Local politicians run off Amazon - Economics

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m741
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Re: Local politicians run off Amazon - Economics

Post by m741 »

@Campitor - OOC - do you happen to know exactly how the deal was granted to Amazon? I'm curious how I'd get a similar deal if I ran a company with a few hundred employees. That's not a rhetorical question, I was under the impression that this was a deal granted especially based on Amazon's size, but I don't have enough details.
No one did anything wrong in regards to granting or desiring pre-existing tax breaks. But in my opinion it was NY that lost out. Amazon can go anywhere. All NY can do is offer enough incentives to make it economically viable for companies to relocate to their state. Otherwise why would anyone want to do business there in the age of computers, planes, trains, and automobiles?
It's funny, because I feel the opposite. There's only one NYC, it's the pre-eminent American city, it has a large, established, expanding tech sector with lots of workers. IMO without the competition Amazon would have chosen it, just as Google recently trebled its workforce there. It's convenient to live in and has an appealing culture for many. Amazon is apparently expanding their existing NYC (Manhattan?) office without incentives, as well as hiring in Chicago, Toronto and Austin (also presumably without additional incentives). They're continuing with the NoVa office. Maybe they'll eventually open another large HQ and reap the tax benefits, or maybe they'll hire 25k people in existing cities without them.

I don't think Amazon is really hurting because of this decision, but neither do I think that NYC will in the long run, either. Queens will hurt the most, but I don't think that dropping 25k people on an area is good for the people who already live there. I guess we'll see what happens to the borough in the next 10 years or so, my prediction is that it will be more desirable in 2028 than in 2018. Most of my millennial friends in NYC were considering moving there... if they didn't like the Brooklyn culture.

IMO remote work will be less impactful on demographic trends than we expect, particularly on this forum (in that the majority of people are willing to pay a lot because of the amenities of a city rather than just looking at its price). People will want to live in the NYC area because of its culture and current size (as well as the jobs); it apparently grew 6% between 2010 and 2017... well after remote work became possible.

Campitor
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Re: Local politicians run off Amazon - Economics

Post by Campitor »

@m741

The amazon deal (https://ny.curbed.com/2018/11/16/180985 ... -explained):

Amazon will build a campus of at least 4 million square feet near the Anable Basin on the East River waterfront, on a site that’s partially owned by Plaxall Realty and partially owned by the city. But rather than going through the city’s extensive land use review process, known as ULURP, the state will take the lead and override local regulations on the lot, currently zoned for manufacturing space.

To facilitate the necessary rezoning for the project, the state will make use of a General Project Plan (GPP), which was used in recent years to advance the Javits Center expansion, Atlantic Yards, and Moynihan Station. (The GPP includes an environmental review and input from the City Planning Commission and local community board, though they’re nonbinding).

The agreement comes with a number of incentives: Specifically, Amazon will receive $897 million from the city’s Relocation and Employment Assistance Program (REAP) and $386 million from the Industrial & Commercial Abatement Program (ICAP). It will receive an additional $505 million in a capital grant and $1.2 billion in “Excelsior” credits if its job creation goals are met. That brings the total amount of public funds granted to $2.988 billion—in other words, the city and state will pay Amazon $48,000 per job.

Amazon could also earn even more tax breaks separate from the city and state subsidies: The census tract in Long Island City where HQ2 (or HQ3) will be built is designated as an opportunity zone under a provision of the so-called Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the tax overhaul President Trump signed into law almost a year ago.


There may be 1 NYC but that doesn't mean that a slow exodus of businesses can't happen. Or that NYC tech workers won't relocate to another state or another town in NY. People with opportunities will go where the jobs are. Currently that is NYC. Today's NYC can be tomorrow's Detroit.

Campitor
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Re: Local politicians run off Amazon - Economics

Post by Campitor »

And Google isn't exactly an angel either despite its utterances of "no tax dollars needed".

