Amazon HQ 2 Is Officially Going To Arlington VA and Long Island City
Tech Crunch - New York City and Arlington, Virginia have reportedly won Amazon’s lengthy and highly-publicized pageant for the locations of its new headquarters, beating out 238 other contestants. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the news, an official announcement may come as early as Tuesday.
The offices will be located in Long Island City, across the East River from Manhattan, and Crystal City, a neighborhood in Arlington, which is a 15-20 minute drive from Washington D.C.
WSJ reported that the Amazon decided to split a total of 50,000 employees between two new offices because the company believes it can recruit better candidates that way, while also avoiding the traffic, housing, and other potential infrastructure headaches of adding tens of thousands of new employees to one area.
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You know what I was just thinking the other day? How Washington DC and NYC needed more people. I was thinking how easy it is to get around Washington DC, especially out to Crystal City. And same goes for NYC. With the amount of bridges and tunnels out to Queens, traffic is virtually non-existent. And both cities have those state of the art public transportation systems that never break down or catch on fire.
No but seriously, obviously Amazon was going to pick two major metropolitan areas to put their HQ2, and they picked the two most important cities in the USA, DC and NYC. Can’t blame them for doing that, they want to be near the action.
I am shocked they didn’t pick places slightly less congested though. The nightmare that is getting to Crystal City just added 25,000 more nightmares. I have never been to Long Island City but what I do know the NYC Subway can’t handle it.
They could have built their own futuristic cities had they chosen areas with more space, but in less exciting parts of the country. I feel like we just missed on on our first city with flying cars and moving sidewalks because Amazon picked places with infrastructure already in place instead of building their own. I wanted to bring the Jetsons to real life. Maybe next time.
On the other hand, if you have some property in either of those places, you’re about to get rich.
Adding 25,000 jobs to a suburb is no joke. There are going to be so many Whole Foods in Long Island City it’s going to make your head spin.
So hey, congrats to NYC and DC. Finally, some jobs in those two cities. Finally some people. And about time it costs an arm and a leg to live there, phew. Was beginning to worry a 1 bedroom apartment would become affordable. Thankfully that is not going to happen. Amazon saves us again.