No Amazon HQ in NY

[*michaelsean*]

Mayor B is blaming Amazon, while AOC is saying it's the will of the people.

Quote:“You have to be tough to make it in New York City. We gave Amazon the opportunity to be a good neighbor and do business in the greatest city in the world. Instead of working with the community, Amazon threw away that opportunity,” de Blasio said in a statement. “We have the best talent in the world and every day we are growing a stronger and fairer economy for everyone. If Amazon can’t recognize what that’s worth, its competitors will.”

Quote:I think it’s incredible,” Ocasio-Cortez responded when asked to comment on Amazon’s about-face. “It shows that everyday Americans still have the power to organize and fight for their communities and they can have more say in this country than richest man in the world.”

[Benton]

(02-15-2019, 01:03 PM)SunsetBengal Wrote: I've also read that Texas is fast becoming the most popular destination for companies fleeing the taxes of California.

Wouldn't surprise me. It's a pretty diverse state, which I think is part of the reason Louisville has had such growth, the Cinncinnati/Louisville area is a couple hour drive to a variety of things. Texas, I would guess, would be fairly attractive if you're trying to bring in employees. A better tax rate has got to be an enticement, too.

Plus just an overall lower cost of operating/living compared to California. I was on an advisory committee a while back and one of the main things existing industry in my area cited was a lower cost of operating. Lower average wages, lower utilities, etc. Just across the river in Illinois it's 2-4 times the cost of living/business operation because of loopy Chicago politics, despite roughly the same industries and social makeup.

[SunsetBengal]

(02-15-2019, 03:24 PM)Benton Wrote: Wouldn't surprise me. It's a pretty diverse state, which I think is part of the reason Louisville has had such growth, the Cinncinnati/Louisville area is a couple hour drive to a variety of things. Texas, I would guess, would be fairly attractive if you're trying to bring in employees. A better tax rate has got to be an enticement, too.

Plus just an overall lower cost of operating/living compared to California. I was on an advisory committee a while back and one of the main things existing industry in my area cited was a lower cost of operating. Lower average wages, lower utilities, etc. Just across the river in Illinois it's 2-4 times the cost of living/business operation because of loopy Chicago politics, despite roughly the same industries and social makeup.

I do know that Texas is quite attractive to perspective employees, as they don't assess a State income tax.  But on the tradeoff side, they must have a pretty high sales tax, as they need to get their revenue from somewhere..

[Benton]

(02-15-2019, 06:35 PM)SunsetBengal Wrote: I do know that Texas is quite attractive to perspective employees, as they don't assess a State income tax.  But on the tradeoff side, they must have a pretty high sales tax, as they need to get their revenue from somewhere..

We run into the same thing with Tennessee. State lawmakers point to companies going there and that's one of the reasons. But they don't want any real tax reform, they just do more breaks.

[SunsetBengal]

(02-15-2019, 07:00 PM)Benton Wrote: We run into the same thing with Tennessee. State lawmakers point to companies going there and that's one of the reasons. But they don't want any real tax reform, they just do more breaks.

It's not like a State doing no income tax is exotic or unheard of, it seems to be working in 9 States, with a movement in Massachusetts trying to be the 10th.  

Meanwhile, here in NC, the State personal income tax rate just dropped to 5.25%, and the Corporate dropped to 2.5%, making it the lowest State Corporate tax rate in the Nation.

https://taxfoundation.org/state-tax-changes-january-2019/


And, we're getting an Amazon distribution hub, just 10 minutes from where I live.

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article214631315.html

[fredtoast]

(02-15-2019, 07:00 PM)Benton Wrote: We run into the same thing with Tennessee. State lawmakers point to companies going there and that's one of the reasons. But they don't want any real tax reform, they just do more breaks.

Companies love Tennessee because of the anti union laws.

[Sociopathicsteelerfan]

(02-15-2019, 07:49 PM)SunsetBengal Wrote: It's not like a State doing no income tax is exotic or unheard of, it seems to be working in 9 States, with a movement in Massachusetts trying to be the 10th.  

Meanwhile, here in NC, the State personal income tax rate just dropped to 5.25%, and the Corporate dropped to 2.5%, making it the lowest State Corporate tax rate in the Nation.

https://taxfoundation.org/state-tax-changes-january-2019/


And, we're getting an Amazon distribution hub, just 10 minutes from where I live.

