Editor’s Note:
On Feb. 14, Amazon spokeswoman Jodi Seth announced the company’s plans to cancel its planned move to New York, stating, “After much thought and deliberation, we’ve decided not to move forward with our plans to build a headquarters for Amazon in Long Island City, Queens.” As Bolster mentions at the end of his piece, the possibility of such a move has been rumored in recent weeks.
I was only vaguely aware of Amazon’s sprawling search for its HQ2 when the news broke that New York City, my hometown, and Washington, D.C. were to be the new locations for the company’s satellite campuses. My first reaction was a sense of pride. Amazon is perhaps the most successful tech company ever; for New York to be selected as the site of their expanding operations seemed like a simultaneous affirmation of the city’s local excellence and global potential — corporate or otherwise.
After I shook off this brief bout of NYC elitism that plagues every New Yorker from time to time, I began to grapple with some of the more sinister realities this move to Long Island City presents. With the well-documented housing price boom in Seattle and community crises in San Francisco floating in the back of my mind, I took to the internet to better inform myself about the realities many members of Long Island City may face when Amazon moves in. While residents of National Landing in Arlington, V.A. will no doubt experience some of the changes I detail below, the scope of what follows is limited solely to New York City.
On Facebook my friend had shared a screenshot of a tweet which read: “Dear New York and DC, Amazon isn’t bringing you 50,000 high paying jobs. They’re bringing 50,000 high paying jobs to where you currently live. This won’t help your community, it will replace your community. Sincerely, Seattle.” This was an inauspicious sign to say the least, but I closed my tab and started a new one, trying to keep an open mind about the urban potential in Amazon’s move. Three pillars of city life — workforce, housing, and education — appeared the most throughout my research and all three are useful as benchmarks for Amazon’s ability to integrate itself into New York City life.
At first glance, the sentiment about the 25,000 jobs Amazon purports to create in New York actually going to migrants with tech backgrounds seems to hold true across most discourse surrounding HQ2.
Metrocity
, a data-driven analytics website,
The Atlantic
, and even Amazon themselves nebulously characterize the source of workforce for HQ2. Lauren Shanesy of
Metrocity
takes it as given that Amazon will “bring 25,000 workers to the two major metros, all of whom are expected to make six-figure salaries,” while Alana Semuels from
The Atlantic
fears for the affordability of housing in the surrounding area of Amazon’s future headquarters, observing that “Amazon is also bringing thousands of high-paying workers to two markets where the competition to find affordable housing is already fierce.”
The connections between Shanesy’s and Semuels’s observations are blatant. Both journalists fear any high-paying jobs created by Amazon will go to migratory tech gurus and not native residents of Long Island City — echoing one of the most popular viewpoints of many activists and journalists who oppose Amazon’s move. This widespread perspective, while it may be applicable to Amazon and other large tech companies’ presences in Seattle and San Francisco, does not necessarily hold true for New York City.
For better or for worse, the rise of Seattle and San Francisco as popular American cities is tied directly to the tech boom of the 21st century — a growing American infatuation with tech-based solutions to urban, national, and global problems. Companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple gradually wove themselves into the urban fabric of Seattle and San Francisco during their rise in popularity. Now, it seems like Seattle and San Francisco are synonymous with those tech conglomerates and risk losing their identities as cities; solutions to city-wide problems of affordable housing have been scrapped in Seattle since wealthy tech workers did not want to pay the high taxes required to address rising costs.
In New York, as Mayor Bill De Blasio pointed out during the press conference announcing Amazon’s move to the city, none of this is the case. New York City is already established as the unambiguous hub of finance, marketing, advertising, and global economic opportunity in America and has done so without the help of tech companies. Interestingly, Facebook and Google have New York offices which were built without tax subsidies. New York is also not far off in the tech sector as it ranks third behind San Francisco and San Jose, California in tech patents. And, with the opening of Cornell Tech’s campus on Roosevelt Island, New York City now stands as a legitimate breeding ground of highly skilled tech employees.
As a result, Governor Andrew Cuomo’s asserted that “with an average salary of $150,000 per year for the tens of thousands of new jobs Amazon is creating in Queens, economic opportunity and investment will flourish for the entire region.”
