Of helipads and billionaires

On my first trip to New York City, I spent a week in glamorous Long Island City, in Queens. I was a senior in high school and was there in “The City” with my friend Kathy, whose career gal Aunt Mary worked for Pan Am and lived in Queens. Queens is not very exciting, but it was a great urban experience. The area where Aunt Mary lived was very dense and concrete – nary a tree to be seen, lots of little mom and pop shops with their fruit displays spilling out onto the sidewalk. Each day, we went hurtling into Manhattan to see the sights – Statue of Liberty, The Rockettes. Naturally, we took the subway. It’s been 50 years, but I think we took the N or the Q. Or was it the 7? I also think this was pre-graffiti, so no “Chico 158” all over the cars. I loved every minute of that trip – love at first sight with NYC; to this day, whenever I get near The City, it’s always a matter of ‘be still my heart’. But that initial trip didn’t instill in me the desire to live in Long Island City.

Jeff Bezos probably doesn’t want to live there, either. But he is planning on building one of his two new Amazon HQ’s there.

Boston was on the short list, but we’ve had to settle for a smaller Amazon outpost. I’m just as happy. We already have enough well-paid young techies driving up housing costs and driving out middle- and working-class natives.

Meanwhile, there’s some griping that by giving the nod to Long Island City, and the weird and sterile Crystal City in Virginia, just outside of Washington DC (where I’ve been a couple of times on business), the rich areas are getting richer. (The same griping would have occurred if Boston had been tapped, or most of the other cities that made it to the Amazon shortlist.) The gripers argue that at least one of these HQ’s should have gone to a lesser-known town in a flyover state so that they would have the opportunity to upskill their workforce, build up IP, forget about coal mining and join the 21st century, etc. The counter-argument, of course, is that communities with less of a developed tech network just didn’t have the employee pool to meet Amazon’s needs.

But NYC, over the past decade or so, has become something of a tech mecca to rival Silicon Valley and Boston. They’ve certainly got the chops to support Amazon’s workforce needs. And, let’s face it, most twenty-somethings would rather live in New York than in, say, Columbus Ohio which, like Boston, was on the shortlist. (I will note that pretty much every place on the Amazon shortlist was at least in a metro area where the cool kids want to hang. And that includes Columbus. It’s just that Columbus is no New York. But Long Island City is no New York, either. Nor is Crystal City.)

In addition to lots of techie resources, and street cred (at least through proximity to Manhattan, Brooklyn and Hoboken) with the young folks, Long Island City also has transportation infrastructure that many cities lack. Sure, we keep hearing that the public transpo in NYC has become completely abysmal – I haven’t ridden it in years – but they do have good transportation bones. The N, the Q, the 7. (“The Bronx is up, the Battery’s down. The people ride in a hole in the ground.”)

But being on a subway line isn’t quite enough for the richest man in world history. That would be Jeff Bezos. He, apparently, doesn’t want to be a straphanger. Or even someone being squired around in a big black limo. And since Elon Musk’s fast-action tunnels aren’t yet on the horizon, that pretty much leave helicopters.

So in order for Amazonians to have access to the new site, they’re going to need a helipad, which New York – state or city or both, I’m not quite sure – has agreed to help Amazon out with.

A helipad, it seems, is:

…a rare thing for a company to have in New York: Rooftop helipads have been banned since 9/11, so even Manhattan’s high rollers have to make their way through the filthy streets to riverside helipads when they head for the airport or the Hamptons. (Source: Slate)

Filthy streets? Riverside helipads? Not for Jeff Bezos and the other Amazon big shots.

Of course, it goes without saying that, in order to get the Amazon deal, New York (and Virginia) “had” to offer up sweeteners. Amazon may be paying for their own helipad, but there’s plenty of tax incentives that went Amazon’s way, including the state “covering most of [Amazon’s] other construction costs,” and no taxes. The incentive package is supposedly in the multiple-billions of dollars. (Massachusetts and Boston weren’t willing to ante up anywhere near this much.) For their part, Amazon will be making ‘in lieu of taxes’ payments to help improve the neighborhood.

We know how well these deals work out. (Wisconsin went multi-billions crazy to woo Foxconn to their state The latest word is that some of the plum jobs are going to go to – wait for it – engineers imported from China.)

Meanwhile, Long Island City will be getting a helipad. Because the richest man in the history of mankind needs to get from point A to point B without having to hop a turnstile or twiddle his thumbs at a traffic light.