S1E3: Sasha Wijeyeratne on holding a "hard no" & winning the narrative “on the doors” in the fight against Amazon’s “HQ2”

A week after the 2018 midterm election, Amazon announced it would spend over $5 billion – matched by billions in tax breaks from Gov. Andrew Cuomo – to build an East Coast headquarters in a working class neighborhood in Queens, NY. Some of the city’s most influential labor unions enthusiastically supported the deal, along with what looked like most of New York’s political establishment, as did many of the neighborhood’s  working class tenants, initially. And yet over four months, a small coalition of basebuilding organizations stuck to their “hard no”, and derailed the country’s most powerful corporation. 

In this episode, we’ll hear about deciding not to negotiate (12:02), quickly mapping out their opponents and key leverage points (15:09), countering Amazon’s & Cuomo’s PR machine “on the doors” in Queens (27:17) and being willing to struggle with their own members on the issue (29:15),  how AOC’s recent primary victory influenced their targets “flipping” on Amazon (32:02), the influence of this fight on their current campaign against Innovation Queens (47:40) and learning more deeply the resonance of Bernice Johnson Reagon’s quote, “coalition isn’t home” (49:05). 

Sasha Wijeyeratne is the Executive Director of CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities. Most recently, CAAAV kicked Amazon’s headquarters out of Queens, helped pass New York’s historic 2019 rent laws, and is currently fighting for a community-led rezoning that would intervene in speculation and displacement on NYC’s waterfront. Sasha has also been part of various kinds of queer and trans organizing, racial justice organizing and political education projects, including the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance (NQAPIA), DC Desi Summer (DCDS), No New Jail Coalition in Dane County, Asians for Black Lives and hotpot!.
 
Check out a writeup on this campaign at our website and at The Forge. This campaign was run by a coalition of many neighborhood-based, city-wide, and state-wide organizations, including CAAAV - Organizing Asian Communities, Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), Central Corona, Queens Neighborhoods United, Make the Road New York, New York Communities for Change, ALIGN, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and others.

Transcript

AWG: In our last episode, we learned about an organization that got its start in early 2019, around the same time the campaign we’re about to hear about was ending. And that’s not the only connection these two stories have: the tenant organizers we’re going to hear from, with CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities, just this month sent a team to visit KC Tenants in Kansas City, to learn about their work building a citywide tenant union. But during a week the villain of this campaign, Amazon, can appear even more ubiquitous than the company already does the rest of the year, there’s clearly a lot we can learn from Caav and their coalition partners, about the four-month fight back campaign that took them by surprise just after the 2018 midterm elections. After a national search for their second headquarters, during which Democratic elected officials in cities all over the country openly courted the company for the right to be the next Seattle, Amazon announced plans to bring their HQ2 to Long Island City, a working class and immigrant neighborhood in Queens.  At the time, the world’s largest company hadn’t ever lost a fight. Yet four months later, they announced they were withdrawing from the deal, after fierce campaigning by a collection of relatively small organizations. We’ll hear about how their coalition quickly came together around the position of holding a ‘hard no’, when others were willing to compromise, how they played to their strengths and how they worked to win the battle of the story over the project in their own neighborhoods and in the national media, and how having been in this fight four years ago shapes CAAAV’s anti-gentrification work today. 

We’ll talk with Sasha Wijeyeratne from CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities, a longtime immigrant basebuilding organization in Queens. For a little geographical context, they talk about what the impact of Amazon’s plan would have been across neighborhoods in Queens, including at the Queensbridge Houses, the nation’s largest public housing community, which is in the Long Island City neighborhood in Queens, and Astoria, which is a nearby Queens neighborhood. And although you won’t hear from them in this episode, there are other local groups, like Desis Rising Up and Moving, who played equal roles in the fight alongside Sasha’s organization. We’ve linked to some of those organizations in the show notes.You can read more about their involvement in the campaign writeup on our website or at The Forge, at forgeorganizing.org. 

AWG: Sasha Wijeyeratne, thank you so much for being with us on the Craft of Campaigns today. 

SW: Yeah, thanks for having me. 

AWG: We're really excited to hear about this campaign in Queens, New York. Can you give us the trailer, if this campaign was a movie? Give us the trailer for the campaign movie.

SW: I think this trailer would open panning over Queens, and I'd say the trailer is that one of the wealthiest men in the world leading one of the wealthiest corporations, one of the most powerful corporations in the entire world, decides that a working class, immigrant borough of New York City, Queens is going to be the headquarters for his next egotistical and capitalist project. And what he doesn't know is that there's a whole crew of working class and immigrant and people of color organizations ranging from the hyper local to the citywide, pulling in different elected officials, different players in the city, labor organizations – that there's a whole crew of people ready to kick him out who are gonna win.

AWG: Wow, this movie has everything: billionaires, drama, New York immigrant communities. So let's get right into it then. And maybe we'll start with you - who are you in this story and your organization and give us a little sense of how we got to this story, how you got to this story.

SW: Yeah, so my name's Sasha Wijeyeratne. I'm the director at CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities. We organize working class Asian immigrants in Manhattan’s Chinatown, and more relevant for this story in Western Queens. At the time, we organized Asian immigrants in the Queensbridge Houses, which is the biggest public housing complex in the entire country and in all of New York City.

