Nobody could have predicted this move:
Amazon.com is reconsidering its plan to bring 25,000 jobs to a new campus in New York City, according to two people familiar with the company’s thinking, following a wave of political and community opposition.
Hailed as an economic triumph when it was announced by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) and Mayor Bill de Blasio (D), the project now faces withering criticism from some elected officials and advocacy groups appalled at the prospect of giving giant subsidies to the world’s most valuable company, led by its richest man.
I really can’t hate the player too much here, since they’re just playing the game that every other big corporation plays to get tax cuts with the promise of economic development. Unfortunately for New York, I have a feeling that Amazon isn’t going anywhere.
The Midnight Lurker
Aide to Jeff Bezos: “Sir, your handling of Pecker has sent your approval ratings through the roof!”
Bezos: “Great! That will provide me with just enough cover to make some very unpopular moves.”
OzarkHillbilly
I can. We have the best govt money can buy. Guess who owns it?
Baud
If that’s accurate, I wonder if there will be blowback.
dr. bloor
Yep. Cuomo has such massive b*ner for them it doesn’t really matter what NYC wants.
Paul W.
This is adjacent to my district, and realistically will affect my next move. Ive heard literally no one in the city give two shits if they come or go other than it being somewhat nice we were “chosen”. That is, until you take into account the huge incentives laid out compared to VA and the fact that Amazon has zero skin in the game in terms of helping the infrastructure and education for the area both of which need it.
It’ll earn a shrug of my shoulders if they don’t come, but if they do they better make their case to more than just the mayor and the gov as to why the public should support this.
Jerry
Very much related:
Inside Wisconsin’s Disastrous $4.5 Billion Deal With Foxconn
RepubAnon
“Satisfaction guaranteed, or none of your money back” – not such a smart deal. It’s sad that so many state and local governments offer massive financial incentives to companies without any protections if the company fails to deliver on their promises.
NOTE: If you ever hire someone to do some work for you – don’t give them all the money up front. Otherwise, the work may never get done.
Gravenstone
@Jerry: Was just going to suggest that Amazon talk to Foxconn. Maybe Bozos could make better use of Walker and friends selling us down the river.
gene108
Crystal City/Arlington VA and Queens are already fairly densely populated areas, with traffic congestion.
I don’t see benefit in making already crowded areas even more crowded and congested.
Amazon had so many other cities, which had more space to accommodate thousands of people moving in, but for whatever reason they decided against those.
Spanky
@gene108:
It’s always – always – about the Benjamins.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Paul W.: I didn’t realize the NYC offer was much more heavily subsidized than the northern VA one. People in NoVA (and elsewhere in the DC area) are not all that excited about them coming because traffic will get worse and we really need more white collar jobs like we need extra holes in our heads. This area is awash in white collar jobs…what we need is something to help the less highly educated find employment – a huge fulfillment center would fit the bill but I don’t get that they’re interested in putting one of those in either NYC or NoVA. Neither city makes much financial sense. I mean, I know he has loads of money to burn but…Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo (if NY State is your goal), St. Louis, Milwaukee… or any of the mid-sized somewhat down on your luck cities like Dayton, OH…they could have oodles of land on the cheap for distribution centers, corporate HQ, and anything else they want. Labor costs would be much lower in any of those places. IT infrastructure, if lacking, could easily be built and I’m not really convinced NYC or DC are all that superior on that front anyway.
DC
@gene108:
You say those areas are already dense, so don’t build there, but you probably don’t like sprawl, either.
I’m not a fan of the subsidies, but sometimes it feels like people don’t want stuff to be built anywhere. How could we have gotten a fantastic city like New York in the first place if places didn’t get built up more?
meander
Perhaps the uproar will force Amazon and the state to use a sizeable amount of the HQ2 bribe to upgrade public infrastructure in the area.
Regarding comparisons between FoxConn / Wisconsin and Amazon / NYC, Amazon might have gone to NYC without any subsidies — huge companies like Amazon, Google, etc. love to have a NYC presence. But the FoxConn to the tundra of Wisconsin is another matter. Why the hell would you want to put a plant in Wisconsin, far from the ports, far from most of the population, and with challenging weather. Weather is certainly a reason that foreign car companies have built most plants in the south (a weak union culture is another reason, of course).
