Nice to see Toronto on the list, though game theory suggest that we're only here because having a Canadian Candidate has the potential to have all 3 levels of government involved rather than just state and city.
I'm not really sure how to go about handicapping the finalists.
Given the current political climate, Toronto is interesting because it's the only city that gives Amazon some escape form the US government.
You'd want:
- an international airport so you can get to Beijing, London, etc on a single flight. This might eliminate the smaller cities.
- a strong existing tech workforce and universities.
- land in the downtown core to build on, this might eliminate New York?
- perhaps you'd preference the cities that already have an amazon campus in them.
Toronto has all of these..
Ah, who am I kidding. its going to come down to which government gives them the most money and that eliminates Toronto.
Would be fun for someone in each city to make a list of what makes your city a good choice for the headquarters!!
Check out the Woodbine’s redevelopment plan. Hundreds of acres next to Pearson airport and on rapid transit to downtown Toronto and the rest of the tech corridor. Amazon will go to Toronto and locate there. Toronto to Waterloo corridor has the highest concentration Per Capita of tech startups and engineers after Silicon Valley. It avoids US immigration nonsense and has free healthcare that saves hundreds of millions per year.
Of course there's land. You just have to convert low-intensity use to high-intensity use. Go east on Bloor past Spadina, and you'll find plenty of two-story commercial buildings right on a subway line. Any of those blocks could be redeveloped into skyscrapers.
If Canadian cities were in serious competition I think there'd be more than one of them on the list. There are a good number of American cities smaller than Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg and Ottawa/Gatineau on the list, let alone Montreal and Vancouver. I suspect that Toronto is the token Canadian city and won't get serious consideration.
I don't blame them, in this era of Trump hyper-nationalism there'd be a huge blow-back for choosing a Canadian city.
Or the fact that their employees would need to sell their organs in order to afford single-bedroom apartments.
But I'm curious, have they actually publicly stated that they want a lot of geographical distance between the old and new HQ? It's an assumption that informs a lot of what's being said here.
I see this sentiment coming a lot from Portlanders.
I understand that rent is rising in your area. That is awful.
But you do realize that Portland's rent is comparable to the rent in many other US metros? In fact, it's cheaper than quite a few! With better infrastructure and poverty rates!
I'm from Chicago, and the rent in Portland is pretty comparable. You can find cheap rent in Chicago if you don't mind commuting 45-60 minutes each way and living in an (almost) literal war-zone. When was the last time you witnessed a drive by? Or had an active gang-shooter outside your house having a gun-fight with other bangers?
And probably the fact that it's so close to Seattle. Geography matters to a company like Amazon and putting up a large hub right next to the first one isn't the best choice.
I second that about Montreal. The language laws are absurd. Getting a temporary work permit to work in Quebec is even weirder. The permanent residents of any other provinces cannot get health care in Quebec without Quebec's CSQ certificate which will take ages to get after you apply. The infrastructure is in ruins. Amazon will have a hard time getting skilled workers in Quebec than the rest of Canada.
Toronto might be the token Canadian city, but it's also the strongest contender Canada has to offer, by far. I would not rule them out.
> I don't blame them, in this era of Trump hyper-nationalism there'd be a huge blow-back for choosing a Canadian city.
Ironically, one reason a Canadian city would offer such big advantages - immigration - is also the main reason for the Trump hyper-nationalism. That tension is interesting. I don't know to what extent politics plays into this but teaching American politicians a lesson about whether they really want to continue playing to the cheap seats on immigration might be a plus for Amazon.
And under the Trump administration, I bet a lot of liberal Americans would be interested in an opportunity to work in Canada and acquire Canadian citizenship "just in case"...
Vancouver is de facto their current HQ2, no? Mostly used to funnel hires to Seattle through L-1 visas, but still.
Keep in mind Amazon is constantly looking for and hiring tons of tech workers. I live in Europe and I'd have a hard time taking their hiring events seriously if I could end up in Winnipeg (no offense). But the same is true for quite a few US cities on the list, though, and it makes me believe they probably aren't considering half of those locations seriously, like other people pointed out.
They are probably put off by hiring issues. Even if they pay over market rates it’s hard to convince people to live in Vancouver because of the high cost of living
Vancouver is right next to Seattle, and wouldn't diversify Amazon in terms of time zones or meterological/geological catastrophes. I don't know enough to say for sure, but I think Amazon has a preference for English-speaking cities which would indicate against Montreal.
Honestly, I think Toronto is a huge dark horse. It's an incredibly attractive location to relocate candidates to and isn't subject to American visa laws. I think the main reason smaller Canadian cities didn't make the cut is because Amazon doesn't really want to go that far north. Toronto is already south of Seattle, for instance.
In Canada, more than 60 percent of permanent residents are admitted via the economic class, most of them via the point-based system. Only one-quarter of permanent residents
are admitted based on family ties.
vs
In the United States, about two-thirds of permanent residents are admitted because they
are closely related to a U.S. citizen or a permanent resident. Less than 15 percent of
permanent residents, including accompanying dependents, are admitted on the basis of
employment.
Immigrants in the United States are three times as likely as natives to have not completed high school; in Canada, immigrants and natives are equally likely to have not completed high school.
So depends on type of workers they are looking for hq2. If they need mostly high skilled then canada might be better option.
The current administration in the US is actively anti-amazon. Primarily due to Bezos' ownership of the washington Post and its unflattering portrayal of Trump. If Amazon chose a Canadian city, the administration would likely go all in on attacking them. A hostile government is a tough thing to overcome even for a company as wealthy as Amazon.
I think Newark set the bar on the financial discounts: $7B [1] so far, but we just changed Governors, so we'll see. I think it meets all the other requirements you mentioned, but I think we got knocked on Infrastructure on some list a month or two ago.
You can already get from Newark Penn to the airport using NJ Transit. It isn't a terrible idea to bring the PATH there so there's a single seat ride from places that PATH services but NJ transit doesn't, but that doesn't apply to Newark.
Given the headlines and buzz today, you'd think Amazon at this point would just create an Amazon Original reality show at this point where each week a new city gets voted off.
- Currently has a large Amazon distribution center in the suburbs
- Strong tech workforce and universities in the area. Other Tech companies in the area Dell(formerly EDS), ATT. Regional centers of Verizon, IBM, Microsoft, Alcatel/Lucent
- Low property values and favorable tax structures. Plenty of areas to lease locations or to build in the suburbs or downtown.
- International airport that is the hub of American Airlines
- Toyota (North America HQ) recently moved to Dallas suburbs. Google HQ2 is rumored to be looking at Dallas.
Nothing's particularly wrong with it. I'm just not sure it's major enough to support Amazon.
I mean, I definitely hope it is, because Dallas doesn't need Amazon setting up shop here. But Chicago and Dallas seem like they have more infrastructure to support a major project like Amazon's HQ2.
I grew up in a small town and have a hard time understanding why it's so contentious to add another major facility in a big city like Dallas or Austin.
It makes almost no impact on things like traffic or social services at a population scale. (In reality, even a HQ1 type facility is just another +0.3% for DFW or +1% for ATX, which is equivalent to hastening net growth by a few months at most.)
That's a great observation! I'm making a few assumptions that I think are pretty safe, namely that an HQ2 would not be distributed geographically around the city in many small buildings, and that the single campus would not be built in various areas of the city that are unlikely to meet the requirements.
Because of those assumptions, I'm not thinking of an influx of employees being mixed among the millions of existing residents. I think it's much more likely that the HQ2 would be built in a northern suburb of Dallas, like Frisco. There are roughly 160k people in Frisco right now[0], and it's already dramatically driven up property values, commute times, restaurant wait times, and construction delays.
I might be letting my skepticism of the entire concept of an "HQ2" color my impressions of the economic impact of an HQ2, but a history of sports stadium construction in this country, and the various incentives cities have paid for them combined with the never-quite-what-was-promised results suggests to me whichever city ends up giving away a pile of money for Amazon's HQ2 will likely someday regret it.
Same. We have come so far culturally from the 90s that we actually have our own urban environment. I don't want to see it watered down when we are just getting something so good.
Austin is a very popular "2nd Campus" for tech companies, but it's not a great "HQ".
1) Poor airport connectivity
2) Seriously bad traffic options, with limited ability for build out
3) Not a lot of great public transit options
4) Limited ability for free land/property tax abatements/government handouts
Austin is a strong candidate because of UT Austin, but UT Austin students primarily come from Austin or Dallas (not like they are trapped on an island) unwilling to move out.
On the other hand Austin is the headquarters of Whole Foods Market which owns a lot of real estate. Until recently they built stores with cash and often owned the shopping centers their stores were built in.
Texas has no state income tax which wouldn’t be a public reason for the choice but is obviously going to be a factor.
Austin is also a good culture fit with Seattle and is a startup hub.
I'm from Texas; I live in Dallas. I think Dallas is a much stronger option than Austin.
Building a grocery store is far different than building a corporate campus. The interesting thing is that Amazon already has a presence in a lot of these cities, so they're intimately familiar with the day to day workings. There's not going to be any "sugar coating" by city officials.
Austin has horrible traffic issues right now - look at the other guys on this thread that are from Austin. None of them are eager to have Amazon move there. I would welcome Amazon with open arms.
I wonder if they meant the city of Dallas itself. I'm not really sure where they'd even put a large HQ campus. Frisco/Plano/etc? absolutely. But in the City of Dallas proper?
