When New York started to come apart at the seams in the 1970s, as crime ran rampant, city finances proved to be a proverbial house of cards, and corporations large and small (but especially large) fled the city for the relative stability of the suburbs, I worried obsessively about it. My parents had taken my sisters and me to the 1964-65 New York World's Fair; in fact, they took us twice. I can only tell you that, from my eight- or nine-year old perspective, I fell in love with the city, and have always felt that way ever since, through all of its ups and downs. And so, as I reached adulthood and went off to college, I would buy the New York Times every day (a habit I acquired from my father) and read about the Big Apple's triumphs and tribulations. I agonized over stories of departing businesses, and rejoiced at the occasional report about people and businesses defying the trend and coming in to New York.
So why should I feel so "meh" about the news that Amazon will not be bringing a "semi-headquarters," and the thousands of jobs that would allegedly come with it, to Long Island City in Queens, as it had committed to do some time ago?
A number of reasons.
To begin with, the economy not just of New York, but of the nation as a whole, is far more homogenized than it was back in the '70s and before then. Businesses, stores, newspapers, theaters--all of the things that make up an urban economy were unique to each city, and they would tend to stay in one location because, back then, there were economic and technological advantages to close physical proximity. But one of the sad consequences of the concentration of wealth over the past four decades is that a lot of these individualized enterprises could no longer depend upon purely local consumers to survive. At the same time, advances in technology, especially in communications and transportation, made the location of organizations far less important in planning their operations.
And thus, newspapers like the New York Times survived by becoming national newspapers, focusing less on the city and more on the rest of the national. Meanwhile, businesses were splitting up there operations and spreading them out to take advantage of lower costs in cheaper locations. Stores? They either became national stores, like Macy's, or they disappeared altogether (like Bonwit Teller and B. Altman) and were replaced with other formerly local and now national stores like Target or Nordstrom's. Theaters? Well, when was the last time you watched a movie or saw a play in one, instead of on your laptop or smartphone?
The physical and other segmenting of major corporations like Amazon, and the related ease by which such companies can helicopter in and out of an urban area, makes me truly wonder why any city, much less New York, would offer $3 billion in tax incentives to have them fly in for who really knows how long. What if, in a short span of time, Amazon found it convenient to helicopter all of some of the promised jobs to another location? What happens to the space they occupy, the local businesses that came to depend on them, the value of property in the area, and so forth?
The Amazons of the world don't care about those things. And it's insane for the New Yorks of the world to care about them. We are living in an age in which the virtues of city living are slowly being rediscovered, and people are moving back to them in significant numbers. In the process, they are making a statement about their own commitment and sense of loyalty to the urban life around them, and they are starting and patronizing businesses of their own. Why not take the $3 billion in tax breaks and given them to those people? Seems to me like they're more worth it. New York is creating new jobs and new opportunities without the Amazons of the world. Once, New York had over 100 Fortune 500 headquarters; today, it has no more than 50. But it still leads all other cities in this category, and the departures aren't stopping people from coming in.
And speaking of Fortune ...
Here's a little item from that magazine that suggests they really have no reason to rattle a tin cup in the faces of public officials. It suggests even further that this whole headquarters search was little more than an effort to find out who was the biggest municipal sucker of all--an effort that, as the Times reported, backfired on them.
Shed no tears for Amazon (and full disclosure: I shop on its Web site). It will do very well without New York and the promised subsidies. If it really needed to come there, it could easily afford to do so without them. New York should be putting that money into making life better for the new arrivals from other states and other countries, who are coming in asking for no help at all, but who could greatly and deservedly benefit from having it given to them, in the form of good schools, good transit, better police and fire protection, better trash collection, better access to capital for housing and business expansion, and so forth. Providing for those things are the true work of municipal and state government.
Amazon can helicopter to wherever it wants. It's best to just get out of its way.
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