On the road to becoming the world’s most valuable company, Amazon has weathered resistance as it expanded across the globe and expected to do the same in New York City, where the company has announced plans for a sprawling corporate campus in Long Island City for more than 25,000 workers.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio, famous antagonists, had promised executives they could smooth the road in a city that has never been afraid to turn down big projects, from a highway down the West Side of Manhattan in 1985, to an Olympic stadium in 2005.
But just as those Democratic leaders were negotiating the deal, the world changed: in western Queens, in New York state and in the Democratic Party nationwide.
With its plan to locate new offices along the Queens waterfront, Amazon inserted itself into a fractious political landscape that looked entirely different in 2017, when the company began its search for a second corporate home, than it did in November, when executives picked New York as one of two sites. The other is in Virginia, where the reception has been far warmer.
In the span of months, a rising cohort of young and energized voters, many of them recent arrivals to the borough, helped Democrats take control of the Republican-led state Senate, and tipped the scales in favor of U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, driving from office the powerful leader of the Queens Democrats, Joseph Crowley.
Last year’s elections shook the foundation of state politics and paved the way for the selection of Sen. Michael Gianaris — now a prominent Amazon opponent — to a key state board with veto power over the deal. It emboldened democratic socialist activists, whose national influence and power appear nowhere greater than in the corner of New York City where Amazon plans to build.
The selection of Gianaris set off paroxysms of concern inside Amazon, whose executives now find themselves embroiled in the very sort of development battle they had hoped to avoid. The company fears spending the next year planning a corporate campus that could get voted down when it comes before the board in 2020.
So far, executives have not said they are pulling out and are still preparing for the move to New York City, including meeting with local business, residents and elected officials.
The company is working on a hiring plan that would be made public at the next City Council hearing, according to a person familiar with the company’s discussions who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Amazon has also been encouraged by recent polls, including one on Monday by the Siena College Research Institute, which found wide approval for the deal in Queens, including among union households. Support was even stronger among black and Hispanic registered voters than among whites.
For their part, opponents have not coalesced around a set of goals. Some want to see the deal scrapped; others want the company to be more amenable to unions; still others want to go much further and dismantle the company altogether.
Gianaris, who urged Amazon to come to New York in a 2017 letter, canvassed with opponents of the deal in Long Island City on Saturday.
When asked what he wanted from the company, he did not respond directly.
“Their behavior does not present a path forward,” Gianaris said of Amazon. “They’re sitting there threatening to leave, which is what they did to Seattle when they got them to bend to their will.
“Amazon is big, but it’s not bigger than New York. They don’t get to tell us what to do.”
Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer of Queens, another onetime proponent turned vigorous opponent, was more direct. “I want the deal to be scrapped in its entirety,” he said. “They want to crush unions. They want to work with ICE. They want to bypass community review. They want to take giant subsidies. I don’t see them changing one bit and, so yeah, they’re not welcome here.”
The fight has drawn in unions on both sides. It has highlighted divisions between long-term residents of public housing in Long Island City, most of them black and Hispanic, and wealthier recent arrivals, many of whom are white. It has become a kind of litmus test for progressive bona fides on the left flank of the Democratic Party in New York, exposing the same sorts of fault lines — pragmatism versus principle; rapid versus deliberate change; capitalism versus socialism — that are roiling the party nationally.
The opponents to Amazon are eclectic, but they unite on one point: They do not want the city and the state to offer up to $3 billion in incentives and direct subsidies for the company to bring 25,000 to 40,000 jobs to Queens.
They are divided, however, on what should happen instead. Young activists and nonprofit groups that are going door-to-door in neighborhoods across western Queens want Amazon to pack its bags — and even to cease to exist in its present form.
“We would like to see changes at the federal level and Amazon broken up,” said Will Spisak, of the Queens-based anti-poverty group, Chhaya. “Obviously that’s a big long-term goal.”
In place of Amazon, activists want government money spent on improving low-income neighborhoods that have already seen rising rents and a boom in construction in Long Island City, the fastest-growing residential neighborhood in New York.
“We want investment into our communities that makes our communities stronger. That means investment in housing, in transit, in education, in workforce development,” said Fahd Ahmed of DRUM, a nonprofit that organizes low-income South Asian residents in Queens. “The status quo is not sustainable.”
Union leaders castigate Amazon for its workplace practices and resistance to unionization, but have said they would be more open to supporting the deal if the company made changes.
“I think that what they need to do is have a dialogue with us,” said Stuart Appelbaum, an outspoken opponent and the president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. “If they’re receiving $3 billion in money, including from union members and workers, they shouldn’t then take that money and use it to fight their workers.”
George L. Miranda, the head of the Teamsters Local 210, said his union could get behind the deal if Amazon agreed to not actively resist unionization at its offices and warehouses in New York.
“Remain neutral. That’s all we’re asking,” said Miranda, whose union has rallied with opponents. “It would say that they want to be good, responsible corporate leaders here in New York City.”
So far, the company has made a few small promises of community investments, including education programs for high schools and job training for local college students, and a small number of jobs for public housing residents at a call center. Asked if Amazon would remain neutral on unionization during a City Council hearing, a company executive quickly replied: “No.”
In a radio interview last week, Cuomo faulted the company for not doing more to sell the merits of the deal.
“I think Amazon has not done a great job communicating,” he said.
But while opponents have been noisy and have influenced local elected leaders, they do not appear to have persuaded the majority of New Yorkers: recent polls by Quinnipiac University along with Siena’s survey, showed support across the city, including Queens.
“It is so ironic for Amazon, after they spent one year with everyone seducing them, and everyone courting them, we win and then there’s political opposition,” Cuomo said Friday as he chastised the Democrats in the state Senate, whose leadership selected Gianaris for the state board. (Cuomo has the power to reject the selection, but has yet to announce a decision.)
On Monday about a dozen or so supporters, including U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney and tenant leaders in New York City public housing developments, rallied at the Queensbridge Houses, the country’s largest public housing development, which is near the proposed Amazon site.
The demographics of the complex, mostly black and Hispanic, are different from those of the recently sprouted towers along the neighborhood’s waterfront.
“All along the East River shoreline, both in Brooklyn and in Queens, there has been a growth in white voting-age citizens,” said John Mollenkopf, a professor of political science at the City University of New York Graduate Center. The changing makeup of western Queens could be seen in Maloney’s closer-than-expected race and Ocasio-Cortez’s surprise win, he said.
Queens residents who voted for Ocasio-Cortez were younger and registered to vote more recently in Queens than those who supported Crowley, according to an analysis of election results and voter data by Mollenkopf. “Being younger and more recent to the neighborhood is associated with an election district leaning toward AOC,” he said.
Those changes have fueled opponents, struck fear in the hearts of some elected officials and worried executives at the world’s biggest company.
But for some veteran consultants, the situation is hardly new.
“This is very similar to what went on during the approval process around Ikea in Brooklyn,” said Tyquana Rivers, a Democratic political consultant who has run campaigns in Queens. “You had some unions pushing back. You also had the housing project residents who were very supportive of the project.”
Some who oppose the Amazon deal, she said, are the very gentrifiers whose influence they are trying to combat.
“You have moved into a neighborhood that was already moving upwards in rent,” she said. “You’re complaining about something you’ve done. The hypocrisy is deafening.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.