 So you probably heard about Amazon's New York headquarters. It was this billion dollar project. There's going to be a new helipad, a waterfront esplanade, and four empire state buildings worth of office space. But on Valentine's Day, Amazon decided to break things off with the city. The company was scrapping the plans, pulling out of the Long Island city site and New York entirely. It was an ugly end to months of planning, a major embarrassment for everyone involved. But to understand how it got so messy so fast, you have to look at the big picture. Amazon's Seattle headquarters is the biggest urban tech campus in America, with 40,000 workers and almost a fifth of the city's prime office space. But that still wasn't big enough for Amazon. In 2017, Amazon announced it was looking for a home for its second headquarters, dubbed HQ2. 238 cities jumped in with proposals, usually dangling massive tax breaks. There was a busy game show vibe to the whole thing. Clickhole joked about the mayors of Pittsburgh and Kansas City beating each other to death for a chance at the headquarters. After all that, Amazon's final choice was kind of an anti-climax. Instead of revitalizing a smaller city, Amazon would split the new headquarters between New York and Washington, DC. There was also a small outpost planned in Nashville, but for the most part, the company would be investing in cities that didn't need the money. Almost from the beginning, New Yorkers were skeptical. In the days after the deal was announced, there were a ton of protests. Amazon even got booed out of a city council meeting. B-T-M-O! Amazon has got to vote! B-T-M-O! A big issue in the background was rent. Those high-paid tech workers bring a lot of money into the neighborhood, which has a way of driving up rent, sometimes really fast. The effect has been most extreme in the Bay Area, where the influx of tech money has driven up rents by as much as 50% since 2010. That's led to a lot of conflict between tech workers and everyday citizens, some of whom see the companies as hostile invaders. Anti-gentrification activists have gone as far as blocking the buses that take Google employees to work outside San Francisco, as a kind of protest of what Google is doing to the city. If you're Amazon, you have to think, are we going to see that same kind of local opposition in Queens? Locals also had a problem with the deal itself, which gave Amazon $2.5 billion in tax breaks as a reward for moving in. This kind of deal happens a lot, and you can argue it's a good trade since the city still ends up collecting more tax revenue than it pays out in subsidy. But there's a lot that doesn't take into account, including all the residents and other businesses that get displaced by the new headquarters. On paper, Amazon was offering the city a lot, including job training at nearby housing projects and internship programs with local high schools. But the idea of paying Amazon billions of dollars to remake downtown Queens was just too much for local politicians, particularly city councilman Jimmy Van Bramer. Is giving Jeff Bezos $3 billion of hard-earned taxpayer money progressive values? No! It didn't help that Governor Cuomo, who masterminded the deal, was wildly unpopular and didn't have much goodwill to draw on. But the most dangerous local opponent was state Senator Michael Gianaris, who in January joined New York's Public Authorities Control Board. That has official oversight over the Amazon deal, and since the board requires unanimous approval for a lot of motions, Gianaris would have had lots of chances to make life difficult for Amazon. In November, Gianaris told The Verge his staff was digging into the incentive package to see legally what we can do. But it turned out he didn't get the chance. Three months later, Amazon backed out. In its statement, Amazon said it was pulling out because a number of state and local politicians have made it clear that they oppose our presence and will not work with us. Now that could be a reference to Gianaris specifically, but the broader opposition was just as scary. None of the local politicians had the power to stop the deal completely, but they could make things a lot harder. The Queens project would have taken 15 years to complete, and along the way there were going to be permit issues, labor disputes, and the kind of headaches that come with any ambitious construction project. There would be lots of chances to make trouble and extract real concessions from Amazon. In the end, it just wasn't worth it. Now not every tech company is so unlucky. At the same time that Amazon was fighting in Queens, Google announced a massive expansion to its Manhattan headquarters. But they did it without the big subsidies, without the game show, and as a result without the public opposition. And south of DC, where there are fewer people being displaced and fewer activists to raise hell, Amazon's headquarters is going forward as planned. It's like Mayor de Blasio said after the deal fell through, you have to be tough to make it in New York. Thanks for watching. Ton of questions in this episode. Was Amazon right to back out of New York? Would it have been bad for the city for the headquarters to go forward? Let us know in the comments and as always like and subscribe. See you next time.