“Amazon.com Inc.’s decision to drop its expansion plans in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens plunged local real estate brokers into despair — just months after the euphoria that followed the company’s announcement that it would open offices there and bring thousands of jobs,” Ben Foldy, Sydney Maki, and Lily Katz report for Bloomberg. “But not just despair. Also anger.”
“‘I think those local politicians, their careers are over,’ said Eric Benaim, chief executive officer of Modern Spaces, a Long Island City brokerage, who distributed pins and posters supporting the Amazon deal. ‘They’re responsible for losing 25,000 jobs,’ Foldy, Maki, and Katz report. “Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo lobbied hard for the deal, drawing backlash from local politicians and community organizers who objected to $3 billion in government incentives.”
“Without the boost from Amazon that could have transformed Long Island City into a 24/7 district, Benaim said he thinks it’ll remain just a place for Manhattan commuters to sleep. ‘It’s still going to be a bedroom community, and I feel bad for all the local restaurants, all the local mom-and-pop shops who were counting on this,’ he said. ‘They needed this,'” Foldy, Maki, and Katz report. “Amazon’s withdrawal ‘sends a terrible signal to the marketplace about the ability for companies to expand in New York,’ said Seth Pinsky, an executive vice president at RXR Realty. ‘The people who are younger and don’t remember the fact that New York was not always thriving, I think don’t understand that as bad as the problems of growth are, the problems of decline are even worse.'”
At a contentious City Council meeting on Tuesday, Amazon’s public policy director Brian Huseman touted the deal’s benefits for the city, but also said that Amazon wants to invest in a ‘community that wants us.’ And state Senator Michael Gianaris, who had been appointed to a committee that would have had veto power over the deal, called the $3 billion in incentives ‘extortion,'” Foldy, Maki, and Katz report. “‘They think they can sit there in Seattle and dictate terms and hope that governments bend to their will,’ Gianaris said in a Feb. 8 interview on Bloomberg TV. ‘Well, it’s not going to work.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Well, 25,000 aren’t going to work at Amazon in Long Island City, that much is sure.
The whims of the few outweigh the needs of the many. — MacDailyNews, December 5, 2017
SEE ALSO:
New York City will lose the bulk of the 25,000 jobs that were promised as Amazon pulls HQ2 due to local opposition – February 14, 2019
