Just a stones throw away from Washington DC, imagine that. I’m sure it’s no coincidence that Amazon is in talks to do billions of dollars worth of work with the DOD and that the location choice of the second headquarters might have a lot to do with that.
Scott Galloway was pretty confident that it was always intended to be in Washington, partially because of Jeff Bezos already owning a house there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HyiY_m_YxI&t=542
It's got nothing to do with whether or not Bezos can buy a house in a given location. It has to do with examining the existing incentives that led Bezos to buy a home there in the first place, and applying that logic to the requirements of HQ2.
They got a ton of value — in my area they used the dopey package that the local economic development dopes put together to quickly extract concessions for a distribution center.
JB has had a home there which he’s been renovating to host large Gatsby-esk parties. It wouldn’t be surprising to see HQ2 there. I also foresee a strong potential he’ll turn into a Koch-esk political operative for his political positions; or, He might just make a run for the Presidency in several election cycles from now.
It seemed like the leader after 3/20 location choices were in the DC area (Montgomery County, DC, Northern Virginia). DC and Montgomery were kinda thrown in there to make it look like they could be contenders, but logistically Northern Virginia makes the most sense. It’s near metros, near IAD and Reagan airports, has land available for a large campus, has a lot of offices of other businesses doing work for the government, is a fairly rich suburban commuter area.
1. As you point out, right next to Pentagon and federal government.
2. Good transportation: right on the Metro and literally across the street from National Airport.
3. If you're going to have 2 headquarters, having them be on opposite coasts makes sense.
4. And I think another one that is pretty unique to Crystal City is that Amazon and their employees definitely want to be in a downtown, urban environment. However, most of the other cities on the list were either extremely crowded downtown, available sites were actually more out in the 'burbs, or the cities were far down in what a lot of people would consider "2nd tier" (or 3rd tier) cities. Crystal City is basically an urban suburb of DC that you could easily see having a great "vibe" for an HQ2, but still has room for Amazon to build out.
Surely, you jest. Yeah, it's on a metro line, but hardly anyone lives near a metro line. That area is consistently rated as the #1 or #2 worst traffic in the country for years.
That would make sense if urban planners were the ones telling people not to live near transit stations, but it's generally existing residents opposing new housing.
Though, perhaps to your point, I also am not a fan of almost all planning. The nicest places to live, walk, etc. tend to be ones that arose before planning was widespread. Of course, they existed before the car, too.
Metro serves a tiny fraction of N. VA. Sure, if you're in DC and commuting out, it's probably ok, but people don't tend to stay in DC very long. Once they have kids and realize there is no hope of reasonable public education there, they move.
Your comment about "nobody lives near a metro line" though - I mean, come on! With the orange line and silver line extension there are lots of places in NoVa near the metro. Yes, the car traffic is horrible, but the car traffic is horrible in SF, LA, Boston, NY, Austin...
As another commenter pointed out, there is actually a ton of empty real estate in Crystal City itself and no doubt a ton of it will be built up as apartments/condos now.
I think the poster above meant to be a little facetious. I tend to read “millennial ready” as building out a supply of tiny, $2000/mo studios with loads of flashy amenities and terrible quality construction.
Honestly the city just felt very superficial in a lot of ways. I was there almost a decade and a half, and in that span of time I came to appreciate different things about the city for what they were, but that pervading sense that there wasn't really much substance beneath the surface ever left, and the direction of the city just stopped aligning with my long term personal goals of buying a house.
Once I went from "passively thinking about buying a house" to "making a five year plan to buy a house" I sat long and hard and thought about if I wanted to make central Texas my home. It's gorgeous here, the weather is great, yes The Lege absolutely sucks but find me someone who can't find some gripe about their state government and I'll find you the next Buddha.
I decided to leave and return to the midwest.
Adler's City council fought the state on bathroom bills and bag bans, many teeth were gnashed, garments ripped and sackcloth torn-but aside from a few annoyed editorials and longform pieces from the usual local columnists, when city council abandoned CodeNEXT (a critically needed rewrite of city zoning laws and building codes that would have allowed for greater density and eased pressure on a stunted housing market) once again caving to neighborhood associations that could give a damn about anything outside of their borough and continue to hold council hostage at the expense of development and well design urban planning, I threw up my hands and left.
I’m actually in the Midwest right now and has Austin at the top of my places to move to. However, I do want to buy a house in the next 5 years, so this is making me have second thoughts.
Look don't take my word for it, okay? You can still buy a house there, if your personal finances allow and still really, thoroughly enjoy yourself. Austin is great for that, I will definitely go back for ACL Fest and sxsw (becoming one of THOSE people heh) because at its heart it is a very fun city. My personal priorities just changed as I grew older.
I was someone who got to Austin in the very early 2000's after leaving the military up the road at Ft. Hood, enjoyed it for a few years, and slowly watched it evolve into something that just didn't excite me anymore. My experience shouldn't sour yours.
(But seriously, if you're gonna buy a house, and want to actually enjoy having a bit of land, but still be close enough to Austin to do Austin-y things, Pflugerville, Round Rock and Georgetown to the North are blowing up, as are Buda, Kyle and San Marcos to the south, with Bastrop to the east. To the west is where Michael Dell and probably Lance Armstrong lives. That's all I'll say about that)
p.s. if you absolutely feel like you have to have Franklin BBQ, don't be a rube and stand in line for 4 hours. Get some friends over, pool your money together and call in, they'll do pick up orders for anything over $40 I think and you can skip the line-or call my buddy Mark, his brisket is better anyway :P
Seattle is soulless according to you? I’ve lived in Seattle and worked for Amazon when the headquarters was in a creepy old hospital up on beacon hill, and yes there has been change in Seattle, most of it for the better.
Anyone that tells you South Lake Union neighborhood was better pre Amazon is full of it. It was a bunch of warehouses and run down.
Do you have experience of Seattle over the past decade, or are you just repeating platitudes?
You only have the stresses of major homelessness and an extremely large heroin/meth problem, directly due to the endless growth Amazon and other large companies had on this city, with the "top minds" of Seattle having absolutely no clue how to solve it. I've seen multiple people die since I got here, and I've seen people with guns to their heads over drugs outside of my Capitol Hill apartment. Seattle's population willfully ignores everything wrong with the city too.
I live in Seattle. Things like the Showbox reportedly in serious danger of being demolished for luxury condo's are just showing how soulless this city is becoming in the name of 'growth'. The entire city population has been replaced by tech bros and their significant others, tech bro culture, ubers, the food is boring and most restaurants are over-hyped, costs are insane, the people are selfish and rude, there's nothing to do except drink and ride a bike to look at Puget Sound yet again, there's little culture or diversity, and the politicians work entirely in Amazon's favor. I have a decent stable job here, but I'd move if the opportunity was to arise.
It's been culturally significant since 1939 and still is. There are still packed shows there almost every night. Music is one of the few places Seattle really has culture.
>Founded in 1939,[4] the Showbox has hosted a diverse offering of music over the decades. From the Jazz Age to the Grunge Era, the ballroom has featured shows by Duke Ellington, Muddy Waters and the Ramones — as well as local artists such as burlesque performer Gypsy Rose Lee, and grunge bands Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Mudhoney, TAD and Screaming Trees.[5]
>Other acts to perform at The Showbox have included Al Jolson, Mae West, Nat King Cole, Jimmy Durante and Dizzy Gillespie, The Police, XTC, X, Blondie, Gang of Four, Iggy Pop, Devo, Dead Kennedys and Jerry Cantrell.[7][8] More recent performers include The Weeknd, Snoop Dogg, Dave Matthews, Kanye West, Lorde, Robbie Williams, Modest Mouse, Death Cab For Cutie, Public Enemy, PJ Harvey, Wilco, The Flaming Lips, Daft Punk, Kasabian, Old 97's, Elliott Smith, Peter Murphy, Guided By Voices, Built To Spill, Billy Idol, David Bazan, Bebel Gilberto, Cat Power, Spiritualized, Sleater-Kinney, Minus the Bear, Coldplay, Bright Eyes, The Roots, Sir Mix-A-Lot, Dita Von Teese, Maroon 5, The Shins, The Melvins, My Morning Jacket, LL Cool J, DJ Shadow, Scissor Sisters, TV On The Radio, Ke$ha, Kimbra, Marina and the Diamonds, B-52's, Lady Gaga, Ice Cube, Paul Simon, Macklemore, JoJo, (Kpop group) A.C.E and many more.[9][5]
"In the early 1990s, the rise of the grunge alternative rock music and subculture in Seattle brought media attention to the use of heroin by prominent grunge artists. In the 1990s, the media focused on the use of heroin by musicians in the Seattle grunge scene, with a 1992 New York Times article listing the city's "three principal drugs" as "espresso, beer and heroin" [4] and a 1996 article calling Seattle's grunge scene the "...subculture that has most strongly embraced heroin".[5] Tim Jonze from The Guardian states that "...heroin had blighted the [grunge] scene ever since its inception in the mid-80s" and he argues that the "...involvement of heroin mirrors the self-hating, nihilistic aspect to the music"; in addition to the heroin deaths, Jonze points out that Stone Temple Pilots' Scott Weiland, as well as Courtney Love, Mark Lanegan and Evan Dando "...all had their run-ins with the drug, but lived to tell the tale."[6] A 2014 book stated that whereas in the 1980s, people used the "stimulant" cocaine to socialize and "...celebrate good times", in the 1990s grunge scene, the "depressant" heroin was used to "retreat" into a "cocoon" and be "...sheltered from a harsh and unforgiving world which offered...few prospects for...change or hope."[7]
Leading grunge band Alice in Chains had a song "God Smack", which included the line "stick your arm for some real fun", a reference to injecting heroin.[5] Seattle grunge musicians known to use heroin included Kurt Cobain, who was using "heroin when he shot himself in the head"; "Andrew Wood of Mother Love Bone [, who] overdosed on heroin in 1990"; "Stefanie Sargent of 7 Year Bitch[, who] died of an overdose of the same opiate in 1992...[and] Layne Staley of Alice in Chains [who] publicly detailed his battles with heroin...".[8] Mike Starr of Alice in Chains [7] and Jonathan Melvoin from The Smashing Pumpkins also died from heroin. After Cobain's death, his "...widow, singer Courtney Love, characterized Seattle as a drug mecca, where heroin is easier to get than in San Francisco or Los Angeles."[8]"
How did Amazon cause the heroin problem in Seattle? There's been a growing heroin and homelessness problem all over the country. Did it cause this too?
