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Comment by intsunny | Hacker News Reader

Why would NYS/NYC need to subsidize Amazon in NYC?

If NYC is indeed confirmed, then rents for Queens are going to be absolutely fucked.

While Astoria is high, Sunnyside, Woodside, and Jackson Heights will likely see never-seen-before rent increases.

This would be greatly concerning because Eastern Asians from Flushing are already moving west towards Manhattan and are already encroaching on Hispanic minorities in Elmhurst and Corona.

(Source: was native NYCer for 24 years)

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This is really silly...10k highly paid employees is a drop in the bucket in NY. The effect on rents will be negligible. They are absurd and will continue to be absurd, but 10k employees in a metro area of 20 million won't change that.

All that said, it's hard enough to compete with Google and Facebook and Spotify for local talent...this will only make it worse.

Given that at any time there are only a few hundred or so good houses available in any big city suburb, 10K new highly paid employees looking to get in can overwhelm real estate.

I don't know what you're talking about with "houses". This is NYC and LIC we're talking about, we're talking apartments, and the place is chock-full of new high-rises.

There aren't going to be 10k people looking for houses all at once. It will take them years to ramp up to 10k employees and many of them will already live in the area and will just be changing jobs. Many of them will also be young and single people who want a small apartment and not a whole house.

Where are you getting the 10K number? 50K will be split evenly between the two HQs. That's 25K per HQ.

According to this article, just the Long Island City area of NYC added 9000 apartments last year.

https://www.bisnow.com/new-york/news/home/queens-long-island...

Add in the fact that potentially many people might room, and not everyone who will work there will be from outside the city, and many may want to live in other parts of the city, it looks like absorbing 10k new employees isn’t gonna be much of an issue at all.

> This would be greatly concerning because Eastern Asians from Flushing are already moving west towards Manhattan and are already encroaching on Hispanic minorities in Elmhurst and Corona.

Why is it better for Hispanic people to live in an area than Eastern Asian people?

I think the grandparent post is saying that Asians in Flushings are more likely to own their property and then it gets rented out inside the ethnic group moreso than outside the group. So Hispanics etcetera will be squeezed between that and rising prices from HQ2.

I don't know how much of these are true, but I've heard anecdotes/stereotypes like this a few times in New York. Just haven't seen (or looked for) any confirmed studies about it.

I can't speak for other areas of the country, but NYC native Asian Americans are notoriously obsessed with and very adept at purchasing property. Whether it's pooling money among friends, having very low living costs, or even helping their sons and daughters with a down payment, it's clear it's very important for the culture in a way it's not for other minorities or even white people.

> I can't speak for other areas of the country, but NYC native Asian Americans are notoriously obsessed with and very adept at purchasing property.

I can speak for other areas. To a first and second approximation, all Chinese, regardless of what country they live in, believe very strongly in owning property and will go to what you might consider ridiculous lengths to do so.

There's a reason the rhetorical enemy of Maoism was the "landlord".

It’s shorthand for a whole range of economic factors, housing costs, school quality, local politics, etc. Most big US cities have had waves of immigration that concentrate themselves in various neighborhoods ands it takes too long to list out all the features I listed above characteristic to these neighborhoods so people tend to refer to them as “Ukrainian” or “Hispanic” or “Asian” when they mean, “Working class catholic with some gang problems, a very influential Alderman, dealing with school closures due to budget cuts and rising property values without corresponding rising property taxes because many elderly folks on fixed incomes would be fucked... etc etc etc”

> Eastern Asians from Flushing are already moving west towards Manhattan and are already encroaching on Hispanic minorities in Elmhurst and Corona.

Encroaching is such a strong word. Are they occupying property illegally or are they buying it at market price?

Probably buying it above market price and therein lies the problem

The purchase price is not above the market. It is the market.

I agree in principle, but the estimates for my own home on Redfin would beg to differ. The value of my condo at the time I purchased it seems to fluctuate every month. When I bought it I was below Redfin’s estimate by a few thousand, now it says I overpaid by like 30 thousand.

Huh? Estimates are just that, estimates. The market price is what someone is willing to actually pay for it right now.