Dallas proper had ~8 different sites that fit the criteria Amazon cited.
Amazon doesn't require it all be contiguous space - they have buildings all over Seattle.
Downtown has a lot of parking lots that could become buildings, Exposition Park could fit the whole thing, Victory Park submitted a proposal, and Midtown near the Galleria also submitted one, with a few others.
I think you misunderstood me. Whole Foods was unusual because it would buy the land and build shopping centers for its stores. The idea was that they could be their own landlords and rent out the rest of the space to other companies that have similar products and services. That’s why you’ll often see a natural pet food store or an organic restaurant next to a Whole Foods. They attract customers to each other.
Over the years they’ve bought real estate based on the number of college graduates who live nearby. Having started in Austin decades ago they most certainly own a lot of land there in prime locations.
So, now that Amazon owns Whole Foods, it might already own a lot of the land it needs to build its new campus. If it builds elsewhere it might be much more costly.
Austin's airport is fine, if a bit small. It's got plenty of room to grow, though, and it does pale in comparison to Houston and Dallas airports. However, let's not lose the big picture: Austin is a hub of tech talent. Tech talent wants to be in tech hubs. Neither Houston nor Dallas are seen as tech hubs. Austin is. Austin has a critical mass of hardware companies (Intel, AMD, TI, NI, Dell) and software companies (Apple, Google, IBM, Oracle, Indeed, Facebook, HomeAway, Atlassian, Blizzard, etc.) all have substantial offices here. Even Amazon already has an office here. Despite the lack of great public infrastructure, Austin is a great fit for Amazon HQ2. Would love to have them here, especially if they poured money into infrastructure. Austin is the fastest growing major city in the U.S. with or without Amazon. Better to have them here and help build up the infrastructure than without them.
Dallas isn't a tech hub? It's called the "Silicon Prairie". There's more tech jobs in Dallas than there are in Austin. TI? TI's headquarters are Dallas. IBM, Oracle, McAfee, HP, Intuit, Microsoft, Match.com, Nokia, RIM, Alcatel-Lucent, AT&T, Cisco, EMC, vmware....
Amazon has a substantial AWS office in Dallas as well.
>Austin is the fastest growing major city in the U.S
And Dallas is just behind them, 3rd fastest.
It could very well be Austin, but Dallas is actually a bigger tech hub than Austin is.
Denver appears to be the current favourite (also chosen by the NYT as the winner) but doesn't have any flights to Asia except for Tokyo[1]. But I guess being sufficiently connected within the US is enough, not sure how many flights to China they need.
Denver has a huge airport and is a major United hub. It's just that most non-stop flights to Asia from the US leave from the West Coast (although this is less true than it used to be).
Denver's airport is one of the biggest airports[1]. When I first moved to Denver in 2014, they didn't have a flight to India. In 2015 they announced a _direct_ flight to Banglore, India. My point being not having a flight is not really a roadblock.
I don't know if opinion of residents is that strong? I live here and would welcome Amazon as would a lot of the people I work with from my conversations. But then again my circle is younger, wealthier, white etc.
That's not nearly enough space, the whole thing is 3m square feet with 2/3 of it leased out. Amazon currently has over 8m occupied in Seattle with millions more currently being built.
They won't do this after getting bids from numerous American cities. To choose a city in Canada would piss off too much of their customer base, including the president of the country, and would have a long term material impact on sales.
Have you seen Trump's tweets about Amazon and Bezos? He's already pissed at them. Frankly if I was in their shoes I would go with Toronto also to have some sort of hedging against the US political climate.
I think you're overestimating the trumples. He has an abysmal approval rating, and the types of people who tend appprove of him (e.g. rural poor) aren't exactly big spenders/prime consumers or whatever. Trump will raise a stink about it, but I'd be very surprised if anyone normal/reasonable felt Amazon opening hq2 in Canada to be like a personal attack against America or something.
Just an aside, Trump supporters are NOT poor or the working class, this is a myth. The poor are non-voters and if they vote it's mostly Democrat by and large. Trump voters for the most part were middle class suburbanites or exburbanites.
Do you have a source for this? Historically, republican voters are both poorer and less educated (which in and of itself has class implications).
However, none of those demographics are relevant if they are all located in solid red states. Given that most people seem to attribute the swing state losses to the 'we need jobs' votes coming from the manufacturing and steel industries, the swing implies it's due to jobless (poor) and/or working class voters, the exact demographic you say was not the determinant.
Every income group over $50k voted Trump. If you scroll down you see that rural voters did indeed go for Trump, but they are much smaller proportion of the population than city folk or, the largest group, suburbanites (who went for Trump solidly as well).
I don't have a source handy for the poor being largely non-voters but I've seen hundreds over the years, it's well-established fact.
>Given that most people seem to attribute the swing state losses to the 'we need jobs' votes coming from the manufacturing and steel industries
Most people might make this attribution but it is not correct.
That article doesn't support your assertion. Those are overall exit polls, not polls of swing states. The swings states are the only
meaningful measure of comparison as to "why he won". The middle class are doing very well in red states like Iowa and Nebraska, but they are just as irrelevant
as a billionaire in manhattan or a welfare recipient in the bronx.
In Ohio, the state that has voted for every president to win since 1964, trump won across every level of education and every level of income except the MOST poor according to exit polls.
Okay, if you will only accept extremely specific tailored data on tiny fractions of the population you are perfectly capable of finding it yourself. I'll be happy to review it with you when you do.
The other responder to you has already done this for you, in fact, and the data there backs up my claims.
Plus, my main claim is that Trump voters are not the poor, they are middle-class suburbanites. My source absolutely backs that claim up.
Also, I'm not sure you understand the electoral landscape very well. Iowa is one of the more purple states, it was VERY blue for Obama and almost exactly dead even on Bush both times.
The makeup of Iowa is actually very similar to nearby Wisconsin and Michigan, which were the surprise red states that took the election for Trump.
A lot of the swing states are controlled by Republican state governments who impose draconian racially targeted voter suppression measures yes, but this is true in every election. 2000 was won for Bush first by deep and massive illegal voter suppression in Florida (taking people who had the right to vote off the rolls because they had a black-sounding name, for example) and only second by the Supreme Court.
The Republicans have less support nationally and in states almost every election and it is getting worse for them as time goes on, voter suppression and extreme gerrymandering are the only things keeping them in office.
You also could have never guessed Trump would win the election, right? You and I are not tapped into the minds of plenty of Americans who will absolutely feel the feeling you've described. And your assertion about "trumpies" is just not true.
Forget about normal/reasonable, while trump's approval rating is abysmally low going by historical standards, it's still 30 something percent - a large number in absolute terms.
> Frankly if I was in their shoes I would go with Toronto also to have some sort of hedging against the US political climate.
Meh. However you feel about Trump, confidence in the US economy among businesses has been really high since his election, and even higher after the tax bill got passed. Look at what’s happening with Apple and the hundreds of other companies giving out bonuses and increasing spending in the US. Your comment might have made more sense closer to the election when everyone was making those gloom and doom predictions and nobody was sure what might really happen, but I think right now the US is more attractive to businesses than it’s probably been in a very long time.
That may be the whole point of the competition. Toronto could be the winner from before the competition even started, but holding the competition is still worthwhile. It is a way to get Toronto to cough up some goodies while simultaneously getting a way to claim that this is all Trump's fault.
I sincerely doubted that Hillary would lose the election, and we know how that went. You're probably right in that the majority of their customer base wouldn't care at all. However, even if 10% care, not an unreasonable guess, that would absolutely have a large material impact on sales.
The difference with those offices is they didn't tease 20+ US cities before building them. It's a nonissue to you, but it won't be to millions of Americans.
How many Americans are "pissed off" that their American cars are made in Canada?
They don't even know where their stuff is made any more. Toyota makes cars in Kentucky, Texas, Indiana, Alabama, West Virgina and Mississippi, but they're an "import". Ford makes vehicles in Mexico and Canada but they're "domestic".
Your point is valid, however no car factory built recently has garnered a fraction of the publicity/public interest that HQ2 has. What people don't know can't hurt them.
I wouldn’t be so sure of that. My parents, who are both in their 60s and not the least bit affiliated with technology, are both aware of Amazon’s headquarters search and brought it up with me when I was visiting over the holidays.
This is false. This whole process has been huge news. It's front page on sites like Washington Post, Philly.com, and the IndyStar and I've just checked multiple non tech forums where it's one of the busiest topics today.
If nobody cares about HQ2, then why is it all over the news? You're underestimating it's reach.
Even if people wouldn't normally care, they will care now because of the publicity and bidding process that has taken place. People in cities who do not win will be upset when they lose, and people everywhere, including places that were never in the running, will be upset if they put the office in Canada. You must not have heard of the "America first" line of thinking that got trump elected, in part.
Part of me says that if they wanted to set up shop in Toronto they would have just done it, and not gone out of their way to attract attention like they have.
But on the other hand, if they want to run a PR campaign on the basis of "we seriously considered many US cities, and Toronto was a better option", they're certainly putting in the groundwork for that.
It's probably just going through their "due diligence" so they can pull the pin on a non-US but "North American" location. If they want to hire the best in the world it's easier to get visas for working in Toronto, and the path to citizenship is pretty straightforward.
I think your analysis is a bit Amerocentric. They said they wanted a second HQ in “North America” and received several Canadian bids, all but one of which failed to make the cut.
