AOC, Sanders Say I Told You So, as Amazon, Facebook Come to NYC
Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders are taking a victory lap after Amazon.com Inc.and other technology giants leased millions of square feet of office space in New York City – without the billions of dollars in government support that Amazon tried to negotiate earlier this year.
Jeff Bezos sucks. Hail AOC.
Exactly. NYC has some of the best talents in the world in finance, media and fashion. Strong network effect just like the bay area but in different fields. No need to pay bezos to come. He will come crawling begging for more.
The office will be 1,500 employees which is far below the 25,000 of HQ2. I’m not sure who’d celebrate getting 1,500 jobs instead of 25,000. That’s a ton of lost tax revenue for the state.
This is an interesting observation, In 25 years of the existence of Amazon, Jeff Bezo did not need network of finance, media and fashion experts located in New York. All of the sudden!! BTW, Amazon prime is doing good with its shows and collection of videos. Why need expert for the things you already know how to do efficiently?
Bezos just added a fashion exec to his elite S team. Amazon is unique among American tech firms in that its ambition is truly uninhibited. It doesn’t confine itself to arbitrary limits.
This is how tech has evolved in the last few decades. It has spread into every industry and increasingly the most innovative firms in some old sectors like publishing and fashion are tech firms, not the old guards.
https://avc.com/2019/12/getting-tech-into-the-boroughs/
I think he has a point. While amazon may still going to hire many thousands of people in NYC, without government incentives they are going to do it in Manhattan instead of Bronx. Here we are again seeing the ever more concentration of the most innovative bit of our economy into tighter and tighter clusters. On a national level we have the big 5 cities taking 90% of tech. Within metros city cores are taking in a bigger and bigger share, like how SF rose above South Bay in the last 15 years.
Rationalize your decision to buy in SF instead of SV 
That’s why your Cupertino houses lost value in the last 2 years and my SF property rocketing up. 
Post your numbers as evidences. I know what you have posted previously 
1,500 doesn’t equal many thousands.
How many has Amazon hired in its Virginia HQ2? And you are certain Amazon won’t hire any more in NYC?
You posted the article and claimed it’s a sign of hiring thousands. The article says the space is big enough for 1,500. I guess you’re willing to do some serious extrapolation.
The bet is made on the concept “brain hub” which fosters expansion into other fields (1 tech position leads to 5 others). Supposedly a central part of Virginia’s proposal was putting capital into educational training:
Virginia offered Amazon only $550 million in tax breaks and $195 million in transportation improvements. But it pledged to plow $1.1 billion into tech schooling. According to Moret, it was the only place in the nation that made education the centerpiece of its pitch
The book on which elements of the HQ2 proposal were derived looks interesting (to me):
The formation of superclusters is exactly the opposite of what people used to predict. There was a time when people thought with the advent of fast internet connection, workers can work anywhere in the world. So the logical conclusion was that geographies will matter less and people will move to lower cost state and still make as much as in super cities like SF and NYC.
Turns out it was dead wrong.
What instead happened was the richer and most dynamic cities pull ahead even more. In a knowledge economy talents are the most important success factor, and in particular, density of talents. Like a chemical reaction, concentration of your reactants matter a great deal. That determines how innovative a firm can be.
Even the promised 25k jobs were to occur over a 10+yr time frame. To start out it would have been about 1000-2000/yr. They figured the $3B in incentives offered by NYC came out to $48k/head. Paying $500 million in capital funding for the actual building and another $500 million on public transportation for employees was hard to swallow especially when people heard Amazon had paid zero taxes.
NY should spend that money on fixing its subway system instead. Saving every rider 10 minutes can easily amount to billions of dollars in aggregate every year.
A bit of history: Some of the tech-related cities like Boston and Dallas/Austin are older than Silicon Valley and precede the advent of the internet.
You need not overlook the notion of value addition. What a person earns is not a function of where one works, but how much one contributes to the final value of the product. Does an office-admin in SF or NYC make more than an entry-level engineer in some other city working for the same team? A case on point is Bill Gross of PIMCO who worked for Janus, based in colorado, from Newport Beach, CA. So, the internet did enable a highly capable person to live away from his team and be able to contribute handsomely.
You do have a point about talent density, but you may be overstating it. Most creative people need as much time in isolation, as they need to collaborate with others. Actually, the need for proximity is higher only when a higher degree of interaction is required among the members. Actually, creative talent is expected to be a self-starter and self-managed. Since 2003, I have not worked with any team that is fully located in one place. Yes, some amount of face time is required among the members who work closely or who have not same level of expertise. But, not as much if the interaction is only to provide feedback and status.
First thing first, I presume you are referring to techies.
You may have remembered wrongly. Jobs, jobs, jobs 
is where people will go. Then availability of excellent entertainment (indoors/outdoors) for singles/DINKs and excellent schools for parents. Up until recently, is difficult to work remotely. The rise of cloud computing (the concept has been around for a long time, inflection point is around 2016) allows many businesses to coordinate work productively across different geographical locations, far more effectively than previous tech. Things are changing, albeit a bit slow, tech businesses are slow to change, got to disrupt 
these businesses. Ask yourself, what make AMZN so confident that they can have two HQs in two far apart geographical locations? If can have two, why not 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, … get the picture?
Remind me when fast internet is ubiquitously available? Fast means? 1 Mbps, 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 1Gbps, or? Apps, apps, apps, is the driver, mere infrastructure like fast internet is not sufficient.
Most importantly, remember to buy some cloud-based work collaboration and comms stocks 
Talent density matters the most when business is in start up mode. That’s when creativity, execution and team cohesion matter the most. So startups tend to cluster in super cities like SF.
Cost is irrelevant in the first few years of a firm’s existence. Face to face interaction still is the highest bandwidth medium. Speed is of absolute essence. You snooze you lose.
When a firm gets more established, innovation slows, processes and bureaucracy take hold. There firms can afford to spread out geographically. But since the most value (ie pre-IPO stock) is no longer available, ambitious people leave and cautious types stay behind. So the whole process starts anew. The new batch of startups will again form in super cluster cities because of talent density.
In short this is how the flywheel spins faster and faster in super clusters. Depending on each cluster’s talent profile it has a firm hold on some category. NYC has the highest talent density in finance and publishing. SV has the the density in tech. Once the flywheel gets spinning it’s extremely hard to stop. NYC has been the No.1 financial center in the world since the 40s. I don’t see anyone predicting another city overtaking it. And yet people are always predicting doom for SV.