I'm surprised to see Philadelphia eliminated so quickly, it ticks almost all of the boxes, and has a very large number of engineering schools (UPenn, Penn State, Drexel, Temple, Princeton, Rutgers, etc). It's transit is better than many of the other cities, and it has 2 major development plots in the city with existing full tax abatements.
Not to mention its proximity to NYC and Washington, DC via Amtrak (~1h20m to NYC, ~1h50m to DC)
Philly was dropped by the "job growth is strong" rule, which is also drops many other cities which would otherwise be fully qualified. So the question really is why would Amazon have that rule and how willing are they to bend in it.
Why would Amazon want that rule? Wouldn't it just mean there's more competition for employees? It strikes me as the type of rule put in to ensure their secret favorite gets chosen.
The current political climate sees a bimodal distribution:
* assume the absolute worst in corporations at all times, even if workers benefit
* assume that corporations will always do what's right, even if it hurts workers
I live in Colorado and work at a software company. I have a crew of people here who relocated from Philly.
I've been hearing a ton about this because this crew has been steadily recruiting from there to Denver.
The comments they say when they are doing this:
Philly has worse crime by far. The weather (measured in number of sunny days) is obviously worse. Outdoor activities are limited. Yeah, you can get to pretty places, but it's a few hours drive for the beach or mountains. Culturally, it's not a place that jumps out on the radar. Denver wasn't either, but the weed legalization kind of helped highlight that this place is a tolerant, open-minded location to people who automatically thought of a redneck mountain town.
When I moved from Philly to Boulder, it took me only 3 days to notice that everyone in CO was 'fit' as opposed to Philly, where most people are (generally) shockingly fat and a smelly city/airport. Denver can be pretty stinky, but nothing like anything south of South St. or just outside of University City. Generally, CO had more options to date people than blacking-out in some 'Irish' bar in South Jersey. That said, I liked the demeanor of people of East Pennsy and South/Central Jersey more than Boulder; they were more 'real' and didn't hide feelings or dis/likes at all. You got what you saw, while Boulder/Denver tends to be more 'shy' in demeanor and true feelings. YMMV
I can't speak for others, but I'm more fit because I live near mountains and other outdoor activities. I don't choose to live near those things because I'm fit. The causation is mostly the opposite of what you're implying.
Getting out and into nature will change your lifestyle for the better, no matter what your current abilities. And there are plenty of ways to get out there that don't require any fitness level whatsoever. Sitting in a boat and fishing, RV camping...I spent much of the past few weeks hiking in the Sierras and most of the people in our campgrounds were retirees.
I'm unconvinced. It seems like the allure of the mountains is based on the people self-selecting they want that kind of lifestyle. Given the athleticism / outdoorsmanship of the general population, I have a hard time believing these proclivities are universal.
Not much more than one hour drive to the beach, and two hour drive to mountains (although the mountains probably don't hold a candle to those found in Colorado).
Philly is also a relatively short train ride away from NY, DC, Baltimore, and half a day's drive from everyplace in the Northeast.
I was a little surprised as well. I'm opinionated: I live here, after living in NYC, Chicago, and Portland, and spending a lot of time in Toronto.
Philadelphia doesn't have tech scene like SF or Seattle, but it's well positioned for the next generation for several reasons.
Philadelphia has among the best, or the best, medical institutions associated with upenn and the children's hospital of Philadelphia, and both have signaled that they're very amenable to startups and new ideas. If you wanted to build a medical tech company that's not in San Francisco or Boston, it's great. It has a lot of extraordinary livability: extremely walkable, great public transit, and affordable. And while I'm not defending our politics per se, it agrees with the politics of many developers in NYC and the bay area. It has phenomenal art and food scene that's not copying other cities.
Developers in NYC tired of paying absurd prices for rent would move here in a heartbeat for the right job (and other opportunities if that fell through). In Williamsburg, my grad school roommate and I paid 2400 (plus broker fees) for a 500-700 sq foot apartment, each bedroom big enough to hold a queen sized bed + 3 feet, and a "kitchen/living room" (I'm being generous) that housed a loveseat and not much else. And it wasn't fancy, by any stretch: a five floor walkup with an alley view. It was still 30-80 minutes to work depending on the time of day. In Philadelphia you could live within walking distance to anywhere for half to 2/3 that in a much nicer apartment or townhome: check Zillow/Redfin/Apartments.com if you'd like a fair comparison. Good suburbs are 20-30 minutes by car and 40 minutes by trains that come every 10-20 minutes.
The biggest downside is that there are not as many backup tech jobs, but compared with Chicago, I see it much easier to bring developers here. The ease of moving here is not hard: I travel to NYC 2-3 days/week, the bus is 10 dollars and takes 2 hours to 6th/Grand, the train is 45 dollars and takes 70 - 90 minutes.
It's also smack dab in the middle of the East Coast megalopolis, but I get the impression that supply-chain logistics are being handled at a different level.
Regarding the talent pool, as someone who works in the Philly area, I agree it has a lot of well regarded engineering schools nearby, but tech talent doesn't necessarily stay here in the quantities Amazon might find compelling.
Granted, it's a chicken-and-egg issue. The top talent tends to go where the top jobs are, and if the top jobs are in Philly, the top talent might be more inclined to stay.
I lived in Philly for grad school in comp sci. There's a reason why software folk do their grad school (or undergrad) at one of the places you mention and then quickly leave. No tech scene, the city always felt unsafe, and there's nothing spectacular about the city other then it's close to some better cities (NYC, DC). Amazon needs to find a city with some tech scene already and with an interesting community for employees to come join.
The times is a New York publication and most New Yorkers believe NYC is the best city by far on the east coast. That bias will surely be reflected in their articles.
I don’t think it’s quite as simple as cheap houses.
[edit: I see now TFA settled on Denver, but I don’t think that invalidates my point]
Haha, I did not, though that is a fairly common refrain. As a New Yorker, I do not believe it’s the best city in the world, but I think it’s the best in the States.
I noticed that people pushing Philadelphia never mention its bad crime rate. Amazon might not be explicitly mentioning that in the criteria, but I'm sure it can't help.
I lived there for five years, five years ago. We used to joke that drunk driving was a minor league sport and that "It's Always Sunny..." is actually a documentary. Literally half the people I knew had at least one DUI on their records, and the rest all had a scare-story where the cop let them go. "Imagine a town in which everyone has at least a little larceny in their hearts," elicits a few proud chuckles from my friends still there. Camden, NJ is the only city I've ever seen with more litter. They booed and threw icey snowballs at Santa Claus at a football game in 1968 and they still talk about it like it proves how great the fan culture is. They are very proud that their sports fans are the loudest, drunkest, and most violent. It's the only town in which I've been challenged to a fight just because I was in the room.
I loved it in my twenties. The food and drink scene in DC is nothing in comparison, and there is a yuppiness here that is interminable. But too many yoga and spin-class studios and too-expensive beer aren't going to literally kill me. Philly earns all of its bad nicknames.