And that was directly next to the proposed Amazon headquarters, HQ2 site. And a little bit about me: I actually started at CAAAV I think about three weeks before the decision was made that Amazon had chosen Long Island City as one of the sites for a second headquarters.

AWG: Wow. So you must have been ready. You were like, I'm gonna come in, we're gonna take on the largest corporation in the world. This is gonna be great!

SW: Yeah, guess I didn’t know what I was signing up for, but then it happened, and it was a great way to learn how to be at this organization. [laughs]

AWG: Were you new to New York? You were totally new to the organization, to New York, to everything?

SW: I was new to the organization and new to the city. So really this campaign was my introduction to all of the incredible complications and nuances of the organizing landscape and ecosystem of New York City. It was a great introduction!

AWG: I'll bet. How did you get to New York and the organization? Where did you just come from right before this so we know?

SW: Yeah, I had been living in Los Angeles before that. I grew up in the suburbs of LA, and had moved back there. I had been asked to apply to, and to become, the ED at CAAAV. I had no intention of ever being an ED. They all seemed really stressed. It seemed really miserable. I was like, so glad other people do it. I had no desire to do that. And I had been really clear with folks that I didn't grow up in New York City. I had spent some time here. I had been part of different organizing projects that were based here, but had never actually lived in the city.

And despite that, I had gotten a really clear and compelling ask from CAAAV staff and member leaders to actually come and join the team. And so yeah, in the middle of October I came to New York City and became a part of CAAAV, and in early November we got launched into this site.

AWG: Welcome! Great. And, and you all weren't the only ones I know. So there are other characters on – I dunno if we would call us the left Avengers or whoever in this superhero story, but can you set the stage? So we have Amazon and Jeff Bezos and CAAAV and who else is in the mix as characters in this story we're about to hear?

SW: We have Jeff Bezos, we have Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio. Governor, Mayor of New York State and City. The Economic Development Corporation at the city level, at the state level. So some of the kind of internal inner workings. We have a number of politicians: Andrea Stewart-Cousins, Mike Gianaris, Jimmy Van Bramer. Again, local to the state level politicians. And then we have a whole bunch of community organizations, a lot of them based in Queens. So CAAAV,  based in public housing in Western Queens. We have DRUM - Desis Rising Up & Moving. We have Central Corona, Queens Neighborhoods United, and a whole cast of other hyper-local Queens, neighborhood based organizations.

And we also have organizations that span the city. So Make the Road, New York Communities for Change, ALIGN. I really should’ve prepped a whole list before because now I'm gonna forget people and get into trouble [laughs]. But there were a whole set of organizations that ranged from the hyper-local to citywide to even statewide that were part of this fight.

AWG: Well, just like the Academy Awards, hopefully they'll be graceful with you. When would you start this story? Would it be 2018? When and where would you start?

SW: We really joined in 2018, once the announcement – once the announcement came out, once Amazon had decided that Long Island City would be one of the HQ2 sites. There are other parts of the coalition that had been organizing earlier on, both kind of earlier in the announcement that Amazon was looking for a second headquarters, and that had also been organizing Amazon workers. So for us, the story starts in 2018. But, you know, I wanna acknowledge that there was work happening, and organizing happening before that. 

AWG: Right, because in 2017 the city had submitted its bid to be HQ2, and then early, early 2018, like January 2018, Amazon said “here are all the finalists, the 20 finalists”. And then November was when you all were selected. So you joined CAAAV on staff in October, I assume, and then November, now there’s a real fight.

Can you tell us a little bit - what were the implications of being Amazon’s second headquarters? What did that mean to you all and to public housing residents? What did you feel like this might do?

SW: Yeah. So we are first and foremost in a lot of ways a housing organization. We're an Asian organization, but we are also really at this moment in time, a tenant organization. 

There were multiple things that were at stake with Amazon coming to New York City. But first and foremost for us were the gentrification impacts. And so, you know, we talked to folks in Seattle especially about what it meant to have Amazon be based there, and how the neighborhood had changed, what the gentrification impacts were, who had been displaced, how quickly it had happened. And we knew that that was what was at stake in Queens, and in New York City as a whole. 

The biggest thing that we were afraid of and fighting against was having this big headquarters move and immediately having rents all around Long Island City, just skyrocket. And even though Amazon never actually moved their headquarters, that still happened. So we heard stories of, for instance, a commercial building, with a commercial tenant telling their tenant, “actually, we're not gonna renew your lease for this little bodega because we can get Chipotle money now. Amazon's coming”. And so we knew that that's what was going to happen to tenants, to small businesses, to all kinds of people around the area.

And then the second piece was that Amazon has terrible labor practices and we knew that we didn't want those terrible labor practices to be making their inroads into Queens, even though they already exist here.

AWG: And so right away, you all are not happy about this and not even in the way – it sounds like – that “well, we could negotiate maybe and get a development that's less bad than if we didn't have a community benefits agreement or something else that would mitigate the impacts”. Is that right? And how did the coalition decide to just outright oppose Amazon coming versus a soft opposition or with caveats kind of opposition?

