Amazon’s HQ2 headed to Arlington, Virginia, after pulling out of NYC location

Some New Yorkers rejoiced after Amazon announced it would no longer be building a massive, 25,000-employee corporate campus in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens. But others — including Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio, who helped broker the deal with the tech giant — were less pleased. And now a group of them are begging Amazon to come back.

Led by Cuomo, a disparate coalition of politicians, business owners, and community activists have signed on to an open letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, urging him to reconsider backing out of the deal, the New York Times reported on Thursday. Signatories include representatives Hakeem Jeffries and Carolyn Maloney, the presidents of four public housing tenant associations, and the CEOs of Goldman Sachs and JetBlue. (Cuomo did not sign the letter.)

From the moment Amazon announced its plan to build a massive corporate campus in the rapidly gentrifying Queens neighborhood of Long Island City, the lawmakers responsible for the deal — New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the latter of whom jokingly offered to change his name to “Amazon Cuomo” — went to great lengths to explain how Amazon’s presence in the city would be a boon for all New Yorkers.

“This is a giant step on our path to building an economy in New York City that leaves no one behind,” de Blasio said in November, when the deal was first announced.

Amazon announced Thursday morning that, in the face of backlash from local elected officials to the intended tax subsidies associated with the plans to build “HQ2” in Long Island City, it is going to drop the project entirely.

That’s a good way for Amazon to send a message to other state and city governments around the country that may be considering tax incentives for Amazon facilities in the future: Jeff Bezos is not kidding around. But it’s also a win for the resurgent left in New York City, which rejected both the specifics of the plan and also more broadly the kind of coziness between elected officials and big business that the dealmaking represented.

Amazon is canceling its plan to build a new corporate campus in New York City. The news, first reported by the New York Times, comes less than a week after reports began surfacing that the e-commerce giant was considering pulling out of the deal, which Amazon initially disputed.

“After much thought and deliberation, we’ve decided not to move forward with our plans to build a headquarters for Amazon in Long Island City, Queens,” a spokesperson told the Times in a statement. “For Amazon, the commitment to build a new headquarters requires positive, collaborative relationships with state and local elected officials who will be supportive over the long-term. While polls show that 70% of New Yorkers support our plans and investment, a number of state and local politicians have made it clear that they oppose our presence and will not work with us to build the types of relationships that are required to go forward with the project we and many others envisioned in Long Island City.”

Amazon may not be coming to Long Island City after all.

The e-commerce giant is reconsidering its plans to open a new 25,000-employee office in Queens, New York, the Washington Post reported on Friday. Two people “familiar with the company’s thinking” told the Post that Amazon was turned off by growing local opposition to the deal, which has been building up since Amazon announced it would be building part of its so-called second headquarters in the Queens neighborhood last November.

Amazon has yet to break ground on its new Queens-based office park, which the company is referring to as a “second headquarters,” but it already has a large footprint in New York City.

At a hearing before New York’s City Council on Wednesday, Amazon executives explained that HQ2 was an expansion of its “already significant presence” in the city. “Many people are surprised to learn that we already have thousands of employees in New York City across our retail, operations, and web services teams,” Brian Huseman, Amazon’s vice president of public policy, said in his opening remarks to the council. More than 2,500 of those employees work at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island. According to Huseman, they “make an average of $17.50 to $23 per hour and receive world-class benefits.”

Amazon warehouse workers in New York City are trying to unionize — a development the $800 billion company has tried to prevent for years.

On Wednesday, a group of employees from the company’s warehouse in Staten Island announced the plan along with organizers from the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union. That union is also working with employees at Whole Foods, a grocery chain now owned by Amazon.

The year of speculation around Amazon’s HQ2 landing pad felt like nothing so much as a prolonged anxiety attack. Attracting corporations has generally been viewed as economic development, but Amazon, now valued at $1 trillion, feels bigger than Bell Labs, Under Armour, Twitter, or any given sports stadium.

As of last week, Amazon has picked two new homes, each of which offered incentives and subsidies. Northern Virginia and New York City offered workforce cash grants of $22,000 per job and $48,000 per new job, respectively. New York is kicking in nearly three times what Virginia offered. Both probably overpaid, given that they are already rich in the “access to tech talent” that Amazon stressed as paramount for its next location. And the loosely connected environs of Crystal City, Pentagon City, and Potomac Yards have been renamed, per northern Virginia’s response to Amazon’s request for proposals, as the agglomerated “National Landing.”

