> Amazon executives met two weeks ago with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in the governor’s Manhattan office, said one of the people briefed on the process, adding that the state had offered potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies
> “I am doing everything I can,” Governor Cuomo told reporters when asked Monday about the state’s efforts to lure the company. “We have a great incentive package,” he said.
> “I’ll change my name to Amazon Cuomo if that’s what it takes,” Governor Cuomo said. “Because it would be a great economic boost.”
If these quotes are truly representative of Cuomo's attitude towards Amazon, that's an incredible amount of pandering for the governor of the state containing New York City to be doing. Isn't large amounts of incentives for Amazon essentially a trickle-down economics policy? Interesting to see that Cuomo, ostensibly a progressive, would be for such a thing.
> that's an incredible amount of pandering for the governor of the state containing New York City to be doing
Pandering is free.
I imagine infrastructure-based incentives will be popular in New York. Large tenants make big infrastructure possible. That enables further density, which means more jobs, more municipal budget and more demand for local commerce. Turning Amazon's HQ2 into the catalyst for building out Western Brooklyn and LIC infrastructure isn't a bad trade for the city. (Tax credits would be tone deaf, but if done in a budget-neutral manner could be okay.)
New York City is a commercial centre. Pragmatism wins votes.
>"I imagine infrastructure-based incentives will be popular in New York. Large tenants make big infrastructure possible. That enables further density, which means more jobs, more municipal budget and more demand for local commerce. Turning Amazon's HQ2 into the catalyst for building out Western Brooklyn and LIC infrastructure isn't a bad trade for the city"
What infrastructure is that exactly?
Long Island City and Greenpoint/Williamsburg have already been absurdly built up by developers over the last two decades.
It's hard to believe an influx of new tens of thousands of individuals to fill vacancies at Amazon is going to produce new train tunnels under the East River or new bridges over it. NYC already has large tenants - Google, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Verizon etc, and the city's infrastructure woes have worsened despite their presence.
I would also imagine that much of the gain in the local tax coffers by the additional work force will be offset by whatever tax deals the city and states extends to Amazon.
Indeed. Many people will say dropping a huge Amazon campus in Queens will adversely effect the character of the city, and exacerbate many of its issues.
I don't necessarily disagree with them, and if it was up to me, I'd rather Amazon land in Dallas that probably needs the jobs more.
However, this will be an objectively good thing for NYC as a center of commerce, and help establish it as a tech hub at a time its local job market isn't doing all too well.
Moreover, I doubt Amazon will game the system so excessively that it won't end up paying in taxes and investment and influx of business and salaries much more than it will receive in tax breaks.
It's unlikely they'll game the system so badly because it's not wise to screw the municipal authorities that can make your life miserable.
> Interesting to see that Cuomo, ostensibly a progressive, would be for such a thing.
Cuomo literally engineered a Republican majority in the state senate, even though the Democrats had been elected to the majority, so that he wouldn't be pressured to sign overly-progressive legislation before his 2020 run.
I would love for Amazon to actually take him up on this. It would be an great illustration for all time of politicians being in the back pockets of corporations.
I think we should tease all politicians offering tax breaks to corporations that they might as well say their first name is "Amazon".
I think we should have a federal legislation, (allowed under the interstate commerce clause), banning the current race to the bottom for states and municipalities to offer tax breaks to corporations. Sure we'd have to still deal with companies leaving the US but the leverage is different there and it'd be a start. Am I wrong?
Consider that if Microsoft had put an office in the DC area in the mid 1990s we would all be shopping at some e-commerce behemoth owned by Microsoft.
The reality is that for a company like Amazon, regulatory risk is the biggest existential threat to the company's future, and the only way to fight regulatory risk is through extensive lobbying and various legal forms of bribery that involve lots of face time with powerful officials.
I think you're right. Other commenters are forgetting that there's a lot of soft power in DC.
Yes, employing lobbyists is one way to flex your muscle in DC. But owning a newspaper and employing lots of people in the area is another way.
