'Dear Amazon: New York Doesn't Want You, Find Another City To Destroy'
'Dear Amazon, New York doesn't want you. Go find another city to destroy,' by Hamilton Nolan, The Guardian, Nov. 9, 2018. Jeff Bezos wants to build a colossal HQ in Queens. We’ve already got Wall Street – must we be flooded with rich techies on top of that?
Jeff Bezos wants to build a colossal HQ in Queens. We’ve already got Wall Street – must we be flooded with rich techies on top of that?
New York is a metropolis. It has been able to withstand centuries’ worth of threats to civic harmony, from the Five Points gangs to the administration of Rudy Giuliani. We have successfully absorbed striving immigrants from around the world, weekend partiers from Jersey, and post-college seekers from the midwest. But one thing that New York City has never truly had to battle is a massive influx of rich techies. Let’s not start now.
For a full year, Amazon – a trillion-dollar company led by the richest man on earth – has been busily extracting subsidies from cities across the country, all of them desperate to lure a promised 50,000 jobs and $5bn investment for Amazon’s second headquarters. The “HQ2” became necessary after Amazon filled metropolitan Seattle edge-to-edge with glass towers full of Amazon employees.
This week, at last, it was reported that Amazon had decided to divide its new headquarters bounty between the suburbs of Washington DC and the Queens riverfront..This engineered airdrop of tech people threatens to destroy America’s delicate distribution of unwanted wealthy demographic groups. Silicon Valley and Seattle get to deal with the techies. Los Angeles gets the Hollywood people. Washington gets the politics nerds, and New York gets finance types. We have each adapted to our own particular crosses to bear.
Yes, millions of New Yorkers must share a city with tens of thousands of Wall Street people, but we have developed a complex system of cultural processes that mostly segregate them in easily avoidable areas of Manhattan, and shunt vast numbers of them off to the Jersey suburbs at night. It’s a system that works. Forcing us to take in a flood of rich young tech people on top of this is like giving the flu to someone who already has chronic but manageable diabetes. It’s just not fair..
It is monopolistic. It works its blue-collar and white-collar employees to the bone, prompting frequent exposés of its awful working conditions. New York City is a union town; Amazon is an anti-union company. Its owner should have his immoral hoard of wealth forcibly expropriated by the state before his power grows so great that all of society is warped by it. Jeff Bezos’s money should immediately be put to use helping the public.- More...
Read More, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/09/amazon-new-york-jeff-bezos-long-island-city
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I grew up in New Jersey-- right across the GWB.
I can definitely relate
Pretty close to the truth, Hamilton doesn't spare anybody. Certainly has a way with words, and insults. Ha, ha. 
In the 80s and 90s in NY, I especially remember bashing of 'bridge & tunnel' types coming to the dance clubs...
And DC was known for its unrelenting yuppie Meat Markets downtown, as in the ridiculous 'Rumors.'
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>Washington, fueled by lobbyist money and proximity to power, has long since left behind its Chocolate City status and gentrified into a bland, low-slung landscape of gastropubs.
In New York, though, our sheer size has allowed us to more easily process waves of money that would destroy lesser towns. Long Island City, where Amazon reportedly wants to move, is already a forest of newish glass towers, a neighborhood built especially for >people who like luxury without character.
But adding 25,000 Amazon employees there would obliterate the last vestiges of coolness in neighboring hoods like Greenpoint, once a quiet Polish neighborhood that now teeters on the edge of moneyed oblivion. A massive concentration of tech wealth is like a bomb that will ripple out in concentric circles of cultural destruction.