SW: Yeah, that was a hard decision to make. Not a hard decision to make morally, but a hard decision to make strategically, about what was actually possible to win. And what really decided that for us – or the reason that we decided to just say it's a hard no, we’re not saying “no if you do those things, like no, but if you these things we’ll say yes” – was knowing really around gentrification impacts, right, that Amazon is a massive company. Its headquarters is going to be a massive headquarters and the people who come to work there are going to be at an income level that's completely disproportionate to who currently lives in Western Queens. Long Island City is actually quite gentrified and so that's a little more complicated, but right next door is the Queensbridge houses, is public housing.

There are all of these neighborhoods that are still very working class, very immigrant, and we knew that there were no amount of benefits that would stop that displacement. And so it would've been maybe different if we had been able to say, “Okay, if these people come here, the impacts will be limited to these four blocks and everybody else would get to keep living their lives the way that we have been.” But that's not true, and that's never true when a corporation like Amazon brings that level of gentrification into a neighborhood. 

And so we said, there's no point. We don't want benefits that still mean our people get pushed out beyond Jamaica, that still get pushed out miles and miles away from the places that they call home, from the cultural centers, from the communities, from the places that they actually want to and deserve to live.

There was just no CBA that would stop the displacement. And that's historically not what CBAs have done. Right. We've also seen that in New York, that other development projects that have come with CBAs – sure there have been some crumbs here and there, but for the most part, all of the displacement has still happened. There's just these supposed benefits that hardly anyone actually gets to experience because they've all been pushed out. And the scale was just so much bigger with a corporation like Amazon.

AWG: Sounds like you had an assessment. We don't know if we can win this versus we might be able to – more likely to win a negotiated settlement or something that mitigates harm but isn't keeping Amazon out.

What was the power mapping or power analysis, or did you have one at that point about thinking through, “Well, we think we can, or we guess we can, win this. Or we have a shot at winning this because we can move these pillars of power, these institutions, this is who the deciders are”. Can you take us through that part of the thinking?

SW: I will admit at the beginning, I don't think we had that. And so at the beginning it really was an assessment, I think, that was grounded, right? That even if we fight this really hard and lose, fighting this to get benefits will mean that our people are no longer here. And it's not just our people, right? It's whole organizations that are based in - whose bases are in Western Queens. So many of the grassroots organizations, the local ones. Our assessment was that within the next 10 years, maybe less, those organizations would actually cease to exist. Because our memberships would've all been entirely pushed out.

And so at the beginning, we didn't necessarily do a really in depth power analysis and a power map and decide, “Oh yes, we have the power to move these, these people here and move these pillars here, and therefore we can afford to say absolutely not”. We said it because it didn't feel like there was any other option. Having any kind of compromise was actually – the compromise was our displacement and that was the thing that we were fighting. 

That said, we very quickly did in fact develop the power map and some of what we went through on that power map...part of it was who were the players, right? Who were the different electeds? Who were the different players within Amazon, the different players within the city and state? Who were the big decision makers about whether or not Amazon was going to be able to move here? Who had invited them in? Who were the people who could vote yes or no at different stages on different pieces of this project. You know, what were the different leverage points or opportunities with some of the city council hearings, some of the state hearings?

And then we also mapped some of our own communities. What power we had over electeds and also over Amazon's image. And that actually became a big piece of our power analysis, was that at the time, Amazon really cared about their own public perception, and that was a part of Amazon's brand, like of Amazon's marketing. And so the sort of image and branding of Amazon became a leverage point for us. 

There are also a number of other organizations that were fighting Amazon, right? So we also kind of mapped out, what are the worker fights that are happening, what are the fights that are happening around immigration and Palantir? What are the fights that are happening around surveillance and web services? What are the fights that are happening around consumerism, boycotts, worker fights, right? 

Amazon's also so multifaceted that we did try to map, and I don't think we did it super in depth, but did map a little bit, what are all of the other fronts that Amazon is fighting on and how could those – where can we help each other? Either just knowing that it's happening, but also are there actual places where we could coalesce power across some of these different sites?

AWG: Makes a lot of sense that you all were planning from or leading from a sense of, “Well, we know we have to do everything we can to stop this company, even if we don't know exactly how we're gonna do that”. But it sounds like quickly you settled on - Well, their public image is where they have the most liability, where they have their, maybe the most vulnerable or the weakest in terms of something we can impact that they care about.

And that could be enough, who knows, to get them to withdraw if they feel like their image could get hurt enough in an irreparable way. And then my understanding is, and you all started having protests within like a week of this announcement happening. And had figured out, well, there's some leverage in terms of a city permitting process. There might be some in terms of a state permitting process. Eventually it sounds like you all settled in that first month or so on some idea of, here are the places where we can maybe get them blocked, if we can build the kind of political will we need. Can you take us through like, what did you all learn or what did you all guess about those?