Imagine you're a mid-level bureaucrat facing a routine decision that could help or hurt Amazon. Now imagine that your spouse works at The Washington Post, your college-aged daughter is an intern at Amazon, and a local non-profit you care about just got a donation from Bezos. You can imagine how that could perhaps sway your decision.
It doesn't hurt that there's a lot of government work being done in the area, especially in defense, at a time Amazon is becoming a major contractor for the US government.
The best hedge against regulatory risk wouldn't be jobs in DC, but jobs that turn a light red state purple, or a purple state blue.
Maybe that's partly why Northern Virginia is a leading candidate, but it seems like there might have been even stronger options.
Having a workforce in a low population swing state could have disproportionate impact on national politics. It could elect Dems, or turn against them if they move to break Amazon up.
(I'm not saying this because I know which party would favor Amazon more, but just because polling suggests tech workers are mostly blue, so I think that's the direction you'd start.)
This is if politics were the only consideration, though I'd wager the main considerations are far more mundane, something actuarial.
>The best hedge against regulatory risk wouldn't be jobs in DC, but jobs that turn a light red state purple, or a purple state blue.
How so? If you turn a state purple or blue you're now at risk of being regulated by the state in addition to federally. Red states are generally hands off when it comes to business.
I think they’ll get that angle through being an employer at the regional scale of Walmart or similar. Of course they’ll employ fewer people than a big box retail outlet, but they’ll aggregate to enough power for senators/representatives to take notice.
Amazon also has a lot of government work these days for DoD and intelligence services with AWS. So I imagine that's another motivator for the location. That area of VA will be a great spot to recruit people with the right clearances and backgrounds.
That's right. Tons of contractors want to build into GovCloud as well, which will be exploding in the near future. They already have tons of data centers in Northern Virginia due to its proximity to ISPs and the federal government.
Bezos bought the largest house in Washington D.C. early this year, it was a no brainer at that point that VA was getting it. Breaking it up into two is intersting though, it will probably seem less like HQ 2a and HQ 2b and more like "where does Jeff want to hang out his week?"
Meh. I'm as cynical as anyone, but this is a "just so" hindsight story. You don't need 10s of thousands of engineers near DC to get facetime with powerful officials.
My take on Amazon's political ambition was always that one main goal of HQ2 was to get 2 more US senators on their side. If they now are adding 4 instead, I don't exactly feel disproven :)
Agreed on the regulatory risk. But the biggest defense against that isn't lobbying. It's putting the business's interests in alignment with the governments. Amazon will take a page out of ATT's playback and become the technological arm of the government. THAT is how you avoid being broken up. When the military top brass tells Congress that Amazon can't be broken up because the company is critical to national security.
Northern Virginia was chosen for it's proximity to existing data centers (us-east), proximity to a growing AWS government client base, the size of the workforce, and possibly the consideration that they will win and service the DoD JEDI contract. Companies like Amazon rarely lobby directly. They typically use industry groups.
Northern VA benefits hugely from the Military Industrial complex. There is a large pool of engineers working boring-ish jobs in the security establishment that Amazon can easily lure away.
I think this trumps proximity to the federal apparatus.
If those regulators spouses, friends, family, children, etc all work at Amazon it could make them think twice before making decisions that could hurt Amazon.
But microsoft was also doing almost everything they could to screw over competitors. It was not that the government made up a bunch of stuff. They made many clever anti-competitive agreements that did things like strongly incentivizing dell to only sell windows and not linux. They tied things together, the worked hard to make internet web pages only display "properly" on windows ie 3. They deserved to get shellacked. They had to change, and I say that as a microsoft employee at the time.
Don't forget though that that area in NYC has a ton of both empty space and low-value commercial space that can be torn down and redeveloped. It's also home to one of the biggest transportation deserts in the city, which will be functionally unlocked in the next five years or so once self-driving cars are a thing.
While stuff takes time to build, at the end of the day there is a lot more land to build buildings than there are people who want to live there. And unlike in SF, if there is new demand then those buildings will actually get built.
What transportation desert? Within a few blocks of each other are court square, queensboro plaza, and queens plaza which together have seven subway lines. (E,M,N,W,R,G&7) Go a little further out and you also have an F stop and the LIRR at Hunters Point Avenue. There’s also a ferry terminal.