The current administration says they want less immigration occurring, but also seems confusingly willing to cut deals that completely flying in the face of the President's public statements. There's presumably room for a deal if partisanship doesn't get in the way, because it seems as if there's no will to revoke DACA for real on anybody's (even Trump's) part.
NAFTA has a provision for no-visa entry as an "internal transfer". Having a Canadian office is not unheard-of to invoke this position, by stationing an employee they really want at a US office in a Canadian office and then transferring.
While politicians may be motivated, there's no indication they would be motivated more by THIS business than by ANY OTHER business, all of which have the same concerns, have had the same concerns for years, and immigration has generally been avoided.
The L1 already works like this, and it isn't just limited to Canada. So say you work for Microsoft China for a few years, you can then get an L1 to work in the USA, which is much easier than a H1 (no cap!).
With far-right racist and anti-immigrant sentiment rising and taking power in the US, as a brown immigrant even if you can get a visa wouldn't you be concerned about moving your life here?
Give your requirements, Newark would be the best candidate
- EWR close by, with public transportation connections
- Strong local universities, both in tech and business (Rutgers, NJIT, Stevens)
- Newark development is rising, downtown is still relatively sparse
- Audible is already in Newark
Skeptical it will actually happen though. Wouldn't even consider myself a fan of Newark (even though I go to school here), but it's interesting that it's the smallest city on the list population wise.
Agree. I work in the area. Beyond universities, the amount of talent that goes through Newark, from NJ suburbs into NYC, every day is incredible. I would think many of those people would love to shave 20-40 minutes off their commute and stop paying city taxes.
It would be an incredible advantage. Salaries are already lower when compared with the other major North American tech centers. Add the exchange rate into the mix and Amazon's money will go a long way.
Not only salaries and the exchange rate, but total compensation (of which healthcare is a big chunk) is lower for Canadian employees because healthcare is funded by the Canadian federal and provincial governments[1].
What is the basis for your assumption of "- a strong existing tech workforce and universities."?
Amazon already has a strong and diverse tech force, in fact, they have so many tech workers that it has affected Seattle's housing crises.
I highly doubt HQ2 will have that many tech workers. If anything, Amazon wants to pay less for non-tech workers because they can't write off those salaries, which implies that the location for HQ2 should be favorable for non-tech roles.
I think there's a continuity of business aspect. When you're among the most valuable public companies in the world, losing your one and only headquarters to a natural disaster might not kill the company, but it would be pretty catastrophic. As such, they're probably going to try to build up a pretty comparable workforce in HQ2.
Amazon recently released Amazon Chime, a videoconferencing system. Maybe this was prioritized so that they'll have a homegrown thing when it comes time for a lot of your meetings to be with remote participants.
Chicago is a major city with lots of culture, food, attractions, etc.
Personally I love Chicago, and it's one of my favorite cities to visit in the US. And that's at least in part due to the food scene: Au Cheval, Cantina Laredo, Lao Sze Chuan, Petterino's, Wishbone, Star of Siam, Sushi Pink, etc. But... personally speaking I would not want to live and work in Chicago full-time for one big reason: the weather. It's just way too damn cold there for me in the winters.
Now obviously a lot of people do choose to live there, but I can't help but think a warm weather city would be more favorable in some regards, as far as attracting talent goes. But maybe other people don't weight weather as much as I do, or just enjoy cold. Who's to say...
On a related (sad) note, at least two restaurants in Chicago that I used to love are closed now: Bombay Spice, and Dragon Ranch Moonshine & BBQ. That and the Resa's location near River North. :-(
Other than Au Cheval, they’re just all pretty average places, I guess. Chicago has the best food scene in the country, I just haven’t ever equated Petterinos, which is considered a mediocre place that has a good pre-theater show menu, with that scene.
I've never heard anybody describe Lao Sze Chuan as "average" before.
Petterino's... I like them a lot in general, but one thing in particular about them stands out to me: the Midwest Corn Chowder. Funny thing to fixate on I guess, but I fell in love with that the first time I was there.
Food taste is pretty subjective though... and also consider that while I've spent a lot of time in Chicago for work, I never lived there, and there are a lot of local restaurants there that I haven't eaten at. More than the ones I have, I'm sure. Which to me, is just more proof of just how awesome the food scene there is. :-)
I'll always try and visit Chicago when I can, and if I ever got "IPO exit rich" maybe I'd maintain a second home there. I just can't do the winters or maybe I'd consider moving permanently. :-(
The guy who started Lao is in jail for tax fraud which has really torpedoed the place. It’s not nearly as good as it used to be.
Oh yeah, I remember hearing they got raided and had their records seized, but I never heard what the actual outcome was. So Tony Hu went to jail huh? That's too bad. At least last time I was there (2013?) Lao Sze Chuan was amazing.
That's just you though. If we're just considering weather, I'd take Chicago over anywhere in Texas, or Atlanta, or Raleigh, or anywhere south of Virginia really. Cold winters are normal, hot summers are terrible. :P
The Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area is pretty strong from the education and workforce point of view. Locally there are three highly rated research universities: UNC Chapel Hill, Duke, and NC State University, along with a number of smaller schools: NC Central, Shaw, St. Augustines, Meredith, William Peace, Wake Tech, Durham Tech, etc. Go just a little further out and you have Campbell, Elon, Wake Forest, UNC Greensboro, NC A&T, and the like.
And the area is already known as a strong tech hub, with companies like IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, EMC, and many others having a long-time established presence here.
I can't really compare to Toronto since I don't know much about that area, but I'd say one of the strongest reasons to consider the Triangle relates to the workforce and the education scene.
The Research Triangle has 2 really good schools: Duke and UNC. State is OK.
The Greater Toronto Area has the University of Toronto, Waterloo, McMaster, all of which outrank State. Waterloo and Toronto are especially strong, and beats Duke and UNC in technical disciplines.
I thought the Detroit bid was compelling because it had all of the things you listed, including the Canada connection. They were proposing a campus that stretched across the river into Windsor, with full cooperation and subsidies from the Ontario government.
I doubt that land in the downtown core is a central consideration based on the fact that Northern Virginia and Montgomery County, MD are listed in addition to Washington, DC.
Northern Virginia has a lot of land, an existing tech sector, a ton of data centers, one of the biggest Internet peering points in the world, and a big international airport (Dulles). It's not a cool place to live and work, though, the way the city is. It's family suburbs and strip malls, mostly.
> land in the downtown core to build on, this might eliminate New York?
I saw one analysis that said New York could easily handle Amazon's space requirements with existing Class A vacancies. The problem is that it's not contiguous. But then, neither are Amazon's offices in Seattle.
The problem I'd see with putting a campus in Toronto would be that the transit infrastructure is bursting at the seams. Underfunded public transportation, expensive and underfunded regional transportation, and congestion along all major routes during the day. Along with the sky-rocketing cost of living there you'd filter out a lot of candidates or force people to commute over long distances on a choked network.
YYZ is a decent airport but it doesn't compare to ATL or ORD.
> - a strong existing tech workforce and universities
I'm not saying those of us who stayed North of the border aren't great but a large portion of our talent does head South for the opportunities. Funded technology companies in Canada are hard to come by. A good 80% of the jobs here are for digital agencies. Even Google and Microsoft keep most their technology jobs mostly South of the border despite all of the incentives they're courted with.
Immigration in Canada is a lot more friendly but I don't think that's going to out-weigh the benefits of the other cities listed. My money is on ATL or ORD.
Toronto's not necessarily out of the running because of a smaller public purse; governments don't just throw money at companies for existing; they make investments that have to see returns, like, y'know, tax revenue.
Wages would be significantly lower in Canada and would be in Canadian dollars. That's a pretty big financial win for Amazon.
I agree it's a massive list to have said they've whittled it down much, but I can see some misses. St Louis isn't there, Detroit isn't there, Tampa and Orlando aren't there, Milwaukee isn't there, Phoenix isn't there, Houston isn't there, Minneapolis isn't there, Baltimore isn't there.
They put out far too big of a list of candidates, but they have apparently ruled out just as many major metro areas.
It was a major consideration from the standpoint of local and state government here. With both Target and Best Buy headquartered here, it would have ruffled a lot of feathers if Amazon would have received a bunch of handouts that homegrown companies weren't getting, especially since Amazon is completely dominating them both. There are also statutory limits on what incentives the MN state government can provide, on the order of 7 figures and maybe some limited tax breaks; I'm sure it didn't move the needle at all.
Those limits didn't matter when Mayo called in 2013[1]. There's one reason Amazon didn't get any worthwhile tax breaks. The governor's sons own a bunch of Target shares.
Amazon was offered $100 per employee. The total package was smaller than St. Paul offered Cray to move 200 employees. And much smaller than the $12k per employee Best Buy got for their HQ.
The governor's father co-founded Target and his sons still own a large share. The subsidy per Amazon employee in the Minneapolis HQ2 bid was $100 compared to $12,000 when the Best Buy HQ was built and $150,000 when the new Vikings stadium was built.
My guess is that Amazon isn't _seriously_ considering all 20 cities equally.
Instead, they privately already have 2 or 3 particular cities in mind and the other 18 cities are just there for negotiating leverage for the 2 they really want. The problem is that the cities themselves don't know if they're "really in contention" or just "disposable chess pieces".
That's just because the DC area is so spread out. You don't really have to be in DC "proper" to get the benefits of the area. Which I think is different than a lot of other major metro areas. You see the same thing with New York paired with Newark.