I said on the last thread we had on this that I think PHL is the weak link. It's not a great airport in terms of runways and other facilities and is at capacity.
A plan to expand it a few years back was killed by local opposition. There was supposed to be an alternative plan developed after that, but I'm not sure whatever happened to it.
I don't know what the time frame on an expansion would be or if the city would be willing to consider it, but as it stands the airport is a real Achilles heal.
The problem with PHL is not a problem with the airport or the facilities or the routes currently flown to and from it. The problem with PHL is that it has "Philadelphia" in its name instead of "New York".
As an airport, it's not that bad; I flew through there plenty of times back when I traveled more and did most of my flying on US Airways. Most of the northeastern airports have capacity issues, but PHL is -- no matter how bad it might seem to you now -- much better off than JFK, EWR or even something further west like ORD.
Though if, as you indicated previously, you want to insist only on cities which currently have nonstop flights to PVG, your choices are very slim. Only three US cities east of Detroit have that. Two of them (New York and Boston) either cannot provide the space or would provide it only at ruinous cost, and the other (Atlanta) has one of the worst "transit" systems I've ever experienced. And honestly, if Amazon were to set up somewhere else in the eastern US with an existing international-capable airport, you can bet Hainan and one or both of China Eastern and China Southern would start sending 787s there pretty quickly. As much as people like to complain about it, that plane was a game-changer, and a lot of secondary-tier US cities/airports now are getting nonstops to Asia that never would have happened before.
Though honestly if we're going to decide this on airports, I'd say Detroit is the clear front-runner, probably with Minneapolis not far behind, in terms of access to the rest of the country and the world, and letting Amazon standardize corporate travel on Delta (which is hubbed at Seattle, and at both Minneapolis and Detroit).
All the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic airports are busy and have non-ideal airport layouts.
That said, Philly is still moving forward with their expansion/improvement plan and fundamentally is one of the few major airports in the region that can practically expand without insurmountable environmental/political opposition.
If PHL is handicapped in some way, I would say the ground transportation experience is one of it's larger problems.
- It has a parking crunch so it runs out of parking, or you wind up with a situation where even if you're a high-earning person, you're still going to have to park in economy and lose a bunch of time with a slow bus to the terminal because the garages are full.
- The Airport Line is infrequent, so transit doesn't work for anyone who values their time.
- Not unique to Philly, but the traffic situation on the highways means Uber/Lyft don't solve transportation issues to the airport unless they put the HQ in South Philly.
- Switching terminals is a bus or walk, no people-mover or the like. There are at least post-security connections.
Lets hope not, for the sake of people living there. Obviously half joking, but phily is one of the places im considering to move eventually, most likely for retirement.
This really burns me. The Times compared the metro population of Grand Rapids (1 million) to Detroit's population (670,000) in order to disqualify the city in their first round.
But metro Detroit has a population of 4.5 million so the Times either was sloppy with their criteria or they deliberately snubbed Detroit.
Detroit may be a dark horse in this competition but with Dan Gilbert going all out to win I don't think you can count them out just yet even if the New York Times hastily does.
Detroit was not eliminated due to population, everything on the first map qualified for the population criteria. It failed the job growth test.
(There's an argument about whether “stable business climate for growth" really can be boiled down to just "job growth". But is Detroit really going to do well on any kind of proxy for stable growth?)
I think this is an excellent point. While Detroit has a relatively small population, it's metropolitan area does not. It's large metropolitan area has a large STEM talent pool thanks to the automotive sector, the second largest Delta hub (behind Atlanta and just a giant airport anyways), and has a very willing government plus Dan Gilbert.
It'll be a uphill battle, but I think Detroit is a serious dark horse.
Dan Gilbert has created RocketFiber. 1Gb for $79/month residential and business in Detroit. 10Gb available for reasonable amounts.
When I was running my own company, I came quite close to looking at spots there. I was in Plymouth (30 miles west), but needed lots of bandwidth at the time, and DC hosting wasnt an option.
FWIW: you could do air cooled DCs up and down the Michigan west coast. Wonderfully cool air coming off a natural chiller, Lake Michigan, cheap power, excellent transportation infrastructure, very business friendly state government ... though sometimes they lurch the other way, most of the time they don't do stupid things.
I tried gauging investor interest in this model of DCs a few years ago ... few thought DCs were a growth industry, and clouds/hosting was a fad. Go figure.
Perhaps the point was that there may be some transferable technical talent already in place. Plenty of programmers, statisticians, UX experts, data scientists and IT folks needed for modern auto companies.
I'd say snubbed. The Detroit-Ann Arbor corridor and metro area is 5-ish million, with a strong tech scene, quite a bit of airport capacity (DTW, and if they wanted to use it, Willow Run). Cheap (and I mean cheap) housing, active and growing downtown, etc.
This is not the Detroit I went to grad school in, (mumble) 20+ years ago. Very different place, lots of investment. Ann Arbor is a dense tech mecca. East Lansing (90 miles away) less so, but between Wayne State, UofM's, MSU, Central Mich, MTU, and some of the smaller schools, there is a very strong engineering and computing culture. One that is frequently overlooked.
One thing I will note is a paucity of investment capital in the region, and a strong reluctance on the part of costal VCs to invest in fly over country.
However ... cost to hire/retain people here is very low compared to the coasts. Given how much the percentage of cost is in people, this should be a factor in any companies calculation on where to move.
Land/facilities are cheap. Transportation is ok ... we still have to work on local transit, as decades of mismanagement if not worse, have left the public transportation options in terrible shape. However, there are strong pushes from Dan Gilbert, the Illich family, and many others for modern regional transport. There are light and heavy rail all over here.
And, not for nothing ... we have 4 real seasons. Though, in my first few weeks out here (mumble) 30 something years ago, I surprised how they could all be on the same day ...
Detroit should be in the mix. As a leading contender. All of the rust belt should be.
Still, despite the size of metro Detroit, I think it's 100% off the table for Amazon's HQ2. The positive side of it is, sure, Amazon could own Detroit like vintage Ford – that's neat but I don't think Amazon wants that. The winters are still some of the most frigid and intimidating of any major American city, Michigan is still seen as the turncoat swing state (or one of them) that lead to Trump's election, and even though it's regarded as ripe for an artistic revolution (cheap permits, cheap housing) it's still not a "cool" place to be.
It's a huge gamble on a city that is pulling itself out of bankruptcy.
All depends on your perspective. Unlike many on ycombinator, I voted for Trump. I suppose it is more accurate to say that I actually voted for his Supreme Court justice list -- I viewed that issue as far more important than the president for the next four years. I lean libertarian, and while Trump had several justices that I'm OK with on his list, Hillary had no list and probably wouldn't have nominated anybody that I like. I live in Michigan, and I'm proud of our role in getting him elected (and getting a justice with a strict interpretation of the constitution nominated).
Also, please don't crucify me for admitting that I voted for Trump. I usually don't tell people IRL, because most left-leaning folks are extremely intolerant about it, many to the point of anger/hatred and possibly violence. If you want to know why you can't find the trump voters out in the real world, I think that's one of the big reasons.