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/ ... eeded.html

Google, meanwhile, has tried to appear much more warm and fuzzy when expanding, especially when it comes to office space. Sam Liccardo, the mayor of San Jose, wrote a Medium blog post singing the company’s praises, saying that Google didn’t “ask for a dime” in tax breaks, as long as the city agreed to negotiate in good faith on the actual value of the land. What went unmentioned in Liccardo’s piece is that the city is currently being sued by two nonprofits due to NDAs that kept the citizens of San Jose in the dark about the exact terms of the deal. And Google will happily accept millions in tax breaks when building its data centers, which tend to get much less public notice.

And then there's Google's use of shell companies to acquire data center space and get those juicy tax incentives per this February 15th article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business ... edirect=on

Last May, officials in Midlothian, Tex., a city near Dallas, approved more than $10 million in tax breaks for a huge, mysterious new development across from a shuttered Toys R Us warehouse.

That day was the first time officials had spoken publicly about an enigmatic developer’s plans to build a sprawling data center. The developer, which incorporated with the state four months earlier, went by the name Sharka LLC. City officials declined at the time to say who was behind Sharka.

The mystery company was Google — a fact the city revealed two months later, after the project was formally approved. Larry Barnett, president of Midlothian Economic Development, one of the agencies that negotiated the data center deal, said he knew at the time the tech giant was the one seeking a decade of tax giveaways for the project, but he was prohibited from disclosing it because the company had demanded secrecy.

m741
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Re: Local politicians run off Amazon - Economics

Post by m741 »

My read on the article is that the incentives weren't extravagant (although Nashville successfully bid just $13k per job vs $48k per job in Queens) but that an average company wouldn't have access to the type of favors that allowed it to extract concessions such as waiving city regulations in favor of state regulations. Given that Amazon competes with pretty much everyone, especially local merchants, that's kinda insulting.

And sure, the future isn't guaranteed for anyone, be that NYC or Amazon. NYC may be Detroit or Amazon may be Sears. We'll see what happens. :)

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Mister Imperceptible
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Re: Local politicians run off Amazon - Economics

Post by Mister Imperceptible »

Campitor wrote:
Fri Feb 15, 2019 9:39 am
yes it's a free market.
The market is not free.

“A lack of competition also leads to labor monopsony, a state in which employers have greater wage pricing power than workers. When there is only one major employer in a certain industry in a certain area, that company commands greater control over the pricing of either their products or their wages or both. Think of the many areas of the country that only have one provider of cable and internet, utilities, or medical insurance. Or think of towns that have only one industrial or manufacturing plant, call center, distribution facility, or grocery store.

Though rent-seeking has helped to inflate both stock prices and salaries of corporate executives, it evidently has not helped the average worker.

And easy monetary policy (along with many corporate bailouts over the decades) has facilitated the rise of rent-seeking by making corporations more profitable and entrenched. Artificially low interest rates increases corporate profitability, which gives them more lobbying firepower, which helps them fortify their market position and suppress competition, which reduces the need to offer competitive wages to workers.

Campitor
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Re: Local politicians run off Amazon - Economics

Post by Campitor »

@Mister Imperceptible

Context matters. I was talking about the market freedom that allows NY and Amazon to negotiate with each other. Each is free to enter or dismiss any potential business offers that haven't become a legally binding contract; stagnant wages has no bearing in this regard.

In regards to inflation eroding worker wages and empowering corporate entities, whose fault is that? Perhaps the federal government's touch on the market should be lighter or perhaps the Fed's should stop printing money. "Stimulating" the economy by printing more money seems to do more harm than good to the working class per your link. I close with this link: Best sentence I read today.

Stahlmann
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Re: Local politicians run off Amazon - Economics

Post by Stahlmann »

A lack of competition also leads to labor monopsony, a state in which employers have greater wage pricing power than workers. When there is only one major employer in a certain industry in a certain area, that company commands greater control over the pricing of either their products or their wages or both. Think of the many areas of the country that only have one provider of cable and internet, utilities, or medical insurance. Or think of towns that have only one industrial or manufacturing plant, call center, distribution facility, or grocery store.
Wow, average internet free marketer is 200 years before in terms of knowledge in comparison to beardy guy from Germany...

