“The Hunger Games for cities” – inside the Amazon HQ2 bid process

When Amazon announced with fanfare that it was opening its search for a second headquarters, bringing with it the promise of 45,000 new jobs, it launched what became known as “the Hunger Games for cities”. As American towns genuflected en masse before one of the biggest corporations in US history, it begged one burning question. Just how much sacrifice was it right to offer up on behalf of the taxpayer in service of that most holy of political deities: jobs?

The Hunger Games comparison would prove more apt than anyone realised. As the sheer scale and depth of the offerings America’s municipalities made to try to entice the e-commerce behemoth became clear, a backlash began to stir. But at the beginning, nobody would have thought that this story’s rebellious District 12 would turn out to be New York City.

font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:#333333″>Deputy majority leader of the New York State Senate Michael Gianaris, and Jimmy Van Bramer, a city councilman, both of whom represent the neighbourhood where Amazon’s new headquarters was to be built, refused an invitation to join a local advisory committee for the project. In a statement, they said that “we oppose the deal to bring Amazon to Long Island City and continue to fight against it. We will not participate in the Community Advisory Council, whose purpose is to give local validation to a project we are working to stop in its tracks.” font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:#333333″>The other winning half of the bid, from the Washington, DC, area, was more secretive: it emerged that Virginia had signed a legal agreement to give Amazon written warning of any Freedom of Information Requests “to allow the Company to seek a protective order or other appropriate remedy”. Much of what we have seen of Virginia’s offer to Amazon is heavily redacted. font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:#333333″>Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a rising star on the Democratic left – who just a week earlier had won her midterm election to become one of the two youngest women ever to serve in the House of Representatives – said on Twitter that “the idea that [Amazon] will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks at a time when our subway is crumbling and our communities need MORE investment, not less, is extremely concerning to residents here.” font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:#333333″>New York, Kim told me, has a history of pursuing antitrust and anti-monopoly policies. “But for the last four decades, by design, we’ve stripped away our ability to go after these companies,” he said. “Even the rules that we have on the books, we refuse to enforce them, because we somehow exist in this mindset that these mega-corporations are best fit to manage our money, and they are productive and efficient.” font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:#333333″>“It is no longer, in my opinion, capitalism,” he continued. “We’re living under feudalism of the Lord of Amazon. Because what Amazon has created, unlike previous super-monopolies, is that they are not only controlling the market – they have become the market, you know? Everyone else is just scrambling for scraps.” font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:#333333″>“You can’t really blame Jeff Bezos or any one person. They’re in a designed system that allows this to happen,” Kim said. “Fortunately, because we designed it, we can go back and make it better for everyone.” font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:#333333″>With phrasing that echoed the objections of the progressive Democrats, officials representing Americans for Prosperity, a super-Political Action Committee, and the Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce – both groups backed by the hard-right billionaire Koch brothers – said in a joint statement that “Americans are fed up with wasteful corporate welfare, yet cities and states are breaking the taxpayer bank to give carve-outs to huge corporations. font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:#333333″>“We need a level playing field where businesses can succeed by creating value for others – not a group of politicians cobbling together massive subsidy packages that almost never deliver the jobs they promise,” the statement continued. font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:#333333″>New York’s bid united two other historical foes – governor Andrew Cuomo and mayor Bill de Blasio. The two had often been at loggerheads over the budget – as governor of New York, Cuomo controls the purse strings for much of New York City, including the much-maligned and desperately underfunded Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the subway. The Times has called their relationship “one of America’s ugliest political feuds,” describing it as “so nasty, petty and prolonged that even in the cutthroat politics of New York, few can remember ever seeing anything quite like it.” font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:#333333″>But the pair was simpatico on HQ2. “De Blasio and Cuomo have had a, shall we say, publicly awkward relationship,” Steven Strauss, a professor at Princeton focusing on urban development who served as managing director of the New York City Economic Development Corporation under mayor Michael Bloomberg, told me in December. “I do think it’s quite a pleasant surprise that they were able to work together on this, I think they both deserve kudos for that.” font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:#333333″>Strauss was sanguine about the outlay New York made, though, telling me that, from the point of view of New York City overall, it seemed “like a pretty good win”. He added that most of the tax breaks being offered were set to come from the state, not the city’s coffers – and though of course New York City residents pay New York State taxes too, this seemed like good news to Strauss, especially as the bulk of the tax breaks in both New York and Virginia were contingent on Amazon actually creating the jobs it promised. font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:#333333″>Amazon didn’t just gain an enviable deal for its new headquarters, though: some experts suggest it had also gained an incredible amount of corporate intelligence through the process. “Amazon, which is a growing corporation, has now accumulated a massive database of what people were willing to offer to get a particular project,” Strauss said. In the future, as it expands, “Amazon may be in a position to come back around and go, ‘well it’s not a HQ, but it’s going to be this resource centre and the jobs have similar characteristics to the corporate centre – can we get some of the package you were willing to do for the HQ?’” font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:#333333″>That database may have already proved useful. Despite not winning the HQ2 bid, Nashville – one of the 20 finalists – seems to have impressed Amazon to the extent that it announced it would be building a new operations centre there, which the company said would create 5,000 jobs. font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:#333333″>However, Strauss told me “there’s a bigger point in all of this which is: should states be competing [against each other] on tax breaks? Is this really a useful form of competition?” font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:#333333″>“It may be individually rational – and again, I happen to think it’s individually rational for New York City,” he continued. “[But] that doesn’t mean it’s good policy nationally. That doesn’t mean it’s good policy to the state.” font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:#333333″>“But the rules are the rules,” he added, “and if you’re Mayor de Blasio you’d have probably been crazy to have said no to this.”