>Also, some nyt writer that’d never been there called it the Brooklyn of DC which was hilarious.
Meanwhile, Columbia Heights and Eastern Market will probably see their gentrification rapidly accelerate since they're a short Blue or Yellow line ride away on WMATA. H street will probably be safe since Washingtonians seems to have a pathological fear or switching lines during their commute and it's closest to a Red line station (Union Station).
> H street will probably be safe since Washingtonians seems to have a pathological fear or switching lines during their commute and it's closest to a Red line station (Union Station).
What if the gentrification spreads out from Union Market?
And to its credit, Crystal City is actually pretty rad. It’s full of highly educated people who can’t say where they work or what they do. But they do have good taste in restaurants.
My biggest complaint about crystal city is that the restaurants are pretty bad. One one's above the Crystal City Shops are mostly chains you find wherever business hotels. And the ones on 23rd street are just mostly bad.
If I were going to work in HQ2, I'd live in Del Ray, though its more single-family focused. But it has some nice local restaurants.
I don't know. Compared to other areas around the country maybe. But with NoVA there are just better places. I remember going there twice maybe and just never had a reason to go back Crystal City.
Tons of empty office space for sure though. I think proximity to DC itself is probably the main selling point.
Another major advantage of Crystal City is that it is full of empty real estate. It was built up to house major federal agencies and their contractors, but all the agencies have moved out, and so have most of the contractors.
The Patent and Trademark Office had 5 huge buildings; they moved to Alexandria. The Dept of Defense is moving a lot of its employees to Fort Belvoir, and the contractors are following.
It's really kind of crazy to have such a major business district so deep in a major metropolitan area, with such low average occupancy.
I do believe they have said they want some folks working out of HQ2 in 2019, so that means using existing buildings, at least at first.
The USPTO buildings have a lot going for them: pretty close to Metro, dedicated parking garages, and a great view out over the airport. I had occasion to work in one of them in 2011 and it was in fine shape.
But even if Amazon does choose Crystal City, it doesn't necessarily mean they'll go after those USPTO buildings specifically. There are plenty of empty floors and buildings in CC to choose from.
> However, most of the other cities on the list were either extremely crowded downtown, available sites were actually more out in the 'burbs, or the cities were far down in what a lot of people would consider "2nd tier" (or 3rd tier) cities.
Yeah, in Boston for example (where Amazon is actually doing some fairly heavy building and hiring in the Seaport anyway), the proposed HQ2 site was Suffolk Downs. That's not out in the burbs exactly but it is adjacent to old working class towns a little ways north. It's not what your typical techie would consider being in Boston.
I think Raleigh was somewhere out in industrial parks a decent way outside the city with no transit.
Etc.
We'll see if this story pans out but the DC area always had to seen as a leading contender. Yes, it's probably a bit pricey but one wonders how much latitude Amazon would have had anyway to pick a cheap location and provide much lower compensation than HQ1 to reflect that.
Even if the area doesn't check all the boxes, it checks a lot of them--including the fact that there's a ton of local tech talent and DC is, if not everyone's idea of a dream location to live and work, is at least considered tolerable by many.
It's debatable whether Metro will be able to handle another few tens of thousands of daily commuters going through the downtown core to get to Crystal City. The system's already crammed up at rush hour and nobody has the budget for capital improvements to start to put more tracks through Gallery Place, Metro Center, and L'Enfant Plaza.
It would be interesting though, if Amazon was prepared to invest in capital improvements for Metro...
Judging from Seattle's experience, Amazon is not really prepared to do anything other than garner support from the business community and support a token streetcar. And Metro's capital needs are probably much bigger than Seattle's and are politically more complicated due to three jurisdictions that are frenemies in the best of times.
It's worth noting that Seattle and DC have vastly different representations on their boards. In DC this is two representatives picked by the governments of DC, VA, MD, and the feds each, and in some cases not even appointed by elected officials. In Seattle, this is a board consisting almost entirely of elected officials of counties and municipalities.
Seattle's method works because the responsibility of elected officials is quite clear and their voting records are transparent, whereas a diffuse chain of responsibility via appointment is not.
Metro rideship is down from its peak, overall. The system handles over 600,000 rides per day now; it handled around 750,000 per day between 2008 and 2012.
Riders commuting from downtown DC to Crystal City would be going against the prevailing flow into the city. Plenty of room on those trains in the morning.
Riders in MD would have a hard time, but a person would have to be pretty dumb to move to MD for a job in Crystal City.
Because Metro's reputation suffered when operations couldn't keep up with rising ridership. What will prevent Metro's operations from suffering again when an influx of Amazon employees stresses the system again? Would it be better if those workers got onto the already-jammed freeways?
> against the prevailing flow
Only if they board the trains between the downtown core and Crystal City. Odds are, if they're boarding from the northwest or from newly gentrified neighborhoods, they need to pass through the downtown core to get to Crystal City, which puts them on the same trains as people commuting in from the suburbs. They may get on pretty close to where the suburban commuters get off, but there's still an overlap. Not to mention the overcrowding on the downtown core platforms themselves. Keep in mind as well that Crystal City-bound trains from the downtown core stop at the Pentagon first, which has its own non-negligible share of commuters - those trains may not be full, but they sure aren't empty.
Bezos obviously knows how to run a company, but the only "brand" he has is (I think unfairly) "exploitative capitalism". If Bloomberg can't be president Bezos probably can't either. And probably wouldn't want to, to be honest.
Zuckerberg might want to, but he's universally despised on both sides of American politics, so no chance there.
(Not to mention that VP picks are normally used to broaden the ticket's appeal, not double down on it...)
I don't really see "exploitative capitalism" as being a problem for Bezos. As our current president has pointed out, it's just smart business. In our current political climate that will probably be lapped up by someone.
Been looking to buy a house in the Northern Virginia area for about five years now, but the prices have climbed almost linearly, and never slowed down. If Amazon does settle here, I'll probably continue renting until I can GTFO. Microsoft also bought a large plot of land around Loudon county, on which they plan to build a campus.
If this area is to become the next Seattle, I have no interest in being here.
You're looking at it the wrong way. Instead of looking for a house to buy to live in, look at how you and others can get in on an apartment complex purchase.
> [T]he best way to make it is you collect as much data as you can, you immerse yourself in that data, but then [throw all that data away and decide based on personal whim]
That’s sounds worse than it is. I think a better phrasing would be “read as much information as you can, and then sleep on it and go with the first option your subconscious tells you to go with”. Or gut, or instinct or ‘feel’. Informed intuition is a wonderful thing.
I think that's exactly backwards. I think you review data to use your intuition to form the hypothesis or question, and then look for empirical data to try to falsify it.
Putting intuition at the end of the decision making process is a pretty solid way to screw the entire thing up.
Falsification is part of the data review - the first step is always to eliminate solutions that obviously ie provably won’t work. The decision making process, both for Amazon HQ is inherently subjective / has too many dimensions to make an objective decision.
i.e. the process is for selecting out of the final 20, that have been fully vetted and feasibility established.
Or for deciding among three finalist engineers who’ve passed all interviews and tests and you can only hire one.
That's how you end up making unconsconably biased decisions though. Oops, accidently hired the candidate who looks the most like me AGAIN, darn the luck
"Go with your gut" is code word for "which HQ2 city offered the greatest tax exemptions" ;-)
Oregon gave Intel a 30 year property tax exemption, worth $2B, to establish their their HQ2 fabs near Hillsboro. Wouldn't be surprised if Amazon is asking for similar.
There was an old study that made the rounds, which I cannot find at the moment, that corporation headquarter moves overwhelming move towards the CEO's home. They do lots of studies and analysis and claims of doing what's best for the company, but in the end the primary driving force is the convenience of a single person (and everyone who reports to that person weighting and biasing to favor the desired outcome).
The traffic and congestion is already horrible. The cost of living is excessive. I don't understand why these companies - that can locate anywhere - want to lessen the quality of life for their employees.
Yeah, there are a lot of medium sized midwestern and southern cities that would have had the best of all worlds except 1) presumably a lot of software developers amazon wants to hire don’t want to live in these places and 2) related to 1, there aren’t a lot of software developers already there.
I wish they had considered more cities like Cincinnati, Nashville, or Cleveland. Those are actually fine places and they have low COL (although Nashville’s is getting up there). Plenty of other cities in the US also fit that profile. Even though I’ve heard bad things about working for Amazon and wouldn’t work for them in Seattle or DC, I would seriously consider taking an Amazon SDE salary somewhere that salary could go very far
> 1) presumably a lot of software developers amazon wants to hire don’t want to live in these places and 2) related to 1, there aren’t a lot of software developers already there.
That, in turn, requires the presumption that a lot of software developers want to live near DC.
> And amazon (and many other tech companies) adjust their salary to cost of life in the area.
Which raises costs for everyone and the "location adjustment" is usually less than what is really needed.
I was expecting it to be a bit further out, like Chantilly/Ashburn/Manassas. Close enough to serve the function but far enough out costs for employees/real estate is lower.
