Northern Virginia's housing market won't follow the path of the Seattle housing market, according to Amazon officials, because they have a new growth plan.
"Amazon said its second headquarters in Arlington will not aggravate housing problems as much as the company has in Seattle because it will be able to plan for growth here in a way that it couldn’t in earlier years in its home base," report Robert McCartney and Patricia Sullivan.
Jay Carney, a senior vice president with Amazon, revealed those insights in a "wide-ranging" meeting last week with Washington Post editors and reporters.
Carney was responding to a chorus of criticisms about the company's potential to "drive up housing costs and displace low- and middle-income residents," according to McCartney and Sullivan. Part of Carney's reasoning is that the company has a plan for its growth in mind, but "when Amazon was starting out in Seattle, officials didn’t know the company would undergo explosive growth and create 45,000 jobs."
The Amazon second headquarters is already, and quickly, expanding its footprint on the Crystal City area of Arlington County, Virginia. The meeting comes days after Amazon listed its first job openings in the area. "The company has leased temporary space in Crystal City and will start operations in June instead of October, as originally planned," according to the article.
In related news, Patricia Sullivan also reported in a separate article posted on the same day that thousands of documents released under a Freedom of Information Act request by the Washington Business Journal and now posted on the county’s website, revealed the details of negotiations between Amazon and Arlington County officials to bring the headquarters to Northern Virginia.
Read the full story: Amazon says it will avoid a housing crunch with HQ2 by planning better than it did in Seattle
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