It’s the not the glass helix yet — but the first phase of Amazon’s HQ2, which opened Thursday in Arlington, is made up of two, 22-floor, glass towers and a 2.5-acre park.
The complex at Metropolitan Park in Pentagon City includes 2.1 million square feet of office space and 50,000 square feet of retail space housing 14 local, small businesses, a community garden and a public park with protected bike lanes, a dog run and a children’s play area.
About 8,000 workers have been assigned to the Met Park campus.
At the ribbon-cutting ceremony Thursday, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin praised the nearly five-year partnership with the Seattle-based company and the economic boost he said it will have for Virginia.
“I don’t want to create any tension, intracompany, but I wonder if this should be renamed HQ1,” Youngkin said.
He also thanked Amazon for its investment in the area, including more than $160 million for schools, nonprofits and community groups.
“We celebrate this partnership,” Youngkin said. “This partnership is building a better and a brighter future right here.”
Critics have argued that Amazon’s new headquarters and the thousands of workers moving into the area have driven up housing costs, accelerating gentrification.
Amazon’s Vice President of Public Policy and Community Engagement Brian Huseman told WTOP the company has committed over $1 billion in loans and grants to create and preserve affordable housing in the region.
He also said most of the workers are local.
“We chose Arlington because there’s such a terrific pool of talent, especially tech talent, so we want to hire local and that’s what most of our hires are today,” he said.
Christian Dorsey, chair of the Arlington County Board of Directors, said the impact on housing was an important part of the conversation with Amazon.
“We sold them on the proposition that if we create not only an avenue to enhance the supply — to juice up the supply of units in our area — while also making sure that a significant number of them were affordable, that we wouldn’t repeat some of the negative consequences that we saw in Seattle,” he said.
Amazon said this is just the first phase of development.
In 2018, the company chose Northern Virginia for HQ2 and committed to creating 25,000 jobs by 2030.
In February 2021, Amazon said it would build a 350-foot “Helix” tower to anchor the second phase of its redevelopment plans in Arlington, but construction was paused in March after the tech company’s largest round of layoffs.
Amazon said the Met Park campus will run with zero carbon emissions and is fully powered by renewable energy.
