One day after Amazon revealed plans to descend on New York, Thomas Muccioli showed up to the first major protest against the $1 trillion company in the middle of a cold afternoon.
Muccioli, an NYC native, lives in Sunnyside, a largely Latino and Asian neighborhood that shares a border with Long Island City. His is an area of brownstones and bodegas that feels warm and welcoming, he said, striking a contrast with the chilly mix of glass and steel towers and industrial underpinnings that loom in LIC, where Amazon is set to open a new headquarters. It’s his neighborhood, Muccioli suspected, that legions of techies would soon be angling to rent or buy in.
“They’re not going to want to live in these glass houses,” he said, pointing to the high rises in Long Island City as about 150 people gathered on the patch of grass at Gordon Triangle on November 14. “They’re going to want to live where I live—where people have worked their whole lives to make it a desirable area.”
Donning a purple sweatshirt marking his volunteer work with Congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign, Muccioli joined union organizers and Queens residents holding up signs to decry the project for which Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo promised Amazon an estimated $3 billion in tax incentives. The politicians' case, like those made by leaders across the country hoping to bring Amazon to their own cities over the last year, was fairly straightforward: The richest corporation in America would bring upwards of 20,000 jobs with six-figure salaries, in addition to 15 years of construction jobs. “Amazon is committing to an annual payroll of over $3.75 billion annually within ten years,” Cuomo wrote in an op-ed, “far and away the state’s largest economic development and transaction in modern history.”
And in this case, the new Amazon HQ would be in line with NYC's attempt to position itself as the “Silicon Valley of the East” through both private and public investment in innovation labs, and workspaces in former industrial areas like Hudson Yards.
It’s hard to gauge the scale of opposition, but the uproar to what power-brokers portrayed as a win has been broad and ferocious—a reflection of what people living and working in the city are feeling at a time of political, social and community turmoil. The gig economy has helped drive alienated workers to take their own lives. Brick-and-mortar shops struggle to stay open. Local waterways have been degrading for years. Immigrant communities are stricken with fresh fears of deportation and disruption. Amid a wider housing crisis, gentrification is no longer an if, but a when, in almost every corner of each borough in America’s largest city.
Even with the 2008 market crash and unemployment crisis in their recent memory, most New Yorkers I spoke too were far too cynical to welcome a sweeping corporate savior. Instead, they wanted neighborhoods that felt like real communities, buildings where they could raise their children, restaurants and bars owned by people they knew, jobs that were not at the whim of a couple of rich white men. In that sense, Jeff Bezos’s new corporate playground could not have been announced at a worse time—the city has been spurred into yet another wave of activism by the Trump presidency, and seemed ready to fight like hell to limit the influence that Amazon might have, and maybe even save their home from following in Seattle’s footsteps.
Heather R. Morgan, a software entrepreneur and CEO of SalesFolk, said she moved from San Francisco to New York to get away from the “monolithic culture” of the tech industry. Out West, apart from the stark increases in the price of housing, she felt like she was surrounded by overworked, burned out start-up entrepreneurs, and neighborhoods that catered to them. “There’s this lack of variety—it’s almost cult-like,” she said. “All of my friends who were not in tech left.”
Morgan was more optimistic about New York, where she lived with her boyfriend in Manhattan. She described it as a global city, where the diversity in jobs and people rendered it too resilient to become flattened by any particular industry, and even Amazon.
But some Seattleites argued trouble was virtually inevitable when a company of this magnitude comes to town. Hellman told me multiple small restaurants, including the last local Cambodian spot, had closed down in her area, only to be replaced by higher-end establishments. And people who lived in Seattle before the Amazon boom couldn’t help seeing company’s employees as a kind of caricature. “It’s pretty much people who work 80 hours a week and never leave the office,” said Gillian Caples, a 28-year-old Seattle native who works at Microsoft and lives on the city’s west side. “It’s the whole tech bro thing, they’re very socially awkward.” The New York Post went so far as to express fear about the city's dating scene.
Caples said the company had brought some welcome changes, too—investments in public transit, economic growth, and a different kind of ethnic diversity in the people of the city. (This could give some hope to New Yorkers wondering if Amazon might spell chaos for the already-troubled subway system—the 7 and G trains reaching Long Island City were already going to be strained by the pending L shutdown—or actually support better infrastructure.) But there’s also heavy traffic, skyrocketing rent, and crowds. “It’s kind of a running joke in Seattle, whenever there’s a problem, we blame it on Amazon,” Caples told me.
Kauffman, however, argued cultural shifts were not new for Queens, where waves of immigration and gentrification were a fact of city life, with or without Amazon. “That’s what makes New York City New York City,” he said. “I understand the challenges here—I’m not in any way undermining them. But it’s always been changing.”
Most of the people I spoke to after the announcement saw Amazon’s new headquarters as a done deal—a behemoth to be handled and resisted at the margins with the help of Ocasio-Cortez and other leaders. They were hoping to protect what they loved about Queens: the tiny eateries, the last bastions of affordable apartments, and the few public lands that could still be turned into housing or parks. “This completely transforms the fabric of Queens,” Laforest, the local organizer, told me. “I want to make sure anyone whose employed by this company is able to feed their children, afford a place to live, live a life of dignity.”
But Van Bramer, the city councilman, insisted it wasn’t time to think that far ahead—not yet. “I don’t think we’re ready to abandon the campaign,” he told me. “I don’t think this is moving on any time soon. If anything, we’re seeing renewed interest and it's heating up all the time.”
He might be right. Even on a cold, rainy Monday last week, more than a hundred people showed up at the Long Island City courthouse to hold signs, speak, and march to the office of New York State Assemblywoman Cathy Nolan—who has supported the Amazon deal—demanding their government answer questions. Earlier that day, dozens of organizers and residents also swarmed into a brick-and-mortar Amazon store in Manhattan. The message was simple: New York wasn’t going to be railroaded by a tech monopoly.
Meanwhile, Long Island City’s inhabitants were waiting, albeit not patiently, to learn their fate. Rocking her son in a stroller at an Amazon protest, Pichchenda Bao was just looking for answers: “It’s hard to say if we’re going to be able to stay here, and contribute to the city the way that we want to.”
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