Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon Pulls Out of Planned New York City Campus

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

651–660 of 1001 posts

Re: Amazon Pulls Out of Planned New York City Campus

#651

Post by fixermark »

buboard wrote: post #590
lkrubner wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incorrect: " that otherwise wouldn't be paid at all " The opposite is true, 100% of those taxes will be paid by some other business. Maybe you could make your argument about the New York City of the 1970s, but you sure as heck can not make that argument about the New York City of 2019. New York City is not starving for investment, rather, its biggest challenge nowadays is managing its fast growth. Other busin…

how many thousands of businesses will have to move there to make up for the taxable revenue that an amazon HQ would register?

Probably zero; NYC is very good about generating its own businesses from the population. It's a big city with a pile of opportunity.

Re: Amazon Pulls Out of Planned New York City Campus

#652

Post by Kinnard »

JauntTrooper wrote: post #428
bilbo0s wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even think they're really gonna scale up in Nashville. At least not in any meaningful way. 10 years from now, both Amazon and Google will have right around 25 thousand workers each in NYC. The reality is that NYC is not Wisconsin, they don't need to give out money. EDIT: I'd even go a step further, and predict that both Amazon and Google will also have ludicrously large presences in the DC-NOVA area in 10 yea…

I don’t know, cities rise and fall at lot more quickly than it feels like at the time. New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy in 1975, less than 50 years ago. Detroit’s population started declining as early as the 1950s as companies moved to the suburbs. New York has a world-class, diverse economy, and I expect it to continue to be a central engine of the American and world economy for our lifetimes, but it doe…

And millennials make babies.

Re: Amazon Pulls Out of Planned New York City Campus

#653

Post by meesterdude »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #500
bduerst wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^ For anyone doubting this, Planet Money did an excellent podcast on how this phenomenon played out in Kansas City with corporations like Applebee's, and cost the city millions: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/11/16/668769284/epis...

You could easily argue it put Kansas City on the map. Kansas City is at least a well known name in the tech world now, when there's plenty of other midwest cities of similar size that rarely get brought up. Millions would be a steal for the revenue becoming a tech hub would bring in. Even if it does take a more than a decade to be realized.

News to me kansas city is popular in the tech world now.

Re: Amazon Pulls Out of Planned New York City Campus

#654

Post by Terr_ »

MockObject wrote: post #577
trhway wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>taxes that otherwise wouldn't be paid at all. That is fallacy of excluded other possibilities. Especially for a place like NYC. I generally like AMZN, nevertheless I'm happy just on sheer principle that the bullying behavior by the 800lb gorilla didnt succeed this time.

That's not a fallacy, it's the well known concept of opportunity cost, which rational decision-makers always consider.

The flaw is an implicit assumption that no alternative opportunities exist. Or in other words, the well-known concept of pricing.

It is exactly like a pushy customer demanding a discount on their groceries, saying: "Well, if I don't buy them you won't get any money at all!"

If you are confident you can sell enough groceries at the regular price, the economically correct decision is say "I don't need YOUR money" and laugh in their face.

Re: Amazon Pulls Out of Planned New York City Campus

#655

Post by gamblor956 »

tom-_- wrote: post #611
lkrubner wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incorrect: " that otherwise wouldn't be paid at all " The opposite is true, 100% of those taxes will be paid by some other business. Maybe you could make your argument about the New York City of the 1970s, but you sure as heck can not make that argument about the New York City of 2019. New York City is not starving for investment, rather, its biggest challenge nowadays is managing its fast growth. Other busin…

How long would it be before other businesses would fully occupy the particular block of Long Island City Amazon was prepared to invest in? And would the employees of these businesses earn on average equal to or greater than the average NYC Amazon employee? These aren't rhetorical questions, and I don't know enough about Long Island City to have a confident guess at the answers but when evaluating whether Amazon HQ is…

That block was previously occupied and was cleared out for HQ2, so...almost immediately?

Re: Amazon Pulls Out of Planned New York City Campus

#656

Post by observer12 »

apendleton wrote: post #545
hbosch wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> new people would have to move to NYC specifically for Amazon (or to fill vacancies created by people leaving other companies to work at Amazon) This has certainly been true for Seattle, fwiw.

It has, but is almost undoubtedly slowing as Seattle becomes more expensive and housing becomes more scarce (in other words, as it becomes New York-like). Massive inbound migration was possible because pre-Amazon, housing in Seattle was comparatively plentiful and cheap.

