Amazon said on Friday that it would lease office space in Midtown Manhattan for more than 1,500 employees, increasing its presence in New York City less than a year after abandoning plans for a second headquarters in Queens in the face of stiff local opposition. The retail giant said it had a signed a lease for 350,000 square feet in a 10th Avenue building near the Hudson Yards development. The offices will be occupied by workers in Amazon’s consumer and advertising units, the company said. The Manhattan lease does not qualify for the kind of tax credits and other government sweeteners the company had won in exchange for building a huge campus in Long Island City that was to employ more than 25,000 people. The incentives for the Queens project totaled $3 billion, touching off a contentious debate about the value of using such outsize public subsidies in wooing wealthy companies — and about whether such bait was necessary in a talent-rich city like New York.

Source: New York Times December 07, 2019 03:00 UTC