Anyway, kudos for partial waking up.

niemand
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Re: Local politicians run off Amazon - Economics

Post by niemand »

@Stahlmann: +1. I suppose you mean big bushy beard guy and not his nemesis toothbrush moustache guy?

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Mister Imperceptible
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Re: Local politicians run off Amazon - Economics

Post by Mister Imperceptible »

@Campitor

As I said on page 1, I was not necessarily bashing Bezos. I was just saying that the reason for the anti-business sentiment is because of the way the system is structured. I am hating the game, not the player, to use your language from page 2.

@Stahlmann

Think moustachioed guy from XIX century Germany and not beardy guy from XIX century Germany.

I am still am stunned you were not handed down all sorts of Soviet horror stories, or were unaffected by them.

Riggerjack
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Re: Local politicians run off Amazon - Economics

Post by Riggerjack »

What about two parties negotiating a deal that benefits them both runs contrary to capitalism?
Well, in this case, one party is a faction of politicians, and the other is an outside corporation. If both benefit from the deal, who is left to pay the costs?

It could be customers, taxpayers, foriegners, or competitors. Did I miss anyone? Who pays in this case? Not foreigners, or competitors, or customers. So this was a deal hammered out to carve up taxpayers.

This isn't capitalism, it is the recipe for cronyism.



I think wonderful things about Amazon. They have done more to equalize material wealth to the poor in the last decade than everyone inspired by Marx in all of modern history.

The culture of Amazon is still a bit mind blowing to me today. I expect them to be bigger when all the rest of FAANG is dust.

But the Queens deal was bad for Amazon and Queens.

Amazon wants another HQ. They want it to be in a place that will help attract the talent. Seattle will not do for this, as they already have Seattle as an attractant. The next HQ city needs to be able to attract the talent currently graduating, and not be so bad that talent currently in Amazon would object to the transfer (so Detroit is out). I have never been to NYC, so I don't know Queens, but it seems like the kind of choice an HR and corporate RE committee would make. The best of a list of mediocre possible cities. Wherever is chosen eventually, will benefit and suffer.

So let's talk about the benefits and drawbacks, because we are 5 pages in, and still talking about this like it's sports.

Corporate enconomic benefits package: typically, this is a relief of taxes and regulations the corporation negotiates with politicians. It happens all the time, and sacrifices the local interests to the corporate and political interests. Sometimes, this works out well.

My first job in cabling was working on building 4 in the DuPont, Wa Intel plant. When I did it in the nineties, Dupont was a freeway exit, a street, and the plant. 20 years later, Intel closed the plant, and I went back to bid on some of the building and plant that was auctioned off after the closure.

Now there's a retail district, other businesses, and the old plant is being converted into a giant trucking/warehouse operation. There's a few housing developments, and all the other makings of new suburbia.

What was sacrificed/gained? Intel spent a ton of money on facilities/infrastructure, but saved a ton in B&O taxes. They were thinking in short term the whole time. When we were building it, the story on site was that it was a short term project for Intel, and they would shut it down when the tax breaks went away. And they did. I assume it worked out well for Intel, as it seems to have followed their plans.

But what about the locals? Before, they were close to I-5 and pretty much had to go elsewhere (mainly the local military base(s) ) for employment. Now, there is a variety of opportunities they didn't have 20 years ago. Intel didn't pay B&O taxes for the whole time lthey were here. But they paid sales tax on everything they used, and all the employees they brought to the plant paid taxes, and the businesses around them paid all their taxes. The local schools had a very sudden influx of both students and revenues. I have no idea how that went. The area moved from a patch of woods and a few houses/farms, to a shiny new edge of the Seattle Sprawl. Is this better/worse/neutral? That's a value judgement. It's just different. I think it would have happened anyway, but in a far less organized, more organic, way.