Villago Delenda Est
@The Midnight Lurker: This, this, THIS. Bezos has leverage now to call the whole thing off and Cuomo and de Blasio have both indicated that they’re chumps willing to fork over even more to keep it going, despite the opposition of those who have to live with this thing.
OzarkHillbilly
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?:
“Paul McKee on line 2.”
(for the STL ignorant, McKee is a real estate developer who has bought up about half of N St Louis and has been off and on fighting with STL govt over it all, tho I’m sure he made a chunk when the future STL National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency facility was sited on his land)
Omnes Omnibus
@meander: It is true that Milwaukee is landlocked and the midwest is entirely unpopulated.
Ohio Mom
@DC: New York City is what it is because of water: the large natural harbor on the Atlantic, across from Europe, and also the boost the Erie Canal provided. Goods and crops from the center of the nation could be easily transported through the Great Lakes and down the Canal to the NY harbor.
The Canal is fabulous example of the huge dividends infrastructure development can bring.
Another Scott
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?: I don’t know if it’s still the case, but it used to be that Amazon made most of their money on their IT stuff (AWS and the like). E.g. from 2015 – AWS is now 10x the size of its competitors – Is the Cloud arms race over?. Their retail distribution and Alexa and video streaming gets all the public attention, but it’s not what pays the bills. NoVA is a major hub for IT stuff going back to the MAE-East days:
Amazon wants to automate their distribution stuff as much as possible. They already have fulfillment warehouses in VA and NY (and NJ and many other states). It’s likely not going to be a huge employer of box handlers going forward, is my guess.
tl;dr – These new “headquarters” are about much more than distribution of boxes.
Cheers,
Scott.
OzarkHillbilly
@meander:
Mount Pleasant WI is just south of Milwaukee which is on Lake Michigan.
OzarkHillbilly
@Another Scott: They already have soul sucking warehouses in VA and NY….
FTFY.
Omnes Omnibus
@OzarkHillbilly: Oddly enough, Milwaukee has a better deep water port than Chicago. Chicago, of course, was better placed as a railroad hub and its port is adequate, and the rest is history.
OzarkHillbilly
@Omnes Omnibus: Yep.
Another Scott
@OzarkHillbilly: Yup. But…
Relatedly, BBC Newsnight on an Amazon warehouse in a UK town that came to a town that had a closed coal mine (9:03).
Cheers,
Scott.
OzarkHillbilly
@Jerry:
I soooooooooo want to meet this sucker with the moneymaking deal of the millennium for him to invest in.
Amir Khalid
Off-topic Liverpool lead Bournemouth 2-0 in the first half with goals from Mane and Wijnaldum.
Chyron HR
@gene108:
Maybe they just don’t want to be located in the shithole states?
BruceFromOhio
@Omnes Omnibus: Uh… what?
@OzarkHillbilly: Looks that way on my map, too. It’s a bit of the long way ’round, but you can drop a container on a ship and send it anywhere ships can go. And while it’s no Long Beach, CA, ships can bring things in, too. It’s amazing!
Amazon can patch things up with the locals if they want too – better communication, transparency about plans, sell the deal as good for everyone, not just Amazon and the landlords. If I live in the region/neighborhoods where the building(s) will go, I want to know I’m not gonna get gentrified onto the street in a year or two with no place to go.
Or Amazon can say, fuck you, I got mine, piss off already, roll the cranes and git ‘er done.
polyorchnid octopunch
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?: There is one thing I will say about internet infrastructure and how it works; simply put major centres like NYC etc will straight up blow away mid-sized non-central cities like Cleveland etc when it comes to internet facilities.
Gravenstone
@BruceFromOhio: Sarcasm that dry can be easy to miss.
OzarkHillbilly
@Another Scott: Relatedly: BBC Newsnight on an Amazon warehouse in a UK town that is now populated by zombies (9:03).
