Amazon won’t be building HQ2 in New York City after all

Amazon is canceling its plan to build a new corporate campus in New York City. The news, first reported by the New York Times, comes less than a week after reports began surfacing that the e-commerce giant was considering pulling out of the deal, which Amazon initially disputed.

“After much thought and deliberation, we’ve decided not to move forward with our plans to build a headquarters for Amazon in Long Island City, Queens,” a spokesperson told the Times in a statement. “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. While polls show that 70% of New Yorkers support our plans and investment, a number of state and local politicians have made it clear that they oppose our presence and will not work with us to build the types of relationships that are required to go forward with the project we and many others envisioned in Long Island City.”

Amazon framed its new search for a corporate headquarters as a competition, encouraging cities across North America to submit proposals and claiming the winning city would be rewarded with 50,000 jobs and billions of dollars in investments. But long before the winning cities were announced, critics began speculating that Amazon knew where it wanted to open its new offices all along and had used the competition as a way to wrest maximum incentives from its desired locations.

Opposition to Amazon’s decision to put half of its so-called “second headquarters” in New York City — the other half will be built in the Arlington, Virginia, suburb of Crystal City, which Amazon has seemingly rechristened National Landing — began as soon as the deal was announced. While New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio lauded the deal as an opportunity to provide thousands of locals with high-paying tech jobs, other lawmakers decried the massive tax subsidies the city and state governments promised Amazon, which totaled more than $3 billion.

Even though neither the city nor the state was technically giving money to Amazon, critics said these tax incentives were essentially robbing local agencies like the New York City Housing Authority, which oversees the city’s deteriorated public housing, and the Metropolitan Transit Agency, which is responsible for the city’s crumbling subways and buses, of much-needed revenue.

But the fiercest opposition to the HQ2 deal didn’t come from politicians; it came from a coalition of local community organizations, including the immigrant rights group Make the Road New York, New York Communities for Change, VOCAL New York, the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, and the Real Estate, Wholesale, and Department Store Union. These groups not only criticized the subsidies, tax breaks, and other financial incentives Amazon was promised but also expressed concern that the tech giant’s presence in the already heavily gentrified neighborhood of Long Island City would push low-income people out of the area.

Critics also lambasted Amazon’s staunch anti-union stance; the conditions in its Staten Island warehouse and other fulfillment centers around the world, where workers often complain of long hours, low pay, and unrealistic expectations; and the fact that the company once pitched its facial recognition system to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Amazon’s decision to pull out of the deal is a decisive win for these groups, many of which opposed the tech giant’s presence in the city even before the deal had been announced.

“Rather than addressing the legitimate concerns that have been raised by many New Yorkers, Amazon says you do it our way or not at all, we will not even consider the concerns of New Yorkers — that’s not what a responsible business would do,” Chelsea Connor, director of communications for the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union, said in a prepared statement.

“We applaud the news that Amazon is pulling out of HQ2,” read a statement from a coalition of advocacy groups including Make the Road and New York Communities for Change. “This victory is a clear demonstration of the power of workers and communities across Queens and New York who came together and are fighting for a city that works for us and not for billionaires like [Jeff] Bezos.”

According to the Times report, Cuomo arranged a meeting between Amazon executives and union leaders who opposed the development on Wednesday, just one day before Amazon announced it was scrapping the deal altogether. That meeting “ended without any compromise on the part of Amazon,” the Times reported.

But not everyone is happy about Amazon’s decision to abandon its New York City plans. A recent poll by the Siena College Research Institute found that 56 percent of New Yorkers surveyed support the HQ2 deal, compared to 32 percent who oppose it; among city residents, those figures were 58 percent and 35 percent, respectively. Notably, support for the deal was greater in the suburbs, where 66 percent of voters said they were in favor. (Activist groups in the city, meanwhile, contended that the poll “fail[ed] to capture the growing opposition to Amazon’s HQ2 deal, especially in low-income communities of color and immigrant communities,” they said in a joint statement at the time.)

“We are stunned by today’s unfortunate news. Politics and pandering have won out over a once-in-a-generation investment in New York City’s economy, bringing with it tens of thousands of solid middle class jobs,” Gary LaBarbera, president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York, said in an emailed statement. “This sends the wrong message to businesses all over the world looking to call New York home. Who will want to come now?”

City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, however, seems to think New York is perfectly capable of attracting other companies. “I look forward to working with companies that understand that if you’re willing to engage with New Yorkers and work through challenging issues New York City is the world’s best place to do business,” he said on Twitter. “I hope this is the start of a conversation about vulture capitalism and where our tax dollars are best spent.”

To some critics, Amazon’s decision to pull out of the deal underscores what they’ve been saying about the company all along: It’s Amazon’s way or the highway. “Like a petulant child, Amazon insists on getting its way or takes its ball and leaves,” state Sen. Michael Gianaris, who represents Long Island City and has been one of the deal’s staunchest opponents, told the Times. “The only thing that happened here is that a community that was going to be profoundly affected by their presence started asking questions.”

Gianaris pointed to the fact that Amazon doesn’t plan to turn to a different city to house its new corporate campus. “We do not intend to re-open the HQ2 search at this time,” Amazon’s lengthy statement to the Times reads. “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 US and Canada.”

Even de Blasio, who oversaw the Amazon deal, claimed to be stunned by the company’s failure to negotiate. “We gave Amazon the opportunity to be a good neighbor and do business in the greatest city in the world,” he said in a statement. “Instead of working with the community, Amazon threw away that opportunity.”