[NYguy]

https://ny.curbed.com/2018/11/6/1806...-city-finalist

Is Long Island City ready for Amazon’s HQ2?
Taking stock of the booming Queens neighborhood, which may be an HQ2 contender




By Amy Plitt
Nov 6, 2018

LIC was one of four New York City neighborhoods pitched by city and state officials as a possible HQ2 location, and according to the Times, “the state had offered potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies” in order to get Amazon to the city. (Let us not forget Governor Andrew Cuomo’s offers to rename both the Newtown Creek and himself for the company.)

The city’s bid cited LIC’s “13 million square feet of first-class real estate,” along with its proximity to airports, transit lines, and cultural institutions as selling points. In January, Amazon announced that New York City was one of 20 finalists for its new headquarters; and just this week, rumors began circulating that the city was among the final-final contenders.

But with these rumors comes a number of questions: Where will 25,000 Amazon employees live? Where would Amazon build a 500,000-square-foot headquarters? And does this mean the BQX is back on? Read on for our attempts to answer these, and more.

Long Island City has seen a massive residential real estate boom in recent years, with more than 12,000 apartments added to the neighborhood’s housing stock between 2010 and 2016. But there’s also a good amount of office space spread out across the neighborhood in converted warehouses and new buildings (such as Tishman Speyer’s the Jacx, a 1.2 million square foot tower on Jackson Avenue), and in-the-pipeline development projects.

There are also sites that are currently a question mark, such as One Court Square, currently the home of Citigroup (and the tallest building in the borough). When the banking conglomerate downsizes in 2020, it’ll leave about 1 million square feet of empty space—though the skyscraper, built in 1990, might be out of date for Amazon’s current needs.

On the waterfront, two massive projects—one developed by Plaxall Realty, and the other by TF Cornerstone—would bring around 6,000 apartments, with a chunk of those set aside as below market-rate, to the neighborhood. (Both need to get the requisite rezonings to move forward.) The second phase of the Hunter’s Point South megaproject, which will have 900 permanently affordable apartments, is now back on track.

Further inland, there are other huge developments that are either in the works or nearing completion, including Tishman Speyer’s Jackson Park, which has 1,800 apartments; Jerry Wolkoff’s 5 Pointz-replacing rentals, with more than 1,100 apartments; and Simon Baron’s ALTA LIC, a rental that also offers co-living apartments, recently opened with nearly 500 units. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

It’s also worth noting that there’s a lot of new housing coming to the Brooklyn waterfront, just a hop, skip, and a jump from LIC—between the Domino Sugar megaproject, Greenpoint Landing, and other new developments.

....even with the fancy new high-rises and the new amenities the city used to lure Amazon to LIC, it’s still a neighborhood where the median income is less than $60,000/year. The neighborhood is also home to the Queensbridge Houses, the largest public housing complex in the country. A downsized HQ2 would still have a huge, hard-to-predict impact on an area that’s already working hard to keep up with its massive growth.

“HQ2 has to work for Queens, not just Amazon,” City Council member Jimmy Van Bramer said in a statement to Curbed. “We already have an infrastructure deficit in LIC. We must ask how such a complex would impact the people who live in the surrounding neighborhoods. This isn’t a done deal. The local community must be heard here.”