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Amazon signed a deal to lease more than 335,000 square feet of space in Manhattan’s new Hudson Yards neighborhood, office realty group SL Green Realty announced Monday. The Wall Street Journal first reported the deal on Friday. The deal comes less than a year since Amazon announced on Valentine’s Day it would halt plans to build its new headquarters in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens, New York. Amazon and lawmakers who brokered the deal behind closed doors faced pushback from local activists and city council leaders who criticized the nearly $3 billion in performance-based incentives offered to the...

Amazon.com Inc. said President Trump exerted “improper pressure” on the Pentagon to keep a lucrative cloud-computing deal from going to his perceived political enemy, company founder Jeffrey Bezos. In a complaint filed in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, Amazon said the president “launched repeated public and behind-the-scenes attacks” on the contract and the company to steer the contract away from Amazon. Mr. Trump’s aim was “to harm his perceived political enemy—Jeffrey P. Bezos,” according to the complaint, which was made public Monday. Amazon was long considered the favorite to win the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI,...

WASHINGTON — Amazon has yet to break ground in Northern Virginia for its second headquarters, but residents are already turning away persistent speculators, recalculating budgets for down payments on homes and fighting rent increases. Amazon announced in November that its second headquarters would be in National Landing, which includes parts of Crystal City, Pentagon City and Alexandria, all suburbs of Washington. The company will hire 25,000 people over the next 10 to 12 years. “That day in November, I got more Zillow calls, inquiries and leads off of Zillow than I did the entire month of October,” said Michelle Doherty,...

The elected official getting most of the blame for Amazon’s decision not to open a new headquarters in Queens is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, according to a poll released Monday. The Siena College poll asked New York state voters who was the “hero”, “villain” or “role player” in the Amazon debacle and Ocasio-Cortez led the pack. Thirty-eight percent identified the freshman congresswoman as the biggest villain while only 12 percent called her a hero. By comparison, 34 percent called local activists the chief villain; 29 percent Mayor de Blasio; 28 percent Gov. Cuomo; 26 percent Amazon itself; 21 percent the state...

ARLINGTON, Va. (AP) — Protesters repeatedly shouted "shame" as a northern Virginia county board Saturday unanimously approved a $23 million incentives package for Amazon to build a new headquarters there. The Arlington County Board's 5-0 vote came after hours of heated public testimony, news outlets reported. Supporters said Amazon's plan to build a massive facility in Crystal City will lead to tens of thousands of good jobs and bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue. Opponents, however, said the tech giant neither needs nor deserves public subsidies. They also said lower-income residents would be driven out by...

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is trying to win back Amazon by making calls to executives, including Jeff Bezos, according to The New York Times. Cuomo is upset with local politicians who had opposed the deal with Amazon. Amazon abandoned its plans to build half of its new headquarters in New York City earlier this month. Several local New York leaders will publish an open letter in the Times, asking Amazon to come back. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been pleading with Amazon executives, including CEO Jeff Bezos, to reconsider their decision to abandon plans to build a new...

Amazon, Inc. was forced to withdraw its bid to locate a second headquarters facility in New York City two weeks ago, but New York state and city political leadership hasn't forgotten them. Governor Andrew Cuomo, Mayor Bill de Blasio, major unions, and businesses have all begun a fierce lobbying campaign to woo Amazon back to the city. The governor has been active, talking to Amazon executives including CEO Jeff Bezos, about a new location  The original deal was cancelled when radical socialist politicians like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez objected to the tax breaks being given away to convince Amazon to...

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo lambasted politicians such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others over Amazon's decision to leave New York City. Opponents of the deal with the tech giant had "put their own narrow political interests above their community," he said. "[A] small group [of] politicians put their own narrow political interests above their community -- which poll after poll showed overwhelmingly supported bringing Amazon to Long Island City -- the state's economic future and the best interests of the people of this state," Cuomo said in the statement, which did not mention Ocasio-Cortez or other lawmakers by name. "The...

Notch another victory for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The freshman Democratic representative celebrated online retailer Amazon’s decision Thursday to scrap its plans to build a new headquarters in her New York City district. “I think it’s incredible,” Ocasio-Cortez responded when asked to comment on Amazon’s about-face. “It shows that everyday Americans still have the power to organize and fight for their communities and they can have more say in this country than richest man in the world.” Earlier Thursday, the company announced it was reversing the plan, announced in November, to build new East Coast headquarters buildings in New York City and...

Amazon announced Thursday it was turning back on its plans to build its second headquarters in New York City, a company spokesman said in a statement. The move comes after backlash from lawmakers, notably Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who bemoaned the project. "After much thought and deliberation, we’ve decided not to move forward with our plans to build a headquarters for Amazon in Long Island City, Queens," the Seattle-based Amazon said in the release.