I can only think of four spots in the city that are better served by transit: Times Square, Grand Central, Fulton Street, and Atlantic Avenue.
> in the next five years or so once self-driving cars are a thing
You have another thing coming if you think a) self driving cars will be here in five years or b) that they will make NYC traffic a dream to navigate when they do.
> It's also home to one of the biggest transportation deserts in the city, which will be functionally unlocked in the next five years or so once self-driving cars are a thing.
Self-driving cars don't magically make other cars, self-driving or not, vanish from the roads and they certainly can't match the raw throughput of moving thousands of people in a single train on a dedicated right of way.
Self driving cars are still going to be sitting in standstill on the LIE or BQE. And in 10 years when all those new LIC high-rise leasing offices open up it will be 22 year old fresh college grads bunking up two to an apartment like SF and senior employees will be riding an hour on the LIRR from their park and rides, wishing every day there was a line that ran from Westchester County to LIC.
What? LIC is already, even before Amazon considered an HQ2, a very expensive and congested area. It is one of the prime examples of tech and finance gentrification.
Why would NYS/NYC need to subsidize Amazon in NYC?
If NYC is indeed confirmed, then rents for Queens are going to be absolutely fucked.
While Astoria is high, Sunnyside, Woodside, and Jackson Heights will likely see never-seen-before rent increases.
This would be greatly concerning because Eastern Asians from Flushing are already moving west towards Manhattan and are already encroaching on Hispanic minorities in Elmhurst and Corona.
This is really silly...10k highly paid employees is a drop in the bucket in NY. The effect on rents will be negligible. They are absurd and will continue to be absurd, but 10k employees in a metro area of 20 million won't change that.
All that said, it's hard enough to compete with Google and Facebook and Spotify for local talent...this will only make it worse.
Given that at any time there are only a few hundred or so good houses available in any big city suburb, 10K new highly paid employees looking to get in can overwhelm real estate.
> This would be greatly concerning because Eastern Asians from Flushing are already moving west towards Manhattan and are already encroaching on Hispanic minorities in Elmhurst and Corona.
Why is it better for Hispanic people to live in an area than Eastern Asian people?
It’s shorthand for a whole range of economic factors, housing costs, school quality, local politics, etc. Most big US cities have had waves of immigration that concentrate themselves in various neighborhoods ands it takes too long to list out all the features I listed above characteristic to these neighborhoods so people tend to refer to them as “Ukrainian” or “Hispanic” or “Asian” when they mean, “Working class catholic with some gang problems, a very influential Alderman, dealing with school closures due to budget cuts and rising property values without corresponding rising property taxes because many elderly folks on fixed incomes would be fucked... etc etc etc”
I think the grandparent post is saying that Asians in Flushings are more likely to own their property and then it gets rented out inside the ethnic group moreso than outside the group. So Hispanics etcetera will be squeezed between that and rising prices from HQ2.
I don't know how much of these are true, but I've heard anecdotes/stereotypes like this a few times in New York. Just haven't seen (or looked for) any confirmed studies about it.
Not every moral issue can be encoded in monetary exchange, because of (among other reasons) unequal access to capital.
In general, yes, seeing trends in ethnic groups moving because they can no longer afford what was their home, even if to make way for another ethnic minority, is probably a bad thing.
My old neighborhood in Maspeth and Woodside isn’t Italian, Irish and Polish anymore. I remember the old timers freaking out when Koreans started appearing in the 80s... people are people and life goes on. That’s the cycle of the city.
It hasn't always been the cycle of the city that it continues to get more and more expensive, though. I don't want the city to be taken over by luxury apartment buildings, banks and Starbucks on every corner, but sometimes it feels like it's going that way.
> This would be greatly concerning because Eastern Asians from Flushing are already moving west towards Manhattan and are already encroaching on Hispanic minorities in Elmhurst and Corona.
Jeez, things haven't been this bad since the Huns forced the Ostrogoths into Lombardy.
Just because the campus is located in Queens doesn't necessarily mean all workers will want to live in that area...unlike the Bay Area NYC metro area is fairly well connected by public transportation. It would be just as fast to live in Manhattan and get to Long Island City by subway as it would to get there from other parts of Queens (perhaps even faster).
