Joseph Margulies Urges Amazon To Pick Boston As Its Second Headquarters

But he wants the administrators/politicians of the city which Amazon ultimately picks to be cautious and plan the transformation of the surrounding area appropriately.

We agree.

Betsy Combier
betsy@advocatz.com
ADVOCATZ.com 

Joseph Margulies: The Amazon Shuffle

This is another article about Olneyville, the low income, predominately Latino neighborhood on the west side of Providence, Rhode Island, that I have been studying for over a year.

In case you haven’t heard, Amazon is on the hunt for a second headquarters. The company wants to build a new facility that could become the professional home for as many as 50,000 employees who earn an average of $100,000 a year. When Amazon issued a request for proposals last fall, it was deliberately vague about what it wanted, simply noting a preference for metropolitan areas of over a million people, “a stable and business friendly environment,” locations that would “attract and retain strong technical talent,” and communities “that think big and creatively when considering locations and real estate options.” Cities and metropolitan areas from across the country submitted bids, and late last year, the company announced the 20 finalists. Amazon is expected to choose the winner later this year.

Adding 50,000 high paid, high tech jobs to any metropolitan area has enormous transformative potential. The possible upside is obvious. The city that wins this contest will experience an immediate boost, and not simply from the huge influx of quality jobs. As Berkeley labor economist Enrico Moretti argued in his 2012 book, The New Geography of Jobs, high tech centers tend to attract other high tech talent, which means that Amazon’s decision will likely draw other high tech companies, both well-established firms and start-ups, who want to place themselves in an area with access to a rich and continually refreshed supply of talent. Indeed, this phenomenon is reflected in Amazon’s preferences; they could go anywhere but said they want to be where they can find and keep “strong technical talent.” A metropolitan area that does not already have this high tech infrastructure in place, such as Orlando, is at a comparative disadvantage.

And then there are the benefits that ripple far beyond direct employment in high tech. Young people with discretionary income attract and support an entire economic ecosystem of restaurants, bars, movie theaters, bookstores, fitness centers, home furnishing stores, etc. Moretti estimated that every high tech job tends to create five more in the service sector. Some economists disagree about the size of the multiplier, but most everyone agrees it is substantial. In addition, the people who occupy high tech jobs tend to be net contributors to a municipality’s bottom line, paying comparatively more in all kinds of taxes (property, income, and sales), but using fewer municipal services, like police, public health, and public assistance. High tech jobs thus help replenish a city’s tax base, replacing the revenue that was once provided by heavy industry. Along with life-sciences and higher education, the tech sector has been key to the revitalization of several post-industrial cities like Pittsburgh, Boston, and of course, Seattle (the home of Amazon’s first headquarters).

Yet there is also an ominous potential downside to Amazon’s decision that has received far less attention. Last week, Zillow, the real estate site, released a study that estimated the likely impact of Amazon’s choice on rents in each of the 20 locations. According to Zillow, Denver and Nashville would see the biggest increase, followed by Los Angeles, Raleigh, and Pittsburgh. By contrast, a move to Chicago or Indianapolis would have almost no effect on rents because housing costs are kept comparatively low by ready access to land. In addition, though this did not figure in Zillow’s research, the tech sector tends to favor white men. Because of differential access to education and other professional opportunities that happen upstream, relatively few high tech jobs go to women and under-represented minorities, especially at the executive level. Quite apart from rising rents, therefore, the influx of high tech jobs may further divide rich from poor, men from women, and white from black and brown. (Ironically, Zillow may itself be an example of this phenomenon. Its website lists 12 corporate officers, ten of whom are white men. The other two are white women.)

And this is where Olneyville comes in. Boston is among the 20 finalists for the new Amazon headquarters, and the Zillow study found that if Boston were to win, rents in the metropolitan area would rise considerably—not as much as in Nashville or Denver, but considerably more than in most other cities. Rents in the Boston area are already among the highest in the country, and as housing becomes unaffordable downtown, people in the city move to surrounding towns and suburbs, creating upward price pressures that extend outward from an increasingly unaffordable core. (Boston is hardly unique in this, as anyone who has tried to buy or rent in Manhattan or San Francisco can readily attest). Gradually, those at the bottom of the economic ladder are pushed farther and farther away, since they are least able to absorb the rising costs that radiate out from the city center. Providence, less than an hour from Boston, is exquisitely sensitive to this process, and if Amazon goes to Boston, rents in Providence will rise immediately.

As is always the case, the disruptive effect of this increase will be felt most acutely by those least able to pay higher rents—viz., the working poor. And that means Olneyville, where many residents already devote an excessive fraction of their income to shelter. According to a 2016 study by the Center for Housing Policy, over 90% of Providence households making less than $23,805/year are “severely cost burdened,” which means they spend more than half their income every month on housing. According to the Census Bureau, the median annual household income in Olneyville at this time was under $25,000. One in five households in the neighborhood survives on income of less than $10,000 per year. Let’s be blunt: These renters simply cannot afford to pay more, and if rents rise even modestly, a great many of them will be displaced. And if rents rise as much as predicted by Zillow, the neighborhood—at least as it is now—will be destroyed.

