111–120 of 279 posts
Let the real estate speculation begin!! https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazons-move-to-long-island-cit...
Grab a subway map of Queens. The good thing about NYC is that no one needs to drive to work.
> Long Island City is a mixed-use community where arts and industry intersect It's mostly empty warehouses, housing projects, and luxury condos. There's very little in terms of culture or even basic needs, like grocery stores. > Long Island City has some of the best transit access in New York City, with 8 subway lines, 13 bus lines, commuter rail, a bike-sharing service, and ferries serving the area Realistically it'…
I spend a lot of time passing through in this neighborhood, and can mostly confirm this. In fact, about those luxury condos and housing projects… they're _very_ new, popping up within the past two years and more coming all the time. I’ve been wondering for years what kind of people make the sort of money to afford these places and would also _want_ to live in that area… now I wonder if this decision wasn't made long…
> ... the immediate area can contain this, with minimal spillover to Manhattan and Brooklyn.
People in high paying jobs are often willing to make huge sacrifices in commute-time to land a desirable job while keeping the housing situation that suits them. There are folks with absolutely insane commutes in the NYC area, will Amazon employees will be any different?
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Displacement is a fact of life. Nobody is entitled to live in a certain area for a certain amount of money. What ever happened to living within your means?
Moving is a substantial expense. Should people be forced to consider the likelihood that housing costs that are currently within their means might rise outside of them at some unknown point in the future, and to some unknown degree, when choosing housing? How exactly should that be considered? It seems regressive, socially, to force this consideration on the people least able to afford it. After all, people who "choo…
This has been happening for hundreds of years. Part of being a responsible adult is managing your finances and being prepared. It is crazy to me that so much attention these days is basically advocating for the babysitting of adults.
It is not as if this will happen overnight, either. If we allow people to stay in subsidized housing we remove the biggest carrot for self-motivation.
> Long Island City is a mixed-use community where arts and industry intersect It's mostly empty warehouses, housing projects, and luxury condos. There's very little in terms of culture or even basic needs, like grocery stores. > Long Island City has some of the best transit access in New York City, with 8 subway lines, 13 bus lines, commuter rail, a bike-sharing service, and ferries serving the area Realistically it'…
Where are Amazon employees going to live? Probably not out on Queens Boulevard on the 7/E/F/M/R so they'll be taking the train in the opposite direction. If they live on Long Island, they can take LIRR to Hunterspoint Ave (infrequent service, but demand can change that). If they live in New Jersey or in MNR territory, they'll take the train to Manhattan and then take the subway in the opposite direction from the main flow. If they live in Manhattan or Brooklyn, they're taking the train in the reverse peak direction; trains that are largely empty today because very few people do the reverse commute.
Similarly, JFK is 15 minutes to Jamaica on LIRR and 10 minutes on the Airtrain from there to the terminal. LGA... not super great. Probably take the 7/E/F/M/R to Jackson Heights/Roosevelt Ave. and transfer to the express bus (my preferred way of getting to LGA and I live in Brooklyn).
Finally, as I understand it they are going to use office space in the Citi tower... which is already built and I assume has had tenants throughout its life. So the transit problems were already understood.
All in all, I see this whole thing as completely non-newsworthy. 30,000 employees is nothing compared to the 1 million that already commute in to NYC from the suburbs and the 5 million that already take the subway.
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Nobody is entitled to live in a certain area for a certain price. Such things lead to distorted markets and tons of other issues.
So do the developer incentives that have driven urban redevelopment for the last 2 decades. Hence, in part, the glut of luxury apartments and the ever-tightening affordable housing market.
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> $48k/job in NY That is over 10 years, so is like $5k a year.
even then, assuming 15k jobs in New York is $75MM/yr, which is a lot of money.
Especially for a place like New York.
Consider, in Wisconsin, we have to pay on the order of roughly USD400M to USD500M per year, for about the next ten years. And we're a state that, compared to New York, is mired in abject poverty.
And to add insult to injury, that USD400M per year is for only HALF the jobs that New York is getting. And they don't pay as well.
Yeah, not a good time to be a Wisconsinite.
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I spend a lot of time passing through in this neighborhood, and can mostly confirm this. In fact, about those luxury condos and housing projects… they're _very_ new, popping up within the past two years and more coming all the time. I’ve been wondering for years what kind of people make the sort of money to afford these places and would also _want_ to live in that area… now I wonder if this decision wasn't made long…
LIC is one of the few places New York NIMBYs allowed development
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Uh, that there will only be 25,000 jobs, and not the 50,000 promised.
If the subsidies are per job, is that a problem? Pay half as much for half as many jobs - seems reasonable to me. Doesn't seem like "false pretenses" in a way that materially affects the deal.
Also, it’s not yet public what these cities promised, but how do you “half build” new transit infrastructure and such?
As a New Yorker, I am super disappointed that they chose Long Island City. There were contenders where this stimulus could have been a paradigm shift. Instead, it's just a drop in the bucket for a city that is already growing recklessly. My vote was for Newark, personally. Plenty of office space; access to NJIT, Rutgers, and Princeton; and good public transit that connects directly into NYC. Bezos and co. could have…
> I am super disappointed that they chose Long Island City Edward Glaeser's research on the economic and social benefits from density, summarized in Triumph of the City [1] and referenced in this guy's videos [2][3], is worth reviewing. Long story short, agglomeration breeds efficiencies which lead to further agglomeration. New York can uniquely offer things other cities can't because of its density. A few thousand p…
> Long Island City is a mixed-use community where arts and industry intersect It's mostly empty warehouses, housing projects, and luxury condos. There's very little in terms of culture or even basic needs, like grocery stores. > Long Island City has some of the best transit access in New York City, with 8 subway lines, 13 bus lines, commuter rail, a bike-sharing service, and ferries serving the area Realistically it'…