FTFY ;-) (couldn’t pass it up)
Aurona
I am sorry for New York’s loss that they evidently don’t want. I moved to Seattle in 1993, with Bezos’ spark just getting going, I’ve weathered Amazonia taking over and now that things have settled in (no more housing madness, etc.), it’s cooled down. We’ve got a high tech city, Microsoft nearby, Google and Facebook city headquarters here, and we’re doing fine. If New York doesn’t want it, my idea was always – go Toronto. Move your headquarters to another government and give them the high tech jobs. No dealing with Trumpitis. Or fearful people.
dimmsdale
Well, nobody asked ME (not Bezos, not Cuomo, not even my mayor DiBlasio, could you believe it!? ) but the last thing I want to see is another boondoggle from an already cash-strapped city being poured into the coffers of some squillionaire (be he sports-team owner or corporate CEO) in the faint hope that said squillionaire would honor promises made as to jobs (see also FOXCONN, accent on the ‘CON’) while smugly counting my taxpayer money. New York City is already doing a shit job helping the poor and homeless (even a ’socialist’ mayoral candidate somehow ends up in big real-estate’s pocket once the votes are counted, and fyi, the end 2 cars of any NYC subway turn into rolling flophouses for the homeless in frigid weather). Every nickel our pandering pols push at Bezos is money that doesn’t get spent on people who truly need it, and that’s not even addressing the neighborhoods in the surrounding area that inevitably get gentrified (with resulting loss of affordable rents but also loss of the newsstands, dry cleaners, bodegas, light manufacturing/contracting, mom & pop general stores etc., all of them supplanted by yet more god-damn overpriced condos and cleverly named vegan-mideastern-tacqueria-bistro-latte-avocadotoast eateries catering to hipster office workers). Market rents in the adjacent projected areas are already climbing, and property owners are already only too happy to evict a mom-and-pop bodega and hold the vacant gutted space “For Rent” sometimes for years, in anticipation of just such a squillionaire bonanza. I’ve seen it happen over and over again in NYC, not just with “tech hubs” but also with NYU and Columbia University, both among the most sprawl-minded and brutally rapacious property owners in town. I say f*ck that. I’m not remotely NIMBY over homeless shelters or health clinics for the poor or low-income housing, but for this sort of sh*t? Get Off My Lawn!!
Cheryl Rofer
LOL, when I read the title of the post, I thought it referred to Trump’s foreign policy!
B.B.A.
@BruceFromOhio: Most cargo ships are too big for the Seaway. You’d have to transfer the containers between ships in Quebec, and I don’t know that it would be any more efficient than just putting them on trains and trucks for the inland portions.
Amir Khalid
And Mo Salah makes it Liverpool 3-0 Bournemouth in the 48th minute. Back to the top of the table!
Tokyokie
@Amir Khalid: Updates on how the Reds are doing are never off-topic.
George
There should be a federal excise tax of 200% on all these giveaways by state and local governments to private entities. For sports teams (on general, statement making principle), the rate should be 10,000%.
The Midnight Lurker
Ms. Stacey Abrams will be on NPR’s ‘Wait! Wait! Don’t Tell Me!’ today. Right now as a matter of fact!
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Cheryl Rofer: I assumed it was birth control. A little too on-the-nose?
Raoul
I don’t know how we break out of the absurd cycle, since it seems tailor made for both the Amazons and FoxConns of this world (much less sports teams, etc).
But one can hope that once we take out the GOP trash, one of the middle-rung projects could be ending the massive, corruption-susceptible ‘incentive’ racket.
Also, too, Bezos may have scored some solid points with his Pecker punching (owww!) but he did remind us he’s somewhere in the top 3 richest men in the world, so why are cities paying for Amazon’s needs?
trollhattan
@Cheryl Rofer:
Same. :-)
James E Powell
@dr. bloor:
Cuomo’s a 1990s DLC public private partnership throwback. I thought we agreed to send all such people to an island where they could give each other TED talks about their genius ideas for saving the world.
tobie
@The Midnight Lurker: Can Stacey Abrams move to Virginia and become governor? That would be an ideal solution on so many fronts. On the other hand, people in Georgia may not want to lose their most inspiring Democratic figure.
