Promising Billions to Amazon: Is It a Good Deal for Cities?
Alicia Glen, the city’s deputy mayor for housing and economic development, said Amazon would probably get hardly any tax breaks
if it chose to locate its second headquarters in Midtown or Lower Manhattan, the city’s two traditional business centers.
“Nobody wants to get involved in it, nobody wants to have to do this,
but we’re in a competitive environment,” said Dennis M. Davin, secretary of community and economic development for Pennsylvania, where two cities — Philadelphia and Pittsburgh — are among the 20 finalists for the Amazon project.
Alluding to Amazon’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, she added, “Why should the richest man in the history of the world get money to open his business?”
Indeed, tax incentives tend to flow overwhelmingly to big, established companies, rather than to the local start-ups
that research has shown are a more significant source of job growth.
But she said it was frustrating to watch local governments — three of the 20 finalists for the Amazon
project are in the Washington area — roll out the red carpet for a multibillion-dollar corporation.
Megan Randall, a researcher at the Urban Institute who studies economic development policy, said companies cared most about a talented work force, which requires good schools
and colleges, and amenities like affordable housing, parks and public transit that make a place desirable.
When New Jersey announced a $7 billion package of tax incentives to try to lure Amazon’s second headquarters to
Newark, local officials saw a chance to jump-start a city that has long struggled with poverty and joblessness.

They have the user base — billions — and engineering prowess
that no media company can match, which Stan Wischnowski, the Philadelphia Media Network executive editor, told me, is “putting democracy as a whole at risk because it has put at risk the kind of watchdog journalism we’ve been doing for 187 years.”
It might, for instance, help efforts to increase subscriptions to newspapers with
digital paywalls, while making them more adept online and on social platforms.
Last week, the institute followed up by announcing
that it had secured $26.5 million more from donors, and Mr. Lenfest committed an additional $40 million in future matching funds, all with a goal of finding “sustainable business models for high-quality journalism.”
In an interview, I asked Mr. Lenfest a leading question: Does the diminishing of local newspapers mean open season for corrupt city officials?
“There will be a tremendous vacuum if these local newspapers don’t continue to print.”
I grew up in Philadelphia, reading The Inquirer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning exposés of the Philadelphia court system — by a team including Buzz Bissinger —
and of the Philadelphia Police Department K-9 unit by William K. Marimow, now the paper’s editor at large.
The new environment is forcing newspapers to scramble to come up with a solution
that can keep the lights on, and keep the staff large enough to continue to do real, probing journalism, before it’s too late and it’s all over.
And, like all newspaper groups, it is trying to reorganize its newsroom to provide
its journalism in new forms that fit with new media consumption habits.