New York may face stiff competition from the rest of the country in the race to land Amazon’s second headquarters, but that has not stopped Gov. Andrew Cuomo from putting incentives on the table and more than two dozen city groups from submitting proposals for the possible space.
The New York City Economic Development Corporation announced on Wednesday that the city has received more than two dozen proposals for where in New York City Amazon could put its second headquarters in response to a Request for Expressions of Interest the agency published on Sept. 15. The proposals span 23 different neighborhoods across all five boroughs and collectively total more than 50 million square feet of space.
Additionally, Cuomo’s administration is ready to use significant incentives to lure Amazon to the state, with Empire State Development president Howard Zemsky saying that aspects of the New York economy ranging from content production to drone development align very well with Amazon’s business, according to Politico.
Amazon, which is based in Seattle, recently announced that it would seek to open a second headquarters, representing an investment of $5 billion. The NYCEDC’s Request for Expressions of Interest was meant to identify privately held sites that could complement publicly held properties as potential locations in New York for where this second headquarters could go.
Per Amazon’s request, cities would need to provide 500,000 square feet of commercial space by 2019 and as much as 8 million square feet past 2027.
More than 40 groups and developers took part in the responses, several of which include multiple site options. The city will now review the ideas and present its proposal to Amazon on Oct. 19.
Amazon has already greatly expanded its presence in New York over the past few months alone. The e-commerce giant announced earlier in September that it had signed a 360,000-square-foot 15-year lease at Brookfield Property Partners’ 5 Manhattan West, which will serve as the city’s main location for Amazon Advertising, and the company also confirmed that it will open its first distribution center in New York on Staten Island’s West Shore.
However, the effort to lure Amazon’s second headquarters to New York has at least one significant skeptic in Related Companies chairman Stephen Ross, who said in a recent interview with Bloomberg Television that he couldn’t “realistically” see Amazon coming to New York because of the high cost of doing business in the city.
EDC CEO James Patchett disagreed, describing New York in a statement as “the only city that can immediately meet Amazon’s needs for 50,000 of the most talented workers in the world.”