rant · moment 1 of 18
Amazon HQ2 Comes to Long Island City: The Basics
from Growing Up Gottschee with Dan St. Germain · #122
Audio-only archive episode — no video to seek.
3 minTim lays out the news that Amazon is splitting its second headquarters between Virginia and Long Island City, describing the neighborhood, the promised jobs and salaries, and the group starts debating the ethics of the tax credit bidding war between cities.
- 0:48Amazon is splitting HQ2 between Virginia and Long Island City, each getting 25,000 workers at an average salary of $150,000 a year.
- 1:34Long Island City is the westernmost part of Queens facing Manhattan, an industrial area recently developed with vacant space ready for Amazon.
- 2:35The opposition to Amazon's arrival confuses him because some of their points about cultural displacement in Queens are actually valid.
- 3:15Tim questions why the city is giving a two-billion-dollar tax credit to Amazon when there was a bidding war between 20 cities.
- 4:02The tax credit argument: the city wouldn't have lost revenue they already had, but Amazon wouldn't have come without the incentive.
AmazonLong Island CityCitigroupWest VirginiaPepsi ColaAstoriaManhattanQueens