Over the past four decades, New York City and State, channeling market forces that often confounded their expectations, have overseen a dramatic transformation of the Queens neighborhood of Long Island City. A once-shabby postindustrial landscape is now a forest of high-rise residential and commercial to wers, a quick subway trip from Manhattan. This development—and the talent pool of well-educated professionals living in the neighborhood and within a short commute—attracted the tech behemoth Amazon to propose a new headquarters in Long Island City in the fall of 2018, with a goal of creating 25,000 jobs.
As New Yorkers know, Amazon’s plan soon foundered because of local opposition. The long-standing New York practice of handing out large tax breaks to big companies to locate within the city no longer seemed necessary, or even tolerable, in a community that had already seen so much growth in recent decades. Amazon’s February 2019 withdrawal of its proposal didn’t alter the on-the-ground reality: Long Island City is a boomtown. The city’s aim of nurturing a vibrant neighborhood, where New Yorkers can live and work, has succeeded, but future growth isn’t guaranteed. Past zoning reforms in Long Island City have had both beneficial and sometimes less than ideal unintended consequences. Further zoning changes will be necessary for the neighborhood to meet the demand for housing and office space—but post-Amazon, adversarial land-use politics may make those changes tough to enact.
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Over the past four decades, New York City and State, channeling market forces that often confounded their expectations, have overseen a dramatic transformation of the Queens neighborhood of Long Island City. A once-shabby postindustrial landscape is now a forest of high-rise residential and commercial to wers, a quick subway trip from Manhattan. This development—and the talent pool of well-educated professionals living in the neighborhood and within a short commute—attracted the tech behemoth Amazon to propose a new headquarters in Long Island City in the fall of 2018, with a goal of creating 25,000 jobs.
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As New Yorkers know, Amazon’s plan soon foundered because of local opposition. The long-standing New York practice of handing out large tax breaks to big companies to locate within the city no longer seemed necessary, or even tolerable, in a community that had already seen so much growth in recent decades. Amazon’s February 2019 withdrawal of its proposal didn’t alter the on-the-ground reality: Long Island City is a boomtown. The city’s aim of nurturing a vibrant neighborhood, where New Yorkers can live and work, has succeeded, but future growth isn’t guaranteed. Past zoning reforms in Long Island City have had both beneficial and sometimes less than ideal unintended consequences. Further zoning changes will be necessary for the neighborhood to meet the demand for housing and office space—but post-Amazon, adversarial land-use politics may make those changes tough to enact.
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