It’s official! After a protracted and, frankly, insulting process to choose a site for a giant 50,000 person HQ2 for Amazon, the decision has been made to have two new subsidiary HQs employing 25,000 each.
Guess what? Seattle will be joined by New York and Washington with a consolation prize of a 5,000 person logistics center in Nashville. So, first the hopes of a couple hundred Podunks that never had a chance were dashed. And now the hopes of fifteen other finalists have also been gone up blooey. Instead of a trip up the Amazon, 235 cities are up the creek.
This is a denouement entirely in keeping with our haves-and-have-not times. So much so that the first thought I had was of a 1920s song that became especially salient in the Great Depression.
There’s nothing surer,
the rich get rich
and the poor get poorer.
In the meantime,
in between time,
Ain’t we got fun.
But the only places having fun are the winners, who were already winners. And they have to pay for the pleasure — a whopping $2 billion in tax incentives and cash. But if, as Amazon announced, the decision came down to “one of the most important criteria, the ability to find and attract talent,” and if Washington and New York both had the built-in talent pool Amazon craved, then why was a big competition and even bigger bribe required?
Amazon also said a $5 billion investment in construction would also be required, but it wasn’t clear if the company would foot that bill or expect the lucky cities to also kick in part of that cost. It is certainly the case that Virginia Tech plans to create a new campus near Amazon-Arlington for a modest investment of $1 billion. Will Old Dominion taxpayers enjoy ponying that up, along with the half billion in incentives already committed to snag the HQ?
It can be argued that paying to attract a booming business employing thousands of highly paid workers makes more sense for the tax base than a city coughing up half a billion for a football stadium, the least justified expenditure of tax dollars imaginable, but the many residents of New York and Virginia who won’t get a highly paid job at Amazon may be less than thrilled at having to tithe to the church of Bezos.
I have no complaint about Amazon’s amazing success and handy services, but surely they can afford to fund their own growth out of their mammoth revenues. And the bigger issue is the increasing enrichment of a few of the country’s great urban centers and the ongoing impoverishment of great swaths of the rest of the nation that are deemed beneath the dignity of mighty corporations.
It wasn’t always thus. In the industrial age, proud cities like Wilmington, Peoria, Moline, Cincinnati, Akron, Dayton, St. Louis, Racine, Minneapolis, and dozens more like them thrived as homes to major hometown employers. In the list above, respectively: DuPont, Caterpillar, Deere, Proctor and Gamble, Goodyear, NCR, Monsanto, S.C.Johnson, and 3M. Today, not so much.
In the Amazon gold rush, a few smaller cities not on the coasts made the short list — Columbus, Indianapolis, Newark, Pittsburgh, but they clearly had no chance. They might have offered a relatively low cost of living, but could hardly compete on the basis of tax incentives, educational institutions, or the cosmopolitan attractions supposedly prized by a labor pool of young tech types that were the sine qua non of the exercise.
Obviously, if even such finalists as Toronto, Boston, Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, Atlanta and Austin didn’t measure up, what chance did the other 200 also rans have? Places like Tucson, Birmingham, Hartford, Des Moines, Kansas City, Grand Rapids, Greensboro or Cleveland? No chance. Flyover country, the Outback, the Red State land of the yokels never had a prayer.
I get it. If I were as rich as an Amazon software engineer or manager, I’d like to live down the street from the Met or the National Gallery of Art, Broadway or the Smithsonian, too. Not to mention a thousand good restaurants and all the luxury goods and services wads of money can buy.
But if all the booming tech businesses of the future choose to locate in the same few coastal megalopolises, is it good for the country, or even for the companies themselves? Silicon Valley itself was once a contemptible backwater — a place of orchards that grew fruits and nuts, not tech start-ups. Los Angeles was nowheresville until a few film makers seeking sunlight showed up, followed by defense plants during World War II. Now both are increasingly unpleasant places to live.
Concentrating wealth, power, opportunity, culture and the good life in a few cities so expensive that cops, firefighters, teachers, sous chefs, sales clerks, garbage men, bus drivers can’t afford to live there looks like a fool’s bargain. Instead of utopia, something darker, more crowded, dysfunctional, and uninhabitable may result. Especially if it leaves the rest of the country’s people — also known as customers — un- or under-employed, aging, abandoned, penurious, hopeless and irate.
You’d think the tech geniuses would be smart enough to see they are engineering a dystopia
they may live to regret. Maybe they should get their heads out of their algorithms, portfolios, private jets, gated mansions, and self-regard long enough to read or watch an occasional cautionary tale from H.G.Wells (Morlocks and Eloi), Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” Vonnegut’s “Player Piano,” “Brave New World,” “A Clockwork Orange,” “Les Miserables,” most of Dickens and Zola, Dante’s Inferno, “Gulliver’s Travels,” ”Lord of the Flies.”
Some people have seen they future, and it doesn’t appear to be the doyens of Siliconia. They seem to suppose the money will roll in no matter how great the economic inequality becomes. Or, perhaps they believe that, by the time the music stops, they will have engineered an escape hatch worthy of an very rich arrested adolescent. It is no accident so many tech billionaires are less interested in social justice or environmental protection than in magic longevity pills, their own island, or a second home on Mars. Space, the final gated community.