Also, justices last a lifetime. A few bad justices could shred the constitution and trash our entire democracy faster than you can blink. A president properly constrained by congress and the courts cannot. Nominating activist judges and justices can seem like a great idea in the short term, when the chips are falling in your preferred way, but in the general case it's a terrible idea. If you don't believe me, think about how happy people were when Obama started abusing executive orders, and how upset they were when Trump continued the trend ... although they're not the first presidents to do this, there are some lines that just shouldn't be crossed.
I really couldn't care less about the wall. I do think that choosing not to enforce immigration laws through an exective order was wrong - that is the domain of congress. In the case of an institution as important as the government of the United States, the ends do not justify the means if the means weakening the foundations of the entire system. I think that this applies equally to executive orders from both Trump and Obama that effectively seek to legislate through executive action.
Also ... sigh, I've already got negative two on that post :( The rain of judgement is why we're all silent.
The reason I don't care about the wall is simple: Yes, our immigration laws are complicated and need reform, but people shouldn't be crossing the border illegally, full-stop. That's why we have laws. A country that selectively enforces its laws is a country where the government can imprison you on a whim (because you've broken a rarely enforced law that they can use against you at will), and historically such countries haven't been nice places to live. So as a basis, you want and need a government that consistently enforces laws, and if the laws are bad, you change them -- which is less likely to happen if lax enforcement eases the pain of the bad laws. So how do I move from "we need to enforce our laws, and change them if they're bad" to "I don't care about the wall"? Simple: whether or not we have the wall, immigration laws need to be enforced as they are written (love 'em or hate 'em), which means that until the law is changed anyone caught crossing will be deported anyway. At the point that the law is changed, people who want to cross will be allowed through as specified in the law. With this philosophy as a background, the wall is relatively meaningless in a practical sense, although I do admit that it does have some symbolic weight. I have always had far more concern for pragmatic thought than symbolism and idealism (which probably led me to engineering), and I'm assuming that building a wall would reduced long-term border patrolling costs to compensate for the cost to build it, and so this leaves me in a place where it's a wash and I don't really care whether or not they build it. And yes, I have been called an emotionless robot before ... I took it as a complement :).
One more note: I'm not saying that I expect the government to achieve perfect monitoring -- just like it would be impossible to catch all speeders, it would be impossible to catch all illegal border crossings -- but I am saying that when the government does know that a law has been broken, it should apply a consistent response that is compliant with the laws that have been passed by a congress and signed by a president.
Huh? We already have a wall. It covers about 1/4th of the US-Mexico border.
Trump would just be expanding it. Likely to around a half of the total border (Much of the border is close to impassable, due to mountains, desert, ect).
I think it'd be an amazing PR move, to be honest, and one Amazon would profit much from and suffer minimal risk. Amazon has been criticized lately for eating retail and causing economic upheaval. Going into Detroit turns all that around.
Shinola has been capitalizing on Detroitness. So has Chrysler, successfully.
Things are moving back from burbs into the city and gaining visibility. These are the successful test cases. "Imported from Detroit"
(The bankruptcy itself hasn't prevented much from improving in Detroit. The bankruptcy turned out to be the launchpad.)
Same with Phoenix as Phoenix metro is 4.5 mil. and lots of room to grow, great cities in Tempe/Scottsdale/Chandler and more with an Amazon presence already here.
But ultimately they are probably right, Denver deserves it. Great quality of life, smart governance, good markets, healthy living and room to grow. Lots of people moving to Denver just like Seattle so it is very close to the same style of city. It is very, very easy to attract people to Denver.
I work at a software company between Boulder and Denver.
It's easy to recruit people here. You fly them out (at any time of year, even winter) and the weather is typically sunny and pleasant. (yes, in the winter, it's usually sunny, dry, and mild temps)
The housing prices in Colorado are high because of a specific reason that is soon going to end:
1) Land is available, but labor and building companies are still not fully recovered from the 2008 bust, and this has created a sharp supply issue with new housing to accommodate the hordes of newcomers.
2) This issue is quickly on the way to being remedied, because the housing prices are high enough to produce huge profits for builders, and the national companies are quickly getting their infrastructure in place.
3) If anything, housing prices are going to retreat downward, (probably not a crash due to demand) and Amazon would help cement the decision for big building companies to devote more assets to correcting the supply issue.
I can't speak for the grandparent poster, but it seems he was making a case for Denver being great for Amazon, not necessarily discussing if Amazon would be great for Denver.
That said, I wouldn't mind seeing Amazon HQ2 locate here. While I doubt I would personally want to work for Amazon due to its reputation as being a lousy place to work, it would probably boost the tech scene and salaries. I think Denver's cost of living is going to continue its steep trajectory with or without Amazon.
> ...keeping those metropolitan areas that have had the best job growth over the last decade, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Metro areas that have actually lost jobs (Tucson; Birmingham, Ala.) and those that have grown more sluggishly are out of the running.
This is a good time to remind folks that arbitrary political borders are, well, arbitrary and that all serious city-to-city comparisons should be done using MSA numbers.
A failure to understand this leads to all kinds of ridiculous impressions and conclusions.
As others have stated, Detroit was eliminated for sluggish growth, not low population. Having said that, I'm definitely in their target demographic (35 yrs old, BSCE and MSEE, 10 years software development experience and team leadership experience), and I think that their 'has the right labor pool' filter is a bit off. I'd guess that Amazon is looking to rein in their labor costs a bit, and often a large city with some tech (but not a ton) can provide a very good labor pool at a reasonable cost. They got rid of a lot of places I'd be willing to re-locate to in that round (I can't stand huge cities), but perhaps I'm alone in my desire to live in a place that has low cost of living, reasonable traffic, and abundant housing+land.
PS - I actually currently live and work near Grand Rapids. I have 11 acres that didn't cost me a fortune, and I love it. GR would probably have also failed their 'amenities' filter, which I think is also wrong - any place with broadway, concerts, sports teams, good restaurants/breweries/bars etc. is probably good enough for most young people.
I don't think you're in their target demographic if you want to live on 11 acres but don't want to deal with the traffic to work at a corporate campus of 50,000 workers in a city of 1M+
I think there are a lot of workers who would like to live on that much land, but it's just not sustainable. If 50,000 people each lived on 10 acre plots, the amount of land they'd need to live would exceed that of a large city. That's 780 square miles, larger than the 600 mi^2 of of Houston which has a population of 2M people.
Detroit seems like a fantastic choice. Both Toronto and Chicago are fairly close. All the great Michigan and Ontario schools can be tapped and the city has tremendous potential to grow. Hopefully, they'd be nicer to their local population ala Facebook/East Palo Alto.
Speaking only for myself, "fairly close" is basically as far away as really far away. If I have to move, there's not much of a difference between moving 100 miles and 3,000 miles. If I were planning to operate in one city because it was fairly close to another city, I'd probably just go to the fairly close city instead (or somewhere else altogether).
