Owning an 18-story building in Chelsea that spans the length of a city block will not satisfy Google's appetite for New York real estate. The Wall Street Journal says the $350 billion company is looking to lease half a Chrysler building's worth of office space in Manhattan.

According to DNAInfo, there are more signs of rent hikes to come.

Google has already spoken to several landlords about leasing 600,000 square feet to accommodate more than 3,000 employees. That represents an 80 percent expansion, reports the Journal:

The company occupies a total of about 750,000 square feet in two properties—at 111 Eighth Ave., a mammoth building that it bought in 2010 for $1.9 billion, and in Chelsea Market across Ninth Avenue. Google has run out of available space at those locations, the executives familiar with its search said.

Growth has slowed in New York's financial sectors, while the number of jobs in tech is growing, even if it's not coming from the city's stagnant startup sector:

Much of the tech growth in Manhattan is from Bay Area tech firms, such as Google,Facebook Inc., FB -2.33%Yahoo Inc. YHOO -0.28% and Twitter Inc., which want to recruit software engineers and other who want to live in New York.

No decision has been made, but Google is considering a building near Penn Station that used to house the New York Daily News and the St. John's Terminal Building in the West Village.

Other neighborhoods are also being transformed by the industry's growth, reports DNAInfo. After nearly 20 years, the beloved studio Dance Manhattan is leaving the Flatiron, where a number of venture capital firms have offices, because rent is doubling:

"It's crazy. But, you know, I guess I hear that Chelsea in particular seems to be the Silicon Valley of the east," co-founder Elena Iannucci told DNAinfo New York last week from the studio. "The fallout of that is that you have the Googles and the Yelps and the Yahoos…who are looking for space and they become the people that buildings like this one want to rent to and not necessarily to those of us in the arts who are providing dance to the public."

"Silicon Valley East," I can already picture that on a protest sign.

[Image via Google, h/t @yuliyafalk]

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