An Amazon HQ2 in Northern Virginia would cripple the already strained road infrastructure, especially given Metro's existing difficulties. Dulles seems like an obvious choice given the tech corridor and proximity to IA but 28 and the toll road are incredibly crowded as it is.
Theres 3 different local / state governments to entice competition from with that setup, and montgomery county just lost Discovery which was a huge employer who they were wooing with a serious comp package. So you throw a spender like that into a competitive situation and you might get some insane offer.
Yep, this will start yet another bidding war on our area. For the last couple years we've had a constant back and forth of each region trying to claim the new FBI headquarters.
I'd be willing to bet that Miami is a favorite amongst at least a couple of people actually making the decision. Miami is the capitol of and gateway to Latin America, and Latin America has enormous potential for growth of ecommerce.
That's why I find it surprising that Miami is even on the list at all. Most other cities immediately have an advantage over them because they don't have to contend with hurricanes and tropical storms on a regular basis.
The thing about software is that you don't have to be physically near the markets you serve. Writing software in Miami would provide zero advantage for serving this market.
They also need product managers, vendor managers, inventory managers, analysts, planners, forecasters, operations managers, customer service agents, human resources, legal, research scientists, security, marketing, IT, financial operations, as well as the world's most overweight and useless middle management layer ever seen.
Even in Seattle, programmers make up well less than half of Amazon's personnel.
You sound like you have absolutely no clue how Amazon is run, but really don't like them so you go threw in some unfriendly, unfounded assumptions on top of your ignorance.
Partially correct; I don't like them, but it is precisely because I know too much about how Amazon is run.
Judging by your recent comments, you've been working there for about a couple of weeks at best. Get back to me when you've been around long enough for your RSUs to vest.
My favorite part of the Miami story is the argument that Miami has affordable housing. Amazon is pretty much infamous for sending rents near their offices soaring through the roof.
Got affordable housing in your metro? Amazon can fix that!
Seattle is a pretty large city. It definitely had an extremely large effect.
As I understand it from stories people told me when I lived there for a few years, South Lake Union was a lower-rent district near the lake where younger single people lived that weren't attracted to the lifestyle on Capitol Hill but didn't make enough to live downtown proper or on Queen Anne or Magnolia hills. Now those people commute 45 minutes on the train from Everett or wait in traffic coming south on the heavily congested I-5 or west across the heavily congested Lake Washington Bridges.
Seattle is large by the metric of population (it's the 18th most populous city in the US). San Francisco actually has smaller land area, and higher population - but I definitely consider San Francisco to be a large city.
Agree. I lived in Miami and the tech scene there is a joke. Unless they want to make some Latin America play there is nothing to gain from there. The fact it’s even on the list makes me suspect that is something they are looking to do.
Jeff Bezos grew up in Miami, and his dad is Cuban. Miami has the largest Cuban (and Cuban-descent) community. If Bezos wants to give back to the place that made him who he is today, Miami is a solid contender. I know you don't drive a business with emotions and nostalgia, oh wait... He's already doing it with Blue Origin, we love you Bezos!
I'm pretty sure this process was something like 'hey Alexa, what are the 20 largest metropolitan areas more then 500 miles from Seattle.' followed by an email to each one asking how much they would pay for Amazon to come to town.
I assume Detroit has a lot of the same problems that St Louis has, they are both great little cities with an up and coming tech industry but hiring skilled talent and conniving them to move to the area is a nightmare.
Oakland county to the north of Detroit and Washtenaw county to the west of Detroit are two of the wealthiest, most highly educated counties in the country.
And the cities surrounding Detroit have a lot less problems than the city itself.
I think the parent's point still probably stands. Wherever they end up, assuming there really is a 50K HQ2 in the end, they have to convince a lot of people to relocate. And a lot of people would be: 1.) Detroit, no thanks or 2.) I can live with Detroit but when I end up leaving Amazon after 2 years like so many people do, I'd have to find a job in a different location. I imagine the talent question at least factored in--schools in the general area notwithstanding.
"My point is that the problem is largely one of perception."
That very well might be true, but that's Detroit's problem to fix, not Amazon's. Amazon doesn't want to have to deal with that; they want a place that they can get people to come to day 1.
Detroit is shifting fast in this regard. It still has problems, but it's not the city it was 10 years ago, which is what I think a lot of the perception still is.
The Detroit bid put together by Dan Gilbert and team highlighted the fact that almost 50 million people live within a 5 hour drive of the city, with a huge collection of major research universities. Another big push or two like Amazon HQ2 can provide, and I think the city and metro area become highly attractive as an economic destination like Chicago dominates today in the same region.
Amazon can't create social infrastructure. They can create buildings and jobs, but the social infrastructure of a city are things like government policies and quality, existing tech worker base, etc. They have little to no ability to move the needle on those things on any kind of reasonable timescale.
+1. Proximity to Duke/UNC/NCSU/WFU means there are plenty of local new grads, MBAs, and Ph.D's. Already a pipeline of foreign talent immigrating to the Research Triangle. Good weather. Beach is three hours one way and the mountains are three hours the other. Local government will throw themselves at Amazon.
That's a multi-decade project. They should get started now and will be competitive for whatever the Amazon of 2040 is.
The first step is a backbone rail line that starts in Chapel Hill, runs up to Duke, then through Durham to RTP, to the Airport, and from there to and through Raleigh. Then add spurs and spokes to cover the region and funnel people to the backbone.
Good luck getting the legislature to authorize, much less fund that.
The current airport authority will sadly fight rail at the airport tooth and nail. I believe they make more money off parking fees than the flight ops.
Moreover, the strongest / largest municipality in the region (Wake/Raleigh) seems to be the least interested in serious non-road public transport projects, as they just withdrew from their chunk of the light rail connection with Durham / CH.
How did we ever manage to get where we are today without all that? Pretty much every major company has a presence here, not sure why Amazon alone warrants all that infrastructure.
I grew up in Raleigh and go to NC State. I'm very skeptical that RDU is a better location than Newark (NJIT, Stephens, Rutgers, Columbia, NYU) or Atlanta (GTech, UGA).
The talent is here at UNC and Duke but airport and local public transit is the weakest point.
With that said, I'd love for them to come here as long as they maintain salary parity.
As someone who lives in Durham and frequently commutes to Chapel Hill and Raleigh, the existing infrastructure would NOT support a big increase in commuters. During morning and afternoon rush hours, the highways are just BARELY large enough to prevent total gridlock. If you add just 10000 more cars commuting to Raleigh from Durham or Chapel Hill, you have a traffic nightmare in the making.
Triangle resident here, and we don't have anywhere near the density to actually make general-purpose light rail work, economically.
That said, I do think we're somewhat competitive for this, even though I don't want to see Amazon move in. The housing stock availability is a huge liability for the locals...we're already in a seller's market right now.
They missed a great opportunity to do this as a game show. Pit the mayors against each other Survivor-style and vote one off each week - they could've even staged it in the Amazon.
Nothing new here. I think the list is really down to 17, since I don't see Amazon putting a new HQ in NYC, DC, or LA. We already knew the top 20 or so areas, probably top 15. The interesting news is that now some of these periphery cities have an opportunity to further state their case; I'm looking at you Columbus, Pittsburgh, Nashville, Miami.
The main problem with some of these cities, Indianapolis in particular, is that it might be hard to attract software developers to go live there. Even though the dollar goes farther in Indianapolis, after adjusting for cost of living, you would still need to add a bonus to entice developers to live there rather than Seattle. I grew up near Indianapolis and I certainly would not live there over Seattle, for political/cultural preferences that in my experience most developers share with me
It depends. It would be a beacon for all software developers from the midwest. Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio and Indiana all have solid state schools with some of the better CS programs (top 25) in the nation.
For all the home-grown developers, many would prefer to stay close to home than have to move to the mad-house of the coasts. In other words, I question that most developers would think the same way you do.
Net income adjusted for cost of living for software developers in Indianapolis is one of the highest in the country. Infosys and Salesforce are planning on adding thousands of jobs here over the next few years too, so it's likely those salaries will continue to rise.
I also grew up in Indianapolis and still live here. There are only a few tech companies that will pay engineers 150k+ but they do exist, and 150k+ in the suburbs here (Hamilton County) buys a very nice life for somebody wanting to raise a family.
I grew up in Hamilton county / Indy. There has been lots of growth just within the last 5 years after Salesforce and some other companies moved in. There's a rapidly growing population of younger people and new attractions to meet the demand created by these businesses.
I'm not sure how we would scale for HQ2, however, but I believe it could be done.
Easy access to three airports, the Turnpike, New York City, lots of college educated people from surrounding areas and tons of universities within a thirty mile radius. They also already have offices there for Audible, and a huge distribution center in southern, NJ.
It is possible, but I think unlikely. For all those good points, you can get them in other cities with lower cost of labor, lower taxes, etc. Though taxes might not count for much given the wheeling and dealing states are willing to do to get the business.
Mmmm, you might be surprised. Much like there's a romantic view of the US from other countries, there's a romantic view of India for some Americans. India is an absolutely massive, diverse country with a lot to offer.
The Beatles spent a lot of time in India and came back very different people. That's enough to draw some level of interest from folks looking for a spiritual journey, not to mention the history of their (to many Americans) mysterious, exotic, and ancient religions.
But from that guy's post history, I'm guessing he's from Central or Eastern Europe, which does hold a far more massive draw for many Americans.