Or, Amazon's announcement could just be a move to get Seattle to stop their attacks on local businesses. The Seattle Times has routinely run pretty negative articles on Amazon, and suddenly today they ran a positive one. I think the Times has gotten the message.
Seattle elected and re-elected Kshama Sawant to the city council. She is an avowed socialist, and is openly hostile to Boeing and Amazon. At one point she wanted to nationalize Boeing.
I'd think twice about investing in anything under her sway.
That's right, she's reflective of the community. And if that community is hostile to Amazon/Boeing, why should they continue to invest in that community?
The Seattle mayoral election candidates are all well over on the left. There isn't even anyone to vote for if you aren't on the left.
I know they eliminated Pittsburgh right out of the gate, but I think it has a bunch of things going for it. It's one of the few places where housing is cheap (but a pretty beautiful downtown) but young tech workers would love to live: tons of stuff to do but lots of knowledge workers with CMU. Biggest obvious issue is no direct flights to Seattle, but if Amazon built a headquarters there it seems like it would be easy to reach critical mass to add more flights
Pittsburgh is probably really close to ideal. I can't really think of much of a downside.
It has a lot of universities, and the programmers are quite good (the ex-CTO of Modcloth? had a video where he pointed out that the Pittsburgh office was quite a bit better than the SV office). Your factory workers will be out toward the airport and your knowledge workers will be downtown. It's a very old city, so it is quite a bit more pedestrian friendly than most. And, because it's old, it has a really good arts scene. And Pittsburgh has a woefully underutilized airport.
The only downsides are weather: 1) Lack of sunlight--Pittsburgh is almost as bad as Seattle in that respect and 2) Winter--Northeast winters SUCK.
Not to mention a starving international airport that would be desperate to help make flights to Seattle happen. I know I'd be on the first one.
And really, Pittsburgh is fantastic. Good schools, good commute even if you live in a suburb, great food and alcohol scene, with an arts scene and history to rival any major city (Carnegie and Warhol for starters).
I visited Pittsburgh recently, and I kind of fell in love with it:
1. Beautiful, unique geography, with a ton of outdoor stuff to do (granted, at least in summer).
2. Gorgeous architecture all around.
3. Great public transportation.
4. Lively nightlife, lots of options.
5. Relatively cheap
Pittsburgh basically has infrastructure for a city twice as big, but has managed to transition from its industrial past better than most rust belt cities.
Relatively cheap will go away as soon as ~30,000 new families come in to work at Amazon. Which is a big reason why I'm not sure I want Amazon to come here.
I think Pittsburgh and Cleveland are two ideal choices, for many of the same reasons. They both have strong tech pipelines at Case and CMU, affordable prime real estate, openness to offering incentives, and are are highly under-rated in terms of livability. Both have shown they can attract tech workers with options (CLE with its hospital system, Pitt with Google and others).They are both disadvantaged by the flight availability metric, but I think this could be induced by demand from Amazon.
Also, they eliminated PGH based on the 1 million population without accounting for the city borders being much smaller than normal cities due to how Allegheny county is structured. The metro area is ~2.5 million and is about the same size as most city borders.
I live in the Denver metro area and I think this assessment is pretty spot-on. The only downside is rush hour traffic around downtown can add 15-20 minutes to the commute. However, these is a significant light rail presence.
I would say quality of life is great for anyone that likes to do anything outdoors: fishing, skiing, mountain bikes, dirt bikes, etc.
And there's a pretty strong community of software engineers here.
I lived in Denver for the past 2 years and agree with this assessment as well. The light rail has expanded lines in recent years to the airport and I have read that the plan is for that expansion to continue to eventually link Denver and Boulder. Amazon could build their huge complex anywhere in that area and workers could take public transportation to the office.
I graduated from CU-Boulder in 2009 and have lived in the Denver-metro area ever since. I could very easily see Amazon drawn to the Boulder-Longmont-Lafayette triangle if not in Denver proper.
Lots of growth here in the last 5 years especially. Many long-time locals are complaining about the cost-of-living going up, though.
Having been in Seattle for nearly a decade now, Denver is one place that I'd absolutely consider at some point. I love mountains and sunshine, which Denver gets in spades. Having grown up in MT, the mountains around Seattle are beautiful, but never feel quite right to me—mountains should be dry!
People in the Boulder area approved a sales tax increase to start paying for this back in 2004. At that time it was sold as something that would be built in 10 years, that estimation later changed. Part of the problem is that the plan is to follow an existing railroad right-of-way, so they are financially at the mercy of the company who owns the existing rail system.
That really sucks but I've heard points to one of the issues of why we can't have high-speed rail in the US (outside of politics): freight always gets the right-of-way.
I guess in LA we're somewhat lucky that Metro can pretty much do whatever they want.
The major factor that isn't mentioned: state income tax. Washington has no income tax. It's no small coincidence that it has so many billionaires living there.
But Seattle is trying to impose a 2.5% income tax on high earners. This might be Jeff's way of reminding them they have to compete to keep his business around.
Also, a 0% income tax rate makes a HUGE difference in attracting tech workers who earn $200k+...
I think a lot of cities would be well advised to steer clear, Amazon would have a pretty crazy distortion effect. It might make sense in Denver, but I can't imagine them fitting into any smaller city (~3m).
I expect it to end up in a former rustbelt or midwestern city explicitly eliminated in this article in the 'strong job growth' phase. Dallas, Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit, Philadelphia.
Yeah I'm saying that, for example, the effects on Raleigh would be pretty overwhelmed at 2m, if Denver could even handle it at 3.3m. Contrast with Minneapolis at 3.8m, Dallas at 7.3m, and Chicago at close to 10m on the money.
I'm using the CSA definitions because I think that's a better way of comparing wildly different cities.
> We asked the economist David Albouy to rank these metro areas for us with an index he uses to measure how much people would be willing to sacrifice, in terms of housing costs and commutes, to live in desirable places. On that basis, we cut Charlotte, N.C.
My experience being that neither housing costs nor commute times being horribly bad around CLT - this bums me out. It's actually a great city with lots of nature around it, ATL is 4hr drive, housing costs in nearby areas (Fort Mill, SC e.g.) aren't anywhere near as bad as say Atlanta suburbs. It's not NYC to be sure - culture wise not very hip but I did not think the mid-career experienced people Amazon would be hiring would mind that at all.
Maybe the NYT was too literal when they considered CLT or maybe I don't understand what exactly the sacrifice would be in terms of housing costs and commutes.
I spent the first 18 years of my life growing up in Charlotte during the 90s and 00 housing and bank boom, and have revisited friends there fairly often since. Can't say I am rooting for Amazon to locate a HQ there.
Downtown has never really had any appeal for an under-21 besides Discovery Place (is that even still around?) which is more geared for the pre-13 age group. Post-21 more recently it seems to have been revitalized but having been spoiled by Raleigh, still feels sterile and kind of bland. Even in NoDa, where all those creative people have already been priced out of that community.