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article214631315.html

The Amazon NYC thing is very interesting.  It's AOC and her people's army versus the evil corporations that have come to kill your father and rape your mother!  it would almost be worth letting people like her be in charge so we could point and laugh in five years when everything has gone to complete shit.

[SunsetBengal]

(02-15-2019, 07:55 PM)fredtoast Wrote: Companies love Tennessee because of the anti union laws.

That shouldn't make a difference.  NC is an "at will" employment State, Yet there seems to be enough Federal Labor Protections in place to keep a balance between companies flat out taking advantage of people, and lazy people simply showing up and expecting a paycheck.

[SunsetBengal]

(02-15-2019, 07:59 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: The Amazon NYC thing is very interesting.  It's AOC and her people's army versus the evil corporations that have come to kill your father and rape your mother!  it would almost be worth letting people like her be in charge so we could point and laugh in five years when everything has gone to complete shit.

Almost..  I plan on still being alive, working, and being a consumer of whatever goods I prefer in 5 years. 

[Sociopathicsteelerfan]

(02-15-2019, 08:07 PM)SunsetBengal Wrote: Almost..  I plan on still being alive, working, and being a consumer of whatever goods I prefer in 5 years. 

Things would get bad enough to remove people like her and still be able to set the ship right.  Of course we'd still lose ground to China in the interim and have to dig ourselves out of the hole.  At least we'd wouldn't listen to similar idiots for at least 50-60 years.

[Benton]

(02-15-2019, 07:55 PM)fredtoast Wrote: Companies love Tennessee because of the anti union laws.

Valid point. I'm still shocked Kentucky went that route considering our most stable employers were miners, car makers and other union jobs.

[Benton]

(02-15-2019, 08:05 PM)SunsetBengal Wrote: That shouldn't make a difference.  NC is an "at will" employment State, Yet there seems to be enough Federal Labor Protections in place to keep a balance between companies flat out taking advantage of people, and lazy people simply showing up and expecting a paycheck.

Unions typically increase the overall wage. States with anti union laws by and large have more jobs, but they pay less. The impact of right to work laws won't really be clear for another decade or so, but so far it's panning out in states that if businesses can pay workers less, they generally will.

[*Nately120*]

(02-15-2019, 08:07 PM)SunsetBengal Wrote: Almost..  I plan on still being alive, working, and being a consumer of whatever goods I prefer in 5 years. 

Alas, I fear 2016 may have shown that politics is going to be more about "making the other side mad" than anything else.

[CKwi88]

(02-18-2019, 06:21 PM)Nately120 Wrote: Alas, I fear 2016 may have shown that politics is going to be more about "making the other side mad" than anything else.

2016? Try sometime in the 90s

[GMDino]

Damn AOC even has influences in Seattle!! 

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/huge-downtown-seattle-office-space-that-amazon-had-leased-is-reportedly-put-on-market/

Quote:Amazon is abandoning a prominent downtown Seattle office project 10 months after it threatened to do so if the city imposed a new business tax.



While the Seattle City Council ultimately reversed itself on the so-called head tax, Amazon confirmed Wednesday it will not occupy the 722,000 square feet of space it had leased in the Rainier Square tower under construction at Fifth Avenue and Union Street. The company did resume construction on another high-rise it had paused as part of last May’s threat.

“We are always evaluating our space requirements and intend to sublease Rainier Square based on current plans,” Amazon said in a statement, adding that the company has more than 9,000 open jobs and 2 million square feet of new space under construction in Seattle, and that “it will continue to evaluate future growth.”

The Amazon executives doing those evaluations exit February with much more to consider than when they entered the month. Meanwhile, the company’s growth in Seattle and relationship with the city will likely figure prominently in the upcoming City Council election season.


Changing plans
On Valentine’s Day, Amazon abandoned its plans for a major campus in New York City, which would have accommodated up to 25,000 employees as it was built over several years. (It has upward of 2,000 people working in the city in areas including advertising, fashion and publishing.)


The company said it would spread those jobs across several other North American tech hubs where it has offices, but indicated no immediate plans to accelerate growth in Seattle as a result of its false start in New York. Nor did it indicate it would restart its HQ2 search process, the yearlong sweepstakes it launched in 2017 that yielded in November a split decision with New York and Northern Virginia tapped for huge new offices.