What's the point of announcing your candidate cities? Seems like it's only there so that the two or three cities they're really considering have to throw loads of tax breaks at them.
That is probably the entire point of making it a competition. Make the cities compete against one another. Perhaps once a city is a finalist it’s leaders get together and say “we’ve made it this far. What can we do to close the deal?”
So the leadership in all the cities falls over themselves to bend over the most for Amazon? Amazon will play them off each other use the offers to leverage the city or cities they "really" want.
I think folks are expecting too much from Amazon.
The cities are hoping for an influx of taxpayers with big incomes, but what will really happen is that Amazon will simply build a campus, the bulk of the "tech workers" will live in a wide swath of exburbs around the city. The commuters will stress the transportation infrastructure of the city and the "tax breaks" will greatly limit the actual benefits the cities see.
Of course even that is contingent on the whims of Amazon. They're soliciting solemn proposals that fork over a lot of benefits and promises. Whereas on the Amazon side, they could change their minds before even building the facility-- or just build a much smaller facility, or build several much much smaller facilities in several cities, all of which leverage the "highest bidder" benefits.
I don't believe them and I don't believe the "50000" jobs number. It is too round a number that seems like it was dreamed up by a PR goon. And what is the point of an HQ2 anyway? Isn't ONE HQ enough? How many HQ's does a company need in one country?
Wow, he has way more houses than I imagined. Two each in Medina, Wa and Beverly Hills, Ca. 30000 acres in Van Horn, Tx (not actually anywhere near Austin or Dallas despite being in Texas). Also, the single largest house in DC and a mere three condos in New York City (right next to Central Park).
I can't imagine Los Angeles being a serious contender.
- Land is expensive and not particularly abundant. Mid-Wilshire is relatively cheap has great proximity to everything (airport, downtown, west LA, Hollywood) if Amazon is willing to invest in the gentrification of the area.
- Labor cost is within 10% of Bay/Seattle/NYC
- Mass transit is currently effectively non-existent.
- One of the highest taxed cities in the nation.
On the plus side, there's:
+ A very well connected international airport
+ A lot of top tier universities nearby (CalTech, UCLA, USC, UCSB, UCSD, UCI, Pepperdine); any one of which can single handedly supply a workforce comparable to the other candidate cities.
It's a lot easier moving people and airplanes to the other cities than it is creating cheap well connected land in LA.
And there you have it. Northern Virginia will win this hands down if it's up against neighboring Montgomery County (which is where I live). Northern VA wins in infrastructure, existing tech culture, housing, and transportation options. But, the primary reason is that Montgomery County politics will never bend to accommodate Amazon in a competitive situation like this, and it's been that way for 30 years.
I think this is politically smart and that one of these 3 will end up being the winner. The current US administration is very anti amazon. It is a little tougher for politicians and staff to publicly bash a company when 50k of their employees live and work in the same zip code.
This logic doesn't hold up. Trump bashes us Washingtonians/Marylanders all the time. And the feeling is mutual back at him with a large large majority of the population.
I'm surprised to see Miami make the list, since they're going to have so much work to do over the next 50 years to deal with rising sea levels. I'm not at all sure that the city will still exist in its modern form in 2050, and surely Amazon is planning that far out too.
Miami I think is going to have a big future. At current growth rates it will be #6 biggest city by population, still cheap, nice quality of life. Also as far away as you can get from Seattle in every way, so probably not a great pick for HQ2, but we'll hear more from this city I think.
Unfortunately, Miami's tech scene is really small, especially for it's size. Ft. Lauderdale has a bigger one, but still not very impressive. Amazon would be hard pressed to find enough qualified engineers here that I think it's not viable. I could see a smaller office opening for Latin America though, as we have communities from essentially every country in the region.
I'm surprised to see it as well, and assume it will be one of the first to get crossed off. I worked near Ft Lauderdale/Miami for awhile and its just too small of an area and very expensive already.
If it doesn’t end up somewhere on the silver line in northern Virginia, I’ll eat my hat.
Plenty of housing, transit straight to the city or an international airport, convenient access to the nations capital for lobbying, in the middle of us-east-1, a large population of tech workers, lots of local universities, right in the middle of the east coast...
Take a look at what’s happened to Seattle and you’re liable to say “no, thank you.” The gentrification, the homelessness. The overall wealth inequality.
I mean, sure, Amazon invested billions in Seattle, but those billions went to people who lead end of days capitalist lifestyles oriented around giving that money right back megacorporations like... Amazon. Suggesting the Amazon’s investment will be meaningfully local is kind of comical. It’s a multinational, and the people who get that money will give it right back to multinationals. That’s how those people spend their income.
Amazon isn’t trying to promote ways of life that don’t revolve around cheap foreign goods, soul crushing work, and an isolated, lonely existence. The lucky place that lands HQ2 will have more of all these things, and a lot less humanity. It’s good for business.
Some days I feel disgusted by even participating in the job market for those reasons. I feel there's a very superficial aspect to some lifestyles in Seattle (including my own) that I didn't expect to become so... unavoidable
My stomach feels sick reading the HQ2 updates. It seems so good on paper, and surely it would create jobs and promote infrastructure growth, but... there is something very dystopian about it that makes me want to run away.
Oooh... the cringe is strong. (EDIT: this refers to Mayor Sly's actions in your link, not to your comment!) Realistically, KC doesn't have an international airport. It's a fine national airport, because it's easy to get close to your gate really quickly, and there's a pretty complete set of connections to the West and many parts of the East. To fly internationally, however, requires a layover at O'Hare. One doesn't see KC competing for something like this without being a bit more connected to the world.
Hey, but we've got some deal in the works for nonstops to Iceland! (tongue-in-cheek). [1]
I really didn't intend to get high and mighty on my Midwest horse.
Also, I don't know how well you know the airport situation, but they're really, really trying to work on it. [2] Honestly I'm not sure where they're at in the process though, there's been some hiccups.
I'm disappointed how few midwest cities there were. Minneapolis and St Louis would be excellent cities that have great tech scenes and plenty of room for growth. I do think that Austin and Nashville are great choices as well, but most of the rest seem silly to me.
MCI is sort of a drive for me, but then again all airports are. I'm roughly equidistant from STL, SGF, and COU, with MCI slightly farther away. Icelandair seems like it could be a great way to get to Europe? I'm actually a little bummed out by the terminal plans, since they're likely to throw away the quick-in/quick-out convenience that exists currently. Flying was so much better in the 1990s, and MCI right now is sort of a throwback to that time. However, the current design makes connecting flights through KCI sort of impossible, so I can see why the airlines don't like it.
> Amazon will work with each of the candidate locations to dive deeper into their proposals
Breaking the process into stages like this will create a bidding war where Amazon can then go to each city government and extract more benefits. I'm usually against tax payers funding things like this (ie:stadiums) but I still selfishly want the location to be somewhere in the NYC/Philly/DC corridor.
It would go downtown Dallas if it came to Dallas. Either the Victory Park proposal or the area just south of city hall/Cedars. Plenty of land, plenty of infrastructure to support it, and plenty of tech talent there already/accessible by light rail to major suburbs.
I'm hoping it'll be northern Virginia or Washington, D.C. We already have Amazon stuff here and plenty of tech companies in Tysons Corner, Reston, Herndon, etc. and plenty of universities in close proximity so it wouldn't be a huge stretch.
Used to live there. Inflated salaries courtesy of Federal govt and contractors, and talent pool looks bigger on paper than reality. Govt contracting incentivizes overstaffed projects with slow pace and awful tech. Who wants to work at Amazon for 90k when you can have an easy govt contracting job for 150k that is strictly 9 to 5?
Plus, northern VA has awful traffic and high cost of living. Traffic jam on Saturday morning is a thing in the burbs there.
Interesting, I would have still guessed Massachusetts due to the education system. If there goal is to make high paying jobs an educated population makes it much easier to find talent.
Amazon is already building a pretty big facility (about 5K employees as I recall). The upside is certainly the universities and the fact that Massachusetts is already a significant tech hub, albeit in a somewhat different vein from Silicon Valley. The downside is land and CoL in the city is very expensive and traffic/transit congestion is already pretty bad.
As a Colorado resident, I'd love for them to pick anywhere BUT Denver. We already have major issues with homelessness, and rapidly rising cost of living. Our highways and infrastructure are beyond congested already, and our public transit is pretty half assed. If Amazon is going to build HQ2 here, they better help contribute to improving public transit, creating affordable housing, and help improve the highways to handle the influx of more new people, which I doubt they'll do. So please, pick somewhere else.
If only there was a system in place where the money paid to the 50K employees could be taxed by the state and city..... We could call it an income tax.
Perhaps these people could even spend their money in their new home with local businesses too? Then this income tax could further apply to the people that paid.
Just imagine the possibilities.
Sorry for the sarcasm, but I'm routinely shocked by the lack of basic economic knowledge on HN.
I live in Denver and don't drive. I would love more infill and higher density! Perhaps if the campus took over the Elitch Garden's space I would hope that a lot of the new workers would stay downtown and hopefully many would be without car.
I was happy to see that Denver pitched Amazon with talent and not tax incentives [1]. I think most in Colorado would be perfectly happy if Denver didn't win and would be very unhappy if Denver won by giving tax breaks.