Dc has very good public transport and crystal city is convenient to trains everywhere from ashburn and Dulles all the way around to Springfield. I live in Reston and take the silver line to work every morning.
Still, there is literally a metro stop right in Crystal City that's on 2 lines, and with all the underground corridors between buildings you can get tons of places without even going above ground. If I was an Amazon employee moving out there, damn straight I'd be finding some place right on a metro stop.
The metro is trying to improve the safety of the system after some fatal accidents a few years ago. The work force is unmotivated and maintainence reports are falsified. The wait times for the weekend suck and the system shuts down pretty early leading to fans at sports stadiums chanting, “metro sucks.”
Even with all that it’s one of the better transit systems in the US. Not as good as Chicago or NY, but for the size of city it’s good.
There is one Metro stop directly in Crystal City, an express bus with dedicated lanes from another close station, and Metro is in the final planning stages to build a new station between those. The VRE, a Virginia light rail system that uses Amtrak tracks, has a stop in Crystal City. There are bus routes too, and bike lanes. And Reagan National Airport is directly adjacent.
Public transit to Crystal City is about as good as it gets. Which is good, because the road traffic sucks.
Not great, but could be a lot worse. Crystal city is on two of the main subway lines. And has a Virigina regional rail and Amtrak stop. There is a pretty major bus depot there too.
The downside is one of the subway lines only runs every 13 minutes during rush hour. And that cannot be increased without decreasing runs on other lines (because they share a tunnel). Maybe Amazon will convince the governments to run more on that line (and take it away from the other lines).
edit: Forgot to mention that airport access is probably the best place in the entire country. You could basically walk to national airport.
I think Metro hit bottom a couple years ago and is on the way back up. Dedicated funding (finally!) will enable steady improvement. If Amazon comes to town and uses their clout to push for better transportation, that will on accelerate things.
It's already had an impact. The stalled metro stop between DCA and Braddock (next to one of the potential build sites) magically started moving forward again a few months ago.
I think you might actually be understating how convenient the airport is. No need for “basically”: it’s quite doable, and there’s even a trail connecting them.
metro is somewhere between "incompetence that leads to dead passengers"[1], "shit's on fire, yo"[2] and "meh". Lately the biggest scandal is they turn down ads for the ACLU in favor of Northrup Grumman.
In any event it's generally minimally acceptable at best. Dumping a ton of people onto it will not help matters.
It's super fashionable to bash Metro, but the system today carries over 600,000 riders per day, and that's about a 20-year low. The system is in a hole of deferred maintenance, but attacking it pretty aggressively.
I ride Metro every week day (bus + train) and look: I'm still alive! And on time almost every day. I much prefer it to driving.
I have heard that the HQ2 is supposed to be a kind of "domed city." If it is Crystal City, Amazon HQ2 has started a infrastructure formation using a subscription with a DCaaS.
If “domed city” is the atmosphere they’re looking for, Crystal City is definitely the right choice — the existing buildings there are all connected together by a warren of underground tunnels, which includes an underground shopping mall. Combine that with the Brutalist ‘60s architecture and you get a neighborhood straight out of a bad sci-fi movie.
Seems like an admission that they have nothing new to do so they are seeking growth through federal contracts.
Northern VA is the poster child of what happens when you have tons of growth over decades, but absolutely no planning, or worse, lots of nimby preventing infrastructure.
<Basically any popular urban center in the US in the past 50 years> is the poster child of what happens when you have tons of growth over decades, but absolutely no planning, or worse, lots of nimby preventing infrastructure.
I'm of the opinion that every urban planner from the last fifty years in the US should be stripped of their degrees and titles their lands taken and their crops burned.
The US transportation infrastructure even for how good it is compared to some other places is still a joke.
Arlington, VA probably did the best job of any post-WWII high growth city in America. The orange line corridor is actually urbanizing what was once pure suburbia. Crystal City/Pentagon city is built pretty densely and has space for even more high rise buildings.
Every other city in America that grew post wwII would have just built strip malls and single-family homes.
There are new high rises going up in Crystal city even as rents stagnated. Can't be too much nimby stuff going on.
Compared to say, silicon valley, they did a good job.
Loudon County did a bad job. Fairfax did a mixed job. They definitely grew in some places--like Tysons, but other parts have just grown without planning.
This is true. There are so many high rises being built along the Wilson-Clarendon corridor, and Arlington and Alexandria actually have a big presence of the so-called missing middle of housing development [1]. This location seems like it's pretty well equipped to absorb HQ2
I have a lot of trouble believing that Tysons was planned at all. The area is nearly unwalkable and is effectively dominated by multi-lane roads. Yes, there's there Silver line, and I won't dispute that the station for Tyson's corner managed to make some considerations for walkers, but as for the rest of the area, I shouldn't have to cross a highway to walk to work!
Reston and Ashburn are two fully planned communities. A lot of thought went into Reston particularly. Almost every home is near a walking trail, a pool, and a small shopping center.
> "The company may be having similar discussions with other finalists."
The article sounds very speculative. I don't know anything about this place, but if it's expensive like people here say it is, then I don't see the point of Amazon moving there. I think a place like downtown Chicago would make more sense. (if only the winter was not as cold and better public schools...)
Not too familiar with that, but from what I read they took it pretty seriously and offered some nice tax benefits. They also offered a location in south loop, which is a really nice area of downtown Chicago and still very affordable. It's also a short ride on the train to Midway airpot (not an international airpot like O'hare but much nicer to travel from and to). It's also very close to 3 universities.
Chicago's preferred Amazon location is Goose Island, part of the newly expanded downtown skyscraper district.[1]
The city recently approved 18 new skyscrapers for downtown, including 12 for the proposed Amazon site, with an included professional soccer stadium.[2]
Interesting. I see it's near Lincoln Park, also a very nice location with easy access to O'hare via the blue line. Maybe even better than south loop. I assume it's a bit safer (unfortunately crime rates are still very high in many places across Chicago).
Same weather, even worse schools, way less infrastructure, almost no public transportation, the Chicago area has over twice the population to draw employees from
Amazon is not interested in altruistically revitalizing a once great city. They want to make money and will make their choice solely based on that factor (although there is certainly some nuance that goes into that decision - talent aquisition, politics, etc).
That was my first thought as well, that they would have a hard time finding a more expensive place for every metric, from real estate* to salaries.
However I don't see Amazon and Chicago being a good match, culturally, if that makes sense, nor do I think there are compelling strategic reasons for basing this location there.
*edit: Based on snowwrestler's comment it sounds like Crystal City has seem some large occupants move out, so real estate prices may be trending down. However it's still a fair premium to pay to be next to the airport, compared to farther out (where you also have a high concentration of software developers.)
I used to live in Crystal city until 2011. Back then it was $1700 a month for one bedroom. Now it’s around $2200 a month for one bedroom. Putting their headquarters there will turn Crystal city into a very, very expensive parking lot.
Denver still makes the most sense to me. Single hop to Beijing & Shanghai, real estate and wages aren't at DC, Seattle, Bay Area rates quite. Lots of amenities (open space, good beer, close to skiing) that Amazon doesn't actually have to pay for. Decent tech scene (Google, Facebook, Uber campuses, as well as an ever growing Amazon dev presence). Large downtown property looking for a buyer and is probably underrated (Elitch Gardens). Decent public transit that's trending really well (new light rail within the past couple of years, and more coming out soon).
DC never made sense to me. The other defense contractors manage to not have HQs in DC.
I think this story is exactly what they'd leak if they were trying to buy real estate somewhere else.
Because they explicitly don't want the HQs to specialize.
And the thought is that at some point there's going to be two Internets, US and China. There's a pretty good chance that China is going to run Africa's Internet access. Europe has been a also ran against the US as far as the Internet is concerned, and the Middle East is projected to lose their economic momentum in the coming decades.
That's a pretty piss-poor reason for Denver to be considered geographically favorable.
The main advantage you get from geographical proximity is the fact that you can build closer networking opportunities to other businesses and entities in the area. (A secondary advantage is timezone alignment). Denver's not exactly close to any other major cities; by contrast, it's only a half day of travel between Chicago and the Northeast, and it's even possible to commute between NYC and Boston or DC for a day.
For siting a second major HQ, Denver is just too close to Seattle. You don't get the benefits of having people 3 hours ahead (and more aligned with Europe, for example). The marginal costs of extra travel time to Asia from the east coast versus the west coast just aren't going to be a major factor in determining whether or not travel can happen--your employees have already lost a day or two of travel. Move the site to the east coast, and now you can open up more travel opportunities because it's only a half-day (or less!) of travel.
Denver has some great things going for it, like easy access to mountains and outdoor space. But I must say its downtown is pretty unappealing. Many weirdos (similar to Seattle...) and chain restaurants. I enjoyed my trip to Colorado, but Denver was the most boring part of it.
The tourist part is always weirdos and chain restaurants. That's like saying there's nothing in New York because you went to Times Square and it was just a tourist trap.
DCA is slot controlled so the slot owners are going to have to weigh the revenue of SEA/DCA vs all the other markets they’re currently using those slots for. One business often isn’t going to bring enough revenue to compete with a market like BOS/DCA or NYC/DCA which consumes an enormous amount of the slots.
DCA also has a "perimeter rule" in place, which forbids flights between DCA and airports more than 1,250 miles away, unless a specific exception is made.
Originally, it was to put regional routes in the regional airport, and long-distance routes in the long-distance airport. (As told to me by an urban studies professor I picked up at Dulles when I was a chauffeur in college.)
Similar to how in New York, LaGuardia was supposed to be for domestic flights, Kennedy for international flights, and Newark for freight. But that didn't fully work out. (Same source.)
