I know that there are more pressing political events unraveling in the country today, but I found it a good day to talk about Amazon and cities.
Recently, Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) tweeted about Amazon. Of course, the opinions were immediately divided on whether the 1500 new realized jobs are a “bad deal” compared to the 25000 planned jobs under the HQ2 proposal with city funding. Unfortunately, invariably a majority of these differing opinions are driven by intense fandom or hatred of AOC, more than what the numbers say.
Let’s take a snapshot of the issue that this blog has previously discussed. Last February 2019, I wrote
NYC needs Amazon, but Amazon needs NYC more.
and I further wrote,
It is hard for Amazon to just quit on NYC.
[…]NYC is where a lot of white collar talent exists. Amazon has to be wherever the talent is.
Perhaps, $3B was perceived as giving up too much for a firm that would have come to NYC, but I think with an open ended process, both NYC and Amazon may have arrived at a set of proposals that would have been acceptable to both sides and most stakeholders. This whole spectacle began with disagreements among the diverse stakeholder interests in NYC, aided by an opaque process that Amazon followed.
In fact, examining the data, Joshua Fruhlinger at Thinknum points out that Amazon job openings in NYC grew by 89% in 2019.
In fact, Amazon has increasingly hired faster there, and NYC is now the second biggest hiring location outside of Seattle. See the following chart (Credit: All credit for the chart and data goes to folks at Thinknum). Together Bay Area jobs are higher: (the figure segments SF and South Bay towns).
So, coming back to the earlier point that I had made on the blog — cities are increasingly better places to live for white-collar jobs. It is not surprising that Amazon wants to be present where the labor supply is.
How to revive aging American mid-level cities (Cleveland, Buffalo, etc.) remains one of the challenging problems of the new century.