In addition to the 25,000 jobs that e-commerce giant Amazon has promised to bring to its future Long Island City headquarters, “the number of [local] people who are going to be put to work will be in the tens of thousands,” says Carlo Scissura, president and CEO of the New York Building Congress.
That includes designers, engineers, contractors and construction trades—and these jobs will likely last a while because, according to Scissura, the plan to site one of Amazon’s two new bases in Queens, announced Nov. 13, will be “a decade-long process.” In a joint statement, the state and city said that in 2019, Amazon will occupy up to 500,000 sq ft at One Court Square and will build 4 million sq ft of commercial space in Long Island City’s waterfront area over the next 10 years, with potential expansion up to 8 million sq ft over the next 15 years.