I'm definitely still colored by my hatred of bland suburbia of that city, which afforded teenagers absolutely nothing to do except shop or watch movies in the theatre. It really is geared for the traditional suburban parent types through and through. Compared to other parts of NC with a diverse cultural scene (Asheville and Raleigh) Charlotte drops the diversity for an increased price.
It also has the unfortunate location of being inside NC, whose state politics have been anything but sane the past half decade, and the local college is also overshadowed heavily by Chapel Hill, Duke, and State in the Triangle area. That's the metro area I would expect Amazon to pick over Charlotte, as there's a lot of non-hip tech companies already established there. And even a few hip ones like Epic Games.
The criteria that Charlotte failed is cultural edginess. Meaning how much people are willing to accept a high housing cost and commute in exchange for being in a cool place.
I agree that it should stay in the running. I'd like to see more tech in the south - there's too much on the West Coast.
I used to live in North Carolina. My son was born there, and it's where I met my wife.
Charlotte is a terrible place for Amazon.
The weather isn't remarkably good, gay employees can't get married, the public schools are shit thanks to the state, the traffic is bad, and it's culturally not noteworthy. Sorry. It's just not a good location. Raleigh could do it, but isn't big enough, and again, not a culturally attractive spot.
In fact, I think the lack of gay marriage rights kill both Austin and Charlotte.
Charlotte is just meh. It's not a quick drive to beaches (hours) , and it's an hour or more from the mountains. The business culture is banking oriented, the downtown/city center is crime-ridden, and it's heavily suburbanized.
The airport is good. That's it. Otherwise Asheville or Raleigh would both be better. Asheville is a non-starter due to it's small size though.
This is such a terrible way to make a decision like this. The types of filters they used were completely arbitrary,the filtering level for each type of filter was arbitrary, and the number of filters they used was arbitrary. Plus, they didn't even include Toronto, who is probably a very strong contender.
I agree, there is strong factors to consider a location outside of the US. Despite the NYT analysis, I think this is going to end up in Boston. I don't buy the "there is no room for the location" argument. It is like they've never been to Boston. Sure you can't drop it in the downtown but there are lots of areas in need of redevelopment very near by. I also think that Boston has a huge advantage in terms of talent pool. Look at all the top schools in Boston, Amazon needs the talent more than the money.
Additionally, I think this is a game. They've already decided where, they just want leverage to get a better deal there. This isn't like the Giga factory where they just need manual labor so anywhere would work. I'll be interested to see where it ends up though.
Boston has colleges and universities, and yes, they are amazing.
But guess what? Recent college graduates are happy to move to places with better weather and lower costs of living, and they do. We interview top tier people looking to relocate from Boston all the time.
I say that as someone who loves Boston, and especially like the culture and people.
I meant it largely in the local ability for intern programs, partnerships with the various internal school "labs", etc. You also have a better chance at attracting institutional talent as they can switch without moving or upsetting their life. Look at the huge exodus of staff from CMU to Uber, etc.
Why doesn't Amazon choose a city that almost meets their criteria and invest the wealth they generate there back into the city? Then we get more good cities instead of overinvesting into any single city.
Because they want the most bang for their buck. This is not a goodwill gesture by Amazon, this is them looking to squeeze as much as they can out of their next location.
For the same reason my company used to, I'm retired, sponsor the local little league sports teams - even though the audiences were absolutely never going to be clients?
Sometimes, you do the right thing, just because it's the right thing to do. It wasn't an investment. It was just giving back to the community that housed us.
I guess you could argue that it improved employee morale? I don't think any of our employees even had kids on the team.
I'm not denying that companies do charitable things, but I think where to build your headquarters is much more fundamental than whether to give money to a kids' sports team. Would your former company have made decisions about the parameters of their core business based on the interests of Little League?
I'm not convinced that their office location is a core business decision. Wherever they go, people will also go. They could HQ in Mozambique and still attract top talent.
I'm sure Amazon would be happy to sponsor a little league team. Sponsoring a city in the same way is to then be responsible for people who don't even work for you. It's much better for Amazon to stake its flag in a city that is self reliant, but also fertile for new blood.
Microsoft and Boeing anchor Seattle next to Amazon, that makes Seattle a very stable and fertile place. If Amazon moved to, say, St. Louis? What else is there to balance it out? Budweiser?
Is there a good reason to believe that picking a city that doesn't meet their criteria would be good for the city? If amazon brought a new HQ and 50k jobs into any smaller city or a city with declining growth, it's a crapshoot as to whether it would improve the city or just turn it into a "company town". A city where all the best-paying most desireable jobs are all at with the same company is not a healthy city.
Most of their criteria aren't that flexible. Nobody is going to reroute interstates or move airports for Amazon. They might be able to get a transit line extended or a new station added to an existing line. Population/education might be negotiable if there is a site with awesome transportation.
Cell coverage would certainly be fixable, though, if the local officials commit to reasonable planning approvals, and can convince carriers to play ball.
> Cell coverage would certainly be fixable, though, if the local officials commit to reasonable planning approvals, and can convince carriers to play ball.
Well, there's the Kindle Whispernet thing. I'm in Australia and was impressed when the first Kindles came out and "they just have 3G, no configuration/questions asked - and Wikipedia is free." The high-level involvement and agreements required for worldwide "just works" connectivity (which is not technically amazing, but politically impressive) means that fixing local cellular would likely be a shoo-in and require no drawn-out anything. Chances are the HQ building(s) will have cell towers factored in at the blueprint level.
Because we don't live in an economic system that allows for it. Amazon and every other capitalistic enterprise always cares more about profits than the wellness of a city. "If we do it, someone else won't, and they'll win!"
Because ... They are not charity? If there is a market for Amazon's offer, they surely can pick the one that best suits them. And the line seems getting really long.
Why haven't you done all manner of things to improve the world at your expense? How much are you donating to Harvey relief? Why haven't you sold your gas car to buy an electric? Etc.
Instead of two headquarters, why not 50 headquarters? They have one of the largest and most reliable networks in the world - use it! With offices spread across the country (continent, even), they could hire from a talent pool that dwarfs Seattle and Denver. They wouldn't have to find 100+ contiguous acres for sale in one metropolis. City Council elections wouldn't have to be of strategic importance. Likewise for disaster preparedness. They already have distribution centers all over the place.
The same reason Google, Facebook, Apple, et all still bus employees 40 miles south from SF to their offices -- having people together in one office (or campus) makes them more productive, no matter how much technology you throw at it.
Most communication in an office still takes place virtually just as you do remotely. Within a company located in the same physical area you might communicate across floors, across buildings, across campuses.
Yes it is nice to have small groups together on regular basis in meetings, integration sessions, brainstorming but for the most part jobs are virtual even in an office today with chat, email, text, phones, video chat, etc. Everyone in one location is both a single point of failure and doesn't scale well to employees changes, i.e. people move frequently, skill is available in different technologies not always in one location, etc. Better virtual communication in companies even on-site is needed, being in one place without that can actually put a damper on performance and ability to ship.
Yet the evidence from major tech companies suggests that physical presence is worth the time and expense to bus most employees to a central campus. Apple is spending $5B on their new building to house 13,000 employees together. Amazon is committing $5B to their new campus to house 50,000 employees.
