Author: BEN CASSELMAN, KEITH COLLINS and KARL RUSSELL / Source: New York Times
Amazon may be pulling the plug on its Queens campus, but New York City’s tech boom is likely to endure.
Long before Amazon announced that New York had won a share of its second-headquarters sweepstakes, tech was a rising force in the local economy.
Google, which already has thousands of workers in New York, plans to double its work force in the city and build a $1 billion campus just south of the West Village. Facebook, Apple, Uber and other companies are also expanding their presences, as is a rising generation of homegrown companies.Even Amazon itself said Thursday that it planned to keep adding to its New York work force.
Tech’s rise is helping to offset a gradual decline in jobs on Wall Street.
Technology-focused companies employed more than 130,000 people in New York in 2017, up from 80,000 a decade earlier. Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
“Every part of the city is feeling the impact of the technology boom,” said William C. Rudin, a developer and the chairman of the Real Estate Board of New York. “The geography of where these companies are, it’s not just Midtown South or Meatpacking. It’s downtown, it’s Midtown East, it’s going to Brooklyn, it’s going to Queens.”
In terms of raw economic power, Wall Street still dominates. Its workers earn more than $400,000 a year on average, close to three times as much as tech workers. As a result, the finance sector accounts for a huge share of city and state tax revenue, and wields disproportionate political power.
Finance still dwarfs tech in total pay.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
Mayors dating back to David Dinkins in the early 1990s have sought to make the city less vulnerable to the booms and busts of finance. Those efforts accelerated after the 2008 financial crisis, which wiped out thousands of jobs on Wall Street. Tech’s rapid expansion came at an auspicious time, helping the city rebound much faster than many experts had predicted.
“There was a wide consensus that New York City needed to diversify its economy to add balance beyond Wall Street,” said Jonathan Bowles, executive director of the Center for an Urban Future, a New York-focused think tank. “I really think that tech has finally allowed New York to do that.”
New York has never been a one-industry town. Even at its height in the early 2000s, Wall Street accounted for little more than 5 percent of the city’s jobs and 20 percent of its total pay. New York is a center of media, advertising and fashion. And for…
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