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Amazon Picks New York, Northern Virginia For HQ2 [Update: Confirmed] (washingtonpost.com)
The Washington Post is reporting that Amazon has picked New York's Long Island City and Arlington County's Crystal City neighborhoods as the company's second headquarters (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source). The two locations will split the duty and will reportedly bring the cities an infusion of jobs and tax revenue. From the report: Amazon will open major new outposts in Northern Virginia's Crystal City and New York City, splitting its much-sought investment of up to 50,000 jobs between the two East Coast sites. The choice of Crystal City in Arlington County as one of the winners would cement Northern Virginia's reputation as a magnet for business and potentially reshape the Washington region into an East Coast outpost of Silicon Valley over the next decade.
It also represents a victory for New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D), who had joked that he would change his name to "Amazon Cuomo" if necessary to land the prize. Amazon's decision to split the project rather than open a second headquarters on par with its Seattle campus has angered some who said the company had ginned up competition among cities only to change the rules midstream. Some said it was unfair that the company seemed to be considering only sites in more affluent communities. Updated on November 13, 15:10 GMT: Amazon on Tuesday confirmed that it had selected New York City and Northern Virginia for new headquarters. In a statement, Jeff Bezos said, "We are excited to build new headquarters in New York City and Northern Virginia. These two locations will allow us to attract world-class talent that will help us to continue inventing for customers for years to come. The team did a great job selecting these sites, and we look forward to becoming an even bigger part of these communities."
It also represents a victory for New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D), who had joked that he would change his name to "Amazon Cuomo" if necessary to land the prize. Amazon's decision to split the project rather than open a second headquarters on par with its Seattle campus has angered some who said the company had ginned up competition among cities only to change the rules midstream. Some said it was unfair that the company seemed to be considering only sites in more affluent communities. Updated on November 13, 15:10 GMT: Amazon on Tuesday confirmed that it had selected New York City and Northern Virginia for new headquarters. In a statement, Jeff Bezos said, "We are excited to build new headquarters in New York City and Northern Virginia. These two locations will allow us to attract world-class talent that will help us to continue inventing for customers for years to come. The team did a great job selecting these sites, and we look forward to becoming an even bigger part of these communities."
if you were planning on more than one location, you wouldn't pick the same coast, because of hurricanes and similar electrical grids.
massively overcrowded, horrific traffic, insane cost of living.
Unless someone likes living in an over crowded over priced city with a pile of east coasters.....No thanks!
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
I had been hoping that Amazon would choose a city that could handle to have a large company like Amazon show up; instead, Amazon picked two cities/regions that already have ridiculous issues with real estate. NYC at least has a semi-functional public transit system, but my understanding with DC is that the metro doesn't stretch out far enough to accommodate most people living in the suburbs, resulting in long commutes. There are a number of cities that would have been a better choice and probably handled Amazon's impact on real estate much better (Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, Miami).
Ooops. ;P
[($)]
The fix was in. Ha ha if you thought there was an actual competition for the HQ. Should have sold him a new residence first...
I bet the recipients gave out the full set of perks even though the site was split so they get only half the jobs if that. Tricked again. No wonder that he has billions and they have to lean on the taxpayers again.
In my own case, a VP moved the whole division 25 miles so he could be closer to his hockey rink. Though in that case, he happened to shorten my commute to 3 miles.
That word... Socialist... I don't think it means what you think it means.
And since when is a wholesale/logistics company considered tech?
Amazon makes most of their profit on AWS. They are primarily a cloud-services company. The retailing is just a side business.
A huge percentage of the people who have to do that commute don't live anywhere near VRE or DC Metro. For many of us, the time to get to a rail station is a large chunk of the drive.
"Live closer"
Ok, we'll get right on that. Nevermind that our area has a fetish for high end, luxury homes that are only affordable if you have dual incomes well over $100k.
It really doesn't. Loudoun and PWC have essentially no service, and we are very much DC suburbs. When the post-9/11 increase happened, no one in government really planned and so we now have a totally avoidable catastrophe in terms of public transportation.
Irony is, the situation was under control in 2001 to 2005 to such an extent that they could have brought metro rail all the way down rt 28, 66, etc. because real estate was so much cheaper back then.