SW: So those were the two big vulnerabilities that we identified early on and that I think they were actually a little bit more even almost. So one big vulnerability was, yes, Amazon really cares about their image and they are being dragged through the mud very publicly in international media through this site, and that is not good for them. And that the way that Amazon was coming to New York was through invitation from elected officials. And at the time there was actually a pretty solid and aligned block of elected officials, leaning from electeds who claimed to be more left leaning to more centrist, there was a strong degree of unity.

And so the other piece was beginning to break apart, that with the hopes and, and the intention, like a strategy of being able to actually get to some of the more powerful players in that block to actually peel them away from Cuomo, who was kind of the pillar supporting and, and trying to get Amazon to come to the state.

And so I think those were kind of the two biggest vulnerabilities. There was a third around just kind of the perception of Amazon locally. Right, so, so Amazon had an advisory council. I forget exactly what the name of it was - but that included a large number of the tenant associations of the public housing complexes directly next door. And so a third vulnerability was actually beginning to peel away the veneer of community support, right? Showing, demonstrating that, sure, maybe the singular person who's a president of the TA supports, but their membership, like the tenants across their entire building, do not agree with their singular TA leader. I think those were the three big buckets.

AWG: And of those, was there one that you felt like, if they don't get this specific authorization from a state or a city agency, that's what will keep them from coming? Was there anything like that, or it just felt like we've gotta try to hurt them on these three different tracks and see if they all just kind of hopefully will cause their house of cards of public support to fall away?

SW: Yeah. Well, I would say that they were, those buckets were in dialectical relationship with each other. Right. And so, interrupting the community support and kind of turning the tide around whether local leadership, local communities were saying yes, we support -  That was helpful in moving some of the electeds, particularly the electeds that actually had bases in those districts.

And I think similarly, some of the attack on Amazon's public image. Especially when that was happening at city council hearings or at other city based or state based hearings. I think that was also helpful in moving both community members and also the electeds. And ultimately the choke point that we landed on in kind of the final stages of the campaign was more through the elected officials - that there were particular subsidies that Amazon actually needed to be granted in order for them to move within the kind of confines of the deal as it existed.

That ended up being  one of the biggest actually choke points, was taking away those subsidies and therefore forcing Amazon to make a hard choice, which eventually you know, what they chose was to leave.

AWG: Yeah. So I think we've got the characters and we've got some of the leverage points you all identified and some of the just pressure points that you were gonna try. Do we think we have enough leverage? Do we think this is gonna be sensitive enough for them? We're gonna try to peel away the veneer of community support. We're gonna go after their political support. And , this all happened in four months. 

SW: Uh huh.

AWG: Which is really fast. So this is fascinating because in many ways it's a rapid response. Like even though this has been a company that has had some persistent organizing around the labor conditions, around other things in New York, but now we have a reason to respond quickly in order to keep them from kind of digging in in terms of their getting the kind of political commitment to Amazon coming and reshaping your many communities - trying to keep  that from happening and doing that as quickly as possible, and a whole lot of organizations all trying to do that at the same time. And I'm assuming playing different roles with slightly different constituencies and maybe different targets.

So if there were like two or three acts of this movie from November 2018 to February 2019. What do you say the first one was? What's the sequence like from the inside, from your perspective? 

SW: Yeah, it's a good question. I would say act one is, you know, the announcement happens. We're assessing the terrain and we're assembling our forces. In the first act, Amazon makes the announcement, there is an instant response within maybe a few days, maybe a week. There's a big meeting, right, that AOC is at and a number of community organizations are at. And there's a very clear sense of opposition, but no clear plan as to how all of the forces present will actually assemble  and what line will hold.

So I think the first act is really just the announcement, beginning to assess the train and beginning to assess for us, beginning to actually assess the other courses, right? Cause we were really clear from the beginning that our line would be hell no and no, no matter what. And we were really clear that that was not the natural line that everybody gathered would take. So that, I would say it was really the first act. 

AWG: When you say we, which specific coalition members? And were there others sort of in the orbit who you thought, No, they're gonna take a different line, but we need to stick with this one?

SW: Yeah. When I say we, I mean CAAAV and then some of the people that we had the closest relationships with outside of this campaign. Right? So Drum, JFREJ: Jews For Racial & Economic Justice, Queens Neighborhoods United, a lot of the more local Queens organizations or just organizations that we had worked with really closely in the past, where we were pretty sure what political line they were going to be inclined to hold. And what was less clear to us, and especially to me, as somebody who was new to New York, I wasn't as sure, and we weren't as sure where everybody else would land. And so that was really, I think, like I said before, that was a key part of the first [laughs] the first act is really trying to understand the landscape, both of our opposition, but also of the people who we hope will become our allies.

The second act, act two, I think is really trying to turn the narrative. So turn the narrative tide; that's both taking on and tackling Amazon's public image, trying to shame Amazon in the press locally, nationally, internationally, trying to make what in some ways was a hyper local fight, a national or international one, right? We talked to folks in Berlin, we talked to folks in Seattle, we talked to people in all these other places that were also fighting Amazon and made it clear that this fight was a microcosm of something much bigger having to do with this corporation. So that's one piece. 

