Jeff Bezos wants to build a colossal HQ in Queens. We’ve already got Wall Street – must we be flooded with rich techies on top of that?

New York is a metropolis. It has been able to withstand centuries’ worth of threats to civic harmony, from the Five Points gangs to the administration of Rudy Giuliani. We have successfully absorbed striving immigrants from around the world, weekend partiers from Jersey, and post-college seekers from the midwest. But one thing that New York City has never truly had to battle is a massive influx of rich techies. Let’s not start now.

‘Bezos cackles from inside his cartoonishly large mansion as cities and states desperately compete to shower his company with the maximum amount of public subsidies.’
‘Bezos cackles from inside his cartoonishly large mansion as cities and states desperately compete to shower his company with the maximum amount of public subsidies.’ © Joshua Roberts/Reuters

For a full year, Amazon – a trillion-dollar company led by the richest man on earth – has been busily extracting subsidies from cities across the country, all of them desperate to lure a promised 50,000 jobs and $5bn investment for Amazon’s second headquarters. The “HQ2” became necessary after Amazon filled metropolitan Seattle edge-to-edge with glass towers full of Amazon employees.

This week, at last, it was reported that Amazon had decided to divide its new headquarters bounty between the suburbs of Washington DC and the Queens riverfront. Having tired of the amusement of watching second-tier cities debase themselves in a desperate bid for something they were never going to get, the company has apparently settled on “the two most obvious major cities on the east coast”.

This engineered airdrop of tech people threatens to destroy America’s delicate distribution of unwanted wealthy demographic groups. Silicon Valley and Seattle get to deal with the techies. Los Angeles gets the Hollywood people. Washington gets the politics nerds, and New York gets finance types. We have each adapted to our own particular crosses to bear. Yes, millions of New Yorkers must share a city with tens of thousands of Wall Street people, but we have developed a complex system of cultural processes that mostly segregate them in easily avoidable areas of Manhattan, and shunt vast numbers of them off to the Jersey suburbs at night. It’s a system that works. Forcing us to take in a flood of rich young tech people on top of this is like giving the flu to someone who already has chronic but manageable diabetes. It’s just not fair.

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