Now, in addition to seats for 25,000 would-be New York employees, Amazon — if its growth trajectory holds — would need to find space for thousands more who would have worked in downtown Seattle.


At 722,000 square feet, the Rainier Square lease was one of the biggest in Seattle history. It provided room for at least 3,500 employees, and perhaps up to 5,000.


Amazon had previously secured two large spaces in downtown Bellevue, its original hometown, enough to accommodate 4,500 people. The Puget Sound Business Journal reported this month that the company is looking to expand even more in Bellevue, although Amazon has not commented on its Eastside plans. Other big tech companies in the region maintain locations on both sides of Lake Washington to tap talent in the city and its suburbs.



Seattle real-estate impact
Scheduled to open next year, the $570 million Rainier Square tower project will be the second-tallest building in the Pacific Northwest, at 58 stories. It also will include luxury apartments and a hotel, as well as a PCC Community Markets on the ground floor.

Even by Amazon’s standards, the office commitment was huge: Only a few companies — Starbucks, Google and Facebook — have more office space in Seattle altogether than Amazon was planning to occupy in Rainier Square.


In addition to its size, Rainier Square represented a bit of a departure for Amazon, which has about 40 buildings and 45,000 employees in South Lake Union and the Denny Triangle, to venture south toward downtown.


The impact the pullout will have on the local office market is mixed: On one hand, it’s a ton of space to fill, and likely too big for any one company to take. But on the other hand, the office market — unlike the cooling residential real-estate market — is overheated with demand from companies.


Colliers International released a report Wednesday showing the vacancy rate in downtown Seattle is 7.1 percent — only Manhattan and the Bay Area had tighter markets, among major metro areas. Office rents for top-tier Class A properties downtown, like Rainier Square, have also been rising as companies like Google, Facebook and WeWork continue to snatch up large amounts of space.



Seattle’s economic base is much broader than it was in 2007, the last time a similarly large chunk of top-tier space came on the market unexpectedly. When Washington Mutual — then Seattle’s biggest office tenant — went underand vacated 1.2 million square feet in the city, it “kind of imploded our market,” said David Gurry, senior vice president of Colliers in downtown Seattle.


“It’s my opinion that 720,000 square feet of space will really have an insignificant impact on the market,” Gurry said. 


“There’s enough demand from companies in the city of Seattle and those moving in from places like Silicon Valley that I think it’ll get gobbled up pretty quickly.”


The stakes for Amazon to sublease the space are significant, even for a company that made an $11.2 billion profit last year. 
The company doesn’t release its lease terms, but leases for new buildings in Seattle typically last 10 to 15 years. When Amazon signed its Rainier Square lease in fall 2017, rents in downtown were about $42 per square foot a year. Based on that, its total rent bill for the building would be in the neighborhood of $30 million a year, or $300 million over a typical 10-year lease.


Gurry said it’s possible a sublease deal could even be slightly profitable for Amazon and Seattle-based Wright Runstad & Co., the tower’s builder and owner. Office rents have risen about $5 per square foot in the year and a half since Amazon’s original lease, so it could make a small profit — likely split 50/50 between Amazon and Wright Runstad — if it is able to sublease the full space.

Greg Johnson, president of Wright Runstad, said he couldn’t say why Amazon pulled out of the building and if it’s tied into any larger threads about the company’s future here.


“It’s a relatively small part of what they occupy in the region, so I wouldn’t necessarily try to read that much into it,” Johnson said, noting subleasing goes on pretty frequently in Seattle.

While signing a single, noteworthy company before the project broke ground was a win for Wright Runstad, he said it will still be a success if another strong company or group of tenants ultimately fills the building, which he expects to be the case.


“We wish (Amazon) well and hope it’s super successful” in subleasing the space, Johnson said. “I think the good news for Amazon is we’re in a very robust market and there’s other people and companies out looking for space, and there isn’t much available. I think they’re going to fill it up pretty quickly.”


Relationship with City Hall
Questions swirled around Amazon’s presence in Seattle even before the fight over the head tax and the announcement of a public courting of other cities for a so-called HQ2.

Rightly or wrongly, blame for the city’s worsening traffic, affordability and homelessness has been laid at the feet of the nearly 25-year-old tech and commerce giant, whose outsize growth made it an easy target.