Ever since Dulles was built, there’s been a struggle to actually get people to use it. DCA is just so much more convenient. I’ve heard from people who were around at the time that it was virtually a ghost town when it opened, and was a great place to fly small planes since there wasn’t much commercial traffic. Even today, the two airports serve about the same number of passengers per year, despite Dulles being approximately eleven thousand times larger.
Personally, I use DCA whenever I can. It usually takes me about fifteen minutes from car to gate. Dulles takes ages and ages, since everything is so far away.
A lot of the rules are just trying to get people to use that big expensive airport more.
Most members of Congress don't care about the perimeter rule (if they are inside the perimeter) or hate it (if they are outside the perimeter). That's why there are exceptions now.
The rule still exists because local jurisdictions really really want to keep it, and getting rid of it is just not worth the fight for anyone else.
This is clearly a DoD play. The federal government as a whole is thirsty for cloud services and having a services provider like Amazon literally at their doorstep is going to win them a lot of work. If they do bring good experts to government work instead of what the typical government contractors in the area provide this will be a good thing for taxpayers.
People keep saying this and I really don't follow. Why does the DoD care where the headquarters of the parent company of their contractor is located? Are they gonna pop in and ask questions about the Amazon retail site?
Sure AWS needs a sales office in the region. And a datacenter. And a lobbying shop too. Pretty sure they got all that covered already.
Politically there's probably something to be said for having a strong local economic presence. But you're probably right that it can be overstated as a factor.
As a former government contractor (and employee), I can say having the tech teams nearby is an advantage. Personal relationships should not be underestimated, even when building software for the government. If anything personal relationships are even more important as there’s a high likelihood that non-technical people will be making the decisions on what and how you build the software.
The thing about sales is that at a certain level of client, the clients want to speak to executives, not salespeople.
If you're going to place executives in the area, then their underlings need to be there too, and so on. Putting your HQ where your executives need to be makes sense.
A lot of it is relationships. A lot of it is the kind of workforce you'll get (people already experience with DoD stuff and have the right clearances but don't want to move out of the DC/MD/VA area), and such things.
Amazon's big draw for someone currently doing cleared work is being able to ditch the clearance without taking a pay cut or moving. The people who want to work for Amazon and keep the clearance have already made that move.
I don't follow this logic either. Boeing has their HQ in Chicago, Raytheon in Massachusetts, UTC in Connecticut. The key thing these companies seem to do is spread their offices into relatively small states so when votes happen Senators have to go against large employees in their districts.
I imagine that it will make it much easier to have face-to-face happy hours, dinners, lunches, and so on. It will also enable people lobbying on behalf of Amazon to do so closer to the mothership and include people from Amazon to further strengthen their abilities. Those types of conversations do have benefit for the people they represent and are why there's a huge lobbyist industry. Those face-to-face meetings and parties and eating together really can make things happen faster than trying to broker deals from across the country through phone or video conference. I presume this is one of the main reasons behind this decision.
Plus when trying to make a sale or negotiate a deal I'm sure it makes people on the other side feel better if someone says "And the people to support you or jump when you say how high are going to be 5 minutes away rather than 2 timezones away." It's almost at the point where subcontracting out is similar to just having all the work done in the same building you're already in. Seems like that would make people feel more comfortable.
Or: Amazon is going to heavily recruit former-DoD and government workers, luring them from low pay rates to high paying jobs. Reduce hiring friction: you don't need to convince them to uproot their families to move. They already live in the area, hell, their commute doesn't even change.
Are you more likely to award contracts to AWS if you work at the DoD knowing that in two years you can move over and suddenly quintuple your salary?
If anyone in the consulting field is paying attention - right about now is almost too late to begin going out and lining up a bunch of clearance techies who can be on your secure GovCloud consulting team to provide all the services that the DoD will be needing.
This comment is hilarious to me. Quintuple your salary? I worked in consulting for 5 years, and I can assure you that Amazon is already paying less for equivalent candidates. I'm not sure what you think happens in government consulting, but it is nothing like government employment.
Edit: The strategy you outline re: government employees is already employed by all of the large government consulting firms. Amazon is late to the game and behind the ball with their lack of awarded contracts. They might be able to catch up, but contracting is one field that has repeatedly shown itself to be resistant to disruption.
Agreed: government employment is not the same as government consulting.
There are generations of future government employees that haven't even graduated high school yet. Amazon is not dumb. Bezos has never played the short game.
The Federal government pays incredibly well, but has few technology workers. They instead primarily act as managers for embedded contractors, who themselves are paid far above average for a given role.
Additionally, AWS already has a DoD presence.
Source: Lived in DC area for 8 years, worked on numerous federal contracts, witnessed highly overpaid, lazy shitbags who were so incompetent that government shutdowns forcing them to stay home sped up work on contracts.
Amazes me how the "government workers are underpaid" meme is so strong in people who haven't spent time in DC area.
I grew up in an impoverished rural part of Virginia 6 hours from DC. Going home and seeing my hard working relatives scrape by and do without after paying taxes, then going back to DC and seeing people who arrived at work at 9, left at 3:30, and yapped half the day made me transform from Leslie Knope to Ron Swanson.
I always tell people this:
The US political parties have it wrong. One thinks gov't is always bad and shouldn't exist. The other thinks it is fine, but just needs more money.
The reality is that it is a broken organization that used to be amazing, but has rotted, and the last thing it needs is more money. It needs to be radically reformed and reinvented. End rant.
How could the federal government possibly pay "incredibly well" in the context of software? ~185k is the current cap on salaries. That's not the bottom or the median, it's the top, a place most people will not reach in their whole careers, and there are rigid rules around how to get there. As far as I know, pretty much everyone is on something equivalent to the GS? Even contractors are on a proxy version of it, based on my experience in the space (it's why I left). I know people talk about 18f a lot on HN and I was under the impression they had to get an ultra-special allowance of some kind for even their salaries. What makes the pay so good, I really don't get it? There are benefits, sure, but I am under the impression that pensions aren't what they used to be, and a FAANG is going to give you health insurance as a dev. What am I missing?
Maybe they pay the people in question too much for their skills, motivation, or work product, but that is not "incredibly well" for a software developer in the USA. DC isn't that cheap, though certainly not like SF. If you are a good developer who doesn't show up at 9 and leave at 3:30 and don't want to, who can make it to a decent pay band at a FAANG, or have a specialization that demands high income, I just don't see how the government could be a good choice economically.
You are vastly, vastly discounting the value of the benefits. THE most secure pension in the world (you cannot buy one that good on the private market), incredible health benefits, incredible vacation policies, lax work policies for most jobs, great holiday schedule, Gov will pay to train you, you effectively cannot get laid off (try downloading porn at most corporations for hours and hours and see what happens), etc.
Obviously that doesn't look quite as good right now (pretty much only for the software engineering field), but during the next recession? Best deal in the world. Heck, you even get free holidays every now and then during government shutdowns. (The employees have always been back paid for these if I recall correctly -- maybe there was one time they weren't? Very rare.)
You are vastly, vastly mischaracterizing government shutdowns as “free holidays.” Shutdowns due to lapses in appropriations by congress are extremely traumatic for ordinary government workers. It’s not as though you can just go on a trip while you wait for the government to re-open, as you must be ready to report the next day if appropriations are made. There is absolutely zero guarantee that back pay will be paid, despite what might have happened previously. Even if you wanted to work pro bono, you are forbidden from doing any sort of official work, even checking email, during a shutdown. In all, it’s stressful and morale crushing, and incredibly wasteful, as huge amounts of time are spent preparing for a shutdown and then spinning back up from it. To give just one example, at government science labs, experiments must be stopped, and any field work must cease and everyone must come home, which can ruin a big experiment that may have been years in the making. Calling it a holiday is flat-out false.
And private sector is far, far more stressful. Instead of worrying about whether or not you'll get a week of back-pay, you have to worry about how you're going to feed your family and keep a roof over your head after your job is terminated with no notice and a meaningless severance package.
Cry me a river. Federal jobs have downsides, but this isn't one of them.
My wife works for the feds and I'm in the private sector. I have a better retirement plan, better health benefits (she is on my plan, not vice versa), more paid vacation per year, more flexible work schedule, and more holidays (I get the day after Thanksgiving, she does not). Oh, and I get paid more.
Maybe the reinvention could get automated? Like, any agency is going to be shut down and rebuilt without previous staff every 30 (or whatever) years after it was originally formed? Hard to see how the transitions from old to new version would be done unless you kept outwardly backwards compatibility, though. At least it could shake things up internally.
Norway is actually doing this a rebuild of one agency. The Government's Road Agency has essentially been deigned ineffectual and FUBAR, so a new agency has been formed (New Roads) with responsibility for all new roads. The old agency has stopped replacing retirees (I think) and will eventually disappear. This is of course never said loudly in plain words. I just wish they would do the same for the railroads agency, which is a peerless shitshow.
I’m more for that mindset toward government projects. Ie repaving highways every X years. Rebuilding buildings every Y years. There’s plenty of capital (buildings, roads, dams, etc) that is old enough that a tear down/rebuild makes sense - and would generate careers. As for people, they often represent institutional knowledge and ability. The people who’ve left the state department will be impossible to replace, for instance.
When people are talking about this, they're usually talking about local government positions like teachers, librarians, and social workers. Or the post office. Very rarely are people talking about contractors or white collar bureaucrats.
That's not how it works. There are no restrictions on who you can work for, even if you were a CO/COR. The restriction is on representating a firm to the government. This happens very frequently; it's seldom that a flag officer retires without multiple offers from industry.
"""
it might be assumed that a former contracting officer representative could not be hired by the same company whose contract they oversaw as a federal employee. Even though seeking such employment while still in federal service would represent a prohibited conflict of interest, seeking and being hired after federal service ends would be allowed
...
the rules would bar the employee from representing them, such as through a communication or appearance, before a federal employee regarding the specific contract he or she oversaw
"""
https://www.army.mil/article/194019/moving_to_private_sector...