And yes, it's perfectly valid for market price to decrease over time if an area becomes less desirable.

Just to be clear, I was referring to the estimate of the property at a certain fixed point in time (my purchase date) changing over time. I do expect current market price to change for my home. I was just saying that these sites will estimate a value that differs and shifts, even estimates of periods during which actual market price is an available data point. March 2017 may look like a great investment when you checked in January 2018, but really bad when you check in October 2018.

Anyway, I agree with you that the market is just what people are willing to pay.

It's not determined by their willingness, it's exactly what they pay -- no more and no less.

Not every moral issue can be encoded in monetary exchange, because of (among other reasons) unequal access to capital.

In general, yes, seeing trends in ethnic groups moving because they can no longer afford what was their home, even if to make way for another ethnic minority, is probably a bad thing.

Asians are the poorest racial group in NYC.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_58ff...

NYC is always in flux.

My old neighborhood in Maspeth and Woodside isn’t Italian, Irish and Polish anymore. I remember the old timers freaking out when Koreans started appearing in the 80s... people are people and life goes on. That’s the cycle of the city.

It hasn't always been the cycle of the city that it continues to get more and more expensive, though. I don't want the city to be taken over by luxury apartment buildings, banks and Starbucks on every corner, but sometimes it feels like it's going that way.

That is all about cheap money and tax policy. Real estate is the dumbest of markets and always booms and busts.

No matter what anyone says, eventually the business cycle will swing and everything will crash again. This is especially true of commercial development where things like depreciation and offsetting tax obligations drive profitabilty, but only for the first few years of a buildings existence.

> This would be greatly concerning because Eastern Asians from Flushing are already moving west towards Manhattan and are already encroaching on Hispanic minorities in Elmhurst and Corona.

Jeez, things haven't been this bad since the Huns forced the Ostrogoths into Lombardy.

Just because the campus is located in Queens doesn't necessarily mean all workers will want to live in that area...unlike the Bay Area NYC metro area is fairly well connected by public transportation. It would be just as fast to live in Manhattan and get to Long Island City by subway as it would to get there from other parts of Queens (perhaps even faster).

For those unfamiliar, Long Island City is across the East River directly east of Upper East Side in Manhattan.

>> "For those unfamiliar, Long Island City is across the East River directly east of Upper East Side in Manhattan."

This doesn't really help if you're not familiar with NYC geography...

I had to check Google Maps. It's across the river southeast of all the famous stuff in movies.

Fair - I think when people think of Queens they think JFK airport, which is 60-90m away from Manhattan with some traffic. Point is LIC is about as close as Queen gets to Manhattan and Brooklyn, which have traditionally been more desirable boroughs to live in.

LIC makes it pretty inaccessible from NJ in a reasonable amount of time.

Why is that concerning? Seems to be a pretty racist statement to make.

Agreed; hearing migration patterns inside a city described as ethnic groups “encroaching” on each others’ territory is pretty uncomfortable.

And the folks who bought up all those warehouses in Mott Haven and Port Morris just became billionaires (again).

Long Island itself is going to be affected even more. LI is already expensive, sure, but how many of those tens of thousands of employees will want to buy houses there they can easily commute from?

A day of happiness for those owning property along the 7 train and LIRR.

Long Island has almost 3 million people living on it. I think some posters here don’t recognize the sheer scale of the NYC metro area. If they pick LIC for half a headquarters NYC isn’t going to be a company town. They probably won’t even be the largest private employer.

They wouldn't crack the top 15 even if they put all 50k new jobs instead of splitting it. NYC itself is big as is, and the NY Metro area is unparalleled.

Long Island has way more people living on it than that. Queens and Brooklyn alone are 5M. Now add in all the other counties in NY State and it's substantial.

You also seem to be confusing Long Island with LIC, which is the downtown neighborhood of Queens.

I was responding to the parent poster who claimed that Long Island prices would be strongly impacted. And when people say Long Island, 99.9% of the time they mean Nassau and Suffolk County, not the physical island.

The 7 train stops at Grand Central so going North is essentially the same.

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