I think Amazon has reached the limits of Seattle -- Seattle can't build housing or transportation fast enough to match Amazon's growth, so starting somewhere fresh makes sense.
Plus there's the redundancy benefit -- if the Pacific Northwest suffers the catastrophic earthquake they are predicting, Amazon's HQ2 will live on (and make a fortune shipping supplies to the area).
Building a second HQ is horizontal scaling unless they plan to consolidate at the new location and continue vertical scaling from there. It sounds like they're actually distributing the HQ across two locations, not just building a specialized satellite office. (All of the mentioned companies have those.)
If computing works as an analogy, decoupling a system enough to spread across two servers without one being the true master/head is already half the battle. But you'd rarely design a distributed system only to run it on two servers. The synchronization overhead wipes out most of the gains. Once you have the architecture, you might as well move to commodity servers that are collectively cheaper and more powerful than two top-of-the-line servers.
I wonder if there is an organizational equivalent of the CAP theorem.
Is that really true? How many people in a 50,000-person campus ever even make eye contact, much less work together in a way that requires physical proximity?
I've always thought it curious as to why AWS requires people to relocate to one of their offices. My understanding was that one of the major benefits of the cloud (aka AWS) was to free companies from having to hire locally.
Kind of defeats the purpose of a "headquarters" - Even 2 is pushing it as an "HQ" is about where the primary decision makers will work on a day to day basis.
I was thinking about this today and realized something about tech/finance/entertainment... hubs.
The best way to get one is by having major players in the industry set up shop there. Cities hope the next big tech company will be in their city, but lots of the employees that switch companies to help startups grow come from top companies and it is way easier to get people to switch companies if they don't have to move.
Seattle has become a good tech hub due to amazon and microsoft.
I think whatever city wins this will have a massive long term tech hub boost because of it. This will probably be many times better for a cities economy than some factory.
> Is Amazon looking for a tech hub or a place for administrative functions.
"The jobs will likely be broken down into the following categories: executive/management, engineering with a preference for software development engineers (SDE), legal, accounting, and administrative." [1]
SDE is clearly mentioned but who know the actual distribution.
Not sure if Washington, DC includes Northern Virginia (Ashburn, Herndon, Reston). AWS is already here. And a ridiculous amount of fiber seems to out through this area. I see new data centers popping up quite often. And prices are crazy expensive but probably still cheaper than the city itself.
So I would pick this area if I was them. Though not sure how I'd personally feel about prices and traffic going up even higher with Amazon's second HQ moving in.
I currently live between Denver and Boulder. Lived in the DC area for 8 years.
It's an AWFUL place to build an HQ, but Amazon might do it anyway.
1) Salaries are artificially inflated by competition from the Govt and Govt contractors.
2) Traffic is nightmarishly bad.
3) Housing is incredibly expensive
4) Tech skills aren't as high as the stats indicate. The gov't and contractors have an amazing way of creating people whose titles indicate they know what they're doing, but they don't. See healthcare.gov fiasco for an illustration. A senior data engineer in DC is someone who knows SQL and Informatica, as opposed to someone that can actually do real tech. The intelligence agencies have awesome talent, but they have enormous salaries inflated by their security clearances and you're not going to get them.
5) Weather fucking sucks. I lived there 8 years, it sucks.
6) Quality of life just isn't good. Average commute times and cultural amenities are bad.
Yeah it's a mix of tech companies and gov. + gov contractors. A lot of people seem to work for the "State Dept." here (cough CIA cough) or other such agencies.
Tech talent is varied as you say. There are a lot of tech companies, some of Amazon's AWS is here, and there Microsoft, Google and others. They are probably dwarfed by Lockheed, Booz, Northrop and "We put butts in seats" ManTech but overall at least the NoVa area seems tech-y enough.
Traffic is not bad if you don't have to get on the beltway or go all the way to DC in rush hour. And there is Metro, with all the hate and issues they've been having it works and is better than other cities I've lived in.
> Housing is incredibly expensive
Compared to Midwest or South it is ridiculously expensive. But out in suburbs (and not DC proper) it's more manageable than Seattle, SF, NY and such it seems.
> 5) Weather fucking sucks. I lived there 8 years, it sucks
True, true. Though it's fall now. Finally a few weeks of nice cool mornings when opening windows feels nice. And I do like the mountains out West. Skyline drive, hiking and the small towns and farms.
> 6) Quality of life just isn't good. Average commute times and cultural amenities are bad.
I just tried not to commute and lived closed to work. Now work from home. Now you might ask why would I still stay in this area, and that would be a good question. So far it inertia mostly and maybe the idea that it's probably safer to stay in a tech area if had to wanted to switch jobs and working from home wasn't an option any more.
I think the area around Reston / Dulles would make a great pick. The Silver Line will be finished soon, and there is plenty of room to build it up in the style of Arlington's Orange Line or Old Town's Blue. Dulles being 10 minutes away would be a huge advantage, especially compared to Denver where the airport is a long ways from both the tech corridor and the Boulder area.
Traffic is still a nightmare and housing costs are pretty bad compared to most cities, but there is a lot of tech talent here and wages seem lower than NY, Seattle, and the Bay Area.
NOVA is liberal, but Virginia is business friendly, unlike DC and MD. There is already the big NE Virginia AWS here, and I'm pretty sure most of the governments and intel communities AWS infrastructure is also housed close by.
Absolutely love, despite the fact that it's mentioned numerous times that Amazon is searching all of NA for its second hq, that both Canada, and Mexico are completely ignored. This is despite the fact that Toronto is currently the continents fastest growing tech market due to a lot of factors that would be of incredible interest to a behemoth like Amazon. Feels a like a bit of a snub of the thumb by NYT on that one...
> (With apologies to Canada, we’ve set aside Toronto and several other large cities because they’re not included in most of the data sets we’ve used to determine which places meet Amazon’s needs.)
Exactly! As I mentioned in my reply to this comment, if they actually used the platitudes of data available on the subject - instead of clearly cherry - Toronto would easily be in the top 3, at the very least. The fact that they admit that the data they chose didn't mention Toronto doesn't help their case any.
>we’ve set aside Toronto and several other large cities because they’re not included in most of the data sets we’ve used
Not because the data isn't available, which it is (in abundance), but because it's not available in the data sets the chose to use. Not to put on a tinfoil hat or anything, but I have a very strong suspicion that they chose the data they did, and specifically mention leaving Toronto out, because they know that if they did otherwise, the data would show that Toronto is probably, if not the best, one of the top 3 options, and that likely wouldn't go over well with their core readership...
I think the biggest issue with Toronto is the fact that every American tech worker (60% of the probable HQ2 labor pool, conservatively) would need to get a Canadian work visa before being onboarded. Sounds like a horrible, horrible headache for both Amazon and prospective employees.
I'm simply not a fan of any business building huge HQ offices in Toronto. Ontario as a province is all too happy to regulate the crap out of things that don't need it, and the population has an amazing capacity to support the regulations, regardless of merit, as long as they are different enough from whatever the US is doing.