But that's really the best case example. Because there was almost no infrastructure there, and we place little economic value on forest.

The workers weren't there. Intel imported them.
The roads weren't there. The Intel project built them.
The schools were there. In 2008, the elementary students needed to be split between 3 existing schools, but by then, local government had been collecting more revenue for a decade.

So, for the "You didn't build that!" crowd, eh hem. Check your facts. Government doesn't build infrastructure, as a rule. Government maintains infrastructure. So, cutting a tax break to megacorps to build a tax base can be a very good thing from a tax farming perspective. The costs can be imposed on a small number of citizens, who have options to avoid the costs by moving, (with extra cash in hand, because their property is worth more after the project than before), or they can profit from the changes.

But let's look at how this is different from the Amazon/Queens deal.

Queens is fully developed (I am assuming, again, never been there). If Amazon moved in a HQ, they would pay for construction, and all of the modification of infrastructure necessary to connect up.

But how much more traffic will need to move to and from the site, every day than used to? Where will the additional people live? How many locals will get opportunities at HQ2? How will their community change?

These aren't hard questions when a bulldozer can accidentally go 100 yards off course with no objections, but they are critical when everything one wants to build must destroy everything existing in the footprint, and often that footprint affects the infrastructure of one's neighbor.

Construction basically zeroes out the value of what is existing. Instant, complete depreciation. But construction builds new infrastructure in its place. Then, taxes are paid, and government continues to maintain the infrastructure.

But in a city, there isn't room to make anything new and better without destroying the old. Seriously, just look at the streets. They were laid out for horses. They were sorta reworked every time they absolutely had to be, but you couldn't lay out a few extra arterials and associated transportation infrastructure to move 25-50k people to and from a point in the city, every day. But I could build that in DuPont. And I could do it better and cheaper.

The citizens of Queens have jobs, and infrastructure. What can Amazon offer them? Richer neighbors? Worse traffic? Taller apartment buildings? How's that going to help? Currently income averages 70k. Bring in 25-50k people making on average twice what the locals make, what happens to housing for locals? Well, if one makes considerably more than average, not much. The rest will be displaced. They may still be in Queens, but the sharp rise in housing costs will force many to relocate to less expensive housing. And all that movement will distribute the former locals to worse housing for more money. Many of their jobs will go out of town, as higher RE costs and higher taxes drive out lower margin businesses.

But once Amazon starts building, there will be more jobs. And all those overpaid and overworked Amazon employees will be spreading the wealth. So entertaining and servicing those employees will be lucrative. And if all else fails, as Campitor keeps pointing out, there's always low income housing and Amazon Charity TM to look forward to.

This has been framed as a tax issue. It's not. It's a population density issue. Infrastructure costs go up at an expotential rate as population rises linearly. So adding 25k people to Queens is far far more expensive than 50k people to the periphery of a city. Not because Queens is super expensive, but because Queens was already built. Adding more people and more money won't help. If residents of Queens wanted more people and money, isn't that what Manhattan is for?

Campitor
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Re: Local politicians run off Amazon - Economics

Post by Campitor »

@Rigger

This is where amazon was going to build: Long Island City.

This is according to this site: https://www.6sqft.com/see-the-waterfron ... se-campus/. The place looks like a dump and some of the land is underwater - I guess Amazon was going to fill it in to make it useable. Even if Amazon left at the end of the tax breaks after investing some much into that site, anyone moving in would have a more useable space and an up-to-date office infrastructure to work with.

