Far from the Seattle it changed, Amazon finds new headquarters cities — and new backlash on Day 1

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Construction continues on Amazon’s original headquarters in downtown Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser)

There go the neighborhoods.

Whether they’re going in a good or bad direction depends on how you feel about Amazon, and the tech giant’s announcement that it will plant new headquarters spaces in New York City and Northern Virginia, plus another development in Nashville, Tenn. What is coming, to be sure, is some level of backlash.

Adding 25,000 people to a place, and 5,000 in the case of Nashville, no doubt changes things. Queens, N.Y., will change and Arlington, Va., will change. You only have to look to Seattle and HQ1 to get a feel for it all. There will be jobs, obviously, but there will also be construction, traffic and transit congestion, increased competition for housing, rent increases and so on.

The rapid growth of Amazon in Seattle, and the many thousands of jobs it has created, is what generated all the buzz around HQ2 in the first place. The 238 cities that bid for a chance to “win” what originally looked like one extra headquarters and 50,000 jobs did so because they wanted in on the fastest growing company in the world. And they did so before they fully understood the Amazon effect on a city.

By the time the competition was narrowed to 20 finalists, cities far from Seattle finally started to actually look back across the country for indications of what to expect should Amazon move in. People in those cities started to hear about the increased cost of living associated with being a big tech hub. They heard about the traffic. They wondered, in Boston, Austin, Pittsburgh and elsewhere, whether it would all be a very good idea for the identity of the places they called home.

But those jobs.

Hard to not want in on all those jobs. Today, as the long-awaited announcement finally comes to light, we’re getting a look at what those jobs will actually cost — Amazon doesn’t just move in without incentives. That’s what this competition was for, to root out the places that weren’t willing to give to get. The dream that Amazon would pick some smaller place that was hoping to reinvent its economy after being left behind by the tech boom was just that — a dream.

New York’s decision to cough up $48,000 per job — or $1.5 billion — to get its slice of HQ2 was met with a particularly loud thud on Twitter on Tuesday morning.

Newly elected New York Congressional representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on Twitter Monday night — when word of the coming announcement leaked again, this time in the Wall Street Journal — that Queens residents were expressing outrage over Amazon’s arrival.

The democratic socialist, who will be representing New York’s 14th Congressional District, fired off a series of tweets to let her constituents and everyone else on social media know just how she felt about Amazon’s deal with her state.

Amazon has certainly learned plenty during its meteoric rise in Seattle about how people perceive the company. There are those who love what the company has done for Seattle, whether it’s the high-tech jobs or the decision to transform the entire look of the city with an urban headquarters.

And there are those who resent what has happened over the past decade, culminating in an acrimonious fight over the so-called “head tax” this past summer. The concern about change, now coupled with how the HQ2 race has played out and what’s in those incentives, looks like it’s going to spread.

It’s one thing to face some protests in sleepy old Seattle, tucked up in the far corner of the U.S. It’s quite another to poke New York City and Washington, D.C. The spotlight shines way brighter.

Always so focused on “Day 1,” perhaps Amazon didn’t anticipate any backlash on day one.

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