It Started With a Jolt: How New York Became a Tech Town

New Yorkers have no problem with technology companies. Google just bought a third of the West Village. No one cares. The Times is running trend pieces about hapless Facebook employees moving from Palo Alto to the East Village and paying 7800 dollars in rent. No one cares.

One thing I'd encourage you to do is think of New York as a system instead of focusing on the storylines of the individual players. NY is a grossly corrupt city with a non-functioning democracy. The story of NY for the last two hundred years is a series of big companies making shady deals with the government to get big handouts while public infrastructure is failing, housing supply is unaffordable and neighborhoods get structured by real estate developers instead of people.

Unless the system attracts too much attention, it's mostly stable. That's why Google is on a multi-billion real estate buying spree and the subways have gone sixty years without signaling upgrades. The problem is that Amazon made a huge show out of their arrival and pushed for concessions beyond what their peers asked for. That created a lot of attention and organizers harnessed long standing grievances with the government and housing policy along with it to push Amazon out.

There are a ton of immigration programs. The current fed gov is letting in a ton of people.

If you have a job lined up, go for it. It’s a better situation here than most places.

> The G, 7, E, M, F, R, N, and W are all within a reasonable walking distance from the proposed HQ site. In the short term, Amazon will occupy one million square feet of 1 Court Square, which sits directly above…Court Square on the E, M, 7, and G lines (the other aforementioned lines are not far away). While they’re all crowded during rush hour and Court Square itself will strain under the ridership (but less so than during the L shutdown) the G and M have additional peak-direction capacity. Also, they’re all well below the current crowding levels on the L and 4/5.

Further, there’s good reason to believe many Amazon workers will follow non-traditional commuting patterns. For starters, a number of them will probably live within walking or bicycling distance from HQ2 given the housing construction boom in the neighborhood. For those who don’t, many will reverse-commute from Manhattan (Hudson Yards, the other NYC neighborhood experiencing a housing construction boom, is straight down the 7). For workers looking to commute from the suburbs, LIC has two LIRR stops, although they currently don’t have very attractive service patterns. Some might even choose to live in Metro North country, given that LIC is one stop on the 7 from Grand Central. It’s also worth noting that East Side Access service, which would bring the LIRR to Grand Central, is slated to begin in December 2022, making Long Island a more attractive option.

The point is not that any one of these options will be most attractive to future Amazon employees, but all of them will attract some and the load will be dispersed. This is the beauty of a robust, healthy transit network: it can absorb even the biggest of shocks.

40000 people across 8 lines with a bunch of countercyclical commuters is a drop in the bucket in NY transit.