News and notes from Reston (tm).

Friday, February 15, 2019

Hey Siri, Bing "When Is Google Moving To Reston Station?" And Ask Jeeves If Amazon Wants To Move NYC's 0.5 HQ Units Here Too And Shuffle My "Transit-Oriented Development (Very) Slow Jams" Playlist Please

The Google-colored neon disappeared from our favorite parallelogram almost immediately after our RESTONIAN WORLD EXCLUSIVE about its significance, leading us to lose countless nights of sleep over a speculative filthy "web log" post possibly souring what is undoubtedly a multi-million-dollar real estate deal between two wealthy companies, all for a few pennies of clickbait ad revenue.

Turns out, we needn't have worried. On the heels of Google's announcement earlier this week that it is doubling the size of its Virginia workforce, we've gotten yet another confirmation that execs at the Internet giant really have been Asking Jeeves "How do I hang pictures on a wall with a 45-degree angle?"

Give us some good CRE blockquote, BFFs at the Washington Business Journal:

Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) plans to nearly double its footprint in Reston as part of a much larger expansion its chief executive announced Wednesday.

The Mountain View, California-based company is close to announcing plans to move from Reston Town Center to 1900 Reston Metro Plaza, the trophy office building Comstock Holding Cos. Inc. (NASDAQ: CHCH) developed speculatively at the foot of the Wiehle-Reston East Metro station, said two sources familiar with the situation but not authorized to comment publicly.

More bad news for parking-plagued Reston Town Center, it seems. Even as we speak, the RTC crisis management team must be frantically churning out another press release calling its new anchor tenant the "Google of nail salons."

But we digress. There are already a lot of sweeeeeeeeeeet Google jobs posted for Reston (we're personally holding out for that plum Chief Web Log Officer position), so go for it if your dream board for 2020 includes working in a neon-bedecked glass trapezoid within walking distance of a Starbucks and some impressive An Arts.

Meanwhile, it looks like the 0.5 units of the much sought after Amazon HQ2 that wound up in New York City instead of Crystal City National Landing are coming to Virginia after all. And the photo accompanying a story in the (Failing) New York Times makes it perfectly clear why. After all, why should a company with virtually unlimited resources that could convince potential employees to move anywhere (and Crystal City National Landing is a good test of that theory) have to put up with a view like this:

When it could have this?

Let's enjoy a little bit of schadenfreude on behalf of the fancypants Big Apple, courtesy of Arlington County Board Chairman Christian Dorsey:

Mr. Dorsey said he couldn’t speak directly to New York’s possible fumblings. “I can’t speculate what went wrong, and I don’t really care to think about it much,” he said.

But he discussed how his area had done a better job of planning for Amazon, convincing the company to come and then rolling out an infrastructure and development plan to make its arrival possible.

But if Amazon wants to see what things look like when companies are enticed to move somewhere without an accompanying "infrastructure and development plan," there's a slightly more rectalinear building right next to their Internet rival they could look into on this side of town, the end.

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