I live in CO but not front range and the front range population impacts the entire state from natural resources to transportation and recreation. When it comes down to it I would be OK if Denver didn't win though at the same time feel as if that's squandering growth and cool things for my own personal gains. Ultimately if Amazon adds 25-50K population to the front range that's a drop in the bucket of the already ~4.4M citizens living there.
When you deliberately choose not to live in a city and that city has impacts both near and far that affect you it's tough to want them to grow much especially considering their already large problems.
> Ultimately if Amazon adds 25-50K population to the front range
I think that if Amazon moved out here, the ultimate increase in population would be a lot more than the 50k potential hires that Amazon is advertising on the tin. That also creates a ton of jobs in the surrounding areas for the various amenities that people working at Amazon can afford, and you need people to work those jobs.
I live inbetween Boulder and Denver -- that's my sentiment. I really don't want Amazon to move in, and I'd be even more unhappy with it if we do ultimately give some terrible incentives (terrible for CO residents).
Which is exactly why I think that we're a front-runner. Just like the winter Olympics all over again...
The south Denver/Tech Center area was imagined with something like this in mind, maybe a big chunk of land out east along the southern part of e-470.. It's really all the other stuff that kind of stinks, all the extra traffic, all the extra people on the ski slopes, etc..
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 334 ms ] threadI'm not really sure how to go about handicapping the finalists.
Given the current political climate, Toronto is interesting because it's the only city that gives Amazon some escape form the US government.
You'd want:
- an international airport so you can get to Beijing, London, etc on a single flight. This might eliminate the smaller cities.
- a strong existing tech workforce and universities.
- land in the downtown core to build on, this might eliminate New York?
- perhaps you'd preference the cities that already have an amazon campus in them.
Toronto has all of these..
Ah, who am I kidding. its going to come down to which government gives them the most money and that eliminates Toronto.
Would be fun for someone in each city to make a list of what makes your city a good choice for the headquarters!!
I don't blame them, in this era of Trump hyper-nationalism there'd be a huge blow-back for choosing a Canadian city.
I expect Montreal would be completely ruled out because of the language laws, incidentally. Fine for a branch office, unacceptable for a second HQ.
So, I'm not sure you're right about Toronto being a token candidate.
I expect Montreal would be completely ruled out because of the language laws, incidentally. Fine for a branch office, unacceptable for a second HQ.
So, I'm not sure you're right about Toronto being a token candidate. I believe it's the best candidate in Canada.
But, moving to Canada is a big choice. So big you'd really want to consider only the top candidate.
I expect Montreal would be completely ruled out because of the language laws, incidentally. Fine for a branch office, unacceptable for a second HQ.
So, I'm not sure you're right about Toronto being a token candidate. I believe it's the best candidate in Canada.
But, moving to Canada is a big choice. So big you'd really want to consider only the top 1-2 candidates.
I do wonder what kept Vancouver off the list though.
Housing crisis.
But I'm curious, have they actually publicly stated that they want a lot of geographical distance between the old and new HQ? It's an assumption that informs a lot of what's being said here.
Having HQ2 far away from Seattle reduces business risk from e.g. major earthquakes.
I understand that rent is rising in your area. That is awful.
But you do realize that Portland's rent is comparable to the rent in many other US metros? In fact, it's cheaper than quite a few! With better infrastructure and poverty rates!
I'm from Chicago, and the rent in Portland is pretty comparable. You can find cheap rent in Chicago if you don't mind commuting 45-60 minutes each way and living in an (almost) literal war-zone. When was the last time you witnessed a drive by? Or had an active gang-shooter outside your house having a gun-fight with other bangers?
I understand that rent is rising in your area. That is awful.
Did you intend to post this as a reply to someone else? Someone from Portland?
But, I think it would be crazy for an american, anglophone company to place a second HQ here. It would dramatically cut the talent pool.
Also, apologies for the triple comment on this thread. It seems each edit of my top comment added a comment.
> I don't blame them, in this era of Trump hyper-nationalism there'd be a huge blow-back for choosing a Canadian city.
Ironically, one reason a Canadian city would offer such big advantages - immigration - is also the main reason for the Trump hyper-nationalism. That tension is interesting. I don't know to what extent politics plays into this but teaching American politicians a lesson about whether they really want to continue playing to the cheap seats on immigration might be a plus for Amazon.
Keep in mind Amazon is constantly looking for and hiring tons of tech workers. I live in Europe and I'd have a hard time taking their hiring events seriously if I could end up in Winnipeg (no offense). But the same is true for quite a few US cities on the list, though, and it makes me believe they probably aren't considering half of those locations seriously, like other people pointed out.
Honestly, I think Toronto is a huge dark horse. It's an incredibly attractive location to relocate candidates to and isn't subject to American visa laws. I think the main reason smaller Canadian cities didn't make the cut is because Amazon doesn't really want to go that far north. Toronto is already south of Seattle, for instance.
https://www.wired.com/story/google-sidewalk-labs-toronto-qua...
https://gizmodo.com/nycs-free-wifi-service-is-turning-into-a...
http://michiganradio.org/post/who-owns-downtown-detroit
Curious what specifically would be different between Canada and USA polices towards amazon.
Canada welcomes immigrant workers. Even fast-tracks their applications (within 2 weeks) to work in Canada.
This way Amazon can hire anyone, anywhere in the world (within reason) and they'll be able to move to Canada without any immigration issues.
vs
In the United States, about two-thirds of permanent residents are admitted because they are closely related to a U.S. citizen or a permanent resident. Less than 15 percent of permanent residents, including accompanying dependents, are admitted on the basis of employment.
Immigrants in the United States are three times as likely as natives to have not completed high school; in Canada, immigrants and natives are equally likely to have not completed high school.
So depends on type of workers they are looking for hq2. If they need mostly high skilled then canada might be better option.
I doubt a 4 year administration worries them as much as you think.
[1] http://www.nj.com/essex/index.ssf/2017/12/10_reasons_for_ama...
http://www.nj.com/essex/index.ssf/2017/12/a_timeline_chartin...
The PATH is cheaper, runs more frequently, makes several more stops in Manhattan and NJ, so it would be a better option.
If you want to go downtown, for example, the PATH goes to WTC, as well as midtown.
Given the headlines and buzz today, you'd think Amazon at this point would just create an Amazon Original reality show at this point where each week a new city gets voted off.
- Currently has a large Amazon distribution center in the suburbs
- Strong tech workforce and universities in the area. Other Tech companies in the area Dell(formerly EDS), ATT. Regional centers of Verizon, IBM, Microsoft, Alcatel/Lucent
- Low property values and favorable tax structures. Plenty of areas to lease locations or to build in the suburbs or downtown.
- International airport that is the hub of American Airlines
- Toyota (North America HQ) recently moved to Dallas suburbs. Google HQ2 is rumored to be looking at Dallas.
Do you mean Apple?
Dallas should be a very credible option, even if it might be #2 in Texas, behind Austin.
I hope it goes anywhere but Dallas! I live in Dallas.
It's a reclaimed airforce base with new facilities and better service ratings than LAX or JFK.
I mean, I definitely hope it is, because Dallas doesn't need Amazon setting up shop here. But Chicago and Dallas seem like they have more infrastructure to support a major project like Amazon's HQ2.
It makes almost no impact on things like traffic or social services at a population scale. (In reality, even a HQ1 type facility is just another +0.3% for DFW or +1% for ATX, which is equivalent to hastening net growth by a few months at most.)
Because of those assumptions, I'm not thinking of an influx of employees being mixed among the millions of existing residents. I think it's much more likely that the HQ2 would be built in a northern suburb of Dallas, like Frisco. There are roughly 160k people in Frisco right now[0], and it's already dramatically driven up property values, commute times, restaurant wait times, and construction delays.
I might be letting my skepticism of the entire concept of an "HQ2" color my impressions of the economic impact of an HQ2, but a history of sports stadium construction in this country, and the various incentives cities have paid for them combined with the never-quite-what-was-promised results suggests to me whichever city ends up giving away a pile of money for Amazon's HQ2 will likely someday regret it.
[0] http://www.friscotexas.gov/578/Population-Estimates-Projecti...
Austin is a very popular "2nd Campus" for tech companies, but it's not a great "HQ".
1) Poor airport connectivity 2) Seriously bad traffic options, with limited ability for build out 3) Not a lot of great public transit options 4) Limited ability for free land/property tax abatements/government handouts
Austin is a strong candidate because of UT Austin, but UT Austin students primarily come from Austin or Dallas (not like they are trapped on an island) unwilling to move out.
Texas has no state income tax which wouldn’t be a public reason for the choice but is obviously going to be a factor.
Austin is also a good culture fit with Seattle and is a startup hub.
Building a grocery store is far different than building a corporate campus. The interesting thing is that Amazon already has a presence in a lot of these cities, so they're intimately familiar with the day to day workings. There's not going to be any "sugar coating" by city officials.
1) Austin - Whole Foods 2) Newark - Audible 3) Dallas - HUGE Amazon logistics hub 4) NoVa - AWS location
and on, and on, and on.
Austin has horrible traffic issues right now - look at the other guys on this thread that are from Austin. None of them are eager to have Amazon move there. I would welcome Amazon with open arms.
Hmmm.
Amazon doesn't require it all be contiguous space - they have buildings all over Seattle.
Downtown has a lot of parking lots that could become buildings, Exposition Park could fit the whole thing, Victory Park submitted a proposal, and Midtown near the Galleria also submitted one, with a few others.