Jason

Re: Local politicians run off Amazon - Economics

Post by Jason »

Seventy-five years ago people were fleeing the boroughs for a better life in the suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey. Those protesting are generally the descendants of those who remained and didn't adjust the last go-round. Now the tide has reversed and people want to move back into urban areas. You live in the outlying regions of arguably the most influential and wealthy city in the world you can't build a fence and say "we want to stay where we are." There is no Queens without Manhattan as there is no Brooklyn or no Connecticut or no New Jersey without Manhattan. This has nothing to do with infrastructure or population density. It has to do with the fundamental changes in the economic landscape of the world in which we live and Queens is now free to wither on the branch that they decided to cut off from the bigger tree. It's a bunch of renters acting as homesteaders. Is it unfair. Of course. But what does that have to do with anything.

Most warehousing requirements that are sprouting up in the tri-state region are Amazon dependent. Local entrepreneurs are benefitting from its growth. Some see opportunity. Some see fear.


Edit: This evolution often occurs in areas surrounded by water. What was once beneficial as a trade route or Armed Forces terminal becomes antiquated when those uses become obsolete, and the jobs flee, the best and highest use becomes redevelopment - residential, retail, entertainment - or a combination. This is a repeated phenomenon is this region i.e. Jersey City, Bayonne, Brooklyn, Hoboken, Manhattan. It has greatly stimulated and revitalized local economies. As a matter of fact, it has never failed.

Riggerjack
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Re: Local politicians run off Amazon - Economics

Post by Riggerjack »

Yeah, I can see why they wanted it, and why they tried to work a deal at the state level.

Excellent existing transportation infrastructure for the area. At street level, it looks much like the areas of Seattle before Amazon, except Seattle never tried to get transportation for that many people.

But look at the area in Google maps street view. You see all those people? Those are the ones who would be hit with higher COL. If HQ2 had landed, most of them would be gone, replaced by vibrant, highly compensated, very busy people, and their presperous, equally vibrant young servants. Look to any hip, HCOL area to see this.

But these are not the same local people, only younger and more hip, these are the people who displaced those former locals.

Now I'm not saying that one is better than the other (IMO anyone with half a brain should run out of NYC like their ass was afire), rather, I'm trying to show the trade-off.

Because this is a trade-off. Nobody is Right or Wrong. There are no victims, merely choices. Trying to find and identify with the victim just activates the juices in our monkey brains and shuts down reason.

Are vibrant busy people better than the current population? From a tax farming perspective, absolutely. So if one wants to convert an area to a higher quality tax farm, pitch the idea to distant, absentee plantation owners, or in this case, Govenors.

Jason

Re: Local politicians run off Amazon - Economics

Post by Jason »

I understand the tendency to call these people young and hip but the bottom line is they are like the first generation of the 16th century to grow up without knowing what it was like before the availability of affordable books. It's neither fair nor kind to call the people who preceded them illiterate, but I think its fair to make an argument that if they don't learn how to read, they will fall behind.

Riggerjack
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Re: Local politicians run off Amazon - Economics

Post by Riggerjack »

@jason

Like I said, I have never been there. I don't know anyone there.

If there is a right way for development, I am unaware of it. There are many brutally wrong ways.

I was trying to answer the OP question on the economics of these development packages. And my answer is that like everything else in economics, it depends on the tradeoffs and values of the people making the decision. And when the deal is made far from the people affected by those tradeoffs, their values are... discounted. That doesn't mean local values are good, bad or even important, it means the local interests were only a factor in that they could spoil the deal. That's why the deal happened where it did.

This, I think needs to be part of the conversation if we are talking about the benefits and drawbacks of these packages.

BTW, that giant trucking/warehouse operation I was talking about in DuPont? That now an Amazon shipping center. All the way down at the outer edge if the Sprawl. Because it is worth keeping a warehouse operation far from the ports and trains, just because the traffic is as bad as it is.

Where we build, and how is always contentious, because it pits the interests of one party against another, and infrastructure is built with Other People's Money. OPM plus contention plus politics equal lies. So when we are talking about infrastructure and tax farming, there is much obsfucation to clear out of the way.

I was just trying to get down to the actual issues, as I see them; rather than the preframed conversation this started as.

