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Comment by arcanus | Hacker News Reader

Given the withdrawal of Amazon, didn't that invalidate the argument?

See what happens to the lots Amazon was going to build on. If they're sitting empty in a year or two, sure. If another company (or dozens of smaller companies) snaps them up and builds similar amounts of offices to what Amazon was planning, nah. I'm betting on the latter.

Well you might be wrong, the land will now be redeveloped for condos 1,000 total.

" Patchett did toss out a scrap of news about what’s next for Long Island City. He said city land that had been slated for the tech giant’s corporate towers will instead become a mix of homes and businesses. That, after all, had been the original plan before New York decided to drop it and go a-courtin’ for the company. The new-old project will consist of a thousand residential units—two hundred and fifty of which will be affordable. The neighborhood will also gain 100,000 square feet of light manufacturing and industrial space, ground floor retail, a cultural center, a 600-seat middle school, and a one-acre park."

http://gothamist.com/2019/02/22/amazon_blame_game_patchett.p...

Given the state of housing in NYC that sounds like a far more desirable outcome than Amazon taking up all that space.

> a thousand residential units—two hundred and fifty of which will be affordable. The neighborhood will also gain 100,000 square feet of light manufacturing and industrial space, ground floor retail, a cultural center, a 600-seat middle school, and a one-acre park.

Those things sound like a much better addition to the area than one Amazon.

Amazon didn’t withdraw from NYC. They still have around 5k employees here. Meanwhile Google is significantly expanding their NYC offices and nobody had to bribe them to do it.

Are you sure about that? Giving tax breaks to large employers is pretty standard practice. What was unusual about the Amazon debacle was how public it was.

Amazon's still expanding in nyc too. But....not 25,000 employees. Does Google have 25,000 employees in NYC?

At its current rate of growth it will by the time Amazon would have.

Pretty sure Google is eligible for the same Empire State development grants that made up $2.5B of the $3B that Amazon was going to get.

Actually, the city credits (which constituted about $1.3B) are not available for businesses in Manhattan south of 96th St. That said, Lower Manhattan has its own incentive programs.

That said, I'm really getting annoyed at the people who are both ignorant of how Amazon was going to get its $3B in credits and assuming that other companies, like Google, are getting none simply because nobody talks about it.

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