Amazon and New York
"at the level of the neighborhood, there is the greatest opportunity for democracy but the least amount of power; as we scale up the amount of decision-making power increases, but the potential of people to affect outcomes diminishes." -Susan S. Fainstein
Looking at the different scales of power, I think one key example is Amazon's recent announcement of two new headquarters. One in a suburb of DC, and another in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens. It's the Queens location that received the most blowback.
From the decision-making macro scale, the benefits were clearly the thousands of new jobs coming into the city and millions of dollars of investment from Amazon for revitalizing the neighborhood. However, to get the expansion, the city and state offered $3 billion dollars in tax exemptions to Amazon, one of the world's richest companies.
However, when Amazon came to the city council meeting to begin talking about their plans, the backlash was fierce. Concerns of being priced out of the neighborhood, Amazon's policy towards unions, and sticker-shock towards the amount of tax breaks were at the forefront of the criticism from both protesters and council members.
After just two meetings with the city council, Amazon pulled out of the deal, and will not be building any new headquarters in Queens, stating "local politicians have made it clear that they oppose our presence and will not work with us to build the type of relationships that are required to go forward with the project we and many others envisioned in Long Island City.”
Heres a good podcast about it while you mess around with Safiera:
Thanks for the podcast and the news. Similarly to the examples we looked at in class, it's great to see the change that people can influence even though individually, they might not feel as though they have the power. At a local level, politicians are typically much more in touch with the voice of the people they represent and I'm glad they were able to fight for what they wanted.
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