Here is an email I received from James Liu:

I think metropolitan geography was underdiscussed in the Amazon-NYC breakup. If you look at the Seattle, DC, and NYC areas, the main-city–secondary-city dynamic explains quite a bit.

Apparently, Americans don’t like living near tall buildings. In DC, the tall buildings were banished to the suburbs, and so it seems not unsuitable for a 25,000 person office campus to be built in Crystal City. In NYC, the tall buildings have been banished to Manhattan. When I lived in Brooklyn, they were planning the complex where the Nets would wind up. I watched a great deal of rage about plans to have 30-story buildings put up in downtown Brooklyn. This even though Brooklyn was a city of a million people but had fewer towers than, say, Milwaukee, or Jersey City, or take your pick. The argument was that tall buildings were appropriate for Manhattan, but not Brooklyn.

And in the Seattle metro, there is a cluster of tall buildings in Bellevue, just across a lake from Seattle, which is home to some tech firms (Zillow, Expedia, companies you’ve heard of). I don’t know how the city government was prevailed upon to allow it, but anyway it is there. I don’t think Amazon has much presence there, but Microsoft does, I think to compete with Amazon for transit-preferring workers. In some ways, Bellevue is like a bridge-and-tunnel borough more than it is like a suburb (Jersey City is a borough too, in that sense). Those who prefer to see it that way call Seattle the West Side and Bellevue (maybe Bellevue/Kirkland/Redmond) the East Side.

So it was not beyond imagining by a Seattle company that it was possible to build a tech campus in an outer borough. I don’t know how in the world NY’s city government would have imagined that such a thing was possible. Perhaps because De Blasio drives to work. A subway mayor like Bloomberg or Koch would have insisted on Hudson Yard. And New York would still have an HQ2.5. But that is another story for another email.