It’s been less than a week since Amazon announced its decision to open half of its “second headquarters” in New York City, and the politicians involved in the deal are already in damage-control mode.

HQ2 was billed as a massive economic boon for the winning city — or, as it turned out, the winning cities — that would bring tens of thousands of high-paying jobs and billions of dollars in investments, but some New Yorkers opposed Amazon’s potential presence in New York from the outset. The day after the Amazon deal was announced, local politicians, community groups, and other protesters rallied against HQ2 in Long Island City, just blocks away from the proposed site of Amazon’s Queens campus.

Amazon HQ2’s arrival in Crystal City, Virginia, in the inner suburbs of Washington, DC, is going to be paired with some useful investments in transportation infrastructure in the immediate vicinity of the new office complex.

But while the ideas currently on the table are sound (adding an exit to a metro station, a pedestrian bridge to another, etc.), the region really ought to think bigger.

I think the easiest way to understand Amazon’s HQ2 and the specific question of cities handing out tax subsidies is to abstract away from the particular details of Amazon’s package.

A normal way for governments to raise revenue in the United States is with property taxes. If you build a gigantic new office tower somewhere, then you are going to owe a lot of property taxes to the local government.

On November 14, one day after Amazon formally announced its plan to open half of its so-called “second headquarters” in New York City, nearly 100 politicians, union organizers, and community members gathered in a Long Island City park to protest the company’s impending expansion.

The mood in Gordan Triangle, located down the block from Amazon’s future New York City campus, was a stark contrast to the celebratory press conference New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo held a day earlier. “This is a big moneymaker for us,” said Cuomo, who, a few weeks earlier, said he’d change his name to Amazon Cuomo if the company agreed to set up shop in New York City. “It costs nothing — nada, niente, goose egg. We make money doing this. To get Amazon, did we have to win the competition? Yes. We had to win the competition.”

Amazon has finally announced the two locations for its new headquarters: Queens, New York and Arlington, Virginia.

The company’s announcement followed weeks of reporting and months of speculation about where the new headquarters would be located. The Wall Street Journal first reported on November 5 that instead of placing HQ2 in one city, Amazon would split its so-called second headquarters between two locations.

Amazon is opening a new office in Nashville, Tennessee — but it’s not HQ2.

In addition to its “second headquarters,” which will be split between New York City and Northern Virginia, the company is opening an “East Coast hub of operations” in Nashville. News about the Nashville office was first reported by Reuters on Tuesday and officially announced by Amazon just a few hours later.

New York’s 14th Congressional District Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez represents a number of gentrifying neighborhoods in Queens (plus some not-so-gentrifying neighborhoods in the Bronx) that are likely to see their housing markets affected by Amazon’s decision to locate a large corporate branch office in nearby Long Island City.

And she’s not happy about it. Ocasio-Cortez posted a series of tweets this morning denouncing the tax breaks involved in the deal and, more importantly, questioning whether Queens residents will really benefit from Amazon coming to Queens.

The most exciting business news story of 2018 ended with a whimper this week as reports surfaced that Amazon’s HQ2 project would in fact be two smaller projects, one on Long Island City in Queens and the other in Crystal City across the Potomac from Washington, DC.

Opening two regional branch offices rather than opening a gigantic “second headquarters” makes pragmatic sense. So much sense, in fact, that it’s pretty much what every other large company on the planet does when it decides its home base can’t fully accommodate its needs.

Amazon plans to split its second headquarters evenly between two American cities, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The New York Times followed up the Wall Street Journal’s report to say that the company is nearing deals in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens in New York City and in the Crystal City area of Arlington, Virginia — a suburb of Washington, DC.

Though Amazon still hasn’t announced the location — or locations — of HQ2, a source “familiar with the matter” told the Journal that the two-city decision is due to Amazon’s concerns that it won’t be able to find enough tech talent in any single city. The company plans on hiring 50,000 employees for its second headquarters; splitting HQ2 between two cities would allow it to hire 25,000 employees for each location.

Cities across the country have been aggressively courting Amazon’s proposed HQ2 facility — a massive office development that promises to bring thousands of good-paying jobs to the winner — with an array of tax breaks and other subsidies that have, naturally, attracted their share of critics.

But over and above the question of whether the price of the carrots being offered is worth the benefits, city leader should ask themselves some tough questions about whether an influx of new high-paying jobs is going to be beneficial at all.