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Comment by Bucephalus355 | Hacker News Reader

Totally anedcotal evidence, but the first 5 top level comments (make that 6 now) are all against Amazon for NYC.

Looks like we’ve reached our “Gettysburg” moment against corporate welfare. Terrible years of war still left, but the tide has turned.

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It's very different because a large amount of NYC residents rent as opposed to own. To a resident that rents in NYC, Amazon moving in means they will have higher rents and less money on their pocket. It ends up costing many NYC residents actual money in rent to host Amazon, regardless of the subsidy. I think this one is a special case.

I don't see the problem here at all. If you have higher rents, that's because there's more demand for housing, and not enough affordable new housing is being constructed. Who controls that? Your local politicians. Who controls them? The voters who elected them, which is you if you live there. So you have no one to blame but yourself, and no cause to complain. You have the government you deserve.

That is a very shortsighted blame-the-victim mentality. You're conflating the power of the individual voter with that of the entire voting bloc. Besides, even if new affordable housing was constructed (which is getting harder and harder in nyc as people are being pushed further and further out geographically), it's not easy to just up and move, even in nyc.

Sorry, I have no sympathy for "victims" who have all the power, and bring their misery on themselves. The voters have the power over their government, so if they don't like their government, it's their own fault. In the short term, sure, voters can be fleeced, and have to wait for the next election to choose someone else, but this kind of stuff isn't happening within election cycles, it's long-term.

As for "being pushed further and further out", that again is the voter's own fault for not voting better. They don't need to move farther out, they need to build more densely, and they don't do it. This is largely an American problem because for some reason, Americans associate dense residential areas with "slums" and think that only suburbs with McMansions with gigantic and useless lawns can possibly be "nice".

The real data we have shows that incomes of the people who live in an area has more correlation with the cost of rent than the demand. Amazon will bring in workers that will earn higher salary than the average NYC resident. The only way prices could go down would be if developers made a huge error across the industry and oversupplied housing. What you are suggesting is impossible, unless the government steps in and starts to add housing supply with taxpayer dollars. I'm not sure your idea has much reality baked into it. And a resident of NYC is going to vote for real world solutions that benefit them. Not pie in the sky internet ideology.

They don't need to build housing directly; local government controls zoning and development, so all they have to do is insist that higher-density and more affordable housing be built than what is currently happening. They don't do that. SanFran is a better example of this really, but other places in the US have the same problem to some degree. This isn't "pie in the sky internet ideology"; other countries don't seem to have such a problem with development, it all just comes down to having decent government. Here's an article about how housing prices in Japan have been very stable despite similar increases in urban population; largely it's because the national government has taken away local governments' ability to restrict construction the way it happens in places like SanFran.

https://www.ft.com/content/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3...

God I hope this comment ages well, but my skepticism is very high. We still have cabals of corporate paid lawmakers at every level of government and there's still tons of lobbying money putting a finger on the scale of the fight.

But fewer Foxconn style deals and race to the bottom HQ2 publicity stunts would be great for everyone (except the mega-corps).

HN users commenting with anti-corporate sentiment is not indicative of some fresh new change of attitude.

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