> Why does the DoD care where the headquarters of the parent company of their contractor is located? Are they gonna pop in and ask questions about the Amazon retail site?
Don't underestimate how much of a difference-maker face-to-face is.
I've called and emailed people and the one thing that actually got things moving was just going to their dang office and seeing them in person. I don't think it matters how good the technology gets and how many VR-facetime conference call services develop, there's always going to be something irreplaceable about meeting in person. If there's not much of a significant difference on paper between you and the competition, it really does put you ahead of the competition if those meetings go well and the competition isn't doing it. Same for hosting dinners, etc.
It's got a mediocre quality of life compared to other tech centers, extremely high cost of living, horrific traffic, and has a talent pool that is inflated on paper due to the misaligned incentives of the Federal government workforce (Federal government workers are promoted and hired based on arbitrary checkmarks like Masters degree: yes/no, etc) which cause people to pursue worthless graduate degrees for pay bumps. This is why there are so many diploma mill type schools with campuses there. Add in the incredible over-staffing of Federal projects (both gov't and contractor) and you get incredibly mediocre talent where a "full stack web developer" produces very little over 3 years and has an atrophied skill set. Forced me to hire based on side projects and active Github projects to weed out the huge amount of mediocrity.
Bezos has political aspirations, and honestly, this makes sense from the perspective of already having massive data center presence there. He will now have large numbers of employees added to both Maryland and Virginia, giving him much more influence with Congress since congressman in general kiss the ass of large employers in their districts.
Hopefully, he could have some positive influences on the Federal gov't, by having a contracting wing from Amazon that would help fix the awful, bloated, IBM-like state of the Federal agencies. They used to do great things, but like IBM, they have calcified into jobs programs with dead-sea effect staffing.
100%. My move from SF to DC was mind-blowing in the general expectations set on developers. Without hyperbole, a year of output at most gov't contracts is a couple weeks worth of work at a typical startup.
That plus it’s so much cheaper in DC. As someone who lives in the Bay Area but has to travel to DC a decent amount the complaints about DC housing costs are nothing compared to Palo Alto.
If Amazon is putting their campus there you should buy everything you can.
I’m in pretty much the reverse position, and also bought a house recently. Any time I was feeling frustrated about the housing market here, I just pulled up a search of Bay Area properties, or talked to my California colleagues about their struggles with real estate, and I felt a lot better.
This is not a cheap area by any means, but it’s far from the rarified heights of the more usual Big Tech areas.
Wait why would Congress care about employees near DC, aside from the reps for VA and MD? I could believe Bezos wants to be near the political action... but DC doesn’t really have much pull in. National politics
People have some good replies but they are missing a big one. Relationships. The DoD is absolutely who you know. That is a big part of it. You have to be in the area to have skin in that game.
Cloud services? This is a 2nd headquarters and Amazon is more than cloud services. They could handle the point you are making with simply a large local office. Not the entire company which is involved in a host of things that would make other areas more attractive.
This would effectively double the cost to DoD of any awarded cloud service contract to Amazon. In the form of higher cost of living for federal employees.
Looks like that’s not counting the whole metro area, so it’s kind of misleading. DC is a fairly small chunk of the region as a whole. It’s only the third most populous jurisdiction in the area.
The current locality rate for the DC-ish area (which actually goes halfway to Wilmington and Richmond) is 28.22%; thus, a GS-12-05 salary is $72k in a low-cost-of-living area and $92k in DC. The Federal Salary Council's recommended locality rate is 78.81%, bringing that notional GS-12 to $128k. So there is already somewhat of a disconnect between federal salaries and cost of living.
That aside, it's easy enough for the government to fix the housing problem. They're just too invested in keeping prices high to want that.
There are lots of other good things about the area- good schools, physical room for them to grow and take over a bunch of buildings, lots of engineers and business people in the area already, etc.
As a Pittsburgher living in Seattle for the past few years, hearing this gives me hope. I know NIMBY isn't the best philosophy, but I make an exception for Amazon, who I think has done a number on Seattle and its culture.
I wouldn't knock having enough parking, but Seattle has a ridiculous number of single family residences within spitting distance of downtown. The upzoning regulation is a great first step, but is slow to roll out due to difficulties in permitting teardowns.
yeah it just doesn’t make sense to blame economic growth on Seattle’s problems when most of the issues boil down to: things are crowded and rent is high
Some people think that Chinese investment in real estate is also to blame but I’ve never seen any data that actually suggests that. Still, Seattle won’t pass rules to prevent speculation on property because at the end of the day, voters just want their property values to keep going up more than they want to live in a livable city for everyone
This is no surprise, it was always going to be Virginia, or somewhere else in the east coast tech corridor. The whole "city competition" has been a grand scheme by Amazon to get cities (mostly those in the aforementioned area) to offer incentives to move there. No other states were ever in the running.
HOORAY, the great evil one has avoided Austin, TX, now we austinites can live without the fear of Amazonites causing all our taxes to go through the roofs - - - and housing availability to go to nothing . . . .
I still maintain that not picking Chicago would be a major mistake. I only think this because I want to see them take over most of the Sears Tower and convert it into a delivery drone launch site. A) How bonkers-cool would that look? B) Ideal test site for large scale drone delivery. Less drone power drain, since they would essentially be performing a controlled descent instead of a liftoff and descent. Asymmetric flight paths, like with the drone return around the 2nd-3rd floor, would allow more rapid launches. Grid street layout that makes actual sense, so easier on the AI/ML. Center of the country (ish), so longer distance delivery with solar powered drones might be viable.
Okay, I'll admit it. I just REALLY want to see streams of flying killbots emanating from my home town. The Robot Uprising is coming, people, and I'm hoping early allegiance leads to a nicer brain vat in their biocomputer.
Seriously, though, I would have thought Atlanta, Chicago, and Boston, in that order, would be better. Bi-coastal or geographic center make logistical sense. ATL and BOS have excellent tech resources, but maybe a bit too much competition for talent in BOS. ATL gives a presence in "The South", so could serve as a political/cultural foothold without any major compromises. ATL proved it can easily support a tech boom during the y2k bubble. BOS serves as a great gateway to Europe. CHI is really hungering for more tech influence and would probably bend over backwards to be accommodating. Plus, the most likely site in CHI is actually a great location for anyone that likes an urban setting, not just millennials. Amazon is one of the few tech companies that I think CHI could embrace because it has a strong influence on financial markets and doesn't feel as 'magical' as many tech companies (where it's hard for everyday people to understand what they do). And Chicagoans can be fiercely loyal, even to companies. Case in point - The Sears Tower. The only time you hear "Willis Tower" is on the news. And there are a couple dozen other cases of locals refusing to rebrand stuff simply because ownership or naming rights changed.
Being by DC isn't a BAD location, but it seems like it would be better to have a strong satellite location that can be expanded as needed. I would assume the atmosphere there is more restricted for some of their more ambitious projects involving lots of sensors and physical presence. Every location will have red tape, but it seems like there DC would be ordering it in bulk.
Amazon wanted an in-place tech-ready workforce, an environment that could appeal to yuppie urbanites, and a good transportation hub. Empty office space for quick bootstrapping and the ability to wring concessions were also major sweeteners. Bicoastal geography was also strongly suspected to be a major criterion.
That pretty much cut out any second-tier city from the running. When Montgomery County, DC, and Northern VA were all announced as finalists, it ought to have been pretty clear that Amazon was focused on the DC area. Crystal City itself is basically the description of what you're looking for in that list I gave. Atlanta doesn't really have anything when you take out the airport (which is lousily situated anyways). I suspect Chicago, NYC, and Toronto all have too much focus on other industries (and, besides, Illinois is basically broke, so a sweetheart tax deal needs to be discounted on the basis that Illinois could need to find the cash quickly).
Except for the weather, Chicago isn't a terrible choice. The problem is that no matter how great the city makes itself, it's still in "flyover" country. That's a difficult stereotype to break.
Chicago and its mayor worry too much about being a "world class" city. You know what world class cities don't worry about? Whether they're a world class city or not.
Amazing the amount of people here who takes this as some kind of truth instead of just a story that could have even been leaked for another purpose (perhaps even to gain more leverage with the area that they actually want to go to).
This is also the epitome of infotainment something that in the end won't even matter unless it actually happens other than to discuss the 'inside baseball' of the entire event.
How sure is anyone of this? Sure enough to go and snap up real estate (say residential) knowing that if it is correct that real estate will inflate in value well over whatever it is right now (already inflated).
Also I still am not seeing the advantage to Amazon (as long as everyone is speculating) of going into such a dense and expensive area to begin with. Jeff is all about efficiency and paying as little as possible. What possible advantage does he have but located in such an expensive area that is sure to get even more expensive.
I live in the DC area and this is entirely expected. Bezos owns the Washington Post and a very expensive DC home. Amazon's got data centers in Northern Virginia. We would've all been shocked if it went somewhere else.
But the entire point of the exercise wasn't to make Jeff happier and shorten his commute, it was to find a way to continue to grow without overloading Seattle any more than it already is.
HQ2 needs to be somewhere that people want to live, with the room for lots of them.
I really was hoping HQ2 would go somewhere more conservative politically. There's plenty of people who would work for Amazon but aren't really excited by Seattle (I'm not one of them, but I know some).
Detroit specifically would have been perfect- low cost of living, lots of space to grow, great airport, lots of robotic/mechanical industry leaking from the failing car industry, plus UofM nearby. I don't know how they didn't make the finalists.
I thought the point of the exercises was to get as many local government concessions as possible before making a decision whose outcome was fairly predictable in advance.
