New York’s dance with Amazon shows us how to fight for a city’s future

Between November 2018 and February 2019, the world’s biggest corporation (Amazon) and the US’s biggest city (New York) staged a bizarre, absurd and frequently infuriating public spectacle.

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In just three months, all of the following happened: Amazon announced they had selected New York as a location for one of their two new headquarters; the deal they struck with the city and state of New York was announced; groups representing workers, tenants and immigrants organized furiously against Amazon, while the mayor, the governor and the deal’s supporters scrambled to defend it; several key politicians – most of whom had previously encouraged Amazon to come to New York – turned hostile to the company; and then, with no notice and little fanfare, Amazon announced they were no longer pursuing New York for their corporate headquarters. The opponents had won, and Amazon was sent packing.

For the past few days, New Yorkers have been celebrating or seething, depending on their position, and debating with one another about what just happened and what it all meant. Clearly, this was not just a one-off fight between an obnoxious billionaire and a pissed off populous. New York’s dizzying dance with Amazon tells us a lot about the state of urban politics in the United States, and the kind of fights we need to engage in if we want to alter the balance of corporate and people’s power.

Much has been made of the fact that the US’ federal system allowed Amazon to host a competition for cities across the country to race to the bottom in order to prove they would offer the company generous subsidies, extensive tax breaks and lax regulations. This is, indeed, a travesty that should be addressed legislatively, but it is also a demonstration of the enormous power corporate capital wields in determining cities’ urban planning priorities.

It also displays the shifting economic mix that US planners and policymakers are seeking to attract. Whereas, in the past, cities were accused of “smokestack chasing”, or devising competitive packages to lure factories from one town the next, cities are now engaging in “skyscraper chasing”, or seeking massive investments in real estate (in this case under the auspices of tech industry growth).

Around the country, we have witnessed the rise of the real estate state, a faction of government whose interests are always aligned with escalating land and property values. At the municipal level, we see planners presenting gentrification as a public good to be encouraged; at the national level, we witness the election of a luxury developer to our highest office. Amazon sought to capitalize on this frenzy, and rightly predicted that politicians across the country would devise ways to welcome them and the real estate capital they summon.

The particular siting of the proposed New York City Amazon headquarters was telling. Long Island City, Queens, had been the target of planned deindustrialization for over 35 years, with a succession of governors and mayors seeking to displace manufacturing and incentivize a proliferation of bland corporate office and luxury residential developments.

In the 1980s, Mayor Ed Koch and Governor Mario Cuomo – the father of contemporary New York governor and Amazon apologist Andrew Cuomo – turned up the heat by providing a billion-dollar subsidy to a mixed-use development called Hunters Point South. The next mayor, David Dinkins, presented a Waterfront Plan that encouraged a wholesale transformation of the area, and his successor, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, offered generous subsidies for companies such as MetLife to locate there.

The pace of luxury development accelerated rapidly under Mayor Michael Bloomberg after his 2001 rezoning. By luring Amazon to this particular place, Cuomo and the mayor, Bill de Blasio, were building on a long legacy of marginalizing manufacturing and courting gentrification.

Ultimately, however, Bezos, Cuomo and De Blasio failed – they could not secure the consent of the people, who conducted a forceful and multi-fronted battle on the issues of housing costs, labor and immigrant rights, corporate subsidies, infrastructure demands, small business survival, and more. In so doing, the anti-Amazon movement presented an anti-corporate, anti-gentrification mantel for other cities to pick up. In fact, since New Yorkers successfully stood up to Amazon, protests in northern Virginia – Amazon’s other top choice – have intensified.

By rejecting the logic that cities should bend over backwards to welcome gentrifying, union-busting, homogenizing corporations, New Yorkers asserted a principle that has long been lacking in planning: that the public is the rightful steward of a city’s future.

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That may sound obvious, but it is a major turnabout from ordinary planning practice, which has tended to privilege the rights of property owners and seek little more than advice and consent from the rest of us. Public stewardship, on the other hand, is the contention that the city is a collective product of residents’ labor –in terms of the material production of streets and buildings, the cultural production of neighborhoods and common spaces, and the social reproduction of residents and workers. The city’s fate belongs with those who made it, not just those who own it.

If cities are products of collective labor, then gentrification, in geographer Ipsita Chatterjee’s phrase, is “the theft of space from labor and its conversion into spaces of profit”. Anti-gentrification movements like the one that scared away Amazon can be understood as part of the long legacy of working class struggle against the alienation of labor by capital. In the classic cases, workers have revolted against bosses for stealing the surplus value they created; here, residents are rising up against developers and politicians for alienating people from the spaces they have built.

The city is an expression of popular will, and that will can be summoned to upturn the plans of those who seek to usurp its labor. This kind of mobilization is key to beating back corporate power and resisting the rise of the real estate state. With Amazon on the run, the time is ripe to renew our push for public stewardship and rethink the purpose of urban planning.

• Samuel Stein is a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center, and the author of the forthcoming Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate

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