Even Without Amazon, Tech Could Keep Gaining Ground in New York

Amazon may be pulling the plug on its Queens campus, but New York City’s tech boom is likely to endure.

Long before Amazon announced that New York had won a share of its second-headquarters sweepstakes, tech was a rising force in the local economy. Google, which already has thousands of workers in New York, plans to double its work force in the city and build a $1 billion campus just south of the West Village. Facebook, Apple, Uber and other companies are also expanding their presences, as is a rising generation of homegrown companies.

Even Amazon itself said Thursday that it planned to keep adding to its New York work force.

“Every part of the city is feeling the impact of the technology boom,” said William C. Rudin, a developer and the chairman of the Real Estate Board of New York. “The geography of where these companies are, it’s not just Midtown South or Meatpacking. It’s downtown, it’s Midtown East, it’s going to Brooklyn, it’s going to Queens.”

In terms of raw economic power, Wall Street still dominates. Its workers earn more than $400,000 a year on average, close to three times as much as tech workers. As a result, the finance sector accounts for a huge share of city and state tax revenue, and wields disproportionate political power.

Mayors dating back to David Dinkins in the early 1990s have sought to make the city less vulnerable to the booms and busts of finance. Those efforts accelerated after the 2008 financial crisis, which wiped out thousands of jobs on Wall Street. Tech’s rapid expansion came at an auspicious time, helping the city rebound much faster than many experts had predicted.

“There was a wide consensus that New York City needed to diversify its economy to add balance beyond Wall Street,” said Jonathan Bowles, executive director of the Center for an Urban Future, a New York-focused think tank. “I really think that tech has finally allowed New York to do that.”

New York has never been a one-industry town. Even at its height in the early 2000s, Wall Street accounted for little more than 5 percent of the city’s jobs and 20 percent of its total pay. New York is a center of media, advertising and fashion. And for the accounting, consulting and law firms that serve those industries — as well as for the real estate moguls who build their office towers and condominiums.

New York’s economic diversity is part of what drew tech companies to New York in the first place. When Google and other West Coast giants set up outposts here in the mid-2000s, they were mostly hiring advertising sales representatives and marketing managers, not hard-core coders.

Gradually, however, New York began to become a force for tech talent. Media and finance firms were trying to become more digitally savvy and needed programmers. Universities — encouraged by successive administrations in City Hall — created and expanded programs to give students digital skills.

As a share of the population, New York still has far fewer programmers, software developers and similar workers than Silicon Valley and Seattle. In raw numbers, however, the New York area has more such professionals than any other urban area.

But as Amazon’s pullback in New York shows, the technology industry also has yet to fully integrate itself into New York’s power structure.

Only a handful of tech executives serve on the board of the Partnership for New York City, an influential business group. Financial firms, labor unions and other traditional pillars of New York’s economy still dominate the ranks of the city’s top political donors.

And while New York has a growing start-up scene, few major tech companies are based here.

“New York’s cachet, New York’s strength, is as a global headquarters city,” said Kathryn Wylde, the partnership’s president and chief executive. “And if the C.E.O.s of the industry leaders are not here, we can’t continue to lead the world as a commercial center. We won’t have the magnetism.”

Not everyone, of course, is pushing for tech to play a larger role in New York. Amazon’s plans were scuttled by a powerful backlash from unions, neighborhood groups and elected officials in Queens. Some of that opposition was fueled by the multibillion-dollar incentive package the city and state offered to lure Amazon. But critics also worried that the flood of well-heeled tech workers would drive up already sky-high rents.

Dan J. Wang, a professor at Columbia Business School, said those concerns were particularly acute because of the size and concentration of Amazon’s planned campus, which he likened to the “company towns” of the early 20th century.

“There is the possibility of displacement of existing businesses and of the exacerbation of inequality that already exists in New York,” Mr. Wang said.

Other companies, such as Google, have been more subtle, building up presences in neighborhoods without taking over.

That might explain why, before the furor over Amazon, tech’s rise had managed to stay largely beneath the radar.

“Tech has become a huge and crucial part of the New York City economy,” Mr. Bowles said. “I’m not sure that most New Yorkers know that right now.”