221–227 of 227 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Profit motive leads to more shelter being built. The same reason why you want food production for-profit. Not everything works best with profit motive (eg, healthcare) but if you want affordable housing then maximizing profit motive will help produce more housing.
Well, we had food and shelter before we had profit motives.
I don’t think profit margin typically makes things possible in a binary manner. I think it just makes them more efficient.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Giving amazon the ability to not pay taxes is a subsidy. My question is whether it would still have been a good detail if NY had removed 26B of their tax burden because of the economic benefit? Where is the line in your view? How much help is too much for a company?
The purpose of city government is collection of taxes from one set of people and expenditures of revenue to another set of people, in an effort to serve the greater good of the community. The economics which determine where the “line” is, is set by the market of people/companies willing to move into and invest in the city, the services and infrastructure and regulation and talent pool they require to be able to funct…
Even if you believe all those numbers, that is $60 a year per New York resident in revenue. New York City itself has 4M jobs: https://www.labor.ny.gov/stats/nyc/
Amazon would have been a small part of that. So whether HQ2 should located in NYC and whether the residents around it would be hurt or helped are all valid questions. This isn’t going to make or break New York City or New York in general by any stretch of the imagination.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
LIC does not have many commercial tenants, and none on the scale of Amazon. It would be a good thing to not concentrate all jobs in Manhattan. Also, if you walk around LIC, it's not as developed as you might think, sure there are huge buildings, but they're next to empty lots & industrial spaces. It's largely a desirable area because of it's proximity to Manhattan, not really anything intrinsic about the neighborhood…
All of our transportation is Manhattan-centric. That's why all the jobs are in Manhattan. Putting jobs in LIC will still force workers from the non-Queens sections of the metro area to go into Manhattan and then back out to Queens. Even the LIRR can't really serve LIC, because it's impossible to build a station that serves waterfront LIC that is on the way to Penn.
And it's also ignoring the fact that a lot of people already live in Queens, and that LIC specifically is connected to Brooklyn via the G.
It's not an ideal situation, but it's a chicken & egg problem, there's no reason to build commuter transit there without employers and employers don't want to be there without that transit, so the Amazon deal would have done a good amount to break that stalemate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
These people you talk about don't live in those communities and haven't lived in communities that have been destroyed and made worse by big corporations like this. How's Seattle doing? Great for the rich, but not for anyone else. Walk the city streets in Seattle, head down to city mission in Pioneer Square, you'll figure out what the word "despair" really means. I'm glad the public stood up. The workers have power. G…
Unfortunately, some other community will have to suffer having so many high paid workers.
Just because you have different priorities, priorities that are "infinite growth" (cancer), doesn't mean its automatically a good idea. Those workers weren't being employed from NYC and surrounding areas, and you know it. They were coming there to displace people already living there.
It's time the lower end of society starts getting a fucking say too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Should shelter, a basic human need, be for-profit? If so, why?
Here's a thought; do you want to rely on the goodwill of people you don't know, that live hundreds or thousands of miles away, to get up at 4am to farm and create food (a basic human need) for you? Or do you want to rely on the profit motive? If not, why?
Want to try another argument?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Should shelter, a basic human need, be for-profit? If so, why?
Profit motive leads to more shelter being built. The same reason why you want food production for-profit. Not everything works best with profit motive (eg, healthcare) but if you want affordable housing then maximizing profit motive will help produce more housing.