With one click, New York (Long Island City) and Washington, DC (Crystal City in Northern Virginia) got a big delivery today.
These two cities will be home to HQ2 – Amazon’s second north American headquarters, which will be divided. The race to land HQ2 was put in motion more than a year ago, when Amazon created a bidding war among metropolitan areas all across the country.
It was the economic development game on steroids: the promise of roughly 50,000 jobs and billions of dollars in economic development, in exchange for incentives and tax breaks. There are always critics of these types of trade offs, but for now, the two winning cities seem to be basking in the promise of new jobs, infrastructure and the spin off: restaurants, amenities.
See video from the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story yesterday