IDK if Arlington has "bad" areas or if it's all fully absurdly expensive, but MSFT just paused on a massive budling/employment center in on of Atlanta's developing n'hoods and essentially immediately cratered all new development around it.
AKA a not insignificant amount of work / money got put on hold for the company user timo works for, which isn't great let me tell you
it's going to hurt the housing market in Arlington, Alexandria, and probably DC, a little. From a dollars and cents perspective though, I'm not sure why Amazon would build a huge new business center in Arlington when 3/4 of the existing office buildings in Tyson's Corner are clear at this moment. I just did an inspection of large building last week that was 80% occupied 6 or 7 years ago that's 100% vacant now
And so many tech/SaaS jobs are still work from home. Yes many companies are trying the hybrid office thing again, but enough people will remain remote that large scale office projects just don't make sense to me to me anymore.
it will be super annoying if/when they just sit on the Pen Place land instead of developing it as the high density residential it was going to be until they bought it. Surely the Crystal Drive corridor of empty defense contractor buildings can suit their future needs.
Well, JBG-Smith is sitting on a bunch of projects in that area. Pretty sure they own the property the Potomac Yards strip mall sits on too. Those box stores were supposed to have been demolished to put in high density / mixed use and that's on hold... indefinitely it seems.
I thought Amazon bought the property rights from JBG (maybe just Pen Place)? As in JBG is still the developer, but Amazon controls what goes up.
How much Monday did VA give to Amazon? Assume it's just in tax breaks at this time? Or did they gift land?
Arlington’s incentives were based on occupancy. So actually we’ve gotten a bunch of shit more or less for free since Amazon hasn’t hit any of the occupancy numbers. The state has big incentives for Amazon coming but those are also predicated on new hires. https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/02/arlington-amazon-hq2-incentives-covid/
Under the project deal, state officials are expected to pay the company $22,000 per full-time, qualifying job with an average salary of $156k, resulting in the $152 million payment Amazon is requesting in the grant application, Lightly wrote in an email to The Center Square. According to Lightly, the company submitted its application for incentives March 31.
The economic assumption is these are high paying jobs for mostly younger people, this demographic tends to eat out at restaurants, buy homes and spend discretionary income at a higher rate. The tax funds going to Amazon for these jobs would then lead to an economic impact on the community much higher than the cost of the original funds. It's high risk in this environment of work from home, probably made more sense 5-10 years ago, of course you also have to believe the jobs wouldn't be in Virginia if not for the tax funds either.
It’s big Corp simping and rarely pays off. There’s been plenty of border war fighting between KCK and KCMO and companies sometimes just move their office a couple miles down the road once their current incentives end.
Lol yeah that's nonsense. Amazon should pay their own workers. Not use public money to do so. I assume they pocket the profits and don't give it back so maybe pay for the labor to produce it
Kinda makes it hard for smaller companies to compete for talent when you have a gigantic company getting $22k of their employee salary covered by the government.
1. Keep business taxes relatively low. It’s mostly passed onto consumers anyway 2. Heavily tax income and wealth problem solved.
Am I cynical for thinking the politicians give Amazon money so Amazon will in turn give them less money so they can campaign for the next election?
It was absolutely the case where it’s happened when you try to create high paying jobs in an area. Just that it leads to gentrification and other things that certain people inevitably whinge about. Direct subsidies are a waste of money though imo.
Basically that's what happens. Or they funnel it into a charity. A good example was people gave Trump org or his campaign donations where he'd then throw banquets with the money at one of his properties so the money ends up back in his pocket but it's harder to follow. Change the proper names in the previous sentence and that's how all this works, whether it's a campaign or charity.
I can't really understand why Virginia would do this, because those jobs were coming to the area anyways once the big cloud companies won the Jedi work. It's not diversifying jobs away from public sector adjacent industries, and was negotiated by a democratic administration. My guess is Virginia was willing to take the haircut to get the hq in VA, since these jobs were coming here anyways, as opposed to letting them set up some office in Maryland and most likely lose our on the tax revenue from business and wages altogether
Pretty sure TN gave them the same type of package to move some of those jobs to Nashville and their big shiny new building. No idea the size of the incentives or the current status of the project other than the building is done.
Nashville gave Asurion a big package to build a new building downtown and consolidate all but one of their local offices into it. One of the conditions was they had to brink 1k new jobs to the area or something like that. Then in 2019 they laid off like 400 local workers (higher paying jobs, not warehouse) and laid off more last year or in 2021, can't remember. I'd almost guarantee that when they replaced those laid off workers they counted those as "new" jobs. They are also trying to lease out the bottom 3 floors of their new building now.