The weather is terrible compared to Vancouver or ANYWHERE IN THE US. Yeah, it's easy to bring in immigrants, but that's not enough for a 50,000 strong hq.
Let's not forget that they are in the midst of a huge, epic housing bubble that dwarfs anything seen in the US in 2007. Toronto is insanely expensive for the privilege of living in a city whose weather is approximately (less snow, but still) like that of the cities in the US that are known for their terrible winters. (Buffalo, Erie, Cleveland)
I think a lot of the issues with Amazon.ca stem from NAFTA's exclusion of ecommerce. That's one thing I'm actually pretty excited for in terms of the NAFTA negotiations.
I live in Atlanta. I was hopefully it would be the final pick...but when I got down to the section about being able to move around the city easily, I knew we'd be cut.
Not going to complain about traffic/mass-transit here...but it's a known issue and we supposedly lost another bid (can't think of the company here) because of traffic. We did get a few others...Mercedes-Benz for one.
I think Rahm might be able to pull it off for Chicago. I could see Amazon moving into the Old Post Office, partially for the symbolism, partially for the convenience.
This could actually be a cool idea. It seems like the Fulton Market boom flopped and all the real estate went to condos and luxury apartments. Moving a major tech hub into the loop could have some interesting outcomes like balancing the opportunities for people who don't have easy access to the near north and west sides.
I'm surprised none of the comments here highlight the time zone benefit that one of the east coast options would give them. Having a large group of employees still based in the US, yet able to sensibly overlap with Europe is a huge deal.
In the same way that Portland is too close physically, Denver doesn't gain you "anything" for timezone diversity. They might offer the sweetest financial package, but it still seems like a wasted opportunity.
When the hq2 news first broke, Denver was the first city to pop into my mind, without really thinking about it. And I've never even been to Denver, just the airport.
And those of us in Utah say... "Wait, no, we have Universities here, and could totally support Amazon." Then we think about the urban sprawl of SLC, and look at the outdoors and think about how crowded it has gotten already at Arches and Zion and say... "Yes, OK. Denver sounds good."
Utah really needs some sort of excellence (lab/institute/etc...) in engineering/science/high tech research that's not just biotech, in addition to a more diverse workforce, to really be a next-level tech environment.
I don't think Amazon is actually "looking" for a new headquarters so much as asking for a sweetheart deal to do business there, sort of like how cities will spend absurd amounts of money to woo sports teams.
The Twin Cities (AKA Minneapolis) perhaps doesn't scale well on the "raw growth" charts, but the region has a strong track record for being a very good place for corporate headquarters. By metropolitan area, it ranks first among the 30 largest metropolitan areas in the number of Fortune 500 companies per capita. It's also a major knowledge hub for shipping logistics, which is why Amazon opened an office there related to that work.
I'm not really jazzed about the idea of Amazon moving in, but don't discount the Twin Cities here, it's a very strong contender.
Actually I would challenge the idea Houston doesn't have enough of the professionals required.
Houston was eliminated as not having enough white collar workers. Yet they left in Austin which is far smaller because at least 12.5 % base of their base has the right skills.
It makes sense to compare desired jobs versus the general population but not without context. Seriously with six million+ people here, do you really need 12.5% or 750,000 of them to be what Amazon would consider hiring when they only need 50,000 people?
I find the idea absurd: Amazon could fill their entire job quota out of the current worker pool.
I haven't lived in Houston in 30 years but wouldn't it have been eliminated on the mass transit/transportation/traffic congestion round or possibly the amenities via outdoor recreation round and definitely the culture of inclusion due to the GOP state priorities on bathroom bills? I loved Memorial Park when I lived inside the 610 Loop but the options after that at that point in time required a significant amount of time in the car. The other amenities of restaurants/arts/music were pretty good, though.
Depends on where Amazon ends up. We definitely are weak on public transportation but have a couple of international airports.
With 600 square miles of area, it's tough to have a single metro system serve that entire area and frankly with our weather few people choose to stay outside and wait on transportation unless they just have to.
Which is why you see things like Exxon's move to the Woodlands. There's enough local infrastructure and housing to support their corporate HQ. Unless Amazon decides to buy an inner-city coporate park here they may end doing the same by going to Clear Lake, Sugarland, etc.
Houston is sort of like Austin in that it's an oasis of less conservative politics but the even so the bathroom bill didn't pass.
There's plenty to do outdoors here: I regularly play disc golf, cycle and kayak in the summer. But you do need lots of sun screen, water and to acclimate to the heat. Otherwise you will suffer. I don't think it's any different that living in the South West. You need to know how to deal with the heat.
So many of the oil companies have left downtown I have to think Amazon could snap up a good chunk of it. I moved away years ago but did anyone even fill up Shell Plaza after they moved out?
I too doubt it'll be Houston. Downtown has slowly been shifting to residential high rises because of the tax incentives our previous mayor put in place for them.
But yes there's still plenty of real-estate downtown, although I don't know the status of Shell One and Two specifically.
Off the top of my head, two main points for why Austin is better-suited than Houston for a tech HQ:
- UT (@Austin) means a large pool of fresh grads from a top-10 CS program they can recruit.
- Existing presence of both Amazon itself and other tech companies (Google, FB, MS, etc) means they don't have to relocate workers, and it's a lot easier to convince SDEs from other companies to jump ship.
I'm glad that NYT removed Austin from the list for mass transit / transportation reasons: the roads are full during rush hours. The only reason I make it is because I commute against traffic, and even that is becoming worse.
Plus the water situation when there's no hurricanes around to refill the lakes is fairly dire.
You're right. I'm a moron. However, I'd like to point out that Texas state gov't doesn't send a big "welcome" message of tolerance and inclusion to LGBTQ community.
> At this point, though, we’re going to eliminate Portland, because it makes little sense for the company to put a second headquarters so close to Seattle.
Nonsense. Most or all of the reasons people have speculated on for why they want a second headquarters work as long as it is not in the same state as Seattle.
Portland is only three hours from Seattle by car. That's close enough that it is not unreasonable for someone at one office to make an occasional day trip to the other. That could give some flexibility they would not get if the offices were farther apart.
I live between Denver and Boulder. My brother lives in Portland.
I think Portland is great, but I think it would be a mistake.
1) The lack of sunlight in Portland is the same as Seattle. There are a ton of people who just won't live in places like this. It's actually allowed my company to easily recruit people from places like LA who won't consider cloudy, rainy places due to Seasonal Affective Disorder.
2) Portland has bad traffic. Shockingly bad for it's size.
3) The airport is nice, but small. Flights aren't often direct.
Denver is not going to make the cut. Housing prices are already growing at 10% yoy. Add an Amazon to that and you're going to be Seattle in about 18 months.
Since Bezos has a house and newspaper in D.C. but D.C. itself isn't suitable, I'm thinking "distance from D.C." is a major unmentioned criteria and the main point is to get suburbs and nearby cities to compete. I'll guess Baltimore.
