911–920 of 1001 posts
If Amazon had just quietly announced plans to expand to LIC without the "HQ2 Search" dog and pony show they almost certainly would still be here. Google buys entire city blocks and nobody bats an eye. Turns out that publicly shaking down cities across the US tends to draw out the opposition. More publicity = more scrutiny = more angry opponents of your business decision
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I'm of two minds on this issue, but: how can the city have good mass transit if there are no tax dollars to pay for it?
I'm under the impression that Amazon has never been a big taxpayer.
I am not advocating for big businesses evading tax mind you. Just suggesting it would probably still be a boon for the state tax income if a bunch of tech wages migrated to the NY tax base.
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> would have to be public data by now Show me the public data source where I could conceivably find that out and I'll do "please provide evidence of the data that has been overlooked". Because I don't think that data source exists. I don't think you realize how opaque tax records are in many places. You seem to be implying that there is a way for the public - or even journalists - to acquire the tax and assessment in…
Property taxes are generally searchable online. Redfin will tell you residential real estate taxes for a property, for example.
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> That tax break is real money . Sure, but it's real money that your community doesn't get either way . You're living in a fantasy world if you believe that the choice was legitimately between "Tax money and 25,000 jobs" or "No tax money and 25,000 jobs." No, the choice has always been between "No tax money and 25,000 jobs" or "No tax money and no jobs." You're not getting the tax money either way. Either Amazon buil…
> Your decision is really between "Do you want 25,000 jobs, or not?" Except that's not the choice either - as others have pointed out. If Amazon doesn't build something in NY, some one else will over the same time period. Will it be more or less than 25,000 jobs? Who knows. But NY is already an attractive metropolitan area judging by its density and property value. It's not a struggling rural town that can't attract…
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By that logic, a city like Detroit, with 600K is 50 times more in demand than a city like Malibu, which only has 12K people.
Why is that hard to believe? More people may say they want to Malibu than Detroit but until they do it doesn't matter. I would love to have a Tesla but dreams don't count as demand.
So, take city A - where house prices cost, $100 and it has 100,000 people. In City B, house prices cost $500 and it only has 10,000 people.
You still don't see the full demand curve for either city. The statement "City A is in more demand than City B" is not a meaningful statement. That's what I was trying to say. I was trying to point out the absurdity of just counting people as a way of inferring the shape of a curve.
Now, how could your statement be changed to make it well defined? You could say "At every price point, City A will have more people than City B". Which means the curve of demand for A is above the curve of demand for B. But is that really true for NY? I doubt it. Maybe, but you'd need to provide some other evidence. And such evidence is hard to find, because NYC is a donor city -- more people move out every year than move in.
https://www.nycedc.com/blog-entry/coming-or-going-nyc-migrat...
The only reason why NYC's total population is growing is because births outpace deaths and it is a port city for new immigrants. But for US-US transfers, it's shrinking by about 2% each year. So at least in the universe of US cities, people tend to choose to live elsewhere.
But that doesn't mean that NYC is a bad city. It most likely means that it's a little out of equilibrium -- most likely because of the influx of immigrants. E.g. you can imagine that existing New Yorkers have some equilibrium price, and then an increase of immigrants raises that a bit, so that some of the non-immigrants leave. This is true in general of port cities: you see an influx from outside the city that pushes a certain number of the people inside out.
Now are these immigrants coming to NY because they prefer it to Phoenix or whatever? No, they are coming to NY because it's a port of entry and because they have relatives there. Immigrants tend to cluster and stay put, which is a shame, because most would be better off living elsewhere, just because they tend to cluster in ghettoes in high cost areas. That's a whole other interesting effect -- why immigrants tend to stop at the first place they land and stay there.
How else could your statement be changed to make it well defined? Well, you can say that real estate prices are really high in New York, meaning that overall it is in great demand compared to other cities where real estate prices are cheaper. This is, I think, your strongest argument. Except there are a lot of factors that affect real estate prices -- including zoning restrictions, prop 13, and most importantly # of high paying jobs, etc. For NY, that would be Wall St jobs or FIRE more generally. Now you could argue that NY has so many Wall St jobs because it's great, but we both know better. There are historical reasons for these types of agglomeration effects that are kinda arbitrary and in the case of NY go way, way back. Even in the period of white flight when NY was dangerous as hell and half empty you had all those Wall St jobs concentrated there.
So, bottom line, it's really hard to infer preferences from the data you are citing and even from the better arguments you could have made but chose not to.
If Amazon had just quietly announced plans to expand to LIC without the "HQ2 Search" dog and pony show they almost certainly would still be here. Google buys entire city blocks and nobody bats an eye. Turns out that publicly shaking down cities across the US tends to draw out the opposition. More publicity = more scrutiny = more angry opponents of your business decision
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One factor is that NY pays 5-10 times more than comparable cities to build its mass transit: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
and in return for all that money, they receive the sewage waterfall: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/05/penn-stations-latest-... Honestly, why is this so hard when so much of the rest of the developed world manages to do it so well?
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Do you dispute that current lifestock welfare standards in the meat/dairy/egg/etc. industries permit what most would agree is animal cruelty if the same things were done to, say, the family dog?
Yes, I dispute that, if we are talking about Australia. As a farmer (both meat and crop), the better you look after your stock, the more you make from them. There is no incentive for cruelty and it will cost you money. Admittedly, we don't have feedlots on the same scale as the US and the majority of beasts go pasture to plate fairly quickly.
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Most new Yorkers supported the project even when told about the subsidies. It's a vocal minority that sank the project https://www.wsj.com/articles/majority-of-new-yorkers-support...
It is always vocal minoirities who do things, even with very popular topics. Animal cruelty? There is only a vocal minority who takes a public stance, despite this beeing a very clear cut issue in terms of public opinion. Migration is the other way round: most people don't give a fuck, but have a loud vocal base that will even hurt themselves to make a point and you will be heard.