And the other piece of it is that, you know, there were many people in our communities that thought this was a good idea because they're getting tons of literature, tons of advertisements from Amazon saying, “These are gonna be good jobs.  You're gonna have great jobs either at a warehouse or as security or in construction”. You know, they're sort of promising you'll be able to work at the headquarters, but I think a lot of our people saw through that. But that you'll have all these other good jobs and that it's a really worthwhile investment in your community for Amazon to come here, obviously without any talk of all of the negative impacts, right? All of the violence that would then also come with having a place like Amazon move in.

And so the other part of act two is really going and talking with our communities, and that's talking with our membership. We had debates within our membership about whether or not we should be part of this campaign, and they were intense debates because there were people who, at least in the beginning, really held the position of like, “We need these jobs. There aren't enough good jobs here. I want my kids to have good jobs. These are good jobs. We should bring them”. 

And so, you know, within our own membership, I know other organizations had those kinds of debates in our membership. I know folks were training members around how to actually combat the misinformation that's coming from other members within working class and immigrant communities.

And then we also held a – we had a long, very long and very effective day where we door knocked as much as we possibly could of the Queensbridge Houses. Again, the biggest public housing complex in the country.  I think we knocked over a thousand doors that day amongst our coalition. And on each door we told people, “Hey, we've heard Amazon's coming. What do you think?” Heard people's responses and struggled with people around whether or not this was really a good idea. And by the time we finished, over 75% of people had said, “Yeah, okay. Yes, we agree. We really don't think Amazon should come here”.

And a lot of those people didn't think that at the top of our conversation. Right. It was through the struggle, through the education on the doors, through the conversation that people actually moved to “Oh yeah, yeah. Like that's right. That is what happens when some giant corporation comes. That is how gentrification works. That is who gets pushed out and no that's not the kind of neighborhood or future that we want”. 

And so I think  the second act or second chapter was really about that. Like winning the narrative fight. And that's not just kind of the story of it, right? Like it's yes, winning the public story, but also winning the narrative on the doors. Actually winning in our communities, the story of what it, what a corporation like Amazon, moving to your neighborhood, into your home actually means. 

AWG: Well, it sounds like putting out an alternate vision, an alternate future than the one Amazon was selling, which is “Everyone's gonna have better jobs, better lives, faster commerce deliveries”, and you're saying, “No, we won't be here. Like there will people who might enjoy that, but we won't be part of that”. And really trying to compete with them and win people over that there is a possible dystopian future here if we don't do something. 

Is that ultimately what you mean? Like is that what the 75% of, I assume not just people on the doors, but maybe even in your membership. Did they ended up getting persuaded by that or was it something else? 

SW: Yeah, I think it was by that. And dystopia is right, like painting the picture of the dystopia and helping people see through the propaganda, right? Like actually Amazon is lying to you. Or at least they're telling you a very intentional quarter truth. And supporting people to be able to actually see through that, which, you know, a ton of money went into that. It was very convincing. It was extremely compelling. 

And there were people who had been chosen by Amazon to be kind of the local trusted messengers, right? So you have folks hearing that from people who look like them, from people who are their neighbors, from people who they trust. Cutting through that and getting to the truth of what was actually happening was very much a part of the second act. 

AWG: So you sort of win the battle of the story or of what this means for our future with your base and your membership. And you can tell ‘cause you can count. 75% of people on the doors agree with us by the end of the conversation? Okay, cool. I think we're headed in the right direction. 

But then you have city elected officials, state elected officials. You have also just the broader media environment, what story reporters are repeating or telling, and they're not going to Berlin and Seattle to ask, “Hey, what happened when Amazon came in here and turned things upside down” like you all are.

So I'm curious – I noticed in an account of this story that, even as soon as at the first press conference you all held in November, there were city council members who had been for the deal and then flipped immediately before. And so I'm curious about if you could take us through into this act too, so we got the internal battle of the story and like the internal narrative that we're winning over.

At what point did you know, or start to see, that it was starting to shift – That more and more elected officials at different levels or city and state, employees, reporters, the story that's getting told is starting to shift and also the pillars of power starting to line up differently based on what you all are doing?

SW: Yeah, totally. So I  would call that the third act. I think that moves us into act three, which is the flipping of elected officials. We're seeing power respond to pressure, which in this case was elected.

And I think there's a couple of things happening here. One is that we are beginning to win some of this narrative in media with our own people, our own communities, with community organizations across the city about what Amazon means, and beginning to build a consensus that this is bad for our people, for our city, for the future of Queens.

And at the same time, there's also a lot of fear in elected officials about being primaried from the left. Because AOCs victory is still a lesson that people, that electeds in New York are learning from. And so the combination of those two things meant that at different stages, different elected officials were willing to flip to be on our side.

And I think at the beginning it was mostly smaller local electeds who had signed on to a letter telling Amazon, like inviting Amazon, “Please come, we want you here.” Who then flipped to standing with us at a press conference and saying, “Actually, we've heard from community and this is no longer a good idea”. I mean, they may or may not have said it, but that's why they flipped. And then slowly as we're building pressure, as we're winning some of the media and the story, as we're disrupting city council hearings or other kinds of public hearings that are focused on electeds, more and more electeds are starting to flip and to move to be with us.

