Pittsburgh’s in the same boat, much as it would have benefited the landed aristocracy homeowners like me. There’s nowhere to put a 25,000-worker campus within an hour’s drive of the fancy city amenities tech workers want.
This made me laugh. Crystal City is a fairly soulless place.
Man, that’s so true. I took the metro into DC from Reagan and I saw a stop for Crystal City and I thought, that sounds awesome!
It is not.
Glad Austin didn’t win this particular beauty pageant.
Haha! And right on the banks of the crystal clear Potomac River!
NYC makes sense in retrospect - I wish they chose the Bronx or eastern Brooklyn instead though, to help promote the growth of additional business centers that’s less Manhattan centric.
LIC sort of accomplishes this but most commuters will need to go through Manhattan to get there so doesn’t help during rush hour much.
We can’t even handle our current amount of traffic, let alone 25k more employees. Also I think we’ve been in the news for having one of the highest rent increases (by percentage points) in the country and that would definitely make ti worse.
Getting downtown is only sane due to the Sunrail, and even that has been getting quite crowded lately.
Pretty much what I take from this thread is that there is no city in America that isn’t a bombed out war zone that could handle 25k additional tech workers because of already high housing prices, traffic, or zombies.
Jokes aside, the housing price issue is starting to concern me. Too many cities are now essentially out of reach for anyone not making a top 5% income on a national basis.
I lease office space all the time for my businesses and I always tell my real estate agent, ‘We can lease any office in the world as long as I can walk there from where I live,’ … Amazon is now talking about having three headquarters, Seattle, Crystal City and Long Island City. The Bezos’s also own three homes, and the average distance from those three homes to a headquarters is 6.4 miles.
I remember reading something once about how when most headquarters of corporations are relocated, they are relocated within a few miles of the CEO’s house.
I’ve worked for a couple of companies that have moved, and they have always moved to be closer to the CEO’s current house.
DC does seem to have the grimmest office architecture of any Western capital.
Does anyone know how much information Amazon received just by holding this fake beauty contest. I mean, every city put together reports and in depth information about what they have and what they can offer. Basically, just the information alone was a massive give away to Amazon.
Also, is anyone else feel a bit pissed by the tax give aways that were promised? When all these cities compete against each the only people that suffer are the tax payers. It’s just another wealth transfer from the poor and middle class to the absurdly wealth.
OK, my last Twitter post re: Crystal City. I really enjoyed working in Arlington but Crystal City not so much (except for the Crystal City Restaurant which was a strip joint with great burgers - no clue if it’s still there).
Edit: Haha, It is still there! Although considerably more upscale than when I went there 20 years ago.
Yeah I’m pretty annoyed by that whole thing too. I really hate these tax games that effectively leave many companies paying zero, or near zero, corporate tax.
Its unfair to the local tax payer, and unfair to local companies who can’t play those games.
It’s really not as bad as it looks at first. Perhaps not the prettiest of areas, but especially in the last couple of years it seems to be turning around. They recently added lots of outdoor furniture and community space scattered around town where you can sit at for lunch. The “water park” is nice and has live music and food/drinks every Friday night in warmer seasons. There’s a great board game meetup on Friday and Saturday in the public indoor space with lots of tables – and it never closes, so people can stay there all night if they want to. There’s an excellent rock climbing gym. Weekly farmer’s market. Community theater. Free parking every day after 4 and during the weekends, which is unheard of in other places so close to DC and metro. It’s still fairly dead on the weekends when there’s not something going on, but they are putting effort into making it a place to be.
Let’s take a look.
They would have to rebuild all the home’s they tore down.
Philadelphia offered 4.6 Billion in incentives, which is more than NY and WAY more than Northern VA and still didn’t get the HQ
How does this number compare to other cities and states? To give you an idea, together, New York and Virginia (the winning locations, which will split the headquarters and the total 50,000 jobs) offered Amazon more than $2 billion in tax credits, rebates and other incentives, according to the New York Times. (Some say the location’s combined benefits are actually higher, though). The publication reports that New York said it would give Amazon $1.525 billion in incentives (and a [helipad] for good measure), while Virginia promised roughly $573 million.
Amazon knew full well where they wanted to go, and ran this circus to drive up the bidding in the areas they were already planning to go anyway.
Yuck.
Called it months ago.
Man, Kevin Sorbo isn’t looking so good these days.