New Google Campus Accelerates Tech’s March Into New York

NY TIMES

As West Coast companies storm into New York, they are reshaping the city’s neighborhoods and changing its identity from a hub of finance, fashion and media to one increasingly centered on technology.

Google said on Monday that it planned to create a $1 billion campus just south of the West Village. The internet company’s push into one of Manhattan’s most famous neighborhoods positions it to become one of New York’s biggest occupants of office space, allowing it to double its work force in the city to more than 14,000 over the next decade.

Google follows Amazon, which said last month that it planned to open a new office in Queens that will house as many as 25,000 employees. Apple, Facebook, LinkedIn and Uber have also embarked on recent New York expansions — much of it driven by a hunt for talent. Each is creating hundreds or thousands of high-paying jobs and leasing or building millions of square feet in commercial real estate.

“Law, medicine and finance have been superseded by information technologies,” said Mitchell Moss, an urban-planning professor at New York University who studies the city’s economy.