I know what some people are thinking: What about all those new jobs created in the service sector? Won’t they raise wages enough to cover the cost of higher rents? Unfortunately, probably not. One of the most important stories of the new economy has been the disappearance of wage growth. After controlling for inflation, wages are only 10% higher in 2017 than they were in 1973, representing an annual real wage growth of below 0.2%. Though economists argue about why wage growth has disappeared, and a number of factors seem to be at play, no one credibly challenges this basic, sobering fact: workers make basically the same wages today as they did 45 years ago.

At the same time, there has been a dramatic shift in the nature of work. As the service sector has eclipsed manufacturing, the United States has seen an increase in what some scholars call “bad jobs.” Workers are more likely to face periods of unemployment, and even when they have jobs, they are less likely to have benefits such as health insurance or child care. And once again, though every sector of the economy has felt this shift from employment security to insecurity, the “bad jobs” are held mostly by the working poor, who predominate in the service sector. So contrary to what we might hope, the shift to a high tech economy has not raised wages, though it has made work far more precarious, especially for the working poor employed in the service sector.

In some cities, community advocates have taken a hard look at all this and concluded that Amazon will cause more harm than good. The crisis in housing is simply too dire to warrant throwing their support behind their city’s bid for the new headquarters. I do not know enough about the local conditions to judge whether they are being wise or foolish.

In Providence, however, I come down differently. Though the risk to Olneyville and low income neighborhoods like it is exceedingly grave, I hope—for the city’s sake—that Amazon goes to Boston. The upside potential is simply too great to pass up. But at the same time, Providence has a profound moral obligation to take concrete steps that will mitigate the risk to places like Olneyville. Providence must make firm, non-negotiable, legally binding commitments to protect and preserve affordable housing in Olneyville, and to make sure that the benefits that will accrue to the city from Amazon’s decision flow equitably to all of her residents. Indeed, planning for this eventuality has to start now, and not wait for Amazon’s decision.

The Amazon shuffle will be transformative. But a city must do more than merely hope the transformation is positive. Hope won’t pay the rent.

JOSEPH MARGULIES: Criminal Justice Must Be Organized Around Dignity, Community, and Equality

Reform and the Failure of Imagination
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These are peculiar times. On the one hand, uttering the words, “criminal justice reform” is an invitation to what a friend once described as a state of heated agreement. As I have often described, and as all can see, there is an accelerating recognition that the American criminal justice system is badly broken and in desperate need of repair.
This is strange enough, given the long and enduring enthusiasm for punishment and demonization in this country. Even more curious is the satisfaction the chattering class seems to derive from declaring, again and again, how bad things have become. The declaration seems to act as a kind of penance, expiating the sin of prolonged ignorance.
And spare me the prattle about the size, cost, and moral bankruptcy of the carceral state, as though repeating it yet again, this time with feeling, will account for the energy that finally swirls around the topic. The conditions that now attract so much attention have existed for years, and cannot remotely explain the relatively sudden interest in reform.
Yet on the other hand, the gathering intensity and increasing popularity of these declarations is not matched by anything in the policy pipeline (as opposed to the research pipeline) that has the slightest chance to effect meaningful reform, let alone achieve a genuine transformation of the criminal justice system.
Indeed, as the call for change grows louder, consensus seems to coalesce around programs like the Justice Reinvestment Initiative that are least likely to achieve comprehensive change. This produces the most curious condition of all: the more people want things to be different, the more likely they are to stay the same. How can we get at the root of a paradox like that?