And to give credit where it's due, a number of organizations who have those relationships are leveraging their relationships and making it clear that this is actually a fight that they're not going to budge on, and that therefore the electeds need to come and stand with us.

And then we have electeds organizing each other a little bit too. But I think that's kind of – in the third act, we start to see the pressure that we're applying based on the ground, based in people power, based in and from the grassroots – beginning to see that actually move up and actually being able to move some of the people at the top of those pillars.

AWG: And were there specific things that you all did that you think made that flipping more possible, or gave them cover, or were more motivational? ‘Cause I noticed that you all did always flood the zone, if you will. Whenever the city council had a hearing on this, or there was any kind of public hearing – wasn't just city council, there were hearings about tax breaks – And so obviously you all would show up when that happened. 

And I'm curious about how you saw the Dominoes fall. ‘Cause you ended up having to convince state assembly members, state senate members. Eventually the majority leader of the state Senate ended up taking what looks like a really dramatic step that was especially threatening the Amazon. Was it in your mind, just a matter of “Well enough city council members caved to their very local opposition that then state reps kind of had the same political calculus”, or what do you think ended up sort of leading all the way to the state Senate majority leader turning on Amazon?

SW: Yeah. A couple of things. So, kind of going back to sort of the second act, if you will, in this metaphor, 

One is that I think we tried to make it really toxic to support Amazon. We made it into a polarizing fight, and tried to draw a really clear kind of black or white line. There was no like, “Oh I support communities, but I also kind of support this for these reasons.” It was either you support communities and you kick Amazon out, or you support Amazon and you betray the rest of us. And I think that that – especially for electives that again, are trying to avoid being primaried from the left – that polarization really helped and forced people to actually pick a side.

I think the other thing that really helped is that the Deputy Majority Leader, Gianaris, was actually our elected. He was our district and a number of other organizations had members in his district, and so it also really helped that it was actually his direct constituents, who could get him elected or not in the future, who were the most vocal opposition to Amazon. And so I think that also helped, in particular for him, for Jimmy Van Bramer, like some of the electeds that were very tied to the district. I think that really helped. It was actually a stroke of luck that Gianaris was so high up and was also so vocal. I think it would've been a much harder fight. Not saying that we would've lost it, but I think it would've been a much harder fight if he had been based somewhere else, that had no direct connection to constituents in Western Queens. 

AWG: And maybe if he hadn't also been geographically as close to AOCs district.

SW: Yes.

AWG: And having felt the reverberation of that primary. So it's interesting that you're drawing these connections of like, that movement win earlier in the year in that primary. And then she literally was just elected right before Amazon HQ was announced. And he wasn't initially a huge opponent of the deal, but by act two you all have him now being a big opponent of the deal, of the HQ2 subsidy deal.

And then it looks to me like there's this fascinating two week period where act three really is kind of – a lot of the things that you all do are sandwiched in there, leading up to heartbreak for Amazon around Valentine's Day. Does it start then when the majority leader nominates Michael Gianaris, your representative, to the Public Authorities Control Board? Or how would you say act three really wraps up?

SW: That was one of the key critical moments, was nominating somebody who had made his opposition to Amazon extremely vocal. You know, he had come the day that we door knocked all of Queens – not all at all, but that we had a master knock from the Queensbridge, right? He had shown up in different moments and made his opposition very clear. I think that his appointment to the PACB was really critical, and that may be the conclusion to act three. 

AWG: And the Public Authorities Control Board, the PACB – maybe could you say what this meant? That in February 2019, now there's a big opponent on this obscure state board. What does it have to do with Amazon?

SW: From what I recall, PACB had some voting authority over the subsidies that Amazon was receiving, and part of the deal was Amazon getting access to state subsidies. And that's actually – that is part of what we had fought really hard, right? Was that Amazon… it wasn't only that Amazon was coming to the city and all the displacement impacts, it was that Amazon was getting a massive amount, a massive investment of public funds, that could have obviously been spent in better ways, right? Whenever we fight, we're told, “Oh, there's no money. Oh, we can't afford this. We're so sorry. We can't meet your basic human needs. There's no money for that.” But there were millions of dollars available to bring Amazon to New York, and the PACB, I believe, had some voting and had some control or authority over some of those public subsidies.

AWG: So that's gonna hurt if they get officially voted against. So what else would you say? What else happens? What's important to know about the end of the third act in this timeline? 

SW: I do think Gianaris’s appointment to the PACB was a massive blow. And then a number of other electeds who had either formerly been silent or had been aligned came out really publicly against Cuomo and against Amazon. And I do think in the way that we organize at CAAAV and I think the way a lot of base building grassroots organizations organize, we try not to overemphasize elected officials. We try to be clear that, actually, our understanding of power is that organized people is one of the core tenants of power. And that as local, everyday working class people, we have a lot of power. And I one hundred percent believe that's true. And I think that that is also demonstrated in this fight, right? That we organized massive numbers of people to join us and to join an opposition, to be leading the opposition against Amazon.

And, a lot of the decision, a lot of the decision points in this campaign and a lot of the decisions about whether or not Amazon could come here, either about the headquarters, about the subsidies, right? There were all of these decision points that were really made by elected officials, and so some of the biggest turning points were having had the people power to actually move the electeds to take the right stance and to take a stance against Cuomo. 

