How Big Tech Is Turning New York Into a Silicon Valley Rival

Opponents of the earlier deal, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of Queens, said Amazon’s decision to expand in Manhattan showed that New York was so attractive that tax breaks were unnecessary.

Others responded that the Hudson Yards space the company was leasing paled next to the campus proposed for Long Island City, Queens, and to the 25,000 people Amazon had pledged to employ there.

Tech companies are choosing New York to tap into its deep and skilled talent pool and to attract employees who prefer the city’s diverse economy over technology-dominated hubs on the West Coast. New York is also closer to Europe, an important market.

“For a long time, if you lived in the broader tech sector, there was inertia that brought you to Silicon Valley,” said Julie Samuels, executive director of Tech: NYC, a nonprofit industry group. “So many people wanted to live here and move here, but felt the jobs weren’t here. Now the jobs are here.”

Google has grown so quickly and is so squeezed for space that it is temporarily leasing two buildings until a much larger development in Manhattan near the Holland Tunnel, St. John’s Terminal, is ready in 2022.

The big tech firms started in New York with small outposts. Google’s first New York employee, a sales worker, arrived in 2000, and worked out of a Starbucks in Manhattan. It was the company’s first office outside California.

Tech industry offices were once mostly filled with sales and marketing employees who needed to be closer to their customers and to industries like fashion, finance, media and real estate that power the city’s economy.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/05/nyregion/nyc-tech-facebook-amazon-google.html?emc=rss&partner=rss