For those unfamiliar, Long Island City is across the East River directly east of Upper East Side in Manhattan.
Long Island itself is going to be affected even more. LI is already expensive, sure, but how many of those tens of thousands of employees will want to buy houses there they can easily commute from?
A day of happiness for those owning property along the 7 train and LIRR.
Long Island has almost 3 million people living on it. I think some posters here don’t recognize the sheer scale of the NYC metro area. If they pick LIC for half a headquarters NYC isn’t going to be a company town. They probably won’t even be the largest private employer.
I really hope Cuomo didn't give Amazon huge tax breaks for coming to NY. Frankly Amazon needs NYC more than we need them. NYC is a boom town at the moment with a lot of jobs and skilled professionals moving in. Since 2010 the population has grown by 375k people which is about 40% the population of San Fransisco.
There are 20 million people in the NY Metro area, and NYC is a true global city. I know it will be some political coup for Cuomo who has sights on national office bringing Amazon here, but to win the Willy Wonka like contest by giving Amazon a lot of freebies is disapointing.
Unless he's caught tossing puppies into a wood chipper he will carry the NYC area and it won't matter what the rest of the state thinks. Cumo doesn't need to give anyone tax breaks.
It's humorous how willing they are to build HQ2/3 in areas already with high rent and income. They probably have the money and the will to create a new city and public transit system out of a pliable town. Why not do that?
It's not so simple and I'm not quite so naive... but it would be interesting if high paying jobs went to places with decent weather and reasonable land prices.
This isn't an unreasonable generalization. But a) there's plenty of talent that wants to live somewhere other than an urban core, and b) if Amazon opens an HQ in a place, that place will become a somewhere, and c) Amazon is at the scale that they can afford to take raw talent and train it up.
Personally, I find Amazon's decision disappointing, and I regret getting caught up in the hype. I was hoping that they'd do something bold and interesting, not open a couple of satellite offices in obvious places.
It's nice to believe that an Amazon could basically found a new city/locate in a small one or run-down one. But I tend to agree. The premiums they'd have to pay to attract people to work in effectively a company town would be significant. It would take years to build out infrastructure and amenities. And it would probably still end up as a rather unattractive monoculture under many circumstances.
You can probably bribe enough people enough to work just about anywhere but it's going to be an uphill battle.
I definitely didn’t like working in NYC. NYC is a net negative for me, unless the wages are in the $300-400k range, it’s a non starter. If I could work in New Orleans, I would jump at the chance. I worked in NYC for years and got over it pretty quickly. Couldn’t afford to live in Manhattan so I commuted from Jersey City. And when it’s freezing cold, that gets old quickly. Then there is a NYC income tax along with higher prices for everything. If your goal is to recruit a bunch of naïve 25 years olds, sure, pick New York — or be prepared to pay some serious money. Talent goes where the opportunities are. If Apple’s HQ were Albuquerque or El Paso, you’d have talent moving to those places. For startups, obviously proximity to Silicon Valley, Austin or NYC is very advantageous because nobody wants to move across the country for a low percentage startup. But for a FAANG company— the talent will follow, perhaps even more merrily. There are a lot of talented engineers that would be great recruits for the FAANGs, but one look at the housing prices and tax rates in those areas sends them running. Wichita, Kansas isn’t particularly “hip,” but given that some important aviation work happens there, those in the aviation business live/move there. Hartford, CT is a shithole, but if you are in insurance, there are tons of opportunities there. Pharma companies are located all over the country, they don’t locate in New York because of talent, they locate where they want and the talent follows. Software and hardware engineers seem to think they are special and that the jobs should come to them; the real world is the other way around. Acting as if the entirety of software talent exists on the coasts is simply arrogant. For startups, of course, it’s different. For trillion dollar companies that can pay fat relocation packages and offer incredible compensation, there is much less incentive to care about Silicon Valley or NYC. A large portion of the talent recruited by Apple and Google, often come from somewhere other than SV. And, if the talent pool is so big in SV, why does nearly every company worth a damn bother offering relocation?
they're moving existing employees there. People don't want to live in the middle of nowhere. People don't want to be moved without their consent to start a new society.