Campitor
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Re: Local politicians run off Amazon - Economics

Post by Campitor »

I have a suspicion that the NYC site wasn’t going to be a distribution center but perhaps a data center or a location for their AWS cloud operators. The proximity to water for cooling and the $150k average salary is an indicator that those weren’t packaging/warehouse jobs being created.

Jason

Re: Local politicians run off Amazon - Economics

Post by Jason »

(@) Riggerjack.

I don't see you re-framing the conversation. I see you pointing out risk that I assumed everyone understood to be implicit in deals of this complexity, deals that involve huge private industry, government concessions, and redevelopment of entrenched communities. Your local anecdote although quaint, is not necessary. Numerous of the revitalizations are happening throughout this area at this moment on a grand scale in such places as Jersey City, Newark, NJ, Brooklyn, NY, an area overall which possesses a population density exceeding downtown Calcutta with an aging infrastructure. You drive to the other local water fronts its like War of The Worlds with the fucking cranes going up. Why? It's fucking Manhattan. It's a goddam island with waterfront views. It's why those idiot ISIS guys dive bombed the shit out of it. The bottom line is the community of Queens was so threatened, and so unsophisticated in analyzing the deal, that Amazon said it wasn't worth negotiating one more minute with them. Was Queens right on certain points. I imagine they were. But this was nothing more than baby with the bathwater.

Amazon has already opened multiple fulfillment centers in the area. Some are very small for the Amazon prime and do not require large vehicles and can use non commercial roads. Some are larger. This was to be a headquarters. My understanding of the renderings was that it would be "mixed use" as it doesn't make logistical sense to put a distribution center in the middle of Queens.

IlliniDave
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Re: Local politicians run off Amazon - Economics

Post by IlliniDave »

@Riggerjack,

I don't see cronyism and any economic system, including capitalism, as mutually exclusive. I acknowledged some of the gray area upthread somewhere including gentrification/disruption. Seems Queens preferred to take the Rust Belt approach (we like what we have, thank you very much). Hopefully it will turn out better for them, perhaps due to their close proximity to the wealthier boroughs. No question it is a difficult thing, with as many perspectives as their are people in the affected area.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Local politicians run off Amazon - Economics

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

cimorene12 wrote:I definitely can't speak for "most girls" but I can speak about my own experience and my own friend group.
My focus group consisted of the mean girl* element of a very multi-cultural urban 6th grade class I had the joy of teaching for a very long two weeks.

*One of them casually asked me if I wanted a piece of Air Head candy, and her friend said "Her head is already big enough." Ha-ha-ha.


Anyways, I got back in bed with J.B. on the very same day his divorce was announced, so I obviously think there is still some room for profit-making short-run. Also, rumor has it that he is not completely unfamiliar with "snappy" youth trends.

Riggerjack
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Re: Local politicians run off Amazon - Economics

Post by Riggerjack »

Jason, I don't think we disagree. Queens was "too much of a pain in the ass to deal with."

Where I think we differ is that you seem to think this is a Queens issue, and I think it's a typical urban issue. Cities are always too much of a pain in the ass, because angry grannies will go to a town hall meeting, but won't go to the Governor's Mansion. If one is going to piss off granny, do it from a distance, it's just easier.

So my perspective isn't really tied to what happens to Queens (really couldn't care) but what happens to an urban areas when something of this sort happens.

That's why I used the quaint example. To show how this works in differing circumstances.

As to your belief that this is how it's done, and the right way to do it, that seems like what I could expect from a NYC RE pro (that's what you do, right?).

Queens will continue to grow and develop, as you said, there's no stopping it. The question is how, and who will profit.

I think smaller, and more organic is better within a developed area, better for the people who live there, and the people who will live there. Save the Scorched Earth development for areas that are less populated. But that's just my opinion from working in construction and telecom; dealing with building and maintaining plant infrastructure; and watching politicians and their puppets lie about infrastructure and these deals for ages.

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