Think Progress, November 16, 2018: Amazon could make it harder for people to find affordable homes in New York and Virginia
Amazon’s decision to place its new offices in New York City and Northern Virginia will likely have an effect on the affordability of homes in the area, pricing many working class families out of these areas.
In the southern part of Arlington County, more than half of the households rent, which means many families could be displaced, Jesse Van Tol, chief executive of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, told The Washington Post. That also means the area could become a lot more white, since a much larger share of the Black and Latino families in the area have lower incomes than white families.
Derek Thompson, staff writer for The Atlantic who covers economics and labor, argued these Amazon deals should be illegal and wrote that Congress could pass a law that banned these sorts of deals across the country. Thompson wrote, “it’s still ludicrous for Americans to collectively pay tens of billions of dollars for huge corporations to relocate within the United States.”
