Amazon "selects" Long Island City, Queens - a view from here

Yesterday, Amazon announced it plans to locate a new headquarters in the corner of Queens where I live, Long Island City. I am based in Astoria, one of the most diverse neighborhoods on the planet, just up the road from the area of gleaming water-front apartment buildings where Amazon intends to move in.

Back in 2011, I interviewed one person a week for a year who lives or works along Astoria’s 30th Avenue. We’ve already seen dramatic changes. On one block, for example, I had interviewed owners of a party-store, a jewelry store, Astoria’s oldest music store and a billiards hall, who hailed from Mexico, Uzbekistan, Greece and Colombia.

All four businesses have now moved elsewhere or closed, as a supposedly “mixed use” development is put up in their place.

The changes that Amazon will no doubt bring are already underway in the neighborhood, big time. In some ways they are the latest chapter in the dynamism of a global city, and in what Frances Fox Piven of the City University of New York (CUNY) has called “the ancient conflict between concentrated property and democratic dreams.” In this new chapter, it is tech-led real estate development that seeks to define the fabric of our streets and our future. It’s not only Amazon of course. WeWork controls three million square feet of commercial real estate in New York City alone.

Yet the scale of Amazon’s pending arrival will bring a seismic shift in this neighborhood. Its choice of location puts cities’ twin challenges of rising inequality and climate change on stark display.

The headquarters will be next to the nation’s largest public housing development – Queensbridge Houses. I’ve spoken with residents of Queensbridge and its neighboring development Ravenswood Houses. They are outraged at the up to $3 billion in State and City subsidies being given to Amazon (whose CEO Jeff Bezos is the World’s richest man), while their apartments are in desperate need of basic repairs like mold removal, and guaranteed heat in winter. While Amazon is coming with its promise of 25,000 new jobs, there are major questions about whether vague commitments to training will create a real pipeline for locals into those jobs.

The location is also right next to East River – which is really a tidal estuary. It’s directly in the city’s floodplain, at a time when sea level rise and storms will be increasing due to climate change.

This challenges us New Yorkers to think about the city we want to build, and act on that vision.

New York City certainly has a strong and dynamic history of struggle led by its working class and immigrant populations to draw on. This is a moment to unite across differences, and challenge in creative ways Amazon’s business model which has long been shown to undermine worker protections and deepen divides in society – from its exploitation of warehouse workers, to burnout levels of stress for white-collar workers, to the exacerbation of homelessness in host cities like Seattle (and political bullying to squash attempts to address it), and the closure of small stores across the country.

The process by which Amazon has negotiated the deal – in closed doors conversations, and circumventing city-level checks and balances – demonstrates the extent to which money speaks so much louder than the electorate. They even got Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio to agree!

Amazon in many ways represents the new incarnation of the giant “octopus” or squid: an image used to illustrate the stranglehold of the California railroads in the late 1800s, Standard Oil in the early 1900s, then more recently Goldman Sachs and other major banks, over the economy, politics, and people’s everyday lives. This monopolization is harmful for everyone except those at the very top. And as a recent op-ed warned, it can contribute directly to the rise of nationalist populism.

In this context it’s easy to feel like Amazon and other tech giants are steamrolling our future on their own terms. But Amazon was ultimately attracted to New York by what it calls its talent pool. In other words, its people. It is New York’s people, in all their beauty, striving, diversity, and resilience, who will continue to define this city so much more than any one corporation will ever do.