’t count.
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And Microsoft, Nintendo, Valve, and so on…
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Boy it sure is good that NYC offered such generous financial incentives to Amazon to move there. I’m just not sure that plucky little city could possibly have brought in any businesses otherwise. /sarcasm
I’m still just… baffled by the whole situation. Amazon pretending like it might locate somewhere other than a major city (from which it can recruit workers), and suckering in tons of communities into giving away all sorts of useful data in the process; big cities bending over backwards to offer costly incentives to bring in a business that was going to locate there anyways…
I don’t understand why cities don’t just say, “Look, we know you’re going to locate here - or if not you, another company. If you need some help consolidating parcels and streamlining processes, we’ll do that, but we’re not giving anything away.” I’ve seen cities do that, and it seems to work just fine for them.
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If people didn’t figure out that this boondoggle will benefit Amazon at the expense of locals when cities started trying to one-up each-other on how shamelessly they could sell out the tax base, the bait-and-switch at the end of the process (“Surprise! You’re only getting half of what you bid for”) should have clued them in.
Bezos played this very well, and the political establishment seems content to go along with Amazon and other large corporations when it comes to these beauty contests.
The only city that did that was Toronto, which made the final 20 despite not offering tax giveaways. The others made a pathetic spectacle of themselves bending over for the HQ:
And Amazon still got a motherlode of data about the candidate cities for future use and/or sale:
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It’s mind boggling that everyone rushed to give Amazon a bunch of data about their communities and development plans that no one else has. It’s literally secret information no other business gets, yet another big boost to the corporation. All the various ways governments, from the federal to local levels have of giving big businesses support that small businesses don’t get - making sure something like Amazon can continue to crush local retailers.
I wonder if anyone has done some serious research on what benefits cities more - having one large business located there, or an equivalent mass of small businesses. I’m guessing that, even with tax giveaways and sweetheart deals aside, the small businesses are better.
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Bezos can have his low income workers live on site, and buy everything they need from the company store. Liberty will be permitted under certain conditions.
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“If they were really Christians they’d be screaming in the streets” - Alan Watts
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Plaxall was gearing up to ask New York City administrators for permission to build close to 5,000 new homes on their property.
Am I the only one who finds this pretty vague? It’s a far cry from maybe someday building low-income housing to tearing down Tiny Tim’s shack. Are we up in arms over a project that may never have come to fruition? Never mind that, corporation bad!
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The way companies like this pay and treat workers, I’ve wondered how they expect them to afford the products they handle. Soon they’ll have the company urgent care, payday lending, and indoctrination daycare center on site, too.
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