This is about diversifying the economy away from real estate and wall street. It is also about bringing high-paying jobs to Queens, and encourage the kind of investment that brings.

From what I understand developers started building in anticipation of Amazon coming there, and that investment is now in question.

The area has been built up with skyscrapers over the past decade, well before HQ2 had even been announced. Development in New York is not so quick that you could shovel a project through in the four months after the announcement.

New York's economy is plenty diverse. There's real estate and Wall Street, sure, but there's also legal services, advertising, media, health, education (NYC has the largest student population in the country), hospitality, tourism, etc. This is no one company town like Gary.

I wouldn't describe LIC (or any part of Queens) as being "built up with skyscrapers" personally. I'd say there are a handful of tall apartment buildings.

So you are saying Queens is in a great place and we do not need to create much more opportunity there?

There's certainly no need to beg for it.

It’s not begging to take 9 out of every ten tax dollars to attract an opportunity.

LIC does not have many commercial tenants, and none on the scale of Amazon.

It would be a good thing to not concentrate all jobs in Manhattan.

Also, if you walk around LIC, it's not as developed as you might think, sure there are huge buildings, but they're next to empty lots & industrial spaces. It's largely a desirable area because of it's proximity to Manhattan, not really anything intrinsic about the neighborhood.

All of our transportation is Manhattan-centric. That's why all the jobs are in Manhattan.

Putting jobs in LIC will still force workers from the non-Queens sections of the metro area to go into Manhattan and then back out to Queens. Even the LIRR can't really serve LIC, because it's impossible to build a station that serves waterfront LIC that is on the way to Penn.

The Amazon proposal explicitly came with half a billion in funding for transportation in Queens.

And it's also ignoring the fact that a lot of people already live in Queens, and that LIC specifically is connected to Brooklyn via the G.

It's not an ideal situation, but it's a chicken & egg problem, there's no reason to build commuter transit there without employers and employers don't want to be there without that transit, so the Amazon deal would have done a good amount to break that stalemate.