Sab
@The Midnight Lurker: That is disappointing. Peter Sagal thinks dwarf jokes are funny.
The Midnight Lurker
@tobie:
Ms. Stacey Abrams could move to Washington and become President.
The Midnight Lurker
@Sab:
Yes, yes… I have problems with Segal too. And Bill Maher, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon… the list goes on.
But it’s Stacey Abrams!!!
James E Powell
@meander:
I followed the auto factory location stories when they were happening and I can’t recall a single person mentioning the weather. Low labor costs, low taxes, and governments practically begging to give taxpayers’ money away lest it fall into the hands of the unworthies.
West of the Rockies
So, Paradise, CA could probably use an economic shot in the arm. Re-do the whole damn thing as Amazon Paradise. Call the high school team the Amazon Cybernauts.
Also, too, the Rams owner built his own damn stadium with no massive tax breaks. 4.5 Billion. Why can’t Foxconn and Amazon see to its own bills?
tobie
@The Midnight Lurker: Yes, that’s an even better suggestion! Happy thought for the day.
James E Powell
@Ohio Mom:
That’s exactly what Frank Sobotka was trying to tell everyone.
JGabriel
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?:
I think the goal was probably more East Coast Corridor, which Buffalo is barely a part of at best, than New York State. Philadelphia or Baltimore would probably be better choices than Buffalo, but maybe they weren’t willing to pony up the kind of incentives Amazon wanted.
Anyway, as a New Yorker, I don’t care that much whether Amazon comes here or not – the only upside I see is that maybe we get faster deliveries. On the other hand, all of our Amazon orders will be subject to state and local taxes now – if they aren’t already. I don’t do enough business with them to remember.
BruceFromOhio
@B.B.A.: CLE made a little ripple when it started freight service to EU – one of the first runs included an old yellow school bus shipped to a buyer across the Atlantic. While the big container ships can’t get to the Great Lakes its still kind of remarkable what can come and go. Definitely not Quebec, tho. Alas.
@Gravenstone: lol noted for future reference, thanks!
Ella in New Mexico
SometimesI want to scream when I imagine what a trillion dollar tax cut targeted to, among other smart and worthy common goals, push giant corporations to open their giant headquarters in rural or economically depressed parts of the country could have done for this country.
West of the Rockies
@dimmsdale:
Good rant, Reverend!
BruceFromOhio
@dimmsdale: PREACH it!
realbtl
@James E Powell: The real reason for locating in the south was and is they are R governed and anti-union. This was of course never mentioned by anyone but the unions.
dr. bloor
@James E Powell: Curiously enough, he seems to be trying to do just that. In addition to Amazon, he’s trying to throw three billion at Long Island in the upcoming budget to turn it into Silicon Valley East.
Or maybe it’s 3B for Amazon, and some other ridiculous number for additional tech development. Can’t remember.
tobie
@Ella in New Mexico: How do you choose which impoverished region gets support? The bulk of fulfillment centers are in rural areas because land is cheap. Places like Baltimore, Flint, Detroit, and Milwaukee desperately need jobs. And, my sense is that decaying erstwhile industrial centers get far less state aid than rural regions. This is certainly true in Maryland. Our Republican governor has been starving Baltimore.
VOR
@OzarkHillbilly: Water. The Foxconn plant location is near Lake Michigan and thus a large source of fresh water. Foxconn got exemptions from environmental regulations and permission to pull massive amounts of water.
Politics was another big reason for locating in Wisconsin. If you read the article, this project got started in 2017 and therefore is located in the district of the then Speaker of the House (Paul Ryan), White House Chief of Staff (Priebus), and a presidential contender seeking a miracle to get re-elected (Walker). The last point is crucial. Despite winning 3 votes for governor (counting the abortive recall), Walker was still not that popular. Walker’s economic plan seemed to revolve around giving tax cuts and favors to business and plutocrats. This is why Charlie Pierce always referred to Walker as “the goggle-eyed homunculus managing the Koch midwest subsidiary”. One of Walker’s innovations was the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC), who was heavily involved in the Foxconn deal. In short, Foxconn found a sucker.
