Amazon’s HQ2 will bring 25,000 jobs each to NYC, Virginia

ARLINGTON, Va. – Amazon has made a more prosaic choice than the hype originally promised, naming New York City and the Washington, D.C., suburb of Arlington, Virginia, as the two areas that will divvy up the 50,000 high-paying jobs the online retail giant is expected to bring.

The announcement Tuesday comes after 14 months of intense jockeying by more than 230 cities vying to take home the glittering prize of becoming the home of Amazon’s second headquarters.

Instead, Amazon chose two areas that have long been considered front-runners, even among the 20 finalists announced on Jan. 18.

While Amazon’s request for proposals listed multiple requirements, including tax incentives and a business-friendly environment, in the end the whole reason for the exercise was to aid the Seattle-based company in hiring the best and the brightest talent to keep up its ferocious pace of innovation – even as other tech companies are pushing equally hard to hire those same workers.

New York City and the greater D.C. area both fit that bill admirably, said Jeffrey Shulman, a professor at the University of Washington’s school of business who studies Amazon’s effect on Seattle.

“Both of those cities are attractive places to live where they have both a talent pool and the cultural amenities that make someone willing to uproot their lives and move there,” he said.

And naming two rather than just one new headquarters gives the company an edge, he explained. “People who want to work at Amazon will now have three cities to choose from rather than one or two,” he said.

The Washington, D.C., metro area emerged as an odds-on favorite to land Amazon’s second U.S. headquarters when it scored three spots among the 20 finalists when the company narrowed its list of candidate sites in January: Montgomery County, Maryland; Northern Virginia (Loudoun and Fairfax counties); and Washington, D.C., itself.

Probably highest on Amazon’s list of musthaves is access to tech and other talent. The New York metro area has close to 1.3 million workers in the relevant fields of management, business, finance, math, public relations and sales.

New York is also a magnet for young professionals. In addition, it has a massive, if somewhat beleaguered, transit system.

And it’s a large enough city that adding another 25,000 highly paid workers won’t seriously distort the job market in the ways they might have in smaller cities such as Raleigh, North Carolina, or Columbus, Ohio.