Amazon said Thursday it will not move forward with plans to build a headquarters in New York after rising opposition from local politicians. The company said it will not reopen the search process "at this time. We will proceed as planned in Northern Virginia and Nashville, and we will continue to hire and grow across our 17 corporate offices and tech hubs in the U.S. and Canada."

I’ve had questions about Amazon’s “contest” to pick a host city for their new headquarters from the beginning. The original pitch made it sound as if they might go to some smaller to middle-sized city that was down on its luck and in need of a major boost in jobs and commerce. Then they made the decision to put one of the big new commercial centers in… New York City. But as a resident of upstate New York, I couldn’t help but be a little grateful that so many new jobs might be coming to boost the economy.All of...

Amazon may not be coming to Long Island City after all. The e-commerce giant is reconsidering its plans to open a new 25,000-employee office in the Queens, New York neighborhood, the Washington Post reported on Friday. Two people “familiar with the company’s thinking” told the Post that Amazon was turned off by growing local opposition to the deal, which has been building up since Amazon announced it would be building part of its so-called second headquarters in the Queens neighborhood last November. “The question is whether it’s worth it if the politicians in New York don’t want the project, especially...

As you probably know, Amazon recently announced that it would place its two additional headquarters in New York and in Washington, DC. That was the headline, but in the body of the various articles, you see that Nashville also got quite a nice consolation prize."After announcing that New York City and North Virginia had won the contest for Amazon’s headquarters, the giant online retailer surprised many with the news that it would create an operations center with 5,000 high-paying jobs in Nashville." (Source.)I think that for real estate investors, the articles buried the lead. The impact of 5,000 jobs on...

Queens residents are “outraged” at Amazon’s plans to build part of its second headquarters in Long Island City, according to Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The Democratic Socialist, who cruised to victory in the midterm elections after beating Rep. Joe Crowley (D-Queens) in an upset primary win in June, fired off a series of tweets Monday night into Tuesday regarding the blockbuster plans. “We’ve been getting calls and outreach from Queens residents all day about this. The community’s response? Outrage,” Ocasio-Cortez, who officially takes office in January, tweeted. The 29-year-old went on to say: “Amazon is a billion-dollar company. The idea that...

New York state is kicking in more than $1.5 billion in taxpayer-funded incentives for getting half of Amazon's second headquarters located in a section of Queens. The Seattle-based company made its long-awaited announcement Tuesday, saying Long Island City and Alexandria, Virginia, will each get 25,000 jobs. The online retailer also said it will open an operations hub in Nashville, creating 5,000 jobs. Amazon will also receive as-yet unspecified incentives from New York City. New York state's incentives are nearly triple those of Virginia's, while Tennessee's are $102 million. According to Amazon, the cost per job for New York taxpayers is...

Amazon laid out its plans for two of the biggest economic development projects in the country on Tuesday, announcing that it will put major corporate outposts in New York City and Arlington, Va. The two locations, in Long Island City in Queens and Crystal City in Arlington, just outside of Washington, will eventually house at least 25,000 employees each, the company said in a statement. It also said the new sites would require $5 billion in construction and other investments.

The rumored announcement has emboldened Amazon’s army of critics. Did the world’s smartest company really need 13 months, and applications from 238 cities, to reach the striking conclusion that it should invest in New York and D.C.? The former is America’s heart of capital, and the latter is America’s literal capital, where chief executive Jeff Bezos already owns a house and a newspaper. Was this national auction nothing more than a scripted drama to raise the value of the inevitable winning bid? And did the retailer miss an opportunity to revitalize a midwestern city by choosing to enrich the already-rich...

The site, founded by best-selling author/researcher Bert Sperling, claims that Amazon – a company whose stock surpassed $1 trillion in valuation earlier this month -- will put its roots down in a relatively remote area of Northern Virginia known as Oatlands. If that name doesn’t exactly ring a bell, don’t feel badly. Oatlands is a leafy, unincorporated community just outside Leesburg, Va. -- and Leesburg itself only has about 52,000 residents. “We can now confidently say that the new Amazon HQ2 will be located … in Northern Virginia near the Maryland border, in a small community that hasn’t been mentioned...

Amazon has been ramping up hiring in the 20 cities it shortlisted for its HQ2 search and Philadelphia is dead last in those efforts while Virginia, Boston and New York rank in the top three, according to a GeekWire report. One can only wonder whether Amazon's hiring has anything to do its HQ2 search and the city it ultimately selects. ▪“A GeekWire analysis of Amazon job data provided by a third-party firm found that of the HQ2 finalists, offices in the Washington D.C. area — which includes three of the 20 regions on the short list in D.C. proper, Northern...