For years, suburbia has offered these companies acres of disposable, cheap, anonymous office parks: mostly one- or two-story concrete structures surrounded by loads of surface parking. These sites minimized costs, maximized security and allowed companies to scale up, contract or split into different units quickly — at the same time they promoted sprawl and traffic jams and transformed once-quaint bedroom communities south of San Francisco into phenomenally expensive places to live. — The New York Times
Even though Amazon's search for its new headquarters' locations has ended all the talks and negotiations about the company's potential impact on the cities it will settle in — New York and Crystal City, Virginia—have only begun.
In ways, the choice comes as no surprise as tech platforms have been attracted to America's wealthy coastal cities, with their established cultures, universities and transit systems, for years. The intensifying expansion of the tech industry amidst urban landscape raises many questions about corporations' powers and rights in a city.
Michael Kimmelman of the NY Times notes that companies like Amazon, through their multi-billion biding process, should offer to satisfy more than just the city's growing need for new jobs. The author suggests options: "As for housing, the city’s regulatory and zoning policies are more responsible for driving up costs than tech companies. But, in an ideal world, Amazon would reverse what it did in Seattle and commit resources to affordable housing in areas where its workers are moving; and it would pitch in for homeless services, which, by extension, would improve the daily lives of Amazon employees.
Mr. Chakrabarti has a modest proposal, as well: The company could extend a hand toward Long Island City neighbors like LaGuardia Community College and Queensbridge, the largest public housing development in North America."
5 Comments
It's a rotten deal and it needs to be shut down.
Too late - the payoffs have been made.
It's humorous to see the NYT corrupt bureaucrat urbanists, Kimmelman and Chakrabarti, see only in terms of how Amazon benefits their own pet projects. Of course, both see the project as "inevitable" (nothing is) regardless of how little scraps Amazon throws down at the public. Would you like a worthless streetcar? Or perhaps a new real estate project?
What a farce of a fake debate this is. How about the NYT find some real journalists, not developers and their partners.
Exactly. Kimmelman and most of his colleagues working at the Times are ineffectual wimps. They think they're being critical by suggesting slight edits to the edges of the status quo. Fuck Amazon and it's destructive business models. Fuck Jeff Bezos.
All the fake new that's fit to print.
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