Going after military money, makes sense to me.
Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, or Atlanta would have met Amazon's criteria better, but I hypothesize the local governments in those cities are dysfunctional enough that they couldn't effectively market themselves to Amazon executives. It sounds like New York City and Crystal City actively worked to impress Amazon.
It really looks like they picked places where their executives can buy their big dumb house. The rank and file can commute for 3 hours, or go 6 guys to a 2 bed.
I mean if this was true that'd be a pretty big coup for you...look forward to seeing the story break in the next couple weeks.
Now they can have billions of tax dollars siphoned off as economic incentives and tax breaks to Amazon. At some point it will dawn on them that the economic benefits are nowhere to be seen, their politics have been corrupted beyond all recognition, and the poverty gap is wider than ever. After they've been bled dry Amazon will decide it wants to build its headquarters somewhere else and the cycle will repeat.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D), who had joked that he would change his name to "Amazon Cuomo" if necessary to land the prize.
deBlasio would have been safe making that joke- I'm pretty sure Amazon would leave him with the Bill.
It's perfectly legitimate for an employee to negotiate a raise when they have offers from other companies. Likewise it's perfectly fine for Amazon to ask for tax breaks and to shop around for a better deal before accepting the offer of the city they most prefer.
It's not a scam. It's negotiating from strength.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
NYC is planning to close the Riker's Island prison. Close it, sell it to Amazon, make it HQ2. It already has housing pre-built and a fence to keep the techbros from wandering into the water. What's not to like?
Yes those are indeed horrible places to live.
However what they are is very good lobbying positions so Amazon can grow unchecked, regardless of whatever theater mask rests atop the massive all-consuming blob that is government.
Glad I didn't bet against Amazon!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Everything is true, they already cancelled the construction of two new office buildings in Seattle, that's already hundreds of millions in lost taxes. Obviously Amazon won't be moving their HQ fully out of Seattle until the two new HQs are built and up and running for 5-10 years.
But it's not perfectly fine for Cuomo and de Blasio to give said tax breaks.
NYC is if not the highest, then close to the highest taxed city in the nation.
We have a federal, a state, and a city graduated income tax. And believe you me, everything else has a tax or a fee here.
Amazon is going to put significant load on the city. Rents are going to go up, the MTA will be further overloaded.
They want to be at the center of the financial world, fine. Let them pay the taxes everybody else pays.
Check your premises.
Also, Northern Virginia and Long Island are nearly 300 miles apart. They are not both going to be hit by one storm.
Not true. Hurricanes are routinely wide enough to hit both locations at the same time. Average diameter of a hurricane is around 300 miles. And it would be quite possible for a storm to hit DC and then move north to NYC.
I'm guessing that your device changed "Bezos" to "Bezels" - stupid autocorrect.
As for the idea that the location(s) were predetermined, shouldn't this be investigated by state/federal authorities for offering a deceptive tender? A lot of people went through a lot of work to put in bids that would never have been considered seriously.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
The neighborhood that Amazon chose, Crystal City, has a very high rate of commercial vacancies. It used to host a large number of Federal employees and related Federal contractors, but between Federal Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) and dispersal of the Federal government post-9/11, a lot of office buildings have stood empty. Given that it's at a unique junction of multiple Metro stations and the VRE Heavy Rail, it should be able to absorb at least the initial waves without infrastructure upgrades. Long run however, they're going to have to make some additional upgrades to reach the full 25,000.
Oh, my. This is hilarious!
We have three income taxes (city, state, federal), sales tax, property tax, fees on everything imaginable.
Rent control and stabilization has just become part of the cesspool of corruption that spans government and the housing/rental industry. The government sets the rent increases, controls how many buildings can be built - all to keep the prices high. Landlords get rich, politicians get re-elected. But don't even try to tell me that the free market is at work in this thing. Nobody who actually lives here believes that for a second.
Check your premises.
You'll have to ask Governor Amazon Cuomo. Or Make Other People Pay the Bill de Blasio.
Check your premises.
Seattle can kiss hundreds of millions of tax dollars and thousands of good jobs good bye thanks to their horrible city management.