* * *

Criminal justice reform in the United States suffers from three, overlapping and equally serious flaws. First, as I have written before, it focuses overwhelmingly on the back end of the system—that is, on the institutions and practices that shape the lives of people who have already been convicted or sentenced to prison. The reforms that attract the most attention, especially among politicians, say almost nothing about the front end—policing, prosecution, and defense services.
Second, criminal justice reform assiduously avoids questions of race. The most widely imitated reforms in state houses across the country and the halls of the U.S. Capitol treat race and racial disparity as though they were obscenities, not to be uttered in polite conversation. The silence surrounding Black Lives Matter and other anti-police-violence movements, for instance, is deafening.
And third, reform expends nearly all its energy on the hunt for the elusive low-level, non-violent drug offender. But as I have noted elsewhere, “drug offenders represent only 20 percent of the prison population nationwide, and only a small fraction of these people are both low-level and have no history of violence. Tracking down this particular inmate is like hunting for a snark.”
Taken together, these three limitations—the refusal to address the front end of the system, the failure to confront questions of race, and the obsessive focus on a very small number of unrepresentative offenders—all but guarantee that criminal justice reform will be modest and incremental at best. Of course, even modest and incremental improvements are better than nothing. But it would be a terrible shame for this moment to pass with no more to show for it than tinkering.
These limitations represent an acute failure of imagination. Policymakers cannot or will not imagine a criminal justice world meaningfully different from the one we have created. To encourage this mental leap, I have urged the development of an alternative,transformative vision for criminal justice organized around three, inviolable principles: dignity; community; and equality.
In response to this call, some people have wondered how to get from here to there. At one level, this is a question about how and why reform happens in the United States, which is a complex phenomenon. But as I have shown elsewhere, to win widespread support for major institutional change in the United States, reformers must construct a narrative that successfully casts the offending institutions as “un-American”—that is, as a betrayal of the potent myths and iconic ideals of national identity. Developing such a narrative does not guarantee a movement’s success—much also depends on expanding political opportunities. But not developing it guarantees a movement’s failure.
And therein lay the problem. Despite all the talk about criminal justice reform, the narrative of the punitive era remains fundamentally unchallenged and unchanged. That narrative runs something like this: The most important role for the state is to guarantee the security of a person’s life and property. Some people threaten that security for no good reason other than personal failings, and it is the responsibility of all law-abiding citizens to see to it that the state has the power and resources it needs to fulfill its central mission.
This deceptively simple narrative is the foundation upon which the entire architecture of the carceral state has been constructed. It gave rise to an interlocking set of institutions, rules, and practices at every phase of the criminal justice system, from the first contact with the police to the enduring disabilities imposed after release from prison. Collectively, this elaborate lattice enabled the state to accomplish what had been constructed as its primary mission—viz., to separate “us” from “them” as thoroughly as possible.
To ensure their legitimacy in a post-civil rights era, these rules, practices, and institutions had to have several characteristics. First, they had to be facially neutral, which honored the newfound creedal commitment to formal equality and permitted the belief that racial or ethnic disparities in criminal justice derive entirely from different rates of offending. They allowed the state, in other words, to appear fair.
Second, the entire system had to be inscribed into the written law, which encouraged the myth that ours is a government of laws and not of men. And finally, it had to protect and promote the historic attachment to individual liberty and private property, which allowed it to claim the legitimacy that comes from a long and uninterrupted pedigree.
The creation of the carceral state was of course more complex than I suggest here. The narrative of the punitive era also had to fit other emerging narratives of the late 20^th century, like the elevation of individual responsibility that lay behind the gradual decline of the welfare state and the triumph of a colorblind ethos. The punitive narrative also needed to create heroes and demons (the over-worked prosecutor twisted into knots by legal technicalities, for instance, and her perennial nemesis, the cunning drug dealer who manipulates the rules to escape justice), which in turn gave cultural legitimacy to the expanding and entangling reach of the state.
The point, however, is that a simple narrative about the way the world ought to be was mobilized and pressed into service again and again to create an entirely new legal, political, and cultural apparatus—the governance of the carceral state. And as yet, this narrative has no competitor. Criminal justice reform in the United States does not attack this narrative so much as sand down its rough edges. As a result, we continue to live in a world dominated by the punitive narrative: when it comes to criminal justice, the state exists to protect us from them.
I continue to maintain that criminal justice in the United States needs to be organized around dignity, community, and equality. But we need a narrative that takes us from here to there—a narrative that makes change just and resistance “un-American.” That is the work of future columns.

JOSEPH MARGULIES

Mr. Margulies is a Professor of Law and Government at Cornell University. He was Counsel of Record in Rasul v. Bush (2004), involving detentions at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station, and in Geren v. Omar &Munaf v. Geren (2008), involving detentions at Camp Cropper in Iraq. Presently he is counsel for Abu Zubaydah, whose interrogation in 2002 prompted the Bush Administration to draft the “torture memos.” In June 2005, at the invitation of Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter, Margulies testified at the first Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on detainee issues.
Margulies writes and lectures widely on civil liberties in the wake of September 11 and his commentaries have appeared in numerous publications, including the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the National Law Journal, the Miami Herald, the Christian Science Monitor, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and the Legal Times. He is also the author of the widely acclaimed book, Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power (Simon and Schuster 2006). Among other accolades, Guantánamo was named one of the best books of 2006 by The Economist magazine. It received the prestigious Silver Gavel Award of 2007, given annually by the American Bar Association to the book that best promotes “the American public’s understanding of the law and the legal system.” It also won the Scribes Book Award of 2007, given annually by the American Society of Legal Writers to honor “the best work of legal scholarship published during the previous year.” He is also the author of What Changed When Everything Changed: 9/11 and the Making of National Identity(Yale Univ. Press 2013) and has won numerous awards for his work since 9/11.