For decades, experts have called for the diversification of the New York City economy. In the wake of postwar deindustrialization, our reliance on Wall Street and the financial industry in general had by the 1990s left our city disproportionately vulnerable to swings in the financial markets. We have experienced significant downturns that today feel like distant memories but could certainly return. I know this from my own experience as director of planning for Manhattan after Sept. 11.

In those heady dark days, few spoke about gentrification or the supposedly ominous specter of new companies entering New York City. To the contrary, many worried that no one would build so much as a Quonset hut in this city again. Darker still were the memories of my older colleagues in city government, who helped rescue us from the nose-dive of the late 1970s, when New York City lost hundreds of thousands of jobs and crime ravaged our most vulnerable neighborhoods.

It is with dismay that I hear the fiercely negative reaction to the announcement that New York City won the Amazon competition to land at least 25,000 jobs and decades of direct and indirect economic growth in Long Island City. The fact that the debate has yielded so much heat and so little light is a sign of how complacent we have become. It is easy to forget that employment generates our city tax base, which strains to help fund the public goods we so desperately need, from schools to transit to affordable housing to parks to basic services like snow and trash removal. The city’s tax revenues have more than doubled since Sept. 11, to $83 billion from $40 billion. The Bloomberg administration put us in this enviable economic position; Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo should be lauded for doubling down on those efforts.

Yet there are stiff headwinds. Municipal spending is outpacing growth. Federal urban investments continue to retract. And we already have some of the highest income taxes in the country. Julissa Ferreras-Copeland , who served on the City Council until 2017 and was chairwoman of the council’s finance committee, said of the budget: “We know there’s a storm coming. We don’t know how big it’s going to be.”