Who was notorious, and eventually this all came to light. And for a variety of reasons, Cuomo was kicked out of office. But Cuomo was known for being a particularly vitriolic and abusive person in power. And so actually it was hard to get people to stand up against him. But I do think a lot of the concluding moments in act three are in these different elected officials actually choosing to be on the no Amazon side.

AWG: That's true. We hadn't talked about this, but at the time Cuomo was incredibly powerful. More so, in a lot of ways, than Amazon, as far as New York politics goes. So you were asking people not just to stand with you and against Amazon, but against him. Someone who demonstrated, you know, he was willing to do all kinds of abusive, you know, retaliatory things to his political opponents, in addition to women, that we found out later.

So you all win. Tell us about the day that Amazon announced they were withdrawing their bid. What was that like for you all? 

SW: It was incredible. I don't think any of us thought it would be the short of a fight. You know, it ended on Valentine's Day also, that was fun. It was nice to break Jeff Bezos's heart on Valentine's Day. That was a great time. But I think for a lot of us it was fast. And to be honest, it was both surprising that it was so fast and it felt a little faster than we were ready for.

So we’d begun to start thinking about what happens next. And particularly we had done all of this learning with organizers and staff, but also with our membership about how the subsidies work, how state money works, how the state economy works. And we were trying to think through what happened after this fight.

And honestly, we won a little sooner than was ideal, because we hadn't quite set the stage for what we wanted to do after and what this victory would propel us into. And because we weren't ready, we actually missed the moment. And we weren't able to lead a really powerful campaign. The win wasn't actually a launch into a next campaign.

That said it was also an incredible win. And it was really fun, you know. We held a big dance party in Queens outside in February – it was freezing – to celebrate with members, with community members in this incredibly diverse and beautiful borough, to celebrate the win of our people and of our neighborhoods against this giant behemoth corporation. And it was a really beautiful celebration. 

AWG: Sounds like it. And I know you said, so there's some in there some like, “Oh, we wish we had been ready to kind of use the momentum more. Cuz we thought we would have more time to build that up into another campaign.” But can you give us a sense of other ripples that you've noticed since then? Whether it's we got a lot sharper at power analysis or we had this kind of impact, this kind of connection, new connection with our base in Queensbridge. What other ripples have you noticed since then?

SW: Yeah. I think one big ripple was like the transformation in people and organizations and communities when you take on an impossible target and win. When I started at CAAAV and told people that we were taking on this site – for instance, funders – there were people who said, “Are you sure? You just started, you really want your first big campaign to be this massive loss? Like you're going off against Amazon, you're gonna get crushed. Is that really how you wanna start your time at CAAAV?”

I think that it gave us the backing to say, “We know how to take on incredibly powerful targets. We know how to take on targets that we have absolutely no business winning and to still win. On the basis of really sharp strategy and really good power analysis and really strong base building, we can actually win these impossible fights.” 

And I think it has been both organizationally, you know – it is actually hard to internalize because your next impossible target doesn't feel any less impossible just because you beat the last impossible target. But it's been a good organizational lesson, and I think also a good lesson across the city that actually we can win impossible battles. 

And I think related to that is it's made us more willing – and I think we've seen other electives or other organizations also be more willing – to hold a hard no in fights like this. Where the kind of common logic is that you get as much as you can, but you allow the massive development to happen, and you just get as good of a CBA or a community benefits agreement as you can. It has allowed us to hold a line of a hard no. And so there's another project in Astoria called Innovation Queens that we're currently fighting, you know, one neighborhood over from HQ2. And we have been really clear in having a very hard no against the project and so has our council member. 

And so I think that's been another ripple effect, is being able to hold that kind of hard line. Because it's not just an ideological or a moral position, it actually can be a winnable one based on your conditions and the power map.

AWG: Based on your conditions and the power map. It’s a great caveat slash thing to remember as organizers leading people into battle. Just being honest about where we think we have that and when we don't. 

And so you already got us into a few of the lessons, and a few of the things that have become lessons since then, or hindsight's 20/20. “Oh, I think we learned that then about the hard no. And here's how we're applying it now.” Curious about if there are a few others, could be in that vein or different, that especially to you this year or in this movement moment that we are in or you all are in or Queens, feel like “Here's another thing that I think that I want us to internalize more of, or I think we should be when we wage campaigns doing more of, anything like that”. 

SW: This was a hard fight and it's a fight that by all metrics at the very beginning of it, we should have lost. And we didn't. And we won, and it was incredible.

And it's much easier to win an oppositional fight like this than to win a fight that actually re-envisions economic development in the city or state. And so that's been one of the major lessons, and I think we've seen that play out again and again, that it's much easier to say and to kick out the things that you don't want in your neighborhood or in your city than it is to actually transform the way that cities or states work. Whether that's through governing power, whether that's through like massive economic reforms, whatever it is, that's actually much harder.