Fair Economist
@Omnes Omnibus: Chicago also built a water connection to the Mississippi basin.
Mr Stagger Lee
@Aurona: How you like those tent cities, and roving RV parks?
Steve in the ATL
@realbtl: bingo
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?: companies like Amazon can’t hire the workforce they need in decaying rust belt cities. There aren’t enough sophisticated white collar workers there, and it’s really hard to entice people to move from SF/Seattle/NYC/NoVa/even Atlanta to Buffalo/Cleveland/Dayton/etc.
Kay
@VOR:
I don’t know if it applies to FoxConn because it seems to be an assembly operation, but the upper midwest has a huge pool of skilled trades workers in manufacturing. Southern auto plants recruit where I live, not for line workers but for skilled trades. The people who build and maintain the big machines that make the smaller machines or components :)
They’ve learned to game this because the southern plants rely on bonuses rather than high wages to get them down there. They go down, get the bonus, stay the minimum length of the term and head back to Michigan or Ohio, where they’re also in demand. They actually prefer to live here, weather or no weather.
My middle son learned how to maintain a specific factory system for making pop bottles. The system itself is made in France. They can’t just find people like that anywhere and there are a LOT of them here.
Ruckus
@gene108:
Amazon doesn’t want to have thousands of new people moving in, they want to find a place that has thousands of people to hire away from someone else. And if a company moves to a place that doesn’t have the workers it’s quite possible that it doesn’t have the places for them to live in so no one is going to move there.
So you go to someplace that has the workers, two birds and all that, you leave a different job to come to work at Amazon you burned an old bridge and finding out that working at Amazon isn’t all that and a bag of chips, what do you do now?
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Steve in the ATL: I don’t know. I live in DC. Visited Detroit the spring before last and it’s got stuff going on. Not sure why people wouldn’t want to live there – I mean, yes i understand why people wouldn’t want to live in certain parts of it, but the nice parts are pretty damn nice. And I’m not talking the suburbs either. If you offered me my current salary to live there I’d take it. Just from what I’d save on housing costs I might be able to retire a decade early – or if I didn’t want to retire early, I’d be able to retire much more comfortably. I visit Cleveland regularly (have extended family that lives there) and can say the same thing about it.
Steve in the ATL
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?: Detroit has come back nicely, but no one wanted to move there 5-7 years ago. And Detroit is a different story from Buffalo and Toledo and even Cleveland. And can you imagine trying to convince someone to move to Flint?!
Ella in New Mexico
@tobie:
I think you answered the question in your comment.
Seriously, almost anywhere besides LA/Silicon Valley, NYC or DC to start. We already know where the areas most in need are thanks to lots of economic development data accumulated over the past few years. I can think of at least 50 places, rural and urban, who are more deserving than where Amazon chose to put their headquarters.
--bd
@Tokyokie: Same. YNWA y’all.
Kay
Amazon wants to locate in NYC because that’s where the managers and executives want to live.
We have a lot of trouble recruiting physicians to come here. They’re in demand and they have a lot of options and they simply don’t want to live here. We literally CANNOT recruit a psychiatrist. The one we had died and it’s been years. The closest is 60 miles away. They have contract docs who rush in and do admits and evals but they don’t live here.
Suzanne
@Steve in the ATL: Bingo. The white-collar workers that Amazon is looking to hire en masses are not found in sufficient quantity in Dayton or Buffalo. Hell, I live in the fifth-largest city in the country, with the largest university in the country (Arizona State), and we did not meet one of Amazon’s criteria: 1/3 of population (or more) having a college degree. And the K-12 here is not awesome, so that’s not a draw for people with kids. So anyone wondering why they don’t want to go to a struggling city or out to a rural area is missing the biggest piece of the puzzle for Amazon: LABOR.
FlyingToaster
@Steve in the ATL: This:
Boston did not offer them much — just the Suffolk Downs property on the Revere/Eastie line, and road/T improvement. Amazon would have to deal with clearing, building, and dealing with the rising water… And we’re not disappointed that we didn’t get HQ2. We have an Amazon Tech presence in the Seaport already, HQ2 wasn’t going to be a big gain for us.