Amazon’s decision in 2007 to consolidate its Seattle presence in an urban corporate campus in the South Lake Union neighborhood ushered in a decade of rapid change and the arrival of tens of thousands of high-paying jobs in technology and associated fields. Other major tech firms such as Facebook and Google followed Amazon into a neighborhood of old warehouses and commercial laundries that was redeveloped en masse by the late Paul Allen’s Vulcan Real Estate.

The tech boom here overlapped with a marked increase in homelessness, which was declared an emergency in the city in 2015, leading some City Council members last spring to propose a per-employee head tax on high-grossing businesses.


In response, Amazon said it would pause construction planning on an office high-rise known as “Block 18” and consider subleasing its space in the Rainier Square tower. The threats spooked the city’s construction-worker unions, which split with service-worker unions that were supporting the tax.


When Mayor Jenny Durkan and a council majority sought to compromise with business leaders in May by passing a smaller version of the tax, Amazon announced it would move ahead with Block 18, one of several new buildings going up in the Denny Triangle. But the company never recommitted to the Rainier Square space, even after an effort to nix the measure through a referendum, backed by Amazon and other local businesses, pressured the council into repealing the tax less than a month later.


The annual tax of $275 per employee on companies grossing at least $20 million per year would have raised about $47 million in 2019 for low-income housing and homeless services. Kshama Sawant, one of two council members who opposed the repeal, described Amazon’s Rainier Square announcement Wednesday as a “told you so” moment.

“This is a good reminder for us that backing down to the bullying of corporations never stops their bullying,” said Sawant, praising activists in New York City who protested tax breaks for Amazon, causing the company to pull out from its campus plans there. (Two Seattle council members, Teresa Mosqueda and Lisa Herbold, spoke at a New York event organized by Amazon opponents in January.)


“As the next step, people in Seattle should gather courage and renew our fight to tax big business for social housing,” Sawant said.

Sawant’s colleagues showed little appetite to revisit the matter last fall as they and Durkan drew up a new budget. But the council that reversed itself last June will soon look very different.


Seven of nine seats are up for grabs this fall, and four incumbents already have decided not to seek re-election. Sawant is running again, and the head tax and Seattle’s relationship with Amazon and the still-growing tech sector likely will be hot topics in many races.


“Whether or not this building is occupied by Amazon workers, we have a housing crisis. We have transportation issues,” said Mosqueda, who also opposed the head-tax repeal and whose seat isn’t up for election until 2021.


“We would welcome workers from Facebook, or Google, or Apple, just like we would welcome workers from Amazon,” 
Mosqueda added. “But we still don’t have as much housing as we need, and we still need to double-down on our investments.”

Durkan’s office issued a brief statement late Wednesday about the strength of the city’s economy and its attractiveness to employers, but did not address specific questions about Amazon’s decision.


An Amazon spokesman said two weeks ago that its buildings under construction in Seattle would bring its total in the city to 14 million square feet, which “will be the completion of our Seattle campus.” The spokesman later backpedaled and issued a statement saying only that the company “will continue to evaluate future growth” in Seattle — the stance reiterated Wednesday — and declined to comment further.

The company has had a steady number of job openings in the city — about 9,800 as of Wednesday, though it’s unclear how many of those are for expansions in the city rather than hiring as part of regular turnover. Amazon has been saying since last fall that it has 45,000 employees in the city, up from 40,000 in March 2018.


Mosqueda said the Rainier Square news isn’t a sign that Seattle is a bad place for Amazon to do business.


“They’re on track to reach 50,000 employees here,” she said. “This is a city that not only welcomed them in but helped them succeed. For that success to now be sustainable, we have to get on the same page about investments in housing, transit and infrastructure.”


Amazon’s statement Wednesday follows the publication of a marketing flyer posted earlier by technology news site GeekWire showing that the Rainier Square space was on the market.

[*michaelsean*]

(03-01-2019, 03:18 PM)GMDino Wrote: Damn AOC even has influences in Seattle!! 

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/huge-downtown-seattle-office-space-that-amazon-had-leased-is-reportedly-put-on-market/

What's the implication here?  That the obsessed right falsely connected her to Amazon's decision in NY?  

