Knew that they wouldn't pick Toronto - Trump would have blown a gasket
We lost the bidding war. Seeing what concessions the other cities coughed up ... I'm maybe glad we didn't "win".
Amazon Selects New York City and Northern Virginia for New Headquarters
11–20 of 279 posts
Re: Amazon Selects New York City and Northern Virginia for New Headquarters
#12> 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's the densely overcrowded 7 train, getting worse each year, with no relief in sight. Once the L shuts down in 2019 the G will be absolutely overrun.
> and LaGuardia and JFK airports are in close proximity
Getting to LGA involves taking a train to a bus, by car it's a breeze, JFK is an hour away by train.
Re: Amazon Selects New York City and Northern Virginia for New Headquarters
#13Let 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.
Re: Amazon Selects New York City and Northern Virginia for New Headquarters
#14Interesting to see the Virginia state ("commonwealth") "incentives". At the state level, the original VA pitch was out near Dulles (the currently state-owned CIT land). Pitches for Arlington et al. were done by the county as far as I know. Presumably once Amazon zeroed in on the Arlington area the state was willing to go along.
(Apple has supposedly been in talks with the state about the CIT land as well, just in a less public fashion than Amazon, so I assume something is still going to go in there soon, whether Apple or something else.)
Re: Amazon Selects New York City and Northern Virginia for New Headquarters
#15Wouldn't you call two new offices that are smaller than the headquarters "satellite offices"? It really does feel like Amazon successfully played a lot of municipalities against each other to try and extract the biggest concessions, knowing all along that it didn't make sense to try and hire 50000 people in a decade in any one location. I know that's how the game is played, but it's still feels a little disingenuous.
> Wouldn't you call two new offices that are smaller than the headquarters "satellite offices"?
They could be divisional HQs, as in Alexa HQ'd in NYC and AWS in DC.
Re: Amazon Selects New York City and Northern Virginia for New Headquarters
#16> 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'…
The 7 and the G are not as important if the Amazon people live in many parts of Queens instead of Manhattan or hipster parts of Brooklyn. As I'm sure many will, since it's currently one of the cheaper areas of the city (Astoria and LIC aside).
LGA would be a quick cab or Uber ride for most people, well within Amazon employee affordability range.
JFK would be comparatively quick by cab/Uber or yeah about 60 minutes by transit. That's par for the course for major metro area airports, certainly including Amazon's hometown of Seattle.
Re: Amazon Selects New York City and Northern Virginia for New Headquarters
#17This entire competition was an obvious sham to try to equivocate really desperate cities willing to give basically anything to have a major tech company headquarters, to the inevitable choice amazon was going to make of california or the coastal northeast, so they could extract maximum concessions.
Its disgusting this worked as well as it did, $48k/job in tax concessions from NYC and $22k/job from VA, expect to see a lot more of this in the future. Hopefully governments wake up and realize its a race to the bottom that advantages megacorps to such a point that having them is barely worth it, while at the same time hurting local businesses.
EDIT: the tax deductions are one time, not per year, i mixed that up.
Re: Amazon Selects New York City and Northern Virginia for New Headquarters
#18If only we had a tunnel from Seacaucus to Grand Central. Thanks Chris.
Re: Amazon Selects New York City and Northern Virginia for New Headquarters
#19Can't believe how many subsidies they got, to me it's a question of fairness, why should we subsidize them, but not others? I get that they are doing the community a service by creating high paying jobs, but there certainly have been negative sides to what they've done (gentrification, poor working conditions for many employees in their warehouses).
Re: Amazon Selects New York City and Northern Virginia for New Headquarters
#20What the heck is “National Landing”? I’ve lived in this area for over a decade and that’s the first time I’ve heard the name.
I just did a dive on that, too. I grew up in the area and I never heard that before.