While that's probably true, it has little to do with Amazon. Amazon was only offering a small handful of good jobs, and a bunch of crap ones. That's much of the point of their business model, they only need a relatively small number of skilled employees.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Ah, variant number 2 on the old "socialism hasn't ever worked because we've never done it right" argument.
Pro Tip: All the "real" socialists become de Blasio clones when they get some actual power. Has always gone that way, and always will.
Check your premises.
Why is this news?
You complain about DeBlasio, but he did one good thing: rein in the power of the NYPD somewhat. Accepting the consent decree on ending stop and frisk was a good first step. Scaling back marijuana enforcement and quality-of-life enforcement were good second steps. Bloomberg and Giuliani were authoritarian pieces of shit -- it's really a shame that Rudy wasn't in his emergency HQ in WTC when 9/11 hit.
This is the truth! I live in Brunswick, MD (origin point for the "Brunswick line" for the MARC commuter rail line in Maryland). CSX constantly does anything in its power to disrupt the MARC and make it appear the lines are overcrowded. Since I live about a block from the train yard, I can tell when pretty much every train passes through. And it's quite common that there will be no train coming through for hours at a time, but during the time window when the MARC runs? Mysteriously, they have all of this freight rail traffic too, and have to make the MARC wait behind a freight train.
To CSX, commuter rail is simply a nuisance that creates more scheduling hassles for them.
Ideally, they'd build another set of tracks that the MARC could use exclusively, or at least in some kind of shared agreement with CSX where MARC gets priority on them. But the last time I saw this proposed, the funding was never approved (after some haggling and debate that led to a watered down proposal of adding an extra track only between a few communities in the DC suburbs like Gaithersburg and Rockville).
NYC has its advantages...
Of course it does. That many people don't live there by accident.
(a) culture, theater, etc
You think these things don't exist elsewhere? NYC has great options to be sure but so do pretty much every other large city in the US. Folks from NYC like to imagine they have options nobody else has which simply isn't true. I live in the midwest and can be in a world class art museum within 60 minutes of leaving my house. My metro area has opera, playhouses, excellent museums, major universities, outstanding restaurants,
(b) public university is cheap, like cheaper than the UC system and great. Many of the CUNY schools have affiliations with research institutions, so it's easy for undergrads to do research
There are public universities that are reasonably affordable in most states. CUNY is a pretty good deal though.
(c) you can walk or take public transit most places. Your kids can be independent, not dependent on a car or having someone to pick them up
Needing a car sometimes to get around does not preclude independence. If you are being fair, having to depend on public transit to get around has some pretty serious limitations too, especially in the US. I live in a small town with a walkable downtown, restaurants, shopping and parks. I also have 16,000 acres of public park within a 10 mile radius of my house with every outdoor activity you can imagine and which NYC residents could only dream of. People from NYC like to think Central Park is something special but compared to what I have access to here in the Midwest it's a sad ugly joke. They only think it's amazing because Manhattan is so disgusting otherwise. Don't get me wrong, NYC can be a great place but living elsewhere is definitely not limiting.
(d) a lot of really interesting people -- diversity is a good thing.
True and I like the diversity too but having a lot of people (quantity) is both a positive and a negative. Personally I like living somewhere a little less over crowded and quieter. Your mileage may vary of course. I live near a major college town which gets the same benefits of diversity without the massive overcrowding.
It sounds like New York City and Crystal City actively worked to impress Amazon.
They accomplished this by being within a few miles of where Jeff Bezos already had purchased homes apparently.
I'm sure NYC acted in it's own best interests. It's a complex set of things to balance.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Go fuck yourself.
Thanks.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
For not selecting Atlanta. Have a nice life!
Well - certainly the politicians acted in their own best interests. NYC politicians are really, really good at that.
Check your premises.
Well, the marijuana enforcement means that me, a non-smoker, has to deal with it in my apartment because there is nothing to stop the neighbors from hot boxing their apartment, which leads it to coming into mine. Great fun in the dead of winter!
And - I'm sure you'd have loved riding the trains in the 70's-90's. You might have a slightly different opinion of the NYPD if you had.
Check your premises.
