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NEW YORK (AP) – Amazon has sentenced New York to Valentine's Day, canceling the idea of building a gigantic head office in Queens, in the fierce opposition of angry politicians for nearly $ 3 billion. tax breaks and the anti-union position of society.
With millions of jobs and a booming economy, New York can withstand this explosion, but experts say the decision by the e-commerce giant to abandon 25,000 promised jobs could scare away other companies that are considering to establish or develop in the city. , who wants to be considered the Silicon Valley of the east coast.
"One of the real risks is the message we send to companies that want to set up shop in New York and expand to New York," said Julie Samuels, executive director of the Tech industry group: NYC. "We are really playing with fire right now."
In November, Amazon selected the cities of New York City and Crystal City, Virginia, winners of a secret process that lasted throughout the year and in which more than 230 cities in North America have decided to become the headquarters of the second headquarters of the Seattle-based company.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that the selection of the city at the time was the biggest benefit for its burgeoning technology economy and emphasized that this deal would generate billions of dollars to improve public transit, schools and housing.
The opposition however came quickly, as the details began to appear.
Critics complained of public subsidies that were offered to Amazon and criticized some of the terms of the deal, such as the company's request to access a helipad. Some have advocated that the agreement be renegotiated or simply abandoned.
"We knew it was heading south as soon as the announcement came out," said Thomas Stringer, site selection consultant for large companies. "If it had been well done, all the elected officials would have been there to boast how great it was.When you did not see it, you knew something was wrong."
Stringer, chief executive of BDO USA LLP, said city and public officials must rethink the secrecy with which they had negotiated. Community leaders and potential critics have been left in the dark just to be caught off guard when the details are made public.
"It's time to press the reset button and say, 'What have we done wrong?', Said Stringer. "It's fumbling at the 1 yard line."
In a statement released Thursday, Amazon said its commitment to New York required "positive collaborative relations" with state and local officials and that a number of them "have made it clear that they opposed our presence and would not work with us to build the kind of relationships needed to move forward. "
Not that Amazon is irreproachable, experts say.
Joe Parilla, a member of the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program, said the company's high-profile bidding process may have fueled the backlash. Companies are generally looking for new sites without making noise, partly to avoid the kind of opposition that Amazon has received.
"They had this huge competition and the media covered it very aggressively, and several cities responded," Parilla said. "What were you expecting? This gave the opposition a much bigger platform."
Richard Florida, professor of urban studies and critic of Amazon's initial research process, said the company should have expected to feel the heat when she chose New York, a city known for its neighborhood activism.
"In the end, it will hurt Amazon," said Florida, director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto. "It will embolden people who do not like the welfare of businesses across the country."
Other tech companies maintain the technological economy of New York City without making noise.
Google spends $ 2.4 billion to build its Manhattan campus. The Salesforce cloud computing company is named after Verizon's former downtown headquarters, and the Spotify streaming service engulfs the space of the World Trade Center complex.
Despite higher costs, New York City remains attractive to technology companies because of its large and diverse talent pool, world-clbad educational and cultural institutions, and access to other industries, such as the capital of Wall Street and Mad dollars Avenue.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, no other metropolitan area in the United States has as many IT jobs as New York City has 225,600. But San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Washington, Boston, Atlanta and Dallas each have a greater concentration of their workers in technology.
In the New York area, average computer jobs are worth about $ 104,000 a year, about $ 15,000 more than the national average. Nevertheless, that's about $ 20,000 less than in San Francisco.
Even after canceling its headquarters project, Amazon still has 5,000 employees in New York, not counting Whole Foods.
"New York has really done a great job of growing and supporting its technology ecosystem, and I'm confident it will continue," said Samuels. "Today, we have taken a step back, but I would not want that nail in the coffin of technology in New York."
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