This past Monday, Google announced that it would lease office space from St. John’s Terminal at 555 Washington Street. This major expansion announcement would make Google the largest commercial tenant in NYC. The Google campus would be over 1.7 million square feet, which would also include two nearby buildings. This comes at an interesting time, as their tech rival Amazon recently announced its plans to expand to NYC as well. With this expansion, Google would add approximately over 7,000 new jobs in New York within the next ten year.
New York City might become one of the biggest tech centers outside of Silicon Valley. “The expansion puts Google’s ambitions for the city on par with tech rival Amazon.com Inc., which recently selected New York as one of two East Coast locations for major satellite offices expected to employ 25,000 new workers each by 2028.”[1] The move by these two giant tech companies is a huge economic gain for the city. While Amazon looked “for favorable tax breaks and incentives, Google has favored a quieter approach to expansion, saying it hadn’t pursued incentives from New York.”[2] This stark contrast approach seen by these two competitors shows a lot about how they want to be publicly perceived. Google comes off as the humble, hard worker that earned their way without government tax breaks, while Amazon goes in the opposite direction. William Floyd, the head of external affairs for Google was quoted, “We’ve been growing steadily for the past 18 years without heralding trumpets, or asking for support from the government. We’ve done it by the dint of our own work.”[3]
To get the campus up to par with Google’s reputation, they plan on investing over $1 billion dollars in capital improvement projects. The Hudson Square Campus will certainly become the centerpiece of the West Village neighborhood. Some Google employees are expected to move into the Hudson Street building by 2020, and into the St. John’s Terminal building by 2022 when construction is over.
[1] MacMillan, D. (December 2018), Google Details Major New York Expansion. Retrieved from The Wall Street Journal https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-details-major-new-york-expansion-11545040801 Accessed on December 21, 2018
[2] Ib.
[3] Swearingen, J. (December 2018), Google to Build $1 Billion NYC Campus, No Tax Incentives Required. Retrieved from New York Magazine http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/google-to-invest-usd1-billion-in-nyc-no-tax-incentives-needed.html Accessed on December 27, 2018