New York City’s loss of Amazon’s HQ2 project won’t be Northern Virginia’s gain, at least not right away.
Arlington County and the state of Virginia are working on the additional housing and transit system upgrades needed to support the 25,000 jobs the e-commerce giant has already promised to create in their region, an area just south of Washington whose payrolls are still dominated by the federal government.
The idea of making a push to boost infrastructure spending and absorb another 25,000 jobs that New York City lost doesn’t seem to be in the cards, and it’s not an option Amazon has floated.
“We’re focused in terms of how we manage their growth,” Christian Dorsey, chairman of the Arlington County Board, told the Washington Examiner. “That’s the target that we’ve negotiated over these many months, and they’ve shared with us that nothing has changed in their thinking despite what they’ve done in New York.”
The focus makes sense, given that similar infrastructure concerns prompted opposition in New York that ultimately derailed Amazon’s plans there. Complaints about already crowded subways to Long Island City, where Amazon planned to locate a complex with just as many jobs as its Virginia site, combined with concerns about affordable housing and a strain on the school system led to criticism from local, state, and federal officials including Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.
“By and large, the Arlington community understands the economic case for bringing Amazon here and are just looking to make sure there are going to be resources enough to manage their growth and we won’t be caught having to deal with unintended consequences,” Dorsey said.
Amazon, which sent staff to a couple of New York City Council hearings before ending that project, has already dispatched personnel to Northern Virginia, where they’re meeting with local governments, public school and university leaders, and more than 50 nonprofit groups, said Holly Sullivan, the company’s economic development director.
“Community engagement is always important when you have a large project,” Sullivan said at a Thursday night meeting on the project at George Mason University in Arlington. “There’s still a lot more people we want to meet with. We want to continue to learn about the priorities so we can build those sustainable long-term partnerships.”
“Long-term partnership” is more than a buzzword for Amazon, whose executives indicated to local officials during the HQ2 search that their employer had become a scapegoat for any and all of the problems in Seattle, its current headquarters.
They wanted to make sure the company — one of the richest in the U.S. — would be truly welcome in a new site, said Michael Farren, who studies the effects of government favoritism on businesses at George Mason’s Mercatus Center.
The comments led Farren to question whether the entire HQ2 strategy was designed to give Amazon an exit from Virginia if its relationships there continued to deteriorate. Amazon’s push to locate in Long Island City, near the border between the boroughs of Queens and Manhattan, came just months after a bruising fight with Seattle’s government over a tax to help a growing population of homeless residents.
In the three months between the fanfare-filled site selection and its demise, however, critics in New York had not only fretted about the impact of thousands of new jobs on the biggest U.S. city, but questioned why one of the world’s richest companies needed the tax breaks Amazon was promised.
The New York City Council even created a Twitter hashtag, #AmazonAnswersNYC, for its 8.6 million residents to ask questions and make comments on the deal.
Its reception in Arlington County has been different. The company’s growth there will be gradual, starting with about 400 new jobs this year and 1,000 next year, Sullivan said. The ultimate target of 25,000 will be spread over a period of 10 to 12 years for an average of as little as 2,000 jobs a year.
They’ll work out of National Landing, a newly branded neighborhood that also encompasses parts of Pentagon City and Potomac Yard. The company will invest about $2.5 billion to set up its operations there and occupy about 4 million square feet with the option of doubling that over the next dozen years, according to county officials.
During that period, local officials will build additional entrances to the Crystal City and Potomac Yard Metro stations, construct a pedestrian bridge from Crystal City to Reagan National Airport and invest as much as $150 million into residential projects. Another $75 million will come from the state.
“The biggest area that my board is concerned with is resources for housing,” Dorsey said, including homes for both low-income residents and those living just above or below median-wage levels for the area.
Affordable housing programs offered in Arlington, Alexandra, and the state of Virginia are already superior to many large metropolitan areas also contending with rising home prices, said Amazon’s Sullivan.
“That’s something we want to be very cognizant of,” she said. “We felt very confident that what they’re doing , we can build upon that. We want to be good partners. We want to be part of the solution. These are going to be our employees living in Arlington.”
