Some thoughts, and some issues the politicians - all of them - should be focused on.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry...b0860184a6a155
Dear HQ2 Cities: Here’s How to Deal With Amazon. Love, Seattle.
By Michael Hobbes
11/15/2018
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Make Work Equitable
The logic behind New York’s and Virginia’s massive subsidies for Amazon ($48,000 and $22,000 per job, respectively) is that the company will have a multiplier effect, forming clusters of tech and service workers around its campuses.
There’s even evidence this will happen the way legislators want it to. A 2017 study of more than 300 cities found that each new high-tech job created five more in supporting industries. The study also found, however, that the majority of these additional jobs weren’t in high-tech sectors. Each highly paid, highly technical position created three jobs in “non-professional” occupations. What this means for the HQ2 cities is that, along with five more digits of software developers, they could find themselves with up to 75,000 new waiters, chefs, hairdressers, cashiers and janitors.
Virginia’s minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. Neither the state nor the city of Arlington, where the bulk of Amazon’s investment will go, have policies guaranteeing paid sick leave or family leave for workers. If National Landing doesn’t improve basic working conditions, the primary effect of Amazon’s investment will be the creation of an army of impoverished, insecure workers. If Amazon, a massive, publicly traded corporation, can guarantee its workers a $15 per hour minimum wage, Virginia has no excuse not to match it.
Legally speaking, things look slightly better in New York. The city already has paid sick leave and family leave and a minimum wage heading toward $15 an hour. Where the city falls down, however, is enforcement. A 2017 evaluation found rampant evidence of informal work, wage theft and sexual harassment, especially among female workers and immigrants. Nearly 20 percent of food-service employees hired as “contingent workers” said they were paid below the minimum wage.
Many of the workers Amazon is hiring for its HQ2 locations will enjoy six-figure salaries alongside luxurious benefit packages. If its new host cities want to make the most of the company’s investment, the least they can do is crack down on the exploitation of the people feeding, clothing and cleaning the homes of its workers.
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Build Lots of Housing
One of the painful, forgotten truths of municipal politics is that cities do not decide how large their populations will be. Amazon did not ask Seattle’s permission to expand by 35,000 workers in 2010. The 114,000 people who moved here in the last eight years did not apply for visas. It all just … happened.
But, although cities don’t control their own growth, they do control how they respond to it. Since Amazon began its rapid expansion, Seattle has built about one new home for every three new jobs. That makes us superstars compared with San Francisco, where the ratio is 1 to 8, but it’s still nowhere enough to meet the need.
The result is nearly a decade of relentless but mostly invisible gentrification. While plenty of glass-and steel-towers have gone up downtown, the vast majority of the city is preserved in amber by zoning regulations that make it illegal to build anything other than McMansions. That hasn’t stopped tech workers from moving here, but it has pitted them against each other in bidding wars for the homes already here. According to their Zillow application, the two Microsoft employees who moved into my last apartment — I decided to move out after two years of 10 percent rent increases — have a combined income of $248,000 per year. The look of my neighborhood didn’t change, but the wealth of its residents did.
Amazon’s new host cities shouldn’t make the same mistake. Even before the company announced its new host cities, Arlington had a housing shortage, steeply rising prices and a local debate about whether to loosen restrictions on building apartments. Across the river, Washington’s lack of affordability is well-documented, and the city is already behind on the estimated 690,000 units of housing it needs by 2045 just to keep up with job growth.
Queens, as part of a city slightly more comfortable with skyscrapers, looks better on this score. The HQ2 site in Long Island City has already built more housing than any other New York neighborhood since 2010. Still, since Amazon’s announcements, calls to halt construction and slow down a planned rezoning are intensifying.
Local residents’ worries make sense. The neighborhood is already suffering from rapid gentrification, and Amazon’s buildings are sited right next to the country’s largest public housing complex. The mayor’s and governor’s ostensible reasons for inviting Amazon are to lift up local residents, not to displace them with luxury condos.
But if Seattle’s experience demonstrates anything, it is that refusing to build new housing won’t lessen gentrification pressures. It will intensify them. Amazon workers, like everyone else, want to live close to their jobs. If the city builds as tall and as dense as possible, new apartments could act as a release valve for the influx of new demand. If the city refuses to ― like San Francisco has for decades ― rich techies will simply buy or rent up all the real estate that’s already there.
No one likes a bunch of soulless new apartment towers going up next door. But in the last two years, as Seattle has added them by the dozen, rents have finally leveled off. We’ve also added fees on developers that pay into a fund to preserve affordable housing.
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Don’t Forget the Fundamentals
King County, where Seattle sits, has the third-largest homeless population in the United States. Nearly 50 percent are unsheltered.
Last year, city officials passed a modest tax on large corporations to scale up the city’s response to the crisis. Almost immediately, Amazon officials threatened to halt the company’s expansion and move thousands of jobs to other cities. Then, when the City Council didn’t relent, the company teamed up with Starbucks to fund an effort to repeal the tax through a ballot initiative.
It worked. Facing a deep-pocketed publicity campaign, the City Council reversed its decision and repealed the law. Somehow, two of the world’s largest corporations convinced voters that mandatory contributions to solving the problems they (partially) helped cause was a bridge too far. Two months later, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced that he was donating $2 billion, or around 1.2 percent of his personal wealth, to ending homelessness and supporting early childhood education. He declined, however, to specify which charities he would give to or how much per year.
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NEW YORK is Back!
“Office buildings are our factories – whether for tech, creative or traditional industries we must continue to grow our modern factories to create new jobs,” said United States Senator Chuck Schumer.
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