This is painfully, ridiculously obvious if you stop thinking about people as numbers and start thinking about them as actual humans living full lives.
People don't want to be moved without their consent, period. It doesn't matter where the new office is.
There are plenty of people who do want to live in the middle of nowhere. I know a number of techies who have taken advantage of remote opportunities to finally live where they want, and at a much better price. And one could reasonably describe the whole trend of suburbanization as people moving to the middle of nowhere, so I suspect Amazon could find plenty of people who'd like a reasonably priced, new-built home in an up-and-coming area.
Those poor, horribly abused humans living in fly-over country. How do they survive? It’s incredibly insulting to suggest that somewhere other than the coasts is the middle of nowhere.
Note the part where I said I wasn't that naive, but someone can dream. Are you really telling me I'm the one thinking of people as numbers, not Amazon?
My employer is planning on moving several hundred people about ten miles from their current location. The only reason aren't quitting is because there isn't enough competition in the tech sector this city.
It would just be nice if there were cities with livable housing costs AND a competitive tech sector.
I'm of the opinion they could have used Newark, NJ in lieu of LIC and had basically the same experience but cheaper.
Newark is maybe 30 minutes from Manhattan by train, has cheaper real estate, and contains a stop on the Amtrak NE Regional Line, which would allow access to their VA HQ in between 2-3 hours.
I'm probably biased because I'm NJ based and I want Newark to become a more attractive location to companies other than Prudential, but Newark was up for consideration and I'd argue the cheap real estate + proximity to NY combo is workable.
Why spend your own dollars when you can consume the infrastructure of other cities without having to pay for it? Property taxes will rise, slowly, as property values increase due to the greater demand in these cities, but not enough (nor fast enough) to offset the infrastructure burden incurred by Amazon.
If true, I wonder if they did this so that their ability to play one city off the other doesn't have to come to a close when they make the announcement. Or ever.
Every year or so, you can call them up and say:
"Hey NY, we're thinking of expanding in VA, but maybe you could convince us otherwise."
"Hey VA, we're thinking of expanding in NY, but maybe you could convince us otherwise."
It will be far more interesting to see the impacts on Queens versus Crystal City, IMHO.
Crystal City already has a strong tech presence - it's government, not industry, but still - no shortage of technology around. 25K new workers is about a second Pentagon in the area, but nothing more than that. Office rental rate pressure will slightly go up, but Amazon's a drop in the bucket compared to federal government buying power for office space.
Queens, though, is a dramatic change to the general landscape of that area. I can't even imagine an Amazon-style campus in the middle of Jamaica.
It seems the new HQ will be in or near LIC. That is already a super tech-and-finance gentrified and expensive area a station or two away from Manhattan. Not exactly groundbreaking.
Assuming that the campus is in or around LIC proper, there's a lot to work with in the immediate area. Given recent and future development of proper high-rises along the waterfront, plus further re-zoning of formerly industrial areas to the south and into Brooklyn, you could see the long-awaited revitalization of the old shipyards.
Readit News
> “I am doing everything I can,” Governor Cuomo told reporters when asked Monday about the state’s efforts to lure the company. “We have a great incentive package,” he said.
> “I’ll change my name to Amazon Cuomo if that’s what it takes,” Governor Cuomo said. “Because it would be a great economic boost.”
If these quotes are truly representative of Cuomo's attitude towards Amazon, that's an incredible amount of pandering for the governor of the state containing New York City to be doing. Isn't large amounts of incentives for Amazon essentially a trickle-down economics policy? Interesting to see that Cuomo, ostensibly a progressive, would be for such a thing.
Pandering is free.
I imagine infrastructure-based incentives will be popular in New York. Large tenants make big infrastructure possible. That enables further density, which means more jobs, more municipal budget and more demand for local commerce. Turning Amazon's HQ2 into the catalyst for building out Western Brooklyn and LIC infrastructure isn't a bad trade for the city. (Tax credits would be tone deaf, but if done in a budget-neutral manner could be okay.)
