By Norrinda Brown Hayat

Newark's business community and politicians may be lamenting Amazon's decision to place one-half of its second world headquarters -- the so-called HQ2 -- across the river in Long Island City, but its low-income and homeless populations (and those who advocate for both) should be breathing a collective sigh of relief.

Newark, already in the midst of a serious affordability crisis, would have slipped deeper into a hole if the HQ2 bid had been successful.

New Jersey put $7 billion on the table in tax incentives to woo the retail giant, but has very little government money at all committed to housing the approximately 9,303 people who are homeless in the state every night, or to stem the estimated 17,000 evictions filed in Newark last year, or to move the 14,000 people off the public housing wait list in Newark.

Newark is simply not a place that can absorb more pressure on the housing market. Supporters of Newark's HQ2 bid hoped that Amazon might lift Newark's existing population out of its economic straits. What affordable housing advocates have learned from Seattle and San Francisco (and a whole host of Silicon Valley cities), however, is that "Amazons" are more likely to exacerbate social problems -- including but certainly not limited to putting upward pressure on housing costs -- than to help solve them. And those same companies are reticent, if not outright hostile, to local governments taking steps to neutralize that pressure.

Exhibit A can be found in Amazon's hometown of Seattle, which has one of the fastest-growing income gaps in the United States. The top 20 percent of earners in Seattle take home over half of the city's total income. In an effort to combat the homelessness that flows from this type of inequity, Seattle's city council unanimously voted last summer to pass a "head tax." The head tax would have collected $275 per employee from mega-corporations, such as Amazon and Starbucks, with $20 million or more in gross revenue, and direct $50 million toward alleviating the city's spiraling homelessness crisis.

Mind you, this is a crisis that these same companies have contributed significantly to by triggering an influx of elite-class, highly educated workers to the city who fought for limited housing stock, causing prices to rise unnaturally and displacing historic residents.

In response to the head tax, Amazon launched a frontal attack on the city of Seattle. Amazon stopped construction on a new campus in downtown Seattle, called the city out for taking "anti-business positions" and engaging in a "hostile approach and rhetoric towards larger businesses" and indicated in subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways that the head tax threatened Amazon's future in its home city.

Ultimately, Seattle's mayor caved and a majority of the council repealed the ordinance. Amazon praised the reversal and promised to continue to donate to two nonprofits "making a difference on this important issue." (Quizzically, Amazon also continues to give out 8,000 bananas daily to the community members as a "public service.") In short, Amazon ended up with no true accountability to the working people of Seattle for a housing crisis it helped create.

There is a lesson to be found in Seattle's summer tale especially for small cities like Newark with deep social problems and a strong desire to woo big businesses. Choose wisely. Your social problems, including but not limited homelessness, will worsen after "Amazons" come and few of them are willing to help cure those problems in any meaningful way.

On the other hand, some headquarter cities are not giving up or in. San Francisco and a number of other Silicon Valley cities -- including Cupertino (home to Apple), Mountain View (home to LinkedIn) and East Palo Alto (near to Facebook) -- are attempting to hold corporations accountable with head taxes similar to Seattle's. And some of those efforts look better-poised for success due, in part, to a willingness of the corporations to accept some social responsibility.

Which offers a second lesson. Just because Amazon was not the right partner for Newark does not mean that the right partner does not exist. Several commentators have predicted that Newark's bid for HQ2 put it on the radar of other business giants for future opportunities. Hopefully, that is true.

Should Newark and the state of New Jersey get the do-over they anticipate, I encourage them to consider exacting a higher price for the partnership -- one that will be equitably distributed from the outset -- to help alleviate the inevitable pressure on the market and attendant loss of affordable housing that will befall Newark's working poor with a new corporate giant in the neighborhood.

In the meantime, Newark's low-income population won last week.

Norrinda Brown Hayat is an associate clinical professor of law and the director of the Civil Justice Clinic at Rutgers Law School in Newark.

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