Seattle has a housing crisis because it has large amounts of the city with extremely restrictive residential zoning and refuses to compromise. They have large areas where multi-tenancy housing can't exists. Additionally, in the US everyone believes housing is not a depreciating asset. There is a reason Tokyo is the largest city in the world while being significantly cheaper to live in then similar cities.

Re: Amazon Pulls Out of Planned New York City Campus

#657

Post by magduf »

kokokokoko wrote: post #568
magduf wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see the problem here at all. If you have higher rents, that's because there's more demand for housing, and not enough affordable new housing is being constructed. Who controls that? Your local politicians. Who controls them? The voters who elected them, which is you if you live there. So you have no one to blame but yourself, and no cause to complain. You have the government you deserve.

The real data we have shows that incomes of the people who live in an area has more correlation with the cost of rent than the demand. Amazon will bring in workers that will earn higher salary than the average NYC resident. The only way prices could go down would be if developers made a huge error across the industry and oversupplied housing. What you are suggesting is impossible, unless the government steps in and s…

They don't need to build housing directly; local government controls zoning and development, so all they have to do is insist that higher-density and more affordable housing be built than what is currently happening. They don't do that. SanFran is a better example of this really, but other places in the US have the same problem to some degree. This isn't "pie in the sky internet ideology"; other countries don't seem to have such a problem with development, it all just comes down to having decent government. Here's an article about how housing prices in Japan have been very stable despite similar increases in urban population; largely it's because the national government has taken away local governments' ability to restrict construction the way it happens in places like SanFran.

https://www.ft.com/content/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3...

Re: Amazon Pulls Out of Planned New York City Campus

#658

Post by i80and »

philwelch wrote: post #633
jpatokal wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people are quite happy to keeping buying cheap factory-farmed meat and dairy, despite vague awareness of the generally horrific conditions of the animals (and humans) producing it.

Oh, so “animal cruelty” is Newspeak for not being vegan.

As someone who grew up on a farm: there are entirely reasonable ways to define standards of livestock welfare that don't require veganism.

Re: Amazon Pulls Out of Planned New York City Campus

#659

Post by RPLong »

wgerard wrote: post #552
RPLong wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, you could focus on whether the word "midwest" is accurate, or you could take my point that there is a reason why people are moving out of places like NYC in favor of less dense cities that don't smell like urine.

> I mean, you could focus on whether the word "midwest" is accurate It's actually pretty important, because the crux of your argument is that they're moving to places with much a lower CoL. If people are moving from NYC to LA/Seattle/etc., your argument doesn't really hold much water. > or you could take my point that there is a reason why people are moving out of places like NYC in favor of less dense cities that do…

> If people are moving from NYC to LA/Seattle/etc., your argument doesn't really hold much water.

Gee, I don't remember mentioning "LA/Seattle/etc." by name. Unlike some other cities that I mentioned by name. Did you see the part where I mentioned cities by name?

> As far as I can tell, NYC has had about a 6% population growth since 2010. It actually matches the US overall population growth pretty well

Great, now compare that to the growth rates of Dallas or Nashville or etc.

Re: Amazon Pulls Out of Planned New York City Campus

#660

Post by maxsilver »

eanzenberg wrote: post #540
clydethefrog wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gentrification is the opposite of people moving up the economic ladder - it's the influx of more affluent residents.

Actually no, gentrification causes existing homeowners to increase their property values. It literally gives the existing community the opportunity to move up the economic ladder.

> Actually no, gentrification causes existing homeowners to increase their property values.

Property values are not necessarily wealth. It is entirely possible to gentrify existing homeowners out of their homes despite increasing their property values -- this moves homeowners down the economic ladder.

Yes, selling their house technically puts fresh cash in their pocket, but only by drastically increasing their cost of living and by making them search for new housing (which by definition will have to be somewhere cheaper than their current neighborhood, since by definition they can no longer afford their current one).

All of this is usually a large net loss in total wealth, despite the sale of their property. Owning a gentrifying home gives you the illusion of wealth building, but if you live in that home, it's really just lifestyle inflation until you sell out.

None of the above is a hypothetical, either. That is an accurate description of how real-world Gentrification usually plays out in Midwestern/Flyover USA today.

Post reply on HN