New York City is a commercial centre. Pragmatism wins votes.
What infrastructure is that exactly?
Long Island City and Greenpoint/Williamsburg have already been absurdly built up by developers over the last two decades.
It's hard to believe an influx of new tens of thousands of individuals to fill vacancies at Amazon is going to produce new train tunnels under the East River or new bridges over it. NYC already has large tenants - Google, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Verizon etc, and the city's infrastructure woes have worsened despite their presence.
I would also imagine that much of the gain in the local tax coffers by the additional work force will be offset by whatever tax deals the city and states extends to Amazon.
I don't necessarily disagree with them, and if it was up to me, I'd rather Amazon land in Dallas that probably needs the jobs more.
However, this will be an objectively good thing for NYC as a center of commerce, and help establish it as a tech hub at a time its local job market isn't doing all too well.
Moreover, I doubt Amazon will game the system so excessively that it won't end up paying in taxes and investment and influx of business and salaries much more than it will receive in tax breaks.
It's unlikely they'll game the system so badly because it's not wise to screw the municipal authorities that can make your life miserable.
Cuomo literally engineered a Republican majority in the state senate, even though the Democrats had been elected to the majority, so that he wouldn't be pressured to sign overly-progressive legislation before his 2020 run.
I think we should tease all politicians offering tax breaks to corporations that they might as well say their first name is "Amazon".
I think we should have a federal legislation, (allowed under the interstate commerce clause), banning the current race to the bottom for states and municipalities to offer tax breaks to corporations. Sure we'd have to still deal with companies leaving the US but the leverage is different there and it'd be a start. Am I wrong?
"This will be New York or it will be DC - Prof. Galloway, Feb 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3baKe4B3eyI
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Consider that if Microsoft had put an office in the DC area in the mid 1990s we would all be shopping at some e-commerce behemoth owned by Microsoft.
The reality is that for a company like Amazon, regulatory risk is the biggest existential threat to the company's future, and the only way to fight regulatory risk is through extensive lobbying and various legal forms of bribery that involve lots of face time with powerful officials.
Yes, employing lobbyists is one way to flex your muscle in DC. But owning a newspaper and employing lots of people in the area is another way.
Imagine you're a mid-level bureaucrat facing a routine decision that could help or hurt Amazon. Now imagine that your spouse works at The Washington Post, your college-aged daughter is an intern at Amazon, and a local non-profit you care about just got a donation from Bezos. You can imagine how that could perhaps sway your decision.
Maybe that's partly why Northern Virginia is a leading candidate, but it seems like there might have been even stronger options.
Having a workforce in a low population swing state could have disproportionate impact on national politics. It could elect Dems, or turn against them if they move to break Amazon up.
(I'm not saying this because I know which party would favor Amazon more, but just because polling suggests tech workers are mostly blue, so I think that's the direction you'd start.)
This is if politics were the only consideration, though I'd wager the main considerations are far more mundane, something actuarial.
How so? If you turn a state purple or blue you're now at risk of being regulated by the state in addition to federally. Red states are generally hands off when it comes to business.
My take on Amazon's political ambition was always that one main goal of HQ2 was to get 2 more US senators on their side. If they now are adding 4 instead, I don't exactly feel disproven :)
You can lobby from pretty much anywhere with a budget and a hotel ballroom rental.
They certainly don't need to be near the upper management or big engineering teams of HQ2.
I think this trumps proximity to the federal apparatus.
While stuff takes time to build, at the end of the day there is a lot more land to build buildings than there are people who want to live there. And unlike in SF, if there is new demand then those buildings will actually get built.
edit: Was referring to the LIC location, not VA.
I can only think of four spots in the city that are better served by transit: Times Square, Grand Central, Fulton Street, and Atlantic Avenue.
You have another thing coming if you think a) self driving cars will be here in five years or b) that they will make NYC traffic a dream to navigate when they do.
Self-driving cars don't magically make other cars, self-driving or not, vanish from the roads and they certainly can't match the raw throughput of moving thousands of people in a single train on a dedicated right of way.
There are general issues with transportation efficacy in NYC right now (subway reliability etc.) but none of them are LIC specific.