Unfortunately, I suspect a lot of places will offer plenty of bribes ("tax benfits") that should be illegal.
I'm a native of Louisville, KY and while I was excited to see them on the original list of cities, I can understand why it might not make it. To me, Louisville is a great place to live; we are average in almost every way possible. So, we get snow but not blizzards, rain but not hurricanes, heat but not heat waves, etc... We also have a lot of growth potential and plenty of room to expand.
The place we falter, IMHO, is the social aspect; it's just not cool to live/work here. Sure we have Churchill Downs (The Kentucky Derby) and quite a lot of bourbon but I'm not sure that makes up for the lack of cool places to live and out downtown shuts down after 5PM. Still, if Amazon HQ showed up I'm sure those things would change pretty quickly. $50MM and 50,000 extra people have that effect. :)
Grand Rapids, MI is just WAITING for something like this to turn it into a major city. It has an awesome culture and a ton of interesting things happening. However, the available tech job pool is still low and what jobs do exist are typically at non-tech companies who happen to employ tech workers.
I'd really like to see something happen in Grand Rapids to help put it on the tech job map. My brief time working there was a _ton_ of fun, and I really hope that I'll be able to return at some point, either as a remote worker or (hopefully) for someone local.
I've lived between Denver and Boulder for a couple of decades now, and my gut reaction is that Denver/Boulder is probably the type of area that Amazon is looking for to attract talent. Louisville, CO (outside Boulder) is often ranked #1 or #2 for great places to live, and Louisville has the abandoned Storagetek campus (~432 acres) and immediate access to HWY36 and the 470 Tollway. Whether or not adding a mega-campus of 50,000 to the 80027 zip code (or frankly, even one 20 minutes south to Denver proper) is good for the Corridor is another conversation entirely.
This is going to sound crazy and I have no idea of the "Willingness to pay to play" aspect but...
Nashua New Hampshire.
- Easy reverse commute from Boston
- Easy access to Boston schools
- New Hampshire is a business friendly state
- Plenty of cheap office space
- No income or sales tax
And, if a larger[1] company moves into the area it will make the commuter rail to Boston project the city has been trying to push a no brainer.
It is even already in one of the highlighted areas of the article (the Boston highlighted region covers Nashua).
[1] It is already home to the headquarters an entire large subdivision of BAE Systems, as well an Oracle office, EMC, Fidelity, and an Amazon distribution center.
Notwithstanding the NYT process, it would be interesting to see if Amazon can find a spot that does not fit all the criteria itself, but is situated such that people can be pulled (by lower cost of living) to the place from nearby areas with talent. An example of this would be the Sacramento / Davis area.
The Mexico possibility is also very intriguing, though it seems difficult to make it work with the safety and language issues.
I wonder if there is a study of these "sweetheart" municipal discretionary tax incentives deals? I have to imagine very few, if any, ever achieve the ROI the politicians claim and usually on top of non-tax incentives.
Would be interesting to see some actual data.
These people in power make these deals with little public oversight, usually negotiated in secret, knowing full well they won't have to deal with the long term impacts.
Amazon made it clear that it was looking for "someplace in North America"... there are 2 other countries you've left out with metro areas that fit at least some of the criteria.
I would be shocked if Amazon put its headquarters anywhere where English is not the primary language. That leaves Toronto and Vancouver, unless I'm forgetting somewhere.
Parts of Mexico could end up satisfying that if Congress does not act on DACA. It would be interesting if a company opened facilities in Mexico with the specific purpose of recruiting from deported DACA beneficiaries.
"workers can easily get around — and out of town" - Washington DC makes the cut, that's a joke, 470 and beltway is one of the most congested roads in the US.
Happy to see Columbus on the list, shame our tech growth isn't quite at the other state's levels right now (although I think it will be in the future!)
> The company has asked for very specific information on all the state, regional and local incentives communities are willing to offer, and the timelines for how long it would take to approve them. Amazon concludes its proposal by stressing that this a “competitive project.” So let the competition among cities begin!
Sigh. I know these could be good in some situations, but sometimes I wish cities had a most favored company law: every business that employs people gets the same tax benefits as the company that got the best deal. Cities could only agree to things that were good for businesses generally, rather than letting one or two ignore the rules for five years before they suddenly relocate to shop for a better deal.
They kicked Sacramento off the first round "1 million or more" yet there are 2 million in the greater Sacramento area, strong job growth and local economy, affordable housing, and decent tech chops (ok not the Bay Area by a long shot). The SMA has no detectable boundaries between cities; they just blend together.
I wonder how many other cities were eliminated due to poor research.
The Albany-Schenectady-Troy MSA is about million people, and it's barely a top 50 market. There are definately a lot of other markets in a bunch of different places that can compete for this.
They've already spent a ton and bought probably 1M square feet in New York. I know it's expensive as hell, but I don't how that slows them down at all. It's the default first choice for any big business on the east coast.
It really doesn't. Big dig and associated/dependent projects have taken care of a lot that.
Also "Boston"!= Boston...which is basically a euphemism for Eastern Massachusetts, Northern RI, and Souther NH. You could do this project in Nashua, Worcester, Providence, Waltham, outside 128, and it would make double or triple the cost sense of downtown Boston/Cambridge/Somerville.
I agree, Nevada is able to provide the largest tax abatements which is probably going to be the deciding factor (helped recruit GigaFactory, Las Vegas Raiders etc). 300 days of sunshine, cheap real state, low cost of living and close proximity to 15 ski resorts, plus 45 minute flights to Seattle/Silicon Valley.
I think Amazon has already selected Toronto (or possibly somewhere else in Ontario like Kitchener-Waterloo or Windsor) and is just running this 'contest' to extract the best deal they can get. I don't see any reason for dual HQs unless they are hedging against the risk they may have to abandon their current HQ and the biggest threat they face is anti-monopoly actions by a hostile government. Any secondary HQ is going to be outside of the USA and they've already eliminated Europe and Asia.
No city in the USA can compete with Toronto on the basis of legal risk, cheap labour (senior software devs top out around $90k usd in Toronto) and population/infrastructure
A huge one: Seattle is starting to feel a bit like a company town. This has all sorts of practical considerations, like labor cost and real estate availability.
For example, from https://www.geekwire.com/2017/how-seattles-office-market-bec...: Amazon "takes up approximately 20 percent of Seattle’s office inventory, one of the highest concentrations in the country by a single corporate entity," and Amazon anticipates 50% growth in square footage between 2016 and 2020.
tl;dr: the strongest reasons for 2 HQs aren't political.
The New York Times is a newspaper, not a city. And ultimately the decision rests with Amazon, not anyone else. The wording of their headline should reflect that, because the way it is written currently is quite disrespectful.
Not to mention its proximity to NYC and Washington, DC via Amtrak (~1h20m to NYC, ~1h50m to DC)
Transit: http://www.septa.org/site/images/system-map-1400-lrg-03.30.1...
Locations w/ Tax Abatements: http://navyyard.org
http://www.schuylkillyards.com