In typical Jeff Bezos fashion, Amazon tried to muscle it’s way into New York City last year….
THAT did Not work…
They’ve settled on a smaller footprint in the ‘Big Apple’, a place they need to be and will keep expanding in nevertheless…
Bloomberg Business is out with a peice that points to how Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc. has quietly been adding jobs and real estate in New York for decades ….
“Google did it very wisely,” said Mitchell Moss, an urban planning professor at New York University.
Google, a tech pioneer when it first arrived in New York 20 years ago, has established itself gradually, buying and leasing mostly older buildings, and leaving the exteriors alone.
Amazon, meanwhile, flirted with cities around the U.S. in its flashy public bid to establish a second headquarters. It ultimately negotiated billions in government subsidies to bring 25,000 jobs to the Long Island City section of Queens. The Seattle-based e-commerce giant abandoned the plans a year ago after the public money became a lightning rod for criticism, partly over concerns about what a huge new campus filled with high-earning Amazonians would do a gentrifying neighborhood.
Google has more than 8,000 employees in New York across several buildings and could surpass 14,000 by 2028. In the past two years, it bought Chelsea Market and a building across 15th Street for a total of about $3 billion. It also announced plans to spend more than $1 billion creating a new campus in Hudson Square, about a mile south of its New York headquarters at 111 Eighth Ave.
When Google bought that building in 2010, it marked a turning point in New York’s bid to be a major technologyhub, said Doug Harmon, who brokered the deal and is now chairman of capital markets for Cushman & Wakefield. The company’s steady presence has attracted other tech giants who are turning Manhattan’s west side into a new tech corridor.
Long a media and finance stronghold, New York has been tipping toward tech as companies that have outgrown California tap the city’s highly skilled workforce. The city had more than 264,000 tech workers in 2018, a 20% jump from 2013, according to real estate company CBRE Group Inc. Facebook Inc. has expanded its presence in recent months with a lease at Hudson Yards, while Amazon also recently took space in the neighborhood to house more than 1,500 workers, a sign it still plans to add workers in the city despite the abandoned HQ2 project.
While Amazon said in February it was disappointed that it couldn’t build the relationships with state and local officials required to move forward with its project in Queens, the company plans to expand in its 18 tech hubs across the U.S., including New York….
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