For HQ2, they need the highly educated workforce that is generally lacking in rust-belt-casualty cities. 30 years ago, I left the Midwest for the East Coast. I could make a LOT better living, even in a high priced locale like Boston, than I could in Kansas City or Indianapolis. Among other things, my student loan was paid off fast, rather than how long it would have taken at the prevailing wage where I grew up.
Kay
I always think “weather” is over-valued as a factor. Chicago and Minneapolis are pretty damn cold and lots and lots of people want to live there. What seems like 25% of our twenty -something population decamp for Chicago every year. They’re not flocking to Alabama. My son’s entire social group in Chicago are all from Ohio or Michigan. Cold, cold, cold, all three of those places.
Suzanne
@Kay: Many of the skilled workers who aren’t managers or C-suite people also want to live there.
I just did a college recruiting event at Texas A&M for my company this week. We have eight locations in CA and AZ. Almost all of the students were only interested in LA or San Diego. They don’t want to live in “suburban” places like Inland Empire or Phoenix or even San Jose. There is much data showing a strong preference among the Millennials for city living and walkability and urban amenities. So a company that needs to hire a lot of skilled workers is wisely going to go where skilled workers are or want to be.
Kay
@Suzanne:
I understand it. I don’t think any of my children will settle here and I don’t take that as an insult. Two already did not, specifically and with planning :)
For small places there’s another problem. If you’re asking someone with a family to move here they have to be pretty damn sure it’s going to work out, because if the job doesn’t work for them they can’t just switch jobs- they have to move again. It’s a higher stakes bet than moving to a city where they can leave one job and find another that is comparable without moving their family. If it doesn’t work out for someone at Amazon in NYC they have a lot of job options without picking up and relocating again. Higher income people who move here complain they don’t have any leverage at work, because where are they going to go? To take a “better” job they have to sell their house and move their kids again. They feel trapped.
opiejeanne
@Mr Stagger Lee: Thank you.
I was wondering what that claim of the price of housing stabilization thing was. prices are still soaring here, in that a 2300 sf house in our neighborhood on .9 acre is for sale for a cool million, and it has formica countertops and a cheap stove from the 80s, and it’s not even in Seattle. Rents in Seattle are still ridiculous.
Steve in the ATL
@Kay: are you in between Cleveland and Toledo?
Suzanne
@Kay: For sure. My MIL keeps begging us to move to Fayetteville, Arkansas, which is where she lives. And my husband and I are like, “You’d have to drag us there feet-first”. The work issue is part of it…..even if I could find a job, that would be the only job.
But even more than that…..I just hate that place and places like it. I know that sounds snobby. But I find them terrible. The built environment is ugly, the restaurants are limited, and there’s not much there that I want to do. I enjoy urban energy and street life and performing arts, and that stuff is just very limited in a place like that.
tobie
@Ella in New Mexico: Thanks for the explanation and sorry if I sounded shrill. It’s just that I’ve seen what’s happened in Maryland where our Republican governor rewards rural and largely white Republican regions while starving Baltimore, and that drives me batty…all the more so since residents of the highly subsidized Eastern Shore will say that they’ve never received a govt handout in their life. One bumper sticker I recently saw in rural Maryland read (on a pickup truck, of course), “I’m a Republican ‘cuz someone needs to work.”
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
Also Detroit has a ton of R&D sector and engineering talent. The idea that there isn’t a highly skilled educated workforce there is BS. University of Michigan, Michigan State and Wayne State (right in the city – the other two are a pretty easy day drive) churn out thousands of grads a year. Finding workers with skills should really not be a problem.
PJ
No one who lives in NYC actually wants this deal, except for DeBlasio and Cuomo. Part of it is that it was all done secretly, without any citizen or City Council input, and Cuomo can make it happen on his say so. Part of it is that Amazon certainly doesn’t need any subsidies, and it will all additional strain to already overburdened transportation and education systems, while driving up rents for residents and businesses. If Amazon wants to move in without subsidies, fine, otherwise, GTFO.