I don't follow this line of reasoning. Jeff Bezos decides where to put Amazon's new HQ based on how quickly he can get home? Demand for his time is probably already spread all over the globe, I'd imagine many of his important meetings happen over phone/conference daily.
Given how wealthy that area already is I'm guessing not as much as other places would have been willing to give us (i.e. IIRC New Jersey and Chicago were offering some of the bigger tax incentives). It would be more because Bezos wants those gov't contracts badly than anything VA was offering.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 310 ms ] threadGood work on 6+ months of press and making cities embarrass themselves for what seemed obvious from the start.
https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/real-estate/news/a...
I recommend watching the actual talk, but there are a few sections of it summarized (including some about Amazon HQ2) in this article: https://www.recode.net/2018/9/19/17878766/scott-galloway-pre...
1. As you point out, right next to Pentagon and federal government. 2. Good transportation: right on the Metro and literally across the street from National Airport. 3. If you're going to have 2 headquarters, having them be on opposite coasts makes sense. 4. And I think another one that is pretty unique to Crystal City is that Amazon and their employees definitely want to be in a downtown, urban environment. However, most of the other cities on the list were either extremely crowded downtown, available sites were actually more out in the 'burbs, or the cities were far down in what a lot of people would consider "2nd tier" (or 3rd tier) cities. Crystal City is basically an urban suburb of DC that you could easily see having a great "vibe" for an HQ2, but still has room for Amazon to build out.
Surely, you jest. Yeah, it's on a metro line, but hardly anyone lives near a metro line. That area is consistently rated as the #1 or #2 worst traffic in the country for years.
Though, perhaps to your point, I also am not a fan of almost all planning. The nicest places to live, walk, etc. tend to be ones that arose before planning was widespread. Of course, they existed before the car, too.
It’ll be on the same line as Shaw which is one of the most desirable neighborhoods for 20/30 somethings in DC right now.
As another commenter pointed out, there is actually a ton of empty real estate in Crystal City itself and no doubt a ton of it will be built up as apartments/condos now.
Also, some nyt writer that’d never been there called it the Brooklyn of DC which was hilarious.
/walks away from the keyboard to avoid ranting about why I got the ever loving hell out of Austin yet again.
Honestly the city just felt very superficial in a lot of ways. I was there almost a decade and a half, and in that span of time I came to appreciate different things about the city for what they were, but that pervading sense that there wasn't really much substance beneath the surface ever left, and the direction of the city just stopped aligning with my long term personal goals of buying a house.
Once I went from "passively thinking about buying a house" to "making a five year plan to buy a house" I sat long and hard and thought about if I wanted to make central Texas my home. It's gorgeous here, the weather is great, yes The Lege absolutely sucks but find me someone who can't find some gripe about their state government and I'll find you the next Buddha.
I decided to leave and return to the midwest.
Adler's City council fought the state on bathroom bills and bag bans, many teeth were gnashed, garments ripped and sackcloth torn-but aside from a few annoyed editorials and longform pieces from the usual local columnists, when city council abandoned CodeNEXT (a critically needed rewrite of city zoning laws and building codes that would have allowed for greater density and eased pressure on a stunted housing market) once again caving to neighborhood associations that could give a damn about anything outside of their borough and continue to hold council hostage at the expense of development and well design urban planning, I threw up my hands and left.
>I decided to leave and return to the midwest.
I’m actually in the Midwest right now and has Austin at the top of my places to move to. However, I do want to buy a house in the next 5 years, so this is making me have second thoughts.
I was someone who got to Austin in the very early 2000's after leaving the military up the road at Ft. Hood, enjoyed it for a few years, and slowly watched it evolve into something that just didn't excite me anymore. My experience shouldn't sour yours.
(But seriously, if you're gonna buy a house, and want to actually enjoy having a bit of land, but still be close enough to Austin to do Austin-y things, Pflugerville, Round Rock and Georgetown to the North are blowing up, as are Buda, Kyle and San Marcos to the south, with Bastrop to the east. To the west is where Michael Dell and probably Lance Armstrong lives. That's all I'll say about that)
p.s. if you absolutely feel like you have to have Franklin BBQ, don't be a rube and stand in line for 4 hours. Get some friends over, pool your money together and call in, they'll do pick up orders for anything over $40 I think and you can skip the line-or call my buddy Mark, his brisket is better anyway :P
Anyone that tells you South Lake Union neighborhood was better pre Amazon is full of it. It was a bunch of warehouses and run down.
Do you have experience of Seattle over the past decade, or are you just repeating platitudes?
I live in Seattle. Things like the Showbox reportedly in serious danger of being demolished for luxury condo's are just showing how soulless this city is becoming in the name of 'growth'. The entire city population has been replaced by tech bros and their significant others, tech bro culture, ubers, the food is boring and most restaurants are over-hyped, costs are insane, the people are selfish and rude, there's nothing to do except drink and ride a bike to look at Puget Sound yet again, there's little culture or diversity, and the politicians work entirely in Amazon's favor. I have a decent stable job here, but I'd move if the opportunity was to arise.
>Founded in 1939,[4] the Showbox has hosted a diverse offering of music over the decades. From the Jazz Age to the Grunge Era, the ballroom has featured shows by Duke Ellington, Muddy Waters and the Ramones — as well as local artists such as burlesque performer Gypsy Rose Lee, and grunge bands Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Mudhoney, TAD and Screaming Trees.[5]
>Other acts to perform at The Showbox have included Al Jolson, Mae West, Nat King Cole, Jimmy Durante and Dizzy Gillespie, The Police, XTC, X, Blondie, Gang of Four, Iggy Pop, Devo, Dead Kennedys and Jerry Cantrell.[7][8] More recent performers include The Weeknd, Snoop Dogg, Dave Matthews, Kanye West, Lorde, Robbie Williams, Modest Mouse, Death Cab For Cutie, Public Enemy, PJ Harvey, Wilco, The Flaming Lips, Daft Punk, Kasabian, Old 97's, Elliott Smith, Peter Murphy, Guided By Voices, Built To Spill, Billy Idol, David Bazan, Bebel Gilberto, Cat Power, Spiritualized, Sleater-Kinney, Minus the Bear, Coldplay, Bright Eyes, The Roots, Sir Mix-A-Lot, Dita Von Teese, Maroon 5, The Shins, The Melvins, My Morning Jacket, LL Cool J, DJ Shadow, Scissor Sisters, TV On The Radio, Ke$ha, Kimbra, Marina and the Diamonds, B-52's, Lady Gaga, Ice Cube, Paul Simon, Macklemore, JoJo, (Kpop group) A.C.E and many more.[9][5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Showbox
"In the early 1990s, the rise of the grunge alternative rock music and subculture in Seattle brought media attention to the use of heroin by prominent grunge artists. In the 1990s, the media focused on the use of heroin by musicians in the Seattle grunge scene, with a 1992 New York Times article listing the city's "three principal drugs" as "espresso, beer and heroin" [4] and a 1996 article calling Seattle's grunge scene the "...subculture that has most strongly embraced heroin".[5] Tim Jonze from The Guardian states that "...heroin had blighted the [grunge] scene ever since its inception in the mid-80s" and he argues that the "...involvement of heroin mirrors the self-hating, nihilistic aspect to the music"; in addition to the heroin deaths, Jonze points out that Stone Temple Pilots' Scott Weiland, as well as Courtney Love, Mark Lanegan and Evan Dando "...all had their run-ins with the drug, but lived to tell the tale."[6] A 2014 book stated that whereas in the 1980s, people used the "stimulant" cocaine to socialize and "...celebrate good times", in the 1990s grunge scene, the "depressant" heroin was used to "retreat" into a "cocoon" and be "...sheltered from a harsh and unforgiving world which offered...few prospects for...change or hope."[7]
Leading grunge band Alice in Chains had a song "God Smack", which included the line "stick your arm for some real fun", a reference to injecting heroin.[5] Seattle grunge musicians known to use heroin included Kurt Cobain, who was using "heroin when he shot himself in the head"; "Andrew Wood of Mother Love Bone [, who] overdosed on heroin in 1990"; "Stefanie Sargent of 7 Year Bitch[, who] died of an overdose of the same opiate in 1992...[and] Layne Staley of Alice in Chains [who] publicly detailed his battles with heroin...".[8] Mike Starr of Alice in Chains [7] and Jonathan Melvoin from The Smashing Pumpkins also died from heroin. After Cobain's death, his "...widow, singer Courtney Love, characterized Seattle as a drug mecca, where heroin is easier to get than in San Francisco or Los Angeles."[8]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin_chic#Grunge
When I lived in Seattle, South Lake Union was pretty much a wasteland. Now Amazon is there and I hear it's a millennial/tech paradise.
Meanwhile, Columbia Heights and Eastern Market will probably see their gentrification rapidly accelerate since they're a short Blue or Yellow line ride away on WMATA. H street will probably be safe since Washingtonians seems to have a pathological fear or switching lines during their commute and it's closest to a Red line station (Union Station).
What if the gentrification spreads out from Union Market?
If I were going to work in HQ2, I'd live in Del Ray, though its more single-family focused. But it has some nice local restaurants.
Tons of empty office space for sure though. I think proximity to DC itself is probably the main selling point.
The Patent and Trademark Office had 5 huge buildings; they moved to Alexandria. The Dept of Defense is moving a lot of its employees to Fort Belvoir, and the contractors are following.
It's really kind of crazy to have such a major business district so deep in a major metropolitan area, with such low average occupancy.
I do believe they have said they want some folks working out of HQ2 in 2019, so that means using existing buildings, at least at first.
The USPTO buildings have a lot going for them: pretty close to Metro, dedicated parking garages, and a great view out over the airport. I had occasion to work in one of them in 2011 and it was in fine shape.
