Amazon's Virginia HQ2 opposition is about affordability, than a joblessness crisis: Delegate Lee Carter
The search is over, but the battle is still on.
Amazon is on a mission to build its second headquarters in Northern Virginia following the dramatic cancellation of its plans in New York City. But now, those efforts are facing some New York-style pushback.
Virginia house delegate Lee Carter, one of the vocal opponents to Amazon's presence in Arlington, explained why he’s opposed to a second Amazon headquarters in his community.
“What we’ve got here in the D.C. areas, we’ve got an area of extraordinary low unemployment,” Carter told FOX Business’ Connell McShane on Thursday. “And this Amazon headquarters is gonna cram more and more positions into an area where we already have more available jobs than people to fill them.”
He also highlighted a major problem that Northern Virginia is facing.
“My argument here is that it’s easy politics to say more jobs are gonna fix the problem. But the problems that we have here in Northern Virginia are problems of affordability,” Carter said. “We don’t have a joblessness crisis. We have a crisis where people are working two and three jobs because they can’t afford to make the rent.”
In this case, the delegate argues having more jobs and population increase in the area are not good problems to have.
“Certainly not a good problem to have when your rent goes up 20 percent in six months like it has in my building. You know there are a lot of people living on the edge, who are gonna get priced out by this, and this is a long running trend in Northern Virginia,” Carter said on “After The Bell.” “Amazon is not the sole source for this problem, but it is the biggest single story around this problem.”
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Amazon still has to face the local community in Northern Virginia.
“You know I voted against the incentive package for Amazon to come here. But there’s still local approvals that need to happen. People are not too happy about being priced out of the building where they already live.”