Also, Crystal City has two metro lines so not entirely a transportation despert.
If NYC is indeed confirmed, then rents for Queens are going to be absolutely fucked.
While Astoria is high, Sunnyside, Woodside, and Jackson Heights will likely see never-seen-before rent increases.
This would be greatly concerning because Eastern Asians from Flushing are already moving west towards Manhattan and are already encroaching on Hispanic minorities in Elmhurst and Corona.
(Source: was native NYCer for 24 years)
All that said, it's hard enough to compete with Google and Facebook and Spotify for local talent...this will only make it worse.
Why is it better for Hispanic people to live in an area than Eastern Asian people?
I don't know how much of these are true, but I've heard anecdotes/stereotypes like this a few times in New York. Just haven't seen (or looked for) any confirmed studies about it.
Encroaching is such a strong word. Are they occupying property illegally or are they buying it at market price?
In general, yes, seeing trends in ethnic groups moving because they can no longer afford what was their home, even if to make way for another ethnic minority, is probably a bad thing.
My old neighborhood in Maspeth and Woodside isn’t Italian, Irish and Polish anymore. I remember the old timers freaking out when Koreans started appearing in the 80s... people are people and life goes on. That’s the cycle of the city.
Jeez, things haven't been this bad since the Huns forced the Ostrogoths into Lombardy.
For those unfamiliar, Long Island City is across the East River directly east of Upper East Side in Manhattan.
This doesn't really help if you're not familiar with NYC geography...
I had to check Google Maps. It's across the river southeast of all the famous stuff in movies.
A day of happiness for those owning property along the 7 train and LIRR.
There are 20 million people in the NY Metro area, and NYC is a true global city. I know it will be some political coup for Cuomo who has sights on national office bringing Amazon here, but to win the Willy Wonka like contest by giving Amazon a lot of freebies is disapointing.
It's not so simple and I'm not quite so naive... but it would be interesting if high paying jobs went to places with decent weather and reasonable land prices.
I wish it did, but it doesn't.
Personally, I find Amazon's decision disappointing, and I regret getting caught up in the hype. I was hoping that they'd do something bold and interesting, not open a couple of satellite offices in obvious places.
You can probably bribe enough people enough to work just about anywhere but it's going to be an uphill battle.
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they're moving existing employees there. People don't want to live in the middle of nowhere. People don't want to be moved without their consent to start a new society.
This is painfully, ridiculously obvious if you stop thinking about people as numbers and start thinking about them as actual humans living full lives.
There are plenty of people who do want to live in the middle of nowhere. I know a number of techies who have taken advantage of remote opportunities to finally live where they want, and at a much better price. And one could reasonably describe the whole trend of suburbanization as people moving to the middle of nowhere, so I suspect Amazon could find plenty of people who'd like a reasonably priced, new-built home in an up-and-coming area.
My employer is planning on moving several hundred people about ten miles from their current location. The only reason aren't quitting is because there isn't enough competition in the tech sector this city.
It would just be nice if there were cities with livable housing costs AND a competitive tech sector.
Newark is maybe 30 minutes from Manhattan by train, has cheaper real estate, and contains a stop on the Amtrak NE Regional Line, which would allow access to their VA HQ in between 2-3 hours.
I'm probably biased because I'm NJ based and I want Newark to become a more attractive location to companies other than Prudential, but Newark was up for consideration and I'd argue the cheap real estate + proximity to NY combo is workable.
Every year or so, you can call them up and say:
"Hey NY, we're thinking of expanding in VA, but maybe you could convince us otherwise."
"Hey VA, we're thinking of expanding in NY, but maybe you could convince us otherwise."
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Crystal City already has a strong tech presence - it's government, not industry, but still - no shortage of technology around. 25K new workers is about a second Pentagon in the area, but nothing more than that. Office rental rate pressure will slightly go up, but Amazon's a drop in the bucket compared to federal government buying power for office space.
Queens, though, is a dramatic change to the general landscape of that area. I can't even imagine an Amazon-style campus in the middle of Jamaica.
https://data.arlingtonva.us/dataviews/227253/vacancy-rates/