Newark, NJ is just a couple of miles down the road from NYC, accessible via the PATH train in what would be a reverse commute for Manhattan residents, and they are desperate for this kind of corporate investment. But the fact is that Amazon doesn’t want to be in a place that needs redevelopment, it wants to be in a place that is already redeveloped.
BTW, there is already a non-unionized Amazon warehouse in Staten Island that employs thousands, and that, as far as I know, was built without any special subsidies.
eclare
@James E Powell: Nice reference!
Raven Onthill
Maybe the new Amazon office should be located in Newark, New Jersey.
But, oh, wouldn’t the racist snobs object!
Ruckus
@Kay:
I moved from LA to Columbus. The weather was an issue but not a deal breaker. I will say though that when I quit that job I had no desire to stay there. East or west costal regions were my choice, moved back to CA. There is a draw to live in a growing economy rather than a stagnate one. And yes some drawbacks as well but worth the trade off.
JAFD
@dimmsdale: In other bad news, I got postcard this week, “Going-Out-Of-Business Sale” at Jerry’s New York Central Art Supply (111 Fourth Ave – around the block from Strand Books). &^&%%*%&$&@#${}|+^^&*^% (pardon my French)
They’re good place to do business (“We’re serious, we know you’re serious, let’s deal.” – no attitude) and I will miss them. But arty jackals in metro NYC may want to bargain hunt. :-(
Kay
@Steve in the ATL:
No, I’m west of both. Toledo is our big city though. I really do love the Great Lakes areas. I’m partial to them over other areas, although I also really like California.
I have vacationed in the UP (Michigan) and I really could have gone somewhere else:)
People think it’s all the same but I’m telling you Lake Erie is a whole different world than Lake Michigan and that’s w/out delving into Superior :)
JR
@Steve in the ATL: There was one formerly rust-belt city that was definitely hot after Amazon — Pittsburgh. And CMU (and to a lesser extent, the University of Pittsburgh) made the move viable, at least from a talent perspective.
Still, I’m not sure the city is/was large enough to support the kind of infrastructure an amazon HQ requires.
scott (the other one)
I understand the reasons why Detroit wouldn’t be the front-runner…but, man, if you were Bezos, wouldn’t you love the idea of being known as the guy who totally rejuvenated Detroit?
dimmsdale
@JAFD:
Yeah, don’t even get me started on what’s happened to Fourth Avenue since it was a haven of eccentric and specialized used-book stores. One thing about Greenwhich Village, to mention something positive, is that much as NYU has tried to knock it all down and put up grotesque, vulgar, gargantuan monolithic monuments named after rich NYU alums, it’s stil possible to walk down MacDougal St. and point at a building and say, “Dylan wrote ‘Blowin in the Wind’ sitting at a table in THERE, and took the song down the street and sang it for the first time THERE”—and not be pointing at a god-damned Starbucks either time.
Michael J Allen
@Paul W.: @dimmsdale: This comment system should have a thumbs up type feature. Take a look at that photo. Turn around and look back at Manhattan. New York City needs to pay billions of dollars for more office jobs? Most people here are renters. With home prices doubling already in ten years almost none of them can afford to buy. People already here will pay the billions, only it will go to property owners, not the city. And they will be farther from ever being able to afford to buy.
WaterGirl
@Kay: I don’t know about the towns in the areas, but I completely agree that Lake Superior and Lake Michigan do not have the same feel at all.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
@WaterGirl: I grew up in Grand Rapids Michigan and Lake Michigan has lots of wonderful towns along the coast. Also towering sand dunes and lots of white sand beaches. Very different from Erie. My relatives in Cleveland have a cottage near Marblehead/Sandusky so I know that part of Erie well. Superior is indeed another whole different animal. It’s much bigger and wilder. Has some dunes, some nice sandy beaches, but also rugged rocky coastline. Pictured Rocks is spectacular and the Canadian shore is too.
Domestic short hair tabby (fka vheidi)
@PJ: I keep thinking the same thing, why not Newark? They could do real good there.