New York has everything Amazon needs for its second headquarters

New York City has a lot riding on where Amazon decides to locate the second headquarters it is planning. The online retailer expects to bring 50,000 jobs to the winning location, which is a big number even by Big Apple standards. The city's largest private employer today is JPMorgan Chase & Co., with about 28,000 workers. Winning the nationwide competition would also signal to the world that New York is the nation's preeminent city for businesses that depend on young, smart employees. And if Amazon were to locate a substantial number of them in an outer borough, it would supercharge an incipient trend occurring in Brooklyn. New York is thought to be one of the top candidates to land the Seattle-based company. Amazon is perfectly happy in its pleasant, if rainy, native city, but to grow as robustly as it envisions, it needs to attract talent that has no interest in moving to the Pacific Northwest. The company is thought to be strongly considering Denver for its second home but is surely asking itself if tech-savvy millennials who balk at Seattle would feel any different about Denver. We think not. Amazon is keenly aware that its chief competitors for talent—Google and Facebook—both have fast-growing offices in Manhattan. As business leaders here have been emphasizing, New York has the diversity, universities, transit network, walkability and culture that Amazon wants. What could go wrong? One factor that rivals will raise against the city is that housing, commercial rents and construction costs are high here. That is why this page has called for measures that would lower them, such as high-density zoning and scaffold-law reform. But New York is expensive mostly because employers want to be here—and get what they pay for.  article continues below advertisement The key is a unified approach by the city and the state focused on the talent pipeline Amazon could tap Amazon has said cost will play a role in its decision, but the company is already expanding in the city. Our biggest concern is the frosty relationship between Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The good news on that front is that their respective economic-development chiefs have been in contact about Amazon, and the governor will likely not offer sweeter subsidies for upstate versus downstate. Upstate will not appeal to the company in any case; New York would be better off with a single, unified bid from the city and the state. Unfortunately de Blasio has been blabbing to the media that the city will not provide discretionary subsidies. New York City could win without offering them, but firing warning shots in the press does not exactly roll out the welcome mat. Amazon's recent local growth is promising: a fulfillment center on Staten Island, a photo studio and distribution center in Brooklyn, offices in Manhattan. What it needs is a hub that puts it at the crossroads of that activity, anchoring the company to the city and the region. — THE EDITORS