Amazon tells New York City: Fuggedaboutit!

Opposition squelches HQ2

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK • Amazon.com Inc. will not move forward with plans to build a headquarters in New York after rising opposition from local politicians, the third most-valuable public U.S. company said in on Thursday.

Amazon’s search for a second headquarters, which it described as HQ2, was deemed a massive, yearlong public relations success, garnering worldwide publicity and interest from cities across the United States.

But its choice of New York ran into immediate criticism in the U.S. financial capital from potential neighbours in the Queens neighbourhood it chose and for billions of dollars in tax breaks.

People briefed on the decision said Amazon had made the decision early Thursday after intense talks starting Wednesday and amid rising concerns about the small vocal minority. The people said Amazon will not shift any of the planned jobs to Tennessee or Virginia but plans to expand its existing network of locations.

Amazon had planned to have 700 employees in New York as part of the HQ2 project by the end of the year and did not plan to hit 25,000 in Queens for 10 years.

The company said it will not reopen the search process “at this time. We will proceed as planned in Northern Virginia and Nashville, and we will continue to hire and grow across our 17 corporate offices and tech hubs in the U.S. and Canada.”

The company had begun considering alternatives last week. The online retailer has not yet acquired any land for the project, which would make it easy to scrap its plans, a person briefed on the matter told Reuters on Friday.

The proposal ran into opposition from local politicians who opposed the US$2.8-billion in incentives promised to Amazon in a deal secretly negotiated by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.

The company said, “for Amazon, the commitment to build a new headquarters requires positive, collaborative relationships with state and local elected officials who will be supportive over the long-term.”

Newly elected Congressional representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was among the more high-profile critics of the deal from the Democratic Party’s leftward flank.

“Can everyday people come together and effectively organize against creeping overreach of one of the world’s biggest corporations?” she wrote on Twitter last week. “Yes, they can.”

Some residents in the neighbourhood, once a scruffy haunt of artists that has rapidly gentrified with a burst of recent highrise development, had also opposed the plan.

Longtime residents feared being forced out by rising rents and untenable pressure on already overburdened subway and sewage systems.

Cuomo was a staunch advocate of the project, touting not only the jobs it would create but the long-term tax revenues it would generate.

Hours before the announcement, Amazon officials in New York betrayed no knowledge of the deal’s cancellation when they met with local community members on Thursday morning, said Kenny Greenberg, a neon artist and member of Long Island City’s community board.

“Either they are really good poker players or they were not aware,” Greenberg said of the Amazon representatives. “There was no hint of this at all.”