635/DNT would probably be a decent place for it, now that I think about it...
Over the years they’ve bought real estate based on the number of college graduates who live nearby. Having started in Austin decades ago they most certainly own a lot of land there in prime locations.
So, now that Amazon owns Whole Foods, it might already own a lot of the land it needs to build its new campus. If it builds elsewhere it might be much more costly.
Dallas isn't a tech hub? It's called the "Silicon Prairie". There's more tech jobs in Dallas than there are in Austin. TI? TI's headquarters are Dallas. IBM, Oracle, McAfee, HP, Intuit, Microsoft, Match.com, Nokia, RIM, Alcatel-Lucent, AT&T, Cisco, EMC, vmware....
Amazon has a substantial AWS office in Dallas as well.
>Austin is the fastest growing major city in the U.S
And Dallas is just behind them, 3rd fastest.
It could very well be Austin, but Dallas is actually a bigger tech hub than Austin is.
Amazon currently has EIGHT large distribution centers in the DFW area, actually.
And I think that they might be building a #9 and #10 within the next couple of years.
[1] https://www.flightera.net/airport/Denver/KDEN
[1]https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/local-news/denver-inte...
They could rent out the space in One World Trade Center.
My bet is on Toronto because they can pick up all the staff they need worldwide without the problems of trying to get US visas.
http://www.businessinsider.com/exit-polls-who-voted-for-trum...
Every income group over $50k voted Trump. If you scroll down you see that rural voters did indeed go for Trump, but they are much smaller proportion of the population than city folk or, the largest group, suburbanites (who went for Trump solidly as well).
I don't have a source handy for the poor being largely non-voters but I've seen hundreds over the years, it's well-established fact.
>Given that most people seem to attribute the swing state losses to the 'we need jobs' votes coming from the manufacturing and steel industries
Most people might make this attribution but it is not correct.
http://edition.cnn.com/election/results/exit-polls/ohio/pres...
The other responder to you has already done this for you, in fact, and the data there backs up my claims.
Plus, my main claim is that Trump voters are not the poor, they are middle-class suburbanites. My source absolutely backs that claim up.
Also, I'm not sure you understand the electoral landscape very well. Iowa is one of the more purple states, it was VERY blue for Obama and almost exactly dead even on Bush both times.
The makeup of Iowa is actually very similar to nearby Wisconsin and Michigan, which were the surprise red states that took the election for Trump.
The Republicans have less support nationally and in states almost every election and it is getting worse for them as time goes on, voter suppression and extreme gerrymandering are the only things keeping them in office.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/06/0...
Forget about normal/reasonable, while trump's approval rating is abysmally low going by historical standards, it's still 30 something percent - a large number in absolute terms.
Meh. However you feel about Trump, confidence in the US economy among businesses has been really high since his election, and even higher after the tax bill got passed. Look at what’s happening with Apple and the hundreds of other companies giving out bonuses and increasing spending in the US. Your comment might have made more sense closer to the election when everyone was making those gloom and doom predictions and nobody was sure what might really happen, but I think right now the US is more attractive to businesses than it’s probably been in a very long time.
The placement of the HQ in Toronto would be branded as a betrayal of America. I think the NFL/Papa Johns case could end up being similar --> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2017/12/21/p...
They don't even know where their stuff is made any more. Toyota makes cars in Kentucky, Texas, Indiana, Alabama, West Virgina and Mississippi, but they're an "import". Ford makes vehicles in Mexico and Canada but they're "domestic".
My point is people care more about where their cars are made, and they don't even really care about that.
Even if people wouldn't normally care, they will care now because of the publicity and bidding process that has taken place. People in cities who do not win will be upset when they lose, and people everywhere, including places that were never in the running, will be upset if they put the office in Canada. You must not have heard of the "America first" line of thinking that got trump elected, in part.
This will blow over in months and be totally forgotten.
But on the other hand, if they want to run a PR campaign on the basis of "we seriously considered many US cities, and Toronto was a better option", they're certainly putting in the groundwork for that.
This assumes that politicians eager to get Amazon are not able to speed up and fix that process which they certainly would be motivated to do. [1]
[1] This is not 'your shitty startup with 10 employees'. It's Amazon and the brass ring.
But, it's an election year, so...
While politicians may be motivated, there's no indication they would be motivated more by THIS business than by ANY OTHER business, all of which have the same concerns, have had the same concerns for years, and immigration has generally been avoided.
What US companies do in Canada is often have an office where people can work on a temp visa while waiting for their status in the US
But non-Canadian staff still need to obtain Canadian visas. I'm not sure how much easier (or not) that process is compared to the TN or H1B lottery.
- EWR close by, with public transportation connections
- Strong local universities, both in tech and business (Rutgers, NJIT, Stevens)
- Newark development is rising, downtown is still relatively sparse
- Audible is already in Newark
Skeptical it will actually happen though. Wouldn't even consider myself a fan of Newark (even though I go to school here), but it's interesting that it's the smallest city on the list population wise.
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/health-care-...
Amazon already has a strong and diverse tech force, in fact, they have so many tech workers that it has affected Seattle's housing crises.
I highly doubt HQ2 will have that many tech workers. If anything, Amazon wants to pay less for non-tech workers because they can't write off those salaries, which implies that the location for HQ2 should be favorable for non-tech roles.
>>We are looking for a location with strong local and regional talent—particularly in software development and related fields
Amazon recently released Amazon Chime, a videoconferencing system. Maybe this was prioritized so that they'll have a homegrown thing when it comes time for a lot of your meetings to be with remote participants.
Hate to say it, but Northern Virginia and Raleigh have Toronto beat on this
Big tech workforce that's almost purely finance... but the talent is there.
Proximity to one of the largest airports in the world.
Chicago is a major city with lots of culture, food, attractions, etc.
The proposed sites are absolutely enormous and perfect for a huge mega-complex like Amazon would want to build.
Relatively short flights to both coasts, since you're smack in the center of the country.
Personally I love Chicago, and it's one of my favorite cities to visit in the US. And that's at least in part due to the food scene: Au Cheval, Cantina Laredo, Lao Sze Chuan, Petterino's, Wishbone, Star of Siam, Sushi Pink, etc. But... personally speaking I would not want to live and work in Chicago full-time for one big reason: the weather. It's just way too damn cold there for me in the winters.
Now obviously a lot of people do choose to live there, but I can't help but think a warm weather city would be more favorable in some regards, as far as attracting talent goes. But maybe other people don't weight weather as much as I do, or just enjoy cold. Who's to say...
Oh? How so?
On a related (sad) note, at least two restaurants in Chicago that I used to love are closed now: Bombay Spice, and Dragon Ranch Moonshine & BBQ. That and the Resa's location near River North. :-(
Petterino's... I like them a lot in general, but one thing in particular about them stands out to me: the Midwest Corn Chowder. Funny thing to fixate on I guess, but I fell in love with that the first time I was there.
Food taste is pretty subjective though... and also consider that while I've spent a lot of time in Chicago for work, I never lived there, and there are a lot of local restaurants there that I haven't eaten at. More than the ones I have, I'm sure. Which to me, is just more proof of just how awesome the food scene there is. :-)
I'll always try and visit Chicago when I can, and if I ever got "IPO exit rich" maybe I'd maintain a second home there. I just can't do the winters or maybe I'd consider moving permanently. :-(
Granted, I think the Chinese food here by and large sucks.
Oh yeah, I remember hearing they got raided and had their records seized, but I never heard what the actual outcome was. So Tony Hu went to jail huh? That's too bad. At least last time I was there (2013?) Lao Sze Chuan was amazing.
But Toronto has perennially top 25 world ranked universities, Waterloo and Toronto.
Toronto may not be the best of these 20 cities for workforce and universities but they can more than hold their own in this regard.
And the area is already known as a strong tech hub, with companies like IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, EMC, and many others having a long-time established presence here.
I can't really compare to Toronto since I don't know much about that area, but I'd say one of the strongest reasons to consider the Triangle relates to the workforce and the education scene.
Workforce? Arguable. You may have a point.
But universities?
The Research Triangle has 2 really good schools: Duke and UNC. State is OK.
The Greater Toronto Area has the University of Toronto, Waterloo, McMaster, all of which outrank State. Waterloo and Toronto are especially strong, and beats Duke and UNC in technical disciplines.
Northern Virginia has a lot of land, an existing tech sector, a ton of data centers, one of the biggest Internet peering points in the world, and a big international airport (Dulles). It's not a cool place to live and work, though, the way the city is. It's family suburbs and strip malls, mostly.
I saw one analysis that said New York could easily handle Amazon's space requirements with existing Class A vacancies. The problem is that it's not contiguous. But then, neither are Amazon's offices in Seattle.
YYZ is a decent airport but it doesn't compare to ATL or ORD.
> - a strong existing tech workforce and universities
I'm not saying those of us who stayed North of the border aren't great but a large portion of our talent does head South for the opportunities. Funded technology companies in Canada are hard to come by. A good 80% of the jobs here are for digital agencies. Even Google and Microsoft keep most their technology jobs mostly South of the border despite all of the incentives they're courted with.
Immigration in Canada is a lot more friendly but I don't think that's going to out-weigh the benefits of the other cities listed. My money is on ATL or ORD.
update: 80% is just a rough guess
I'm sure a large portion of that (myself included) would strongly consider coming back if there were opportunities like HQ2 in Canada.