I live outside of NYC and I'm totally shocked. I'm sure they had to give the store away (ha ha) in terms of tax abatements and other giveaways, and that isn't New York's strong suit. From my experience, NY loses large corporate headquarters to North Carolina, Texas, Georgia and other states because those states will do anything to attract them. Even if the executive HQ doesn't move there, they'll make a deal to move the "support campus" to Dallas or Atlanta and suck out thousands of decent mid-level jobs. The execs get to stay in NY while all the regular workers have to move or lose their jobs, and the places accepting the workers will build roads, provide free electricity and gas, construct buildings, not charge taxes for decades, whatever it takes. It's definitely not a fair fight when you're talking about run-of-the-mill employees. There's so much free space in any of the places I've mentioned that they could build out millions of square feet with thousands of parking spaces. The execs can live in their gated communities and send their kids to private schools, etc.
I'm sure we'll never find out the full extent of the giveaway, but NYC is really trying to gentrify Long Island City. Back when the city had industry, there were a ton of factories and other manufacturing support items like reasonably-priced housing there. I'm assuming part of the deal is to arrange for the construction of a "techbro fortress" and a few square blocks of luxury apartments around it, especially since there's a huge housing project right near where they're going.
I'm happy to see a company for once understanding that moving to a high-tax high-cost area might actually be a good thing in terms of employee quality, education, etc. But, it's going to be a hard sell for anyone who isn't young, hip, single and willing to shell out huge bucks for rent/housing. Getting to LIC even from Long Island is a bit rough right now because the public transportation that exists right now is totally jam-packed. Moving the people off the 7 train once the LIRR goes into Grand Central will help, but even 25,000 new employees will add a lot of riders to an already busy system.
Q? Where does Bezos have other homes? A: DC and NYC. HQ2 Location: Pick someplace within 10 miles of the Bezos' house!
Same as with tobacco smoke, you have remedies in civil court and landlord-tenant court. Or with the co-op/condo board if you happen to own your apartment. It can even be legal and still be a nuisance under civil law.
I liked NYC in the 90s before Rudy fucked it up, to be honest. Cheaper cost of living, clubs open late, you could walk from one train car to another if someone was being an ass without risking having an NYPD swine give you a fine.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"In addition, Amazon announced that it has selected Nashville for a new Center of Excellence for its Operations business, which is responsible for the companyâ(TM)s customer fulfillment, transportation, supply chain, and other similar activities. The Operations Center of Excellence in Nashville will create more than 5,000 jobs with an average wage of over $150,000."
load "linux",8,1
HQ:2 NYC - EMPIRE STATE holds most world corporate headquarters; capitalism capitol
HQ:2.1 DC - CAPITAL of US
Not needing a car is a HUGE increase in independence for YOUR KIDS, who can't drive, though.
It really isn't. Where I live children can walk to their friends houses, quite a few can walk to school, they can walk most areas of our town, the movie theater, and they can easily get rides places even if I'm not there to provide them. I'm not really sure how you think they are being limited without the sort of public transit available in NYC. Sure they need cars sometimes too but this is hardly some huge crimp on their lifestyle. I went to college on the east coast not far from NYC and I've spent lots of time in other cities like Chicago with good public transit so I've seen it all first hand. Good public transit is great but it really wouldn't be a game changer with regard to lifestyle for my daughter.
They can walk themselves to school after age 10 or so, take public transit to/from high school and after-school events.
It's absolutely routine for children to carpool where I live and in many cases they can walk where they need to go. School buses transfer them to/from home. I think you are making it out to be more of an advantage than it really is and I speak from first hand experience.
As far as parkland, if you're talking about a 10-15 miles radius of NYC, we probably do have 16,000 acres of parkland.
No you most certainly do not and most of what you do have is scattered about and barely would qualify as a park in the sense of what I'm talking about. Literally a quarter mile from my door I have a 4000 acre park (central park is 840 acres for comparison) with a nature center, 18 hole golf course, discgolf course, two beaches, a water park, an 8 mile multipurpose trail, 30 miles of hiking an equestrian trails, a working farm park, boat rentals, camping, cross country skiing, ice skating in winter, dozens of pavilions, picnic areas, fitness courses, animal rehabilitation center, a toboggan/sledding hill, horseback riding, boat docks, fishing, and more. Plus this 4000 acre park is contiguous with 2 other similar sized parks via trails and roads. There is nothing even remotely similar within 20 miles of Manhattan.
