Two rhyming bits of Amazon news. The first is that Amazon, according to a report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, was taxed at an effective rate of negative-one per cent in 2018, having paid a federal income tax of zero dollars and having received a rebate from the federal government of a hundred and twenty-nine million dollars. During that year, the company nearly doubled its profits, from $5.6 billion to $11.2 billion.

The second is that Amazon has scrapped its plans to open a branch of its second headquarters, HQ2, in Long Island City, after months of opposition from activists, labor groups, and some politicians. “For Amazon, the commitment to build a new headquarters requires positive, collaborative relationships with state and local elected officials who will be supportive over the long-term,” the company said in a statement.

All told, Amazon did a respectable job in forging relationships with some of New York’s leading politicians. New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, and New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo—whose relationship can be described, charitably, as “tense”—joined forces to lobby Amazon aggressively. The city offered Amazon nearly three billion dollars in tax breaks and incentives for the project, which the company said would bring twenty-five thousand jobs to the neighborhood. In November, Cuomo infamously joked that he would have changed his name to Amazon Cuomo if it won the company over.

But progressive critics, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who celebrated Amazon’s withdrawal on Twitter, were less enthusiastic about offering tax breaks to a company that has resisted unionization, contributed to spiking housing costs in its hometown of Seattle, and, in its HQ2 search, encouraged policymakers across the country to prostrate themselves with incentive offers. After more than a year of song and dance and much commentary about how a new Amazon headquarters could revitalize cities like Detroit or Newark, the company ultimately chose New York City and Northern Virginia, areas not exactly lacking in the well-paying white-collar jobs that HQ2 would bring. In fact, in its statement on Thursday, the company said that it still plans on expanding its workforce in New York, where it already employs around five thousand people.

The statement correctly noted that its arrival in Queens was backed by a substantial majority of the city’s residents. Just this week, a Siena College poll found that fifty-eight per cent of registered voters in New York City backed the city’s incentive offer, and that minorities statewide were substantially more supportive than white voters. The task now facing policymakers is offering those optimists, in Long Island City and elsewhere, a different plan for growth in a city where the cost of living is high and inequality is deep.