@ Campitor
And Gentrification is a natural byproduct of the density of infrastructure and people coupled with excessive government regulation that makes housing and business overly expensive.
I agree with you, but I wish it were that simple. It's not.
If it were, the rust belt would still be expensive. HCOL still requires businesses to bring in the money from the world, and local employees and owners to disperse the money locally. In this case, it matters how much money Amazon would disperse in local employees, and how their income compares to local income. The impact would be much much lower on Queens if they were paying median wages for Queens. Adding 25k outsiders (plus dependents) to a fully populated city would still be problematic, but all that extra money would be a double whammy.
And whenever you have depreciating housing (a byproduct of renting to low income families and/or rent control) but high land value, it makes the site more valuable to developers - buildings can be purchased below cost and renovated and sold for profit or the rents increased.
This has been addressed in all HCOL cities with rent control and other planning regulations. This doesn't stop development, it ensures that developers pay for political connections. That's what this deal was. Amazon just knew that in this case, the governor was cheaper. In most big developments, this is the case.
When Verizon was rolling out FiOS, it required a new fiber optic overlay of the areas to be served. It also meant that VZ was going to need a video franchise (right to compete in providing video service to customers).
Most video franchises are local, but local government is... Difficult to deal with at scale. It's not more expensive, just more difficult, which is more expensive when you are paying lawyers and political consultants to do the negotiations.
As an example, VZ worked out a statewide franchise in California with the Governator. 6% across the board, no need to negotiate with localities, overlay where it makes sense. I don't remember if the tax goes to the state or locality.
Here in Wa, Gregoire wasn't so cooperative, so VZ negotiated with localities. The price was still 6%, but lots of little BS requirements were added. Broadcasting the city's local access stations was the biggest hurdle, and that was a bitch. Once it was done, it doesn't cost anything more, just a few tens of millions in development and compliance. But that's why if you live in unincorporated king county, FiOS is unavailable, but across the street in the city, it is. My boss's boss was on the negotiations team (gotta have someone from engineering around to stop the negotiations professionals from promising a free pony to anyone who listens) and had great stories about how messed up that was.
Each negotiation had to go through a public review process, meaning every tin foil hat gets a say. I can understand Amazon try to avoid that. Anyone sane would.
. And also the children of low income families , as a result of the multitude of opportunities in a business dense area, typically get better education and jobs which increases their purchasing power.
if I remember correctly, this is very similar to your own personal history. How many of those kids making your life difficult followed that path? Going back to the old neighborhood you see the same people, just richer and happier, right? That reputation inner city schools have is a figment of Hollywood imagineering, is it?
This increase in pay allows them to up bid on housing or businesses which gentrifies the very neighborhood they live in. So the children of the poor today become the gentrifiers of tomorrow.
This was true in my case, but strangely, none of my fellow renovators and gentrifiers seems to share anything like my history. Mostly, the ones I know came from middle class families, with middle class or above values and problems.
You cannot raise the standard of living for low income people and avoid gentrification; it's a natural byproduct of their increased economic potential.
This isn't either/or, it's a spectrum. One certainly could not change that one variable alone and avoid gentrification, but nobody has the ability to change only one variable in a city. Every change causes change. But your description is simple and fits a narrative easily.
It may look quaint, righteous, and folksy to wave that anti-gentrification flag but it comes at a cost - you're basically saying that you want to keep the economic status quo for low income people. Voting against gentrification is voting against your future economic viability. This is what NYC did when it sent Amazon packing. It said "NO" to raising the standard of living and it said "NO" to tax revenue that is needed to maintain such a massive and aging infrastructure.
It does, and they did. Where we disagree, is that I think Queens has so much more going on that adding Amazon would be too much of a good thing. All of the above could be true if we were talking about the rust belt, but overstimulation happens at the local scale, too. I was describing the overstimulation when I described the problems in my first post in the thread.
And did anyone look at the site via the Google map pic I posted? The place looked horrible - old buildings, a massive parking lot, and roughly 40% of the lot was flooded. What small business or even a group of small businesses could afford to improve the conditions of that lot? There is no "smaller and organic" means of improving that site - it has to be a big corporation with deep pockets. If there was a small and organic means to do it, it would have been done by now.
I looked at the addresses given in one of the links. The site doesn't seem to be a flooded parking lot, though that is part of it. It also seems to include the the local police building and a bunch of other small lots. The flooded lot, and every other lot HAS been developed. It's capable of further development. The future is unwritten. For this area to be developed, an owner needs a plausibly profitable plan, permits, and funding. That it hasn't been done yet simply means it hasn't been done yet.
I agree with the principal behind all of your statements. But reality is far more interesting than narrative. The map isn't the territory. This territory seems to be on a different map than the one you are referring to.
