Amazon reveals the truth on why it nixed New York and chose Virginia for its HQ2

[Celerity]

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/10/amazon-reveals-the-truth-on-why-it-nixed-ny-and-chose-virginia-for-hq2.html


How did Virginia manage to snag the biggest economic development prize in recent memory?

Amazon says its abrupt decision in February to pull out of a deal to build part of its giant second headquarters in Long Island City, Queens, was not about politics, despite speculation to the contrary. But when opposition in New York grew, Chairman Jeff Bezos and his team decided it only made sense to focus their efforts on the other victor in the HQ2 sweepstakes: Northern Virginia.

The location emerges as the big winner, as HQ2 will add 25,000 jobs and upward of 6 million square feet of office space by the mid-2030s.

Amazon filed the initial development plans for its second headquarters in the Crystal City section of Arlington in May. They call for some redevelopment of a group of vacant warehouses into two office towers, as well as retail and open space, as part of an urban campus concept at a 16-acre, mixed-use development site called Metropolitan Park.

A member of the core site selection team offered CNBC an inside look at how Virginia won — and New York lost.

Among the external sources the team looked at was the CNBC America’s Top States for Business rankings. The annual study scores all states on 64 metrics across 10 categories of competitiveness, including Workforce, Cost of Doing Business, Quality of Life, Infrastructure and Economy.

But the biggest motivator for Amazon: a state committed to developing a technology talent pipeline for the future. Virginia is the Top State for Business in 2019, and it offers the best workforce in the nation, according to the CNBC study, with the nation’s largest concentration of science, technology, engineering and math employees.


snip


and they still are building out in NYC, just not in Queens, and it will be a smaller amount of jobs, plus zero in tax breaks extracted from NY

Link to tweet

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
?Verified account
@AOC

Well, just as we said, Amazon quietly came to NYC without needing a dime of public money or special tax treatment.

The jobs came without the cost.

NYC is an attractive place to locate on its own (incl. public infra!), w/o billions of dollars in corporate giveaway “incentives.”

Link to tweet

…

Michael Kink
@mkink
Google, Facebook, Uber, and Amazon — yes, Amazon — accelerate NYC expansions, adding jobs with NO public subsidies or tax giveaways

https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-city-real-estate-savors-a-tech-boom-11562760760?shareToken=ste2a897e466444a5ea419de5ce3c6b9d6&reflink=share_mobilewebshare …

32.9K
6:02 PM - Jul 11, 2019
9,469 people are talking about this

[MichMan]

1. They are making it sound like Amazon will now be paying more net taxes to the city than HQ2

I am pretty certain that is not the case

[Celerity]

2. depends on the tax breaks VA gave them

Amazon is a master tax avoider

Amazon Will Pay a Whopping $0 in Federal Taxes on $11.2 Billion Profits

https://fortune.com/2019/02/14/amazon-doesnt-pay-federal-taxes-2019/

[MichMan]

3. Not referring to Virginia

Referring to the taxes Amazon would have paid NYC had it gone there. Lots of property taxes plus state and local income taxes of 25K employees.

[UniteFightBack]

4. I don't get the 'public infra' comment. It almost seems like she hasn't been on a bus or subway

commuting into NYC.