Boston has been holdings its breath for months waiting for Amazon to release the winners of its HQ2 contest, determining where its second headquarters will be housed and determining which city is most deserving of the influx of jobs and economic investment that will come from that honor.
The city was half disappointed and half relieved Tuesday to find that Amazon is expected to choose between Long Island City, New York, and Arlington, Virginia, as the locations for its next headquarters. But many were not surprised.
Boston doesn’t have what it takes to house the next headquarters — we can’t even cope with housing and transporting our residents. We don’t have the space and resource accessibility for mass manufacturing of products, and we also don’t need any more congestion than we already have.
Mayor Martin Walsh responded with an optimistic view of the city’s attributes, saying that “Amazon might have missed an opportunity here in Boston …”
Who really wanted HQ2 to begin with? It wasn’t the people — it was the politicians. Mayors and City officials offered outrageous things to Amazon in exchange for their favor. Tuscon, Arizona, sent Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos a giant cactus. Stonecrest, Georgia, offered to rename parts of its land “the city of Amazon.”
But the biggest problem is how cities have battled to one-up each other with tax incentives, some offering billions of dollars, which directly hurt residents. It’s money from the taxpayer that isn’t going back to the state — it’s going to a private company that’s already owned by the world’s richest person.
Boston was a contender for the project due to its universities and talented workforce, according to The Boston Globe. Think about who would be getting these jobs if Boston had been chosen — they aren’t easily accessible to lower-income people. Amazon would be recruiting straight out of universities in the area, which made Boston an interesting location for the company and would have made the city even more gentrified.
And in Queens, where Amazon has decided to set up shop, are they going to hire thousands of workers from the surrounding neighborhood? It’s unlikely. People are going to commute in and leave after 5 p.m. every day.
Amazon has a large presence in Boston nevertheless — it’s opened up three Greater Boston offices recently, and on its job board, there are about 400 listings for full-time jobs in Massachusetts. This is evidence that Boston had potential, but it’s evidence that we lacked on some fronts.
A second headquarters in Boston would have brought thousands of jobs to the city, but it’s a blessing in disguise that they passed us over. Instead of telling ourselves that the company made a mistake, that we had talent that they just couldn’t see, we need to think about whether we realistically could have handled HQ2’s impact.
Walsh said the city is “already” successful without Amazon’s presence. But really, the City had to stretch the truth quite a bit trying to convince Amazon that we were ready for their presence.
The idea of connecting the Red and Blue T lines was brought to life as part of Boston’s bid to host the next headquarters. The City pitched the idea to Amazon saying the state government had made it a priority, when the state had actually just completed a process to terminate plans for the project, according to the Globe.
And now that we won’t host HQ2, what will become of the two T lines that don’t connect? Will we abandon the project altogether? It’s sad to think that we may give up on attempts to improve our city when it’s no longer in hopes of impressing a major company.
In reality, Amazon was probably never considering most of the places they had bids from. They wanted to drum up hype, deceiving people into thinking HQ2 was a fun competition about city pride. People haven’t realized they’ve been rooting against their own best interests. Amazon planting its feet in any city will only exacerbate tensions.