[GMDino]

(03-01-2019, 03:57 PM)michaelsean Wrote: What's the implication here?  That the obsessed right falsely connected her to Amazon's decision in NY?  

Well, yes.

She has magical socialist powers.

[*michaelsean*]

(03-01-2019, 04:03 PM)GMDino Wrote: Well, yes.

She has magical socialist powers.

She was connected to it, and she celebrated afterwards.  Why are you trying to downplay your girl's accomplishments?

[GMDino]

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

Quote:Big technology companies are doubling down on New York City by adding millions of square feet in office space and creating thousands of new jobs, with few aftereffects fromAmazon.com Inc. ’s nixing of a Queens headquarters.
Alphabet Inc. ’s Google last week closed a deal to lease 1.3 million square feet in lower Manhattan, part of Google’s plans to add 7,000 in staff to the city over 10 years.

Facebook Inc. is in talks to lease one million square feet of office space at 50 Hudson Yards, a skyscraper under construction on Manhattan’s far West Side, according to a person familiar with the talks. Uber Technologies Inc. and Amazon have been looking for large office space at the Farley Building, say people briefed on the matter. Part of the former James A. Farley Post Office will be used as a train hall for Penn Station.



New York is emerging as an East Coast hub for technology because of the size of its labor force, its extensive transportation infrastructure and the cultural and entertainment activities that come with a big city, analysts and real-estate executives said.


“New York has lured the talent, and now the employers need to set up shop to lure that talent,” said Kevin Egan, an executive at Oxford Properties Group, which is one of Google’s Manhattan landlords. “These tenants want to be here and need to be here.”
Related Video

The city’s tech frenzy comes barely four months after Amazon stunned developers and others in the business community by canceling plans for a second-headquarters project in Long Island City, Queens. Some elected officials had criticized a government incentive package of as much as $3 billion to lure the retail giant.



Amazon’s abrupt reversal sent shock waves through the New York real estate community, with some suggesting that the company’s decision to bolt could discourage other major tech companies from considering the city.


Instead, interest among social media, e-commerce and ride-hailing companies has been intensifying. Many of these companies are willing to spend big dollars renting high-end Manhattan real estate, rather than the older office stock in Queens that Amazon was prepared to lease.


“A spat between Amazon and a faction of City Council is not going to prevent the continued tech boom of New York,” said Matthew Harrigan, chief executive of Company, a venture that manages a tech-centric serviced office building in Midtown Manhattan.


Tech-sector jobs have increased at a faster clip than the city’s overall job growth. The top tech-job categories, which include software publishers, internet publishing and web search portals, averaged 9.6% growth annually between 2009 and 2018 in New York City, according to economist James Parrott at the New School. That growth was almost four times as fast as the average annual private-sector job growth.
New York’s prominence as a global financial capital and center of fashion, advertising and marketing makes it attractive for tech companies looking to poach workers from these industries, analysts said.


“Social media companies have to sell ads to have revenue streams, and New York City is the advertising capital,” Mr.  Parrott said. “If you want smart people in advertising, you have to come to New York City for that.”

Tech companies have had a presence in New York City, but now they look eager to go bigger. Since 2015, Uber has more than doubled its office space in New York City to about 160,000 square feet, while Amazon has boosted its office space almost three times to about 800,000 square feet, according to CoStar Group Inc. Facebook’s office space is now at least three times as large as it was five years ago.

“A company like Facebook and others are expanding because they are running out of talent in Silicon Valley and San Francisco,” said Paul Leonard, a managing consultant at CoStar.


Technology, ad, media and information companies leased 74% more space in the first half of 2019 than they did a year earlier, according to Cushman & Wakefield PLC. That group of companies, known as the TAMI sector, leased space at a faster clip than the financial industry, which signed deals for 70% more office space.

In 2018, Toronto-based Oxford Properties and a partner bought St. John’s Terminal on Manhattan’s west side for $700 million, with tech tenants in mind. The former freight terminal, which Google will occupy, has floor sizes of over 100,000 square feet, high ceilings and views of the Hudson River, enticing features for tech and ad tenants, Mr. Egan said.


Oxford initially planned for a $2 billion development that would add abundant outdoor terraces and decks before landing Google. It is now redeveloping the property as the centerpiece of a campus in the Hudson Square neighborhood, where Google will ultimately occupy three buildings.