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That block was previously occupied and was cleared out for HQ2, so...almost immediately?

It's like Amazon will occupy and populate all of the buildings from day 1. They will also eventually hire people or transfer people over, I remember reading that they plan to bring 25,000 jobs over the next 3 years.

This was the proposed location of the Long Island City campus along Vernon Boulevard bordered by 44th Road, 46th Avenue and East River: https://goo.gl/maps/6G43qfpqLws . Whether provided by Amazon or otherwise, tech employees would at least ostensibly be a net positive in terms of tax revenue.

> And would the employees of these businesses earn on average equal to or greater than the average NYC Amazon employee?

Does it matter? If they earn enough to live and spend locally then isn't that good enough?

Some Amazon employee giving a developer an extra 1000 bucks a month for a luxury apartment and getting their food delivered instead of going to the store isn't exactly an amazing economic benefit.

Are you sure? 25,000 employees * 12 months * 1000 = 300 million in economic activity.

Obviously not all 25000 employees would get an extra 1k, but the point being...these things can scale significantly when you're talking about Amazon. It's not a trivial thing for SMBs to fill the void that Amazon is leaving.