Community Allies in the News

I’ve recently published two commentaries urging cities to do a cost-benefit analysis of joining the competition to “win” Amazon’s second headquarters. The Chicago Sun Times ran Take a Hard Look at Any Amazon Deal, the first piece I'd seen in any of the major Chicago papers that questioned the wisdom of subsidizing the tech/retail behemoth. Yesterday, YES! Magazine put out How To Say No To Amazon, my article exploring the handful of cities that have opted out of bidding or at least declined to include financial incentives in their offer.

Since I wrote those pieces, the estimate of the likely payout to lure Amazon has shot up to as much as $7 billion. To put that in perspective in my city, Chicago's total 2017 budget is $9.8 billion, and we're already closing schools and shutting down mental health facilities because we can't pay our bills. If we're looking at an expense that's more than a 70% budget increase, we'd better run the numbers about whether it's a good investment.

Why has Community Allies taken a strong stand on this issue? Because where we spend our tax dollars matters. Money spent on Amazon won't be spent on schools, neighborhood improvement, social services, and other services that impact our communities profoundly. We ask cities simply to consider this question: is subsidizing Amazon the best and highest use of their economic development dollars?

Our colleague Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, has penned what I think is the definitive article on Amazon H2Q. In it, he suggests that cities could take control of this negotiation by banding together and setting basic terms for the deal that they will all adhere to. This should be an obvious move, but in the modern era of corporations pitting cities and states against one another, it seems strangely radical.

We'll continue to keep you posted as this issue develops. Thanks for reading.

— Ellen Shepard