And fwiw I'm always pleasantly surprised by the TTC when I go back to visit.
I’d like for there to be more interesting opportunities and challenges here. Doing what I can.
Wages would be significantly lower in Canada and would be in Canadian dollars. That's a pretty big financial win for Amazon.
They put out far too big of a list of candidates, but they have apparently ruled out just as many major metro areas.
I had that somber realization too. Houston has more problems on its mind than bankrolling Amazon's real estate deals.
Amazon was offered $100 per employee. The total package was smaller than St. Paul offered Cray to move 200 employees. And much smaller than the $12k per employee Best Buy got for their HQ.
[1] http://www.startribune.com/rochester-mayo-clinic-celebrate-5...
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/02/amazon-will-buy-target-in-20...
Instead, they privately already have 2 or 3 particular cities in mind and the other 18 cities are just there for negotiating leverage for the 2 they really want. The problem is that the cities themselves don't know if they're "really in contention" or just "disposable chess pieces".
Again, that's just my guess.
Even in Seattle, programmers make up well less than half of Amazon's personnel.
Judging by your recent comments, you've been working there for about a couple of weeks at best. Get back to me when you've been around long enough for your RSUs to vest.
Got affordable housing in your metro? Amazon can fix that!
As I understand it from stories people told me when I lived there for a few years, South Lake Union was a lower-rent district near the lake where younger single people lived that weren't attracted to the lifestyle on Capitol Hill but didn't make enough to live downtown proper or on Queen Anne or Magnolia hills. Now those people commute 45 minutes on the train from Everett or wait in traffic coming south on the heavily congested I-5 or west across the heavily congested Lake Washington Bridges.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
Not sure if any of his childhood stomping grounds are going to get much favoritism.
But that's why I'm not in public relations. :-)
And the cities surrounding Detroit have a lot less problems than the city itself.
The hundreds of thousands of people in the area with technical educations aren't working at McDonald's.
That very well might be true, but that's Detroit's problem to fix, not Amazon's. Amazon doesn't want to have to deal with that; they want a place that they can get people to come to day 1.
The Detroit bid put together by Dan Gilbert and team highlighted the fact that almost 50 million people live within a 5 hour drive of the city, with a huge collection of major research universities. Another big push or two like Amazon HQ2 can provide, and I think the city and metro area become highly attractive as an economic destination like Chicago dominates today in the same region.
Austin, Tex.
Boston
Chicago
Columbus, Ohio
Dallas
Denver
Indianapolis
Los Angeles
Miami
Montgomery County, Md.
Nashville
Newark
New York
Northern Virginia
Phladelphia
Pittsburgh
Raleigh, N.C.
Toronto, Canada
Washington, D.C.
The first step is a backbone rail line that starts in Chapel Hill, runs up to Duke, then through Durham to RTP, to the Airport, and from there to and through Raleigh. Then add spurs and spokes to cover the region and funnel people to the backbone.
Good luck getting the legislature to authorize, much less fund that.
Moreover, the strongest / largest municipality in the region (Wake/Raleigh) seems to be the least interested in serious non-road public transport projects, as they just withdrew from their chunk of the light rail connection with Durham / CH.
The talent is here at UNC and Duke but airport and local public transit is the weakest point.
With that said, I'd love for them to come here as long as they maintain salary parity.
The population density is probably higher on average in New Jersey than in metro Raleigh..
As someone who lives in Durham and frequently commutes to Chapel Hill and Raleigh, the existing infrastructure would NOT support a big increase in commuters. During morning and afternoon rush hours, the highways are just BARELY large enough to prevent total gridlock. If you add just 10000 more cars commuting to Raleigh from Durham or Chapel Hill, you have a traffic nightmare in the making.
That said, I do think we're somewhat competitive for this, even though I don't want to see Amazon move in. The housing stock availability is a huge liability for the locals...we're already in a seller's market right now.
But yeah in all seriousness this is obnoxious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takeshi's_Castle
Proximity to an international airport that can easily handle Amazon's shipments has got to count for something, right?
For all the home-grown developers, many would prefer to stay close to home than have to move to the mad-house of the coasts. In other words, I question that most developers would think the same way you do.
I'm not sure how we would scale for HQ2, however, but I believe it could be done.
It is possible, but I think unlikely. For all those good points, you can get them in other cities with lower cost of labor, lower taxes, etc. Though taxes might not count for much given the wheeling and dealing states are willing to do to get the business.
Hopefully it goes to a region that kinda needs it and can grow further.
Everyone wants to be somewhere else.
The Beatles spent a lot of time in India and came back very different people. That's enough to draw some level of interest from folks looking for a spiritual journey, not to mention the history of their (to many Americans) mysterious, exotic, and ancient religions.
But from that guy's post history, I'm guessing he's from Central or Eastern Europe, which does hold a far more massive draw for many Americans.
I think folks are expecting too much from Amazon.
The cities are hoping for an influx of taxpayers with big incomes, but what will really happen is that Amazon will simply build a campus, the bulk of the "tech workers" will live in a wide swath of exburbs around the city. The commuters will stress the transportation infrastructure of the city and the "tax breaks" will greatly limit the actual benefits the cities see.
Of course even that is contingent on the whims of Amazon. They're soliciting solemn proposals that fork over a lot of benefits and promises. Whereas on the Amazon side, they could change their minds before even building the facility-- or just build a much smaller facility, or build several much much smaller facilities in several cities, all of which leverage the "highest bidder" benefits.
I don't believe them and I don't believe the "50000" jobs number. It is too round a number that seems like it was dreamed up by a PR goon. And what is the point of an HQ2 anyway? Isn't ONE HQ enough? How many HQ's does a company need in one country?
http://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-owns-five-massive-...
- Land is expensive and not particularly abundant. Mid-Wilshire is relatively cheap has great proximity to everything (airport, downtown, west LA, Hollywood) if Amazon is willing to invest in the gentrification of the area.
- Labor cost is within 10% of Bay/Seattle/NYC
- Mass transit is currently effectively non-existent.
- One of the highest taxed cities in the nation.
On the plus side, there's:
+ A very well connected international airport
+ A lot of top tier universities nearby (CalTech, UCLA, USC, UCSB, UCSD, UCI, Pepperdine); any one of which can single handedly supply a workforce comparable to the other candidate cities.
It's a lot easier moving people and airplanes to the other cities than it is creating cheap well connected land in LA.
https://www.ocregister.com/2017/07/24/is-southern-california...
* Montgomery county, MD
* Northern Virginia
* Washington DC
But wouldn't be surprised if they pick NoVA.
Not sure much about MD, I think VA traditionally had a more favorable tax structure.
Plenty of housing, transit straight to the city or an international airport, convenient access to the nations capital for lobbying, in the middle of us-east-1, a large population of tech workers, lots of local universities, right in the middle of the east coast...
Amazon Web Services to set up East Coast corporate campus in Fairfax County https://www.bizjournals.com/washington/news/2017/06/08/amazo...
CEO residence location is a strong predictor of where businesses set up shop.
I also think it's telling that 3 of the 20 listed cities are DC + DC suburbs.
I mean, sure, Amazon invested billions in Seattle, but those billions went to people who lead end of days capitalist lifestyles oriented around giving that money right back megacorporations like... Amazon. Suggesting the Amazon’s investment will be meaningfully local is kind of comical. It’s a multinational, and the people who get that money will give it right back to multinationals. That’s how those people spend their income.
Amazon isn’t trying to promote ways of life that don’t revolve around cheap foreign goods, soul crushing work, and an isolated, lonely existence. The lucky place that lands HQ2 will have more of all these things, and a lot less humanity. It’s good for business.
My stomach feels sick reading the HQ2 updates. It seems so good on paper, and surely it would create jobs and promote infrastructure growth, but... there is something very dystopian about it that makes me want to run away.
Oh well, same old same old. Look at all the dots on the edges.
[1] http://www.kansascity.com/news/business/article180878701.htm...
I really didn't intend to get high and mighty on my Midwest horse.
Also, I don't know how well you know the airport situation, but they're really, really trying to work on it. [2] Honestly I'm not sure where they're at in the process though, there's been some hiccups.
[1] https://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/news/2018/01/09/kansa...
[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/flights/todayinthesky/...
Breaking the process into stages like this will create a bidding war where Amazon can then go to each city government and extract more benefits. I'm usually against tax payers funding things like this (ie:stadiums) but I still selfishly want the location to be somewhere in the NYC/Philly/DC corridor.
I think it'll be Dallas or Atlanta though.
Plus, northern VA has awful traffic and high cost of living. Traffic jam on Saturday morning is a thing in the burbs there.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/09/upshot/where-...
Just imagine the possibilities.
Sorry for the sarcasm, but I'm routinely shocked by the lack of basic economic knowledge on HN.
- [1] https://www.denverpost.com/2017/10/18/amazon-headquarters-co...
When you deliberately choose not to live in a city and that city has impacts both near and far that affect you it's tough to want them to grow much especially considering their already large problems.
I think that if Amazon moved out here, the ultimate increase in population would be a lot more than the 50k potential hires that Amazon is advertising on the tin. That also creates a ton of jobs in the surrounding areas for the various amenities that people working at Amazon can afford, and you need people to work those jobs.
The south Denver/Tech Center area was imagined with something like this in mind, maybe a big chunk of land out east along the southern part of e-470.. It's really all the other stuff that kind of stinks, all the extra traffic, all the extra people on the ski slopes, etc..