Now to be fair, I don't have much in the way of restaurants open 24/7, I have shitty public transit options when they exist at all, I do have to drive quite a lot, getting stuff delivered is a pain, and there are certain conveniences of living in a dense urban area. Nothing is perfect in every way. We have better parks but worse conveniences. We have bigger/nicer homes for much less money but have to go further to get where we want to go. Tradeoffs...
I'm glad that they're going someplace that's already ruined by coastal liberals so they won't "Californicate" anywhere else!
No, government taxes, by any name - be it income tax or usage fee or levy or whatever - absolutely do tend to indicate a socialist system when everything that is done, traded, sold, observed, ate, drank, driven, lived on or in, or used in any way, has a fee or tax or levy associated with it.
The entire rent control system and borough rent control boards are as socialist as it gets. They actually wind up driving rents up artificially, as the market can't play.
Too, there is this concept here that the government, at some level or anther, has to have a hand in on every. single. detail. of. life. Again, socialist.
Check your premises.
GNAA Post
You fail it. You will never troll as hard as Amazon trolled 20 cities with their HQ2 "selection" con game. It is the most epic troll of my lifetime. The cities were obviously chosen ahead of time.
If you doubt that, consider the following: JeffB has 3 houses. Amazon will have 3 HQs. The average distance between a HQ and a JeffB house will be 6-7 miles (depending on exact location). The whole thing was a con game to bilk the cities.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
No it didn't operate in its own best interests. Having a different tax rate Amazon negotiated for itself is inherently unfair to other businesses operating in the city. If a city thinks it can get a net tax increase if they can attract Amazon by offering it a lower tax rate, then that exact same reasoning applies to all businesses, not just Amazon. And "their own best interest" would be to lower the tax rate for everyone. Lots of small businesses would then set up in NYC instead of elsewhere, providing it more tax revenue. Lowering tax rates for Amazon while keeping them high for other businesses is either an admission that their high tax rates lower net tax revenue from other businesses, or that they're unfairly giving preferential treatment to Amazon.
Everyone loves to complain about the 1% lobbying for tax loopholes which reduce their overall tax burden. This is the exact same thing. Every business operating in a city should have to pay the same tax rates.
http://www.fox5ny.com/news/48k...
According to Amazon, the cost per job for New York taxpayers is $48,000, compared to $22,000 for Virginia and $13,000 for Tennessee.
Another possible reason for the Crystal City pick is because of a major contract the Pentagon is trying hammer out. Its a $10 Billion contract that's aiming to move large portions of the military systems (Administrative stuff I'm guessing) into the cloud. A number of companies are competing for it right now but the contract is a "winner takes all" type so it can't be broken into a series of sub-contracts and doled out to smaller businesses. This means the winner is likely to be a big player such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, or maybe Cisco(?).
What better way to improve your odds of scoring the contract than to have one of your HQs just "across the street" from the Pentagon?
Which says the schools are not producing folks who can work at headquarters.
Stick your head in the sand, vote down taxes that support schools, teach to the test to meet some arbitrary number, and here we are.
Now, that is kinda funny.
Two points: first, you don't understand political machines, and two, furthering their interests often means selling a bill of goods that gets a politician elected.
Check your premises.
Obviously, the winning cities in this massive corporate shake-down are the cities that did NOT get chosen.
1. One person making well over $100k is not dual incomes well over $100k, as in both partners/spouses each making well over $100k. Husband makes $150k-$160k, but wife makes $50k as a school teacher? Not going to work well.
2. Try getting to the VRE in Manassas at 7:30-8:00. It's not going to be a pleasant commute, particularly if you have to take 66 part of the way there.
3. VRE doesn't do a damn thing for Loudoun folks.
You're also talking about a place that elected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Incompetent. The 29 yo idiot bartender that thinks money just pops in to existence.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez opposes the Queens Amazon. Didn't you just prove my point?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I'm referring to the post I replied to.