But even if Amazon does choose Crystal City, it doesn't necessarily mean they'll go after those USPTO buildings specifically. There are plenty of empty floors and buildings in CC to choose from.
Yeah, in Boston for example (where Amazon is actually doing some fairly heavy building and hiring in the Seaport anyway), the proposed HQ2 site was Suffolk Downs. That's not out in the burbs exactly but it is adjacent to old working class towns a little ways north. It's not what your typical techie would consider being in Boston.
I think Raleigh was somewhere out in industrial parks a decent way outside the city with no transit.
Etc.
We'll see if this story pans out but the DC area always had to seen as a leading contender. Yes, it's probably a bit pricey but one wonders how much latitude Amazon would have had anyway to pick a cheap location and provide much lower compensation than HQ1 to reflect that.
Even if the area doesn't check all the boxes, it checks a lot of them--including the fact that there's a ton of local tech talent and DC is, if not everyone's idea of a dream location to live and work, is at least considered tolerable by many.
It would be interesting though, if Amazon was prepared to invest in capital improvements for Metro...
It's worth noting that Seattle and DC have vastly different representations on their boards. In DC this is two representatives picked by the governments of DC, VA, MD, and the feds each, and in some cases not even appointed by elected officials. In Seattle, this is a board consisting almost entirely of elected officials of counties and municipalities.
Seattle's method works because the responsibility of elected officials is quite clear and their voting records are transparent, whereas a diffuse chain of responsibility via appointment is not.
Narrator: Amazon wasn't.
Riders commuting from downtown DC to Crystal City would be going against the prevailing flow into the city. Plenty of room on those trains in the morning.
Riders in MD would have a hard time, but a person would have to be pretty dumb to move to MD for a job in Crystal City.
Because Metro's reputation suffered when operations couldn't keep up with rising ridership. What will prevent Metro's operations from suffering again when an influx of Amazon employees stresses the system again? Would it be better if those workers got onto the already-jammed freeways?
> against the prevailing flow
Only if they board the trains between the downtown core and Crystal City. Odds are, if they're boarding from the northwest or from newly gentrified neighborhoods, they need to pass through the downtown core to get to Crystal City, which puts them on the same trains as people commuting in from the suburbs. They may get on pretty close to where the suburban commuters get off, but there's still an overlap. Not to mention the overcrowding on the downtown core platforms themselves. Keep in mind as well that Crystal City-bound trains from the downtown core stop at the Pentagon first, which has its own non-negligible share of commuters - those trains may not be full, but they sure aren't empty.
Found the guy who doesn't live in or around DC...
Running mate Zuckerberg?
Zuckerberg might want to, but he's universally despised on both sides of American politics, so no chance there.
(Not to mention that VP picks are normally used to broaden the ticket's appeal, not double down on it...)
If this area is to become the next Seattle, I have no interest in being here.
> [T]he best way to make it is you collect as much data as you can, you immerse yourself in that data, but then [throw all that data away and decide based on personal whim]
Putting intuition at the end of the decision making process is a pretty solid way to screw the entire thing up.
i.e. the process is for selecting out of the final 20, that have been fully vetted and feasibility established.
Or for deciding among three finalist engineers who’ve passed all interviews and tests and you can only hire one.
Or schools or colleges or whatever.
Oregon gave Intel a 30 year property tax exemption, worth $2B, to establish their their HQ2 fabs near Hillsboro. Wouldn't be surprised if Amazon is asking for similar.
https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/index.ssf/2014/08/...
The closer they are to a big city, the better, because they can attract more talent from the people already living close by.
[1] https://www.geekwire.com/2018/seattle-traffic-congestion-nin...
It's bad everywhere but DC has a weird love of choke points and funnels and abrupt 70 degree turns with no shoulders or overflow or spillover.
I wish they had considered more cities like Cincinnati, Nashville, or Cleveland. Those are actually fine places and they have low COL (although Nashville’s is getting up there). Plenty of other cities in the US also fit that profile. Even though I’ve heard bad things about working for Amazon and wouldn’t work for them in Seattle or DC, I would seriously consider taking an Amazon SDE salary somewhere that salary could go very far
That, in turn, requires the presumption that a lot of software developers want to live near DC.
Which raises costs for everyone and the "location adjustment" is usually less than what is really needed.
I was expecting it to be a bit further out, like Chantilly/Ashburn/Manassas. Close enough to serve the function but far enough out costs for employees/real estate is lower.
Even with all that it’s one of the better transit systems in the US. Not as good as Chicago or NY, but for the size of city it’s good.
Public transit to Crystal City is about as good as it gets. Which is good, because the road traffic sucks.
The downside is one of the subway lines only runs every 13 minutes during rush hour. And that cannot be increased without decreasing runs on other lines (because they share a tunnel). Maybe Amazon will convince the governments to run more on that line (and take it away from the other lines).
edit: Forgot to mention that airport access is probably the best place in the entire country. You could basically walk to national airport.
In any event it's generally minimally acceptable at best. Dumping a ton of people onto it will not help matters.
[1] https://www.aboutlawsuits.com/dc-metro-crash-lawsuit-filed-4... [2] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/washington-d-c-s-metro-...
I ride Metro every week day (bus + train) and look: I'm still alive! And on time almost every day. I much prefer it to driving.
Let's go ask Seattlites what they think about Amazon.
Growth has killed plenty of communities, or made them not worth living in anymore. Just ask San Francisco.
Northern VA is the poster child of what happens when you have tons of growth over decades, but absolutely no planning, or worse, lots of nimby preventing infrastructure.
Could easily say that about SF, LA, Austin, etc.
I'm of the opinion that every urban planner from the last fifty years in the US should be stripped of their degrees and titles their lands taken and their crops burned.
The US transportation infrastructure even for how good it is compared to some other places is still a joke.
Every other city in America that grew post wwII would have just built strip malls and single-family homes.
There are new high rises going up in Crystal city even as rents stagnated. Can't be too much nimby stuff going on.
Compared to say, silicon valley, they did a good job.
Loudon County did a bad job. Fairfax did a mixed job. They definitely grew in some places--like Tysons, but other parts have just grown without planning.
[1] http://missingmiddlehousing.com/
The article sounds very speculative. I don't know anything about this place, but if it's expensive like people here say it is, then I don't see the point of Amazon moving there. I think a place like downtown Chicago would make more sense. (if only the winter was not as cold and better public schools...)
The city recently approved 18 new skyscrapers for downtown, including 12 for the proposed Amazon site, with an included professional soccer stadium.[2]
[1] https://www.chicagoarchitecture.org/2018/03/26/river-distric...
[2] https://www.chicagoarchitecture.org/2018/10/18/you-get-a-sky...
They could remodernize Detroit in a massively good way.
Leave us alone, the blue line is still broken.
However I don't see Amazon and Chicago being a good match, culturally, if that makes sense, nor do I think there are compelling strategic reasons for basing this location there.
*edit: Based on snowwrestler's comment it sounds like Crystal City has seem some large occupants move out, so real estate prices may be trending down. However it's still a fair premium to pay to be next to the airport, compared to farther out (where you also have a high concentration of software developers.)
DC never made sense to me. The other defense contractors manage to not have HQs in DC.
I think this story is exactly what they'd leak if they were trying to buy real estate somewhere else.
Why would Amazon need a single (longer) hop to Asia, when it can already get there from Seattle?
Going to DC/VA gives it better access to EMEA.
And the thought is that at some point there's going to be two Internets, US and China. There's a pretty good chance that China is going to run Africa's Internet access. Europe has been a also ran against the US as far as the Internet is concerned, and the Middle East is projected to lose their economic momentum in the coming decades.
https://nypost.com/2018/09/20/former-google-ceo-predicts-two...
The main advantage you get from geographical proximity is the fact that you can build closer networking opportunities to other businesses and entities in the area. (A secondary advantage is timezone alignment). Denver's not exactly close to any other major cities; by contrast, it's only a half day of travel between Chicago and the Northeast, and it's even possible to commute between NYC and Boston or DC for a day.
For siting a second major HQ, Denver is just too close to Seattle. You don't get the benefits of having people 3 hours ahead (and more aligned with Europe, for example). The marginal costs of extra travel time to Asia from the east coast versus the west coast just aren't going to be a major factor in determining whether or not travel can happen--your employees have already lost a day or two of travel. Move the site to the east coast, and now you can open up more travel opportunities because it's only a half-day (or less!) of travel.
http://www.flyreagan.com/dca/dca-reagan-national-slot-perime...
Similar to how in New York, LaGuardia was supposed to be for domestic flights, Kennedy for international flights, and Newark for freight. But that didn't fully work out. (Same source.)
Personally, I use DCA whenever I can. It usually takes me about fifteen minutes from car to gate. Dulles takes ages and ages, since everything is so far away.
A lot of the rules are just trying to get people to use that big expensive airport more.
The rule still exists because local jurisdictions really really want to keep it, and getting rid of it is just not worth the fight for anyone else.
It's always been the case that DCA has a limited number of long haul flights.
It's nice to be able to WMATA to the airport but IAD is a short Uber away from Crystal City.
Is that the official estimate? If so I'd double it :)
Sure AWS needs a sales office in the region. And a datacenter. And a lobbying shop too. Pretty sure they got all that covered already.
If you're going to place executives in the area, then their underlings need to be there too, and so on. Putting your HQ where your executives need to be makes sense.
This is why all sales people are called "executives" and why all executives spend a large fraction of their time on sales.
Plus when trying to make a sale or negotiate a deal I'm sure it makes people on the other side feel better if someone says "And the people to support you or jump when you say how high are going to be 5 minutes away rather than 2 timezones away." It's almost at the point where subcontracting out is similar to just having all the work done in the same building you're already in. Seems like that would make people feel more comfortable.
Are you more likely to award contracts to AWS if you work at the DoD knowing that in two years you can move over and suddenly quintuple your salary?
