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It turns out that technological oligarchs are not much better than old dogs to learn new tricks. By dividing his supposedly coveted second seat between New York City and Greater Washington DC, Amazon's Jeff Bezos repeats what worked for him in Seattle saying "yes, sir" to power.
Technology companies were once considered foreigners, most of them located far from the traditional centers of power on the East Coast. Now, as they gradually take control of all the sectors once coveted by the old establishment (media, finance and retail), companies like Amazon are offering consolation prizes to their new subjects.
The move to Washington amplifies the already clear message that Bezos, passionate about the Trumpian dryness of Washington's "Marsh", wants to play an important role, operating from the 27,000-square-foot mansion – Washington's largest home – It has disbursed $ 23 million to buy and an additional $ 12 million to renovate. He already controls the dominant local spokesperson, the Washington Post (who announced that he was the "anonymous" buyer "of the former textile museum, turned into a single-family home), and located his main for-profit business, cloud computing services , partly on a new campus in the suburbs of Fairfax. And Amazon already has one of the biggest lobbying activities in Washington.
I worked with Richard Florida on the Kansas City bid for QG2. We presented our arguments as finalists in Indianapolis, Dallas-Ft. Worth and Columbus could also argue that Amazon's workforce, half of which earns less than $ 100,000 a year, could make the most of cheaper, family-friendly and tax-efficient areas. high. After all, an apparent reason to open a second head office – if it was not a contradiction before the decision to split it between New York and Virginia – was high housing prices in Seattle, which was not a problem when Bezos launched Amazon in 1994.
If Amazon had moved to a downtown city, Bezos would have made a statement not only to its employees, but also to the center of the country, where the technology sector is often seen as another control agent of the progressive thinking group . Instead, he genuflected at the preferred locations and conventional wisdom of the upper class.
Rich and I suspected that headquarters might end up in the Washington area, near the big house in Bezos, To post and the bipartisan marginals that make up our ruling class in both pathetic parties. Trump may have gone, like the majority in the Republican House, but Bezos will be there for the long term, the unelected lord of a capital who, if he believes in anything, worships the toxic mixture of power and money.
Thus, Amazon has reasons, even venal, to favor the great Washington. The relocation to Long Island City, Queens, a former industrial area turned into a popular new residential satellite of Manhattan, is less understandable and could prove more problematic. Unlike Washington, New York is largely overestimated – it helps to have media journalists nearby – as a technology center, especially outside of finance.
Overall, the percentage of people working in mathematics and computer science in the New York area was actually below the national average in 2017 and had risen to one of the lowest rates in the country. . Let's say there is no Silicon Valley, or even Austin or Raleigh. Over the past two years, the urban leader in job growth in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math has been Orlando, with 8% either three times the national average, while cities like Charlotte, Grand Rapids, Salt Lake City and Tampa all had a clip faster than New York, which is a player, like Los Angeles, basically to size.
As for the "talent" already in New York, the millennial generation and others have actually left the city more quickly in recent years, while the costs have gone up. Many sectors, including finance, are relocating jobs to lower-cost countries. Last year, Brooklyn, the epicenter of urban gentrification, lost its population, as young people seek more affordable housing and older people flee the cold and high taxes. Largely thanks to foreign investment and strong and continuous immigration, New York already has some of the most exorbitant housing prices in the country and, after the announcement made by Amazon speculators – the iconic opportunists from New York – to focus immediately on Queens, the technology giant where rents and housing prices will skyrocket.
This is consistent with the Seattle experience, where the median house price of $ 739,600 and the median rent of $ 2,479 now make it the third most expensive and competitive housing market in the country.
"The hardest thing is unlearning the secrets of your past success," said Japanese analyst Jiro Tokuyama, who predicts Japan's decline when many US experts predict the island nation will overshadow America. Although Amazon can maintain its dominance, it will undoubtedly find the new realities to which it has helped to create less comforting. Bezos started in the late 1990s Amazon when Seattle prices were low, but the presence of Microsoft and Boeing guarantees the presence of a talented workforce. The state of Washington has other advantages, such as the absence of income tax.
Amazon now shares half of its headquarters with the second largest social housing project in the country. Since the poor New Yorkers are already struggling to pay rents, this can not be good news for them. Few high school graduates, let alone dropouts, will find a job at headquarters. Their role at Amazon is to work in warehouses located in less modern places, where they are generally underpaid, need good food to survive and are forced to work in poor conditions. Amazon officials – the masters of the workshop of the future – require that workers wear bracelets to be able to monitor them at any time.
And Amazon arrives in what is already very expensive and, as in most countries, enjoys almost full employment. There will be no honeymoon for the workers; they will have to compete for flats at the brutally expensive market price. The New York political class, furious to be cut off from the agreement that the mayor and the governor have decided to bring Amazon here, will unleash a flood of demands against the new player in town.
Ironically, Amazon has already arrived in Seattle, where Amazon dominates totally, and was one of the main reasons for the decision to seek a second seat. The northwestern town, once proudly the middle class now seems to be another San Francisco in manufacturing, attracting not only the hip and educated but a huge homeless population. The diversity? Both cities are losing African-Americans and are increasingly segmented between a wealthy upper class, hipster short films and a booming lower class. Seattle, once relatively cheap, has become increasingly expensive, with some of the highest rents in the country; Already 45% of Millennials say they plan to leave because of the high price of housing.
He is certainly widely criticized by the progressives there. Amazon was one of the main targets of a proposed tax on employees last year, an effort that was rejected with massive lobbying.
Hey, Jeff, if you think it's hard to deal with these people in Seattle, wait until you have a ton of New York, where I grew up and where I went to politics. The Gothamites are almost as far left and not so easily intimidated by someone who has a big checkbook. After all, they can easily argue that the billions – about $ 50,000 per job – of tax breaks granted to a world's richest man-run business should be shared more equitably in a city where more than one in five people live below the poverty line.
Gotham will test Bezos' political skills in a way he can not even imagine, although he may have found a clue in the furious and furious response to the announcement made by the city councilor Jimmy Van Bramer, Local Councilor, to new Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. Congress star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
New York City, like every city in the country, is increasingly aware of the forces that are diminishing the middle class and depriving the poor of the opportunities available to them. Amazon is likely to aggravate the life of New York before it even begins to improve, and New Yorkers might well reciprocate.
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