Illustration by Vicente Martí
Virginia won big — really big — when Seattle-based Amazon.com Inc. chose Arlington County as one of two locations where it would build operations for its planned East Coast headquarters.
Virginia and New York’s Long Island City neighborhood beat out more than 230 other hopeful localities across North America that vied for the project, sending out proposals packed with economic development incentives.
A few months later, though, the news got even sweeter for Virginia after Amazon dropped plans for the New York branch, leaving Arlington as the sole locale for Amazon’s $2.5 billion second headquarters, which promises to create 25,000 high-paying jobs and add more than 8 million square feet of development to be centered in Arlington’s Crystal City, Pentagon City and Potomac Yard areas.