Mayor De Blasio supported Cuomo’s hopes for economic prosperity in the region. With his proclamation that Amazon’s move will be “a giant step on our path to building an economy in New York City that leaves no one behind […] New Yorkers will get tens of thousands of new, good-paying jobs, and Amazon will get the best talent anywhere in the world,” there’s reason to believe this is more than just a rare instance when the governor of New York and the mayor of New York City agree.
Still, the fact that 25,000 high paying jobs may go mostly to New Yorkers is not enough to guarantee the smooth transition of a global economic phenom into a neighborhood with underfunded public transportation, overcrowded schools, and housing prices that were beginning to climb long before Amazon’s arrival.
As Metrocity reports, “Queens had already been experiencing a spike in home sales — the median closing price for a new home is up 3 percent over this time last year, and existing resale saw a 13 percent jolt in median prices year over year.” Taking into account the presence of Amazon’s new headquarters in the area, “the average new construction home price in New York, which in 2017 was $660,048, could reach an average of $1.2 million in seven years.” Not everyone who lives in Long Island City will be making the wages Amazon pays (the wages necessary to afford those high prices), so it is more than fair for New Yorkers to worry about gentrification.
Though Amazon’s presence alone will cause a housing spike, according to Semuels of
The Atlantic
: “Mayor De Blasio says New York is planning to add hundreds of thousands of housing units over the next few decades, and the growing tax base from Amazon will afford it more money to invest in housing and transit.” It’s unclear if Amazon will acquiesce to these requests — they didn’t in Seattle — so what can the company and the city do to combat the negative effects Amazon’s presence may have on New Yorkers?
To me, it starts with Amazon embracing the culture of communal vigilance and public prosperity that makes New York such a special city. As Michael Kimmelman points out in his article, “Amazon’s HQ2 Will Benefit From New York City. But What Does New York Get?” in
The New York Times
, the “insularity, secrecy […] bedrock libertarianism and algorithmic notions about progress” that rule most tech companies is wholly out of place in New York’s diverse ecosystem ruled by “a focus on collective welfare.” In applying Amazon’s hypothetical altruistic attitude toward Queens’ education districts, we realize just how much their employees must commit to local public schools — schools which are some of the most overtaxed in all of the city.
Queens’ public schools are overflowing with students. According to Jake Bittle of
CityLab
, high schools in the borough are reaching overcapacity rates as high as 117 percent, and Long Island City’s lone middle schools are way over-enrolled at 135 percent capacity. Making matters worse is the fact Amazon is moving to a site originally commissioned as a new school to accommodate the growing population of the area. With Long Island City ranking as the fastest growing neighborhood in America over the last five years, Amazon’s move to the area will only exacerbate a severe lack of seats in schools. The company has pledged to pay outright for a middle school in the area, but this will subtract only a couple hundred seats from a few-thousand deficit.
Amazon must take a long-term interest in local public education and public libraries. Doing so has obvious long-term self-interest. The company will grant its employees access to low-cost, tech-savvy education for their children all the way through college — should Amazon turn its subsidiary gaze towards the colleges in Queens, too — and in turn, create a local pool of applicants for future jobs, making the headquarters more attractive to those seeking employment.
If all of this sounds recklessly optimistic that’s because, in some sense, it is. Optimism surrounding Amazon’s move to New York is undoubtedly a privileged mindset in this instance, as my time in New York will likely not be impacted by whatever transpires in the years to come.
Nevertheless, the billions of tax-subsidized dollars involved in this deal could have been spent fixing the comically-underfunded MTA, addressing the growing dearth of seats in public schools, or providing affordable housing to the city’s neediest citizens. Instead, this money was awarded to a company that has been a harbinger of gentrification and the astronomically increasing cost of living, with the terms of the courtship shrouded in bureaucratic secrecy. There’s little to this deal that signals anything other than confirmation of the growing gap between the haves and have-nots in America.
But just as New York has never seen anything quite like Amazon, Amazon has never seen anything like New York. As I stated before, this city has a special way of binding its diverse residents together through access to and opportunity for a myriad of different lifestyles. I’ll pay for Jeff Bezos to take a helicopter to work, and he will pay for a school in Queens — maybe even subway renovations if we’re lucky. Amazon should not command so much attention and money from the United States’s cities, but even with
The Wall Street Journal
and
The New York Times
reporting last week that Amazon is privately reconsidering its move to New York in the wake of local protests, it may already be too late. If Amazon is to create a long term future in New York, it will have to invest in it. Every aspect of it.
After all, Amazon is coming to New York. Not the other way around.
