Although Amazon has decided against setting up a new Queens headquarters, New York City remains a hotspot for technology giants like Google, Apple, Facebook and Uber, The New York Times reports.
Google plans on establishing a $1 billion campus in Manhattan, giving the company space to expand its workforce to over 14,000 in the next ten years. The company paid about $2.4 billion for Chelsea Market, a former Nabisco factory that was turned into a food market, office building and is a popular tourist attraction, early last year.
“Every part of the city is feeling the impact of the technology boom,” William C. Rudin, who chairs the Real Estate Board of New York, told the Times. “The geography of where these companies are, it’s not just Midtown South or Meatpacking. It’s downtown, it’s Midtown East, it’s going to Brooklyn, it’s going to Queens.”
Facebook, Spotify and Salesforce all have bought hundreds of thousands of square feet in the city, and tech employment in New York City has grown at three times the average rate in the private sector, with more than 50,000 jobs added since the recession ended in 2010.
“The modern tech sector began on the West Coast when it was about developing new technology and programming,” Scott Rechler, the chair of RXR Realty, told the Times in February, 2018. “It’s now about the implementation and application of technology. And that’s presented an opportunity for New York, the business capital of the world. The talent pool is here.”