As cities vie to host second campus, local activists say the ‘Hunger Games’-style competition is a bad deal for everyone – except Amazon

'Not welcome here': Amazon faces growing resistance to its second home

What do you get for the man who has everything? When it comes to Jeff Bezos – the richest man in the world with around $130bn to his name – many US cities competing to host Amazon’s second headquarters have an answer: billions of dollars in tax incentives.

That proposition has united an ideologically diverse group of dissenters to Amazon’s grand HQ2 competition, ranging from rightwing organizations linked to the Koch brothers to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Groups and individuals that would normally agree only to mutual disdain and distrust have somehow come around to the same conclusion: that Amazon’s decision to pit 20 cities against each other in a fight to host a future hub is a bad deal for everyone except Amazon.

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In Atlanta, an anonymous group of activists with roots in the Occupy movement has set up AtlantaAgainstAmazon.org, a website that compares the HQ2 process to “something like a televised Hunger Games death-match”, and has designed anti-Amazon flyers that have been plastered around town.

Generation Opportunity, a conservative advocacy group for millennials associated with the Koch brothers, has launched a targeted digital ad campaign with a slickly produced, ominously soundtracked video that compares the HQ2 competition to – wait for it – the Hunger Games.

And a petition launched by the prominent urbanist Richard Florida and dozens of other academics calling for the finalist cities to unite in a “mutual non-aggression pact” on tax incentives has garnered more than 15,000 signatures.

The idea behind the pact is that rather than engage in a tax-break arms race, everyone should agree not to offer incentives. That would force Amazon to simply choose its new home by the merits of the locations, which Florida told the Guardian he suspects they will do anyway, and free up local governments to invest their tax dollars in the kind of improvements that make a city attractive to a corporation in the first place.

“I didn’t expect to ever write a protest letter,” said Florida, who was part of the group that organized Toronto’s bid for HQ2, where he advocated against tax incentives. “But one weekend I was so mad, I started emailing my friends across the ideological spectrum, and every one of them said they’d sign on in a minute.”

Are we going to give the richest man a tax break before we make sure homeless children have a place to sleep?

Florida called the tax incentives proposed by states like New Jersey ($7bn) and Maryland ($3bn) “obscene”, an assessment shared by the Washington-based advocacy group Fair Budget Coalition.

“Jeff Bezos personally has more money than the district’s budget,” said the group’s co-director, Monica Kamen. “Are we going to give the richest man in history a tax break before we make sure that homeless children have a place to sleep?”

The Fair Budget Coalition has worked with the local DSA chapter to launch “Obviously Not DC”, a campaign that takes its name from the district’s pro-DC hashtag campaign, #ObviouslyDC.

Asked how the group felt about ending up on the same side of an issue as the liberal bogeymen the Kochs, Kamen’s co-director Stephanie Sneed chimed in: “A broken clock is right twice a day.”

Brad Landers, a member of New York City council who signed the Florida petition, said that he would be happy for Amazon to move to New York, as long as it paid its fair share.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jeff Bezos at the launch of Amazon Spheres, a new botanical garden that forms part of its Seattle headquarters. Photograph: Lindsey Wasson/Reuters

“You’re not opening a second headquarters as a charitable project,” he said. “You are opening it to make more money, and that is going to impose all these costs that our city has to bear, especially around transit, infrastructure, schools, and housing. You’re not expected to pay more, even though you have some outsize impacts, but to ask to pay less is just appallingly bad corporate behavior.”

But some said they would oppose Amazon’s presence in their city, whether or not they were offered tax cuts.

“Right now in Pittsburgh, we’re losing three black people every day from the city to the surrounding area,” said Carl Redwood, a community organizer and professor of social work at the University of Pittsburgh. “Amazon coming won’t change that trend. It will accelerate the trend.”

“My view is that they should keep on walking,” he added. “Don’t come to Pittsburgh. Amazon is not welcome here.”

Anti-HQ2 activists in Atlanta and Washington shared Redwood’s concern about the displacement of black communities from cities, and the tech industry’s execrable track record for hiring black and Latino employees does not give them confidence that selecting a majority black city will change that.

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Kamen said she expected Amazon would have “district residents work in the janitorial jobs and construction, and give all the high paying jobs to incoming white workers”.

Despite the breadth of the opposition to Amazon among academics and community activists, however, just four elected officials from finalist cities have signed on to the non-aggression pact.

Lander expressed disappointment that he had not been able to garner more support from a network of progressive elected officials around the country, but was also understanding of the intense political pressure that many feel to support their cities’ bids. “We have a lot of organizing to do or it will probably happen just like this the next time,” he said.

But Florida, who called the city councilors who signed the pact “heroes”, said that he believes the backlash to HQ2 is just getting started, and that politicians who feel pressured to support the bids are mistaken about how residents will respond once a winner is chosen and the details of the deal become public.

“If you win this thing, God help you,” he said. “The backlash in that community is going to be horrific, and the person who thinks they’re going to ride that to the governor’s house or the White House is going to ride it to being unelected.”