That's part of why we weren't able to use this as a launching pad. Part of it was that we weren't ready – it had been a four month campaign, we hadn't had the time to actually build out a future vision. But part of it was also that that was much harder and it was much harder to align ourselves around. It was much harder to actually envision and implement, and I think we've seen it in our own local work. Where as CAAAV, we're in this massive fight against innovation queens that's trying to stop their rezoning, right? Trying to stop their massive development from coming and taking over our neighborhood. And knock on wood, right now, we're winning that fight. And it's been hard in the ways that organizing is always hard, but we've been able to mobilize and build a massive base around that. 

In Chinatown, we're trying to pass our own rezoning plan. So we are trying to actually be the ones who  decide what gets built and what percentage is affordable housing and how tall can it be and who can be here. And that fight has been so hard and in a lot of ways that's a fight that makes a lot of sense, right? It's pushing our own actual vision, it would give us a lot of power over and in our own neighborhoods. But even the baseball thing around that is so much harder than a fight that's against a really clear and concise and individual target. So I think that's one big lesson from this. 

And the lesson that I think we're still trying to figure out is, when you get those fights that are about a really hard no that have a really clear villain and a really clear target – to actually prep and make sure that you're ready to pivot those into what you really want, and into the more visionary and long term and future fight, knowing that it will still most likely be harder.

And I think the second lesson is, I think this is a Bernice Johnson Reagon quote, that “coalition isn't home”. The coalition that we assembled for this fight was incredible. It's honestly one of the best experiences I have had working in coalition. Which often are painful and really hard, and it was a great coalition because we all had different roles. We built a lot of trust, we built a lot of alignment. We struggled when we needed to, but we had different roles and we played them. So the people who could move the electeds moved the electeds, the people who could build a base that was local – build a base that actually had the most say, that had both moral and political power over electeds, over Amazon. – we built that base. The people who were really good at media, at narrative, at developing beautiful images of the cultural work. They did that. And so everybody – and there are tons of other roles, but people played their roles really well and played to their. 

And at the end of the campaign, the coalition ended, or at least – maybe it didn't fully end, but a number of us actually ended up leaving and that was the right move. It had been beautiful and powerful, but we weren't in a unifying fight anymore. And we still have relationships, we’ll still throw down for each other when needed or asked, but we don't actually need to still be fighting together just because we fought well together if that's actually not what our current conditions or the current assessment of power needs. It was hard to leave and I think we stayed a little bit longer than we should have because we wanted something else to be possible because it had been a really good fight in coalition. But that was another good lesson, that actually coalitions aren't meant to be home. They're not meant to be permanent actually. Other formations are meant to be long term and permanent, but not a campaign coalition. So closing the coalition when it needed to be closed.

AGW: It sounds like then you all tried to figure out as a coalition,  what's our next campaign as a coalition, whether it's against Amazon or something else?

SW: So CAAAV and a number of other organizations were trying to move the coalition into taking on more of the – kind of economic development. How does economic development work? What interventions can we actually make and how the state allocates and distributes money, and how resourcing works at the level of the state, but it actually didn't make sense. Like it wasn't the right group of people or it wasn't the right time for that group of people to take on that work.

And different organizations had different priorities that made sense, that meant that actually we didn't need to be – that it didn't actually make sense for us to be working together. So on our end, there were, there was still work going on around organizing Amazon workers and we support that, but we don't do that. And it didn't make sense for us to try to pivot into organizing Amazon workers when that's not who our base has been, and it didn't make sense for that to be our base in the near future. 

AWG: So it sounds like it was just helpful to regroup and reenter around what is home, what is our lane, and follow that north star. That feels also relevant to a lot of organizers I'm in relationship with. And a lot of formations. A lot of sectors today. 

I know our time is wrapping up right now. Is there one other offering? It could be in this vein, of a thing that I want us to struggle with more or that – or to bring more attention, awareness to, or a wish that I have for us as organizers, as base builders, as campaigners. Is there another offering like that that you'd like to offer as we wrap up?

SW: Yeah, I think…one of the most powerful things about this campaign was feeling a glimpse of what it could look like to have really clear left strategy, and to have a vision of the world that we need and the vision of the world that we deserve. And this was not a path of how to get to that world, but how to win one major campaign on the way there.There were moments – I don't think that we actually had that whole left strategy or that whole road to get there, but there were moments where you could glimpse what might be possible if we did. And those were some of the most powerful moments of the campaign. What it looked like to have a really strong united front in a city. What it looked like to have a really clear target and a really clear vision of what we wanted our neighborhoods to look like and what the path was to get.

And I think I just – I wish for that at a larger scale, at a scale that's bigger than what we had at this campaign. I wish for that at a national or international level, and I wish for more of us to have those moments. Because there's something that just can't be replaced about feeling like you are moving towards a vision. That your strategy is clear, that the tactics line up, that the base you’re organizing lines up, that they're hitting the right choke points. That kind of synergy is really beautiful and I wish that more for us at CAAAV and more for anybody else who ever listens to this podcast.

AWG: And let it be so.

SW: [laughs] And let it be so.

AWG:  I think if we invoke enough ancestors, but also enough of us in the present, maybe we can make these wishes come true for ourselves. 

Sasha, thank you so much for your time, your storytelling, your wisdom. Really appreciate it.