If anyone in the consulting field is paying attention - right about now is almost too late to begin going out and lining up a bunch of clearance techies who can be on your secure GovCloud consulting team to provide all the services that the DoD will be needing.
Edit: The strategy you outline re: government employees is already employed by all of the large government consulting firms. Amazon is late to the game and behind the ball with their lack of awarded contracts. They might be able to catch up, but contracting is one field that has repeatedly shown itself to be resistant to disruption.
There are generations of future government employees that haven't even graduated high school yet. Amazon is not dumb. Bezos has never played the short game.
The Federal government pays incredibly well, but has few technology workers. They instead primarily act as managers for embedded contractors, who themselves are paid far above average for a given role.
Additionally, AWS already has a DoD presence.
Source: Lived in DC area for 8 years, worked on numerous federal contracts, witnessed highly overpaid, lazy shitbags who were so incompetent that government shutdowns forcing them to stay home sped up work on contracts.
Amazes me how the "government workers are underpaid" meme is so strong in people who haven't spent time in DC area.
I grew up in an impoverished rural part of Virginia 6 hours from DC. Going home and seeing my hard working relatives scrape by and do without after paying taxes, then going back to DC and seeing people who arrived at work at 9, left at 3:30, and yapped half the day made me transform from Leslie Knope to Ron Swanson.
I always tell people this:
The US political parties have it wrong. One thinks gov't is always bad and shouldn't exist. The other thinks it is fine, but just needs more money.
The reality is that it is a broken organization that used to be amazing, but has rotted, and the last thing it needs is more money. It needs to be radically reformed and reinvented. End rant.
Maybe they pay the people in question too much for their skills, motivation, or work product, but that is not "incredibly well" for a software developer in the USA. DC isn't that cheap, though certainly not like SF. If you are a good developer who doesn't show up at 9 and leave at 3:30 and don't want to, who can make it to a decent pay band at a FAANG, or have a specialization that demands high income, I just don't see how the government could be a good choice economically.
Obviously that doesn't look quite as good right now (pretty much only for the software engineering field), but during the next recession? Best deal in the world. Heck, you even get free holidays every now and then during government shutdowns. (The employees have always been back paid for these if I recall correctly -- maybe there was one time they weren't? Very rare.)
Cry me a river. Federal jobs have downsides, but this isn't one of them.
My wife works for the feds and I'm in the private sector. I have a better retirement plan, better health benefits (she is on my plan, not vice versa), more paid vacation per year, more flexible work schedule, and more holidays (I get the day after Thanksgiving, she does not). Oh, and I get paid more.
That's absolutely not true. Or rather, while it's a cap on basic pay, many Feds in technical roles make more than that after retention incentives.
Norway is actually doing this a rebuild of one agency. The Government's Road Agency has essentially been deigned ineffectual and FUBAR, so a new agency has been formed (New Roads) with responsibility for all new roads. The old agency has stopped replacing retirees (I think) and will eventually disappear. This is of course never said loudly in plain words. I just wish they would do the same for the railroads agency, which is a peerless shitshow.
When people are talking about this, they're usually talking about local government positions like teachers, librarians, and social workers. Or the post office. Very rarely are people talking about contractors or white collar bureaucrats.
""" it might be assumed that a former contracting officer representative could not be hired by the same company whose contract they oversaw as a federal employee. Even though seeking such employment while still in federal service would represent a prohibited conflict of interest, seeking and being hired after federal service ends would be allowed ... the rules would bar the employee from representing them, such as through a communication or appearance, before a federal employee regarding the specific contract he or she oversaw """ https://www.army.mil/article/194019/moving_to_private_sector...
Don't underestimate the power of the face-to-face meeting.
There's a reason that videoconferencing didn't kill the business class airfare.
Do not underestimate the power of locality. It is a big factor in marketing. Having face time with clients is the chief reason you win jobs.
for that reason a lot of the federal contractors are baked in and grown from Northern Virginia.
Don't underestimate how much of a difference-maker face-to-face is.
I've called and emailed people and the one thing that actually got things moving was just going to their dang office and seeing them in person. I don't think it matters how good the technology gets and how many VR-facetime conference call services develop, there's always going to be something irreplaceable about meeting in person. If there's not much of a significant difference on paper between you and the competition, it really does put you ahead of the competition if those meetings go well and the competition isn't doing it. Same for hosting dinners, etc.
I lived in Northern Virginia for 8 years.
It's got a mediocre quality of life compared to other tech centers, extremely high cost of living, horrific traffic, and has a talent pool that is inflated on paper due to the misaligned incentives of the Federal government workforce (Federal government workers are promoted and hired based on arbitrary checkmarks like Masters degree: yes/no, etc) which cause people to pursue worthless graduate degrees for pay bumps. This is why there are so many diploma mill type schools with campuses there. Add in the incredible over-staffing of Federal projects (both gov't and contractor) and you get incredibly mediocre talent where a "full stack web developer" produces very little over 3 years and has an atrophied skill set. Forced me to hire based on side projects and active Github projects to weed out the huge amount of mediocrity.
Bezos has political aspirations, and honestly, this makes sense from the perspective of already having massive data center presence there. He will now have large numbers of employees added to both Maryland and Virginia, giving him much more influence with Congress since congressman in general kiss the ass of large employers in their districts.
Hopefully, he could have some positive influences on the Federal gov't, by having a contracting wing from Amazon that would help fix the awful, bloated, IBM-like state of the Federal agencies. They used to do great things, but like IBM, they have calcified into jobs programs with dead-sea effect staffing.
If Amazon is putting their campus there you should buy everything you can.
This is not a cheap area by any means, but it’s far from the rarified heights of the more usual Big Tech areas.
I was looking at one bedroom condos in SF, but they’re around 850k to 900k for a small one.
He can literally get great onsite political influence with DC based HQ2.
Imagine having a large group of employees under you whose close friend or family member works in sensitive or influential federal jobs.
I also love the spot in assessments about the inflated pay, degree mills, etc.
That aside, it's easy enough for the government to fix the housing problem. They're just too invested in keeping prices high to want that.
A base pay of 72k would be ~82k w/ locality (Rest of US) vs ~92k (DC).
There are technologies that exist that allow more than a handful of people to live on a given unit of land.
Some people think that Chinese investment in real estate is also to blame but I’ve never seen any data that actually suggests that. Still, Seattle won’t pass rules to prevent speculation on property because at the end of the day, voters just want their property values to keep going up more than they want to live in a livable city for everyone
Okay, I'll admit it. I just REALLY want to see streams of flying killbots emanating from my home town. The Robot Uprising is coming, people, and I'm hoping early allegiance leads to a nicer brain vat in their biocomputer.
Seriously, though, I would have thought Atlanta, Chicago, and Boston, in that order, would be better. Bi-coastal or geographic center make logistical sense. ATL and BOS have excellent tech resources, but maybe a bit too much competition for talent in BOS. ATL gives a presence in "The South", so could serve as a political/cultural foothold without any major compromises. ATL proved it can easily support a tech boom during the y2k bubble. BOS serves as a great gateway to Europe. CHI is really hungering for more tech influence and would probably bend over backwards to be accommodating. Plus, the most likely site in CHI is actually a great location for anyone that likes an urban setting, not just millennials. Amazon is one of the few tech companies that I think CHI could embrace because it has a strong influence on financial markets and doesn't feel as 'magical' as many tech companies (where it's hard for everyday people to understand what they do). And Chicagoans can be fiercely loyal, even to companies. Case in point - The Sears Tower. The only time you hear "Willis Tower" is on the news. And there are a couple dozen other cases of locals refusing to rebrand stuff simply because ownership or naming rights changed.
Being by DC isn't a BAD location, but it seems like it would be better to have a strong satellite location that can be expanded as needed. I would assume the atmosphere there is more restricted for some of their more ambitious projects involving lots of sensors and physical presence. Every location will have red tape, but it seems like there DC would be ordering it in bulk.
I dunno, just rambling.
That pretty much cut out any second-tier city from the running. When Montgomery County, DC, and Northern VA were all announced as finalists, it ought to have been pretty clear that Amazon was focused on the DC area. Crystal City itself is basically the description of what you're looking for in that list I gave. Atlanta doesn't really have anything when you take out the airport (which is lousily situated anyways). I suspect Chicago, NYC, and Toronto all have too much focus on other industries (and, besides, Illinois is basically broke, so a sweetheart tax deal needs to be discounted on the basis that Illinois could need to find the cash quickly).
Chicago and its mayor worry too much about being a "world class" city. You know what world class cities don't worry about? Whether they're a world class city or not.
This is also the epitome of infotainment something that in the end won't even matter unless it actually happens other than to discuss the 'inside baseball' of the entire event.
How sure is anyone of this? Sure enough to go and snap up real estate (say residential) knowing that if it is correct that real estate will inflate in value well over whatever it is right now (already inflated).
Also I still am not seeing the advantage to Amazon (as long as everyone is speculating) of going into such a dense and expensive area to begin with. Jeff is all about efficiency and paying as little as possible. What possible advantage does he have but located in such an expensive area that is sure to get even more expensive.
HQ2 needs to be somewhere that people want to live, with the room for lots of them.
I really was hoping HQ2 would go somewhere more conservative politically. There's plenty of people who would work for Amazon but aren't really excited by Seattle (I'm not one of them, but I know some).
Detroit specifically would have been perfect- low cost of living, lots of space to grow, great airport, lots of robotic/mechanical industry leaking from the failing car industry, plus UofM nearby. I don't know how they didn't make the finalists.
>Detroit specifically would have been perfect...
???
Detroit? Conservative?
total guess, I have nothing to back this up
https://ggwash.org/view/31563/ceos-want-faster-commutes-for-...