Half of Amazon’s HQ2 is coming to the Washington region. And you probably have a ton of questions about it. Here are some answers to some of the more pressing queries.

Where is HQ2 going to go?

It will be going in National Landing. If you’ve never heard of National Landing, don’t be surprised — it didn’t exist earlier today. According to a source in Virginia, it’s a new branded neighborhood encompassing Pentagon City, Crystal City and Potomac Yard.

The heart of Amazon’s local HQ2 will be in Crystal City, the neighborhood of high-rise office buildings south of the Pentagon and north of Alexandria. Originally developed in the 1970s to house defense contractors that have since left, almost half of the buildings there are now owned by real estate company JBG Smith. There’s no shortage of properties that Amazon could quickly take over, as Greater Greater Washington recently summarized.

Crystal City is also close to freeways and Reagan National Airport, and is located along Metro’s Blue and Yellow lines. It’s also in the midst of its own rebranding — one developer once compared it to Brooklyn — and has plenty of empty office buildings that Amazon could quickly refurbish and occupy.

“Crystal City, Va., is boring, corporate, and perfect for Amazon’s HQ2,” read a particularly apt headline in the Boston Globe.

And if you’re wondering where the name comes from, Arlington County explains: “Crystal City derived its name from one of [the] early apartment buildings, the Crystal House and the large crystal chandelier that graced its lobby.”

How many people will Amazon be hiring in the region?

The original plan for HQ2 was for 50,000 employees, hired over the course of a decade. But a surprise twist came earlier this month. Amazon floated the possibility of splitting HQ2 — and the employees that will work there — between two separate locations. In its official announcement on Tuesday morning, Amazon said the 25,000 jobs would pay an average of $150,000 a year.

So what does that mean for Crystal City and the greater Washington region?

It depends, really. First, it’s worth noting that 25,000 new jobs in the greater Washington region isn’t much; there were 50,900 jobs added between mid-2016 and 2017. Of those, 22,600 were in Northern Virginia. (All together, there are close to 800,000 professional and business services jobs in the region now.) If the new hires do indeed trickle in over the course of a few years, the additions may not be that noticeable. For 2019, for example, Amazon only expects to hire 400 people; in 2020, it will be 1,180. Hiring will top out in 2027 and 2028, at 3,000 employees each year.

That said, if Amazon does bring those 25,000 jobs to Crystal City, it will become one of the largest private employers in the region. The current leaders are Medstar Health, based in Columbia, Maryland, with more than 17,000 employees; Marriott, based in Bethesda, Maryland, with more than 16,000; INOVA Health in Falls Church, Virginia, with around 16,000; and Booz Allen Hamilton, based in McLean, Virginia, with more than 15,000.

But it’s also worth considering how the addition of Amazon might spur other companies to come to the region and do their own hiring in a process known as “agglomeration.” Over the past seven years or so, Amazon hired 40,000 workers for its original headquarters in Seattle —and other companies hired another 53,000. That same dynamic could play out in the Washington region.

How is Amazon’s arrival going to impact housing prices?

This is the $64,000 — or, whatever your monthly rent or mortgage payment is — question that everyone is asking. When we first addressed it in May, under the expectation that HQ2 would generate 50,000 jobs, the consensus seemed to be that the impact on housing prices would be modest. That’s because many of those HQ2 employees could already live in the region, and also because this is a big region so any new employees could spread out across parts of D.C., Maryland and Virginia.

With the news that our region is likely only going to be getting half the number of expected employees from Amazon, housing experts say the impact may be even more limited. “It will be an easier undertaking to meet a smaller influx of housing demand,” said Aaron Terrazas, a senior economist with Zillow. 

There’s also this to consider, however: The Washington region is already lagging behind on the number of housing units it should be producing for the number of jobs being created. The Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments estimates that the region will need to add 235,000 housing units by 2025 to account for expected job growth, but is currently on track to only produce 170,000.

That estimate led the Urban Institute recently to conclude that yes, Amazon’s arrival to the region could exacerbate the existing problem of high housing costs. That analysis was premised on the assumption that HQ2 would bring 50,000 jobs, but it’s still worth considering.

“Without substantially more housing production at a wide range of rent levels and price points, the challenges of rising affordability pressures and lengthening commutes will intensify, and more households will experience hardship,” the study concluded.

Finally, it’s important to note that the impact will vary by parts of the region and housing type, depending on the type of employees Amazon hires. If a large chunk of the new HQ2 workers are younger, the impact may be more centered on the rental market in D.C., as opposed to suburban areas around the city.

On Tuesday, Stephen Fuller, the well-known regional economist, chimed in with his own assessment of the impact of Amazon on housing prices: “HQ2 would increase the demand for housing in the Washington region. However, this demand would be relatively dispersed in the region and occur gradually, allowing jurisdictions to plan for the increase or adjust their current plans as needed.”

How much worse will traffic get?

In a Washington region already notorious for its traffic-clogged roads and freeways, it’s fair to worry that 25,000 more workers — and that’s just Amazon — could make an already bad situation much worse. But that’s in part why Amazon stressed that proximity to mass transit was critical for HQ2 sites, and on that, Crystal City fits the bill — it’s easily accessible on two Metro lines that stop at Crystal City. (And they will eventually both stop at the new Potomac Yard station just south of Crystal City.) It also has a VRE station, not to mention Metroway, a bus rapid-transit line running from Pentagon City to Braddock Road.

But anyone can tell you Metro continues facing challenges, including service cutbacks outside of peak hours that have contributed to a dramatic decline in ridership. And even if Metro were to increase service, the transit agency will eventually have to address the fact that there’s a significant bottleneck at the Rosslyn tunnel under the Potomac. Still, the region did take a historic step this year aimed at putting Metro on firmer financial footing: it approved $500 million annually in dedicated funding, all of which will go to capital improvements and maintenance. And while local officials didn’t explicitly say so, it was understood that the prospect of landing HQ2 made the dedicated funding deal happen.

What financial incentives could Amazon get?

According to Amazon, Virginia will be giving the company $573 million in performance-based incentives. That boils down to $22,000 for every job created at the new HQ2 over the next 12 years, provided the jobs meet the $150,000-per-year wage Amazon has promised. Arlington County will throw in $23 million over 15 years “based on the incremental growth of the existing local Transient Occupancy Tax, a tax on hotel rooms.”

The deal also hinges on Virginia spending $195 million on infrastructure improvements in and around Crystal City, “including improvements to the Crystal City and the Potomac Yards Metro stations; a pedestrian bridge connecting National Landing and Reagan National Airport; and work to improve safety, accessibility, and the pedestrian experience crossing Route 1 over the next 10 years.”

By way of comparison, Arlington County gave Nestlé $12 million in incentives to move its U.S. headquarters from California to Rosslyn. Virginia offered semiconductor manufacturer Micron $70 million to expand a plant in Manassas that is expected to hire 1,100 more workers.

And Virginia’s package of incentives is far below what Maryland had been offering, between $5 and $8.5 billion to land HQ2.

Of course, there are some who argue that Amazon doesn’t need any of the public’s money for HQ2, so it shouldn’t be offered up.

Will this make my Amazon deliveries any faster?

Probably not.

This story originally appeared on WAMU.