Amazon HQ2: The Winnowing
January 18, 2018 6:51 AM   Subscribe

In an announcement made today, Amazon Chooses 20 Finalists for Second Headquarters.

Amazon's announcement page

From the NYT article above by Nick Wingfield:
Amazon’s Top 20

Here are the 20 locations chosen by Amazon as the finalists for its second headquarters.

Atlanta
Austin, Tex.
Boston
Chicago
Columbus, Ohio
Dallas
Denver
Indianapolis
Los Angeles
Miami
Montgomery County, Md.
Nashville
Newark
New York
Northern Virginia
Philadelphia
Pittsburgh
Raleigh, N.C.
Toronto, Canada
Washington, D.C.
posted by ZeusHumms (179 comments total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
Oh bummer! Calgary was very hopeful.
posted by Calzephyr at 6:53 AM on January 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


I'm guessing either Toronto or somewhere in the D.C. area. My long-shot pick is Pittsburgh.

This is a weird game, isn't it?
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:56 AM on January 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


Oh please do not come to NYC. We have enough problems without handing out a gazillion dollars and land to Jeff Bezos.
posted by Ampersand692 at 6:56 AM on January 18, 2018 [16 favorites]


The announcement page has a map which makes it clear how close some of the final candidates are to each other.
posted by ZeusHumms at 6:59 AM on January 18, 2018


There were also more serious offers, including a commitment of up to $7 billion in tax incentives by New Jersey to bring Amazon to Newark. Officials in Chicago offered Amazon tax credits that would allow it to keep about $1.32 billion in income taxes that employees would ordinarily pay to the state, according to a report by The Chicago Reader.
I didn't think we had a method to make things worse for a city than bringing the Olympics there but welp
posted by griphus at 7:00 AM on January 18, 2018 [46 favorites]


As a person who lives in the Boston metropolitan area, I wholeheartedly endorse Atlanta as the final choice.
posted by briank at 7:00 AM on January 18, 2018 [42 favorites]


I find it interesting that three parts of the DC metropolitan area are listed separately -- the city of Washington, Montgomery County and Northern Virginia.

It makes me think that the DC area is a strong contender since they're giving themselves a lot of leeway for an exact location (particularly because of the all-encompassing "Northern Virginia" which could include Arlington, Alexandria, Fairfax city and county etc.). About the only major part of the region that isn't included there is Prince George's County, which incidentally is the wealthiest black-majority county in the country.
posted by andrewesque at 7:00 AM on January 18, 2018 [10 favorites]


Wow, I'm not shocked that they're seriously considering the DC metro area, but I am surprised that three separate bids from the area (Northern VA, DC proper, and Montgomery County) were all selected as finalists. Sadly, not surprised they didn't submit a regional bid.

Also, not looking forward to more local funds here being used to further these bids. I'm already unhappy that as much money was spent on it as it was. I hope we don't get it. We don't need yet another contributor to rising housing costs, higher traffic/commute times, and widening the economic divide.
posted by bowtiesarecool at 7:01 AM on January 18, 2018 [11 favorites]


Watching mayors and governors debase themselves in this race to the bottom is quite the microcosm of late-capitalist democracy.
posted by tobascodagama at 7:01 AM on January 18, 2018 [51 favorites]


Newark.

Amazon owns Audible, which already has their headquarters there. It's close enough to NYC that commuting is feasible, though the state of the train tunnels......
posted by SansPoint at 7:02 AM on January 18, 2018 [6 favorites]


We're not on the list! We're not on the list! I had a terrible anxiety that we'd get them here and Minneapolis is not on the list!

(We are hosting the Superbowl, and the giant abusive anti-resident clusterfuck that has ensued has given me an additional dread of the types of things that would be needed to bring another big corporation here.)

I'm sorry for all of the rest of you all, but we're not on the list!!!!
posted by Frowner at 7:03 AM on January 18, 2018 [30 favorites]


This is a weird game, isn't it?

I can't decide if it's a game show, beauty pageant, or reality TV.
posted by ZeusHumms at 7:09 AM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


Does it count as a list of "finalists" if it's more or less just a list of half the major metro areas in the continental US? This doesn't narrow anything down for anybody.
posted by Strange Interlude at 7:10 AM on January 18, 2018 [12 favorites]


I can't decide if it's a game show, beauty pageant, or reality TV.

The Hunger Games
posted by m@f at 7:13 AM on January 18, 2018 [5 favorites]


I didn't think we had a method to make things worse for a city than bringing the Olympics there but welp

I get that Amazon and their shitty work culture doesn't play favorably around here but to say that HQ would be "bad for a city" in the same way that a giant rotting Olympics complex would be bad for a city seems like a super inaccurate false equivalency.
posted by windbox at 7:14 AM on January 18, 2018 [3 favorites]


Well, Indy is on the list, I see. That makes some sense, given that there are, I believe, five Amazon distribution centers in Indiana. But, dammit, if Amazon plants this HQ in Indiana, it's only going to further reinforce the state government's dogma that throwing millions of dollars at corporations, while chopping-away at things like funding public schools, social safety-net functions, aid to anyone who isn't rich, etc. is a winning gameplan.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:15 AM on January 18, 2018 [5 favorites]


ArbitraryAndCapricious: This is a weird game, isn't it?

Yes, a strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:18 AM on January 18, 2018 [8 favorites]


AMZN has east-1 datacenter in NoVA, so would make some sense to put an HQ there. (east-2 is Ohio, which didn't make the cut).. But to quote Fireball: this is a list of Last Season's losers.
posted by k5.user at 7:18 AM on January 18, 2018


to say that HQ would be "bad for a city" in the same way that a giant rotting Olympics complex would be bad for a city seems like a super inaccurate false equivalency

There was something written recently (maybe posted here? I can't remember) arguing that the tax breaks cities offer to get companies to move there almost never end up benefiting the city. The increase in employment and other knock-on effects never come close to equaling the cost of the tax break.

I think Boston has shown some restraint in recent years, but GE's recent headquarters move to here makes me concerned about what the city would do to accommodate Amazon. They were talking about taking public transportation funds to build a helipad in the Seaport district for GE while the subway system is crumbling underground. Luckily that got squashed, but Amazon is arguably more powerful than GE in getting the city to do stuff for them, so who knows.

Meanwhile, GE touted all the jobs they were going to bring to the city with the HQ move and then announced a ton of layoffs not six months later.
posted by backseatpilot at 7:20 AM on January 18, 2018 [15 favorites]


Yay, we've got a 0.05 chance!
posted by octothorpe at 7:20 AM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


On the other hand, I get a perverse sense of glee watching local tech companies move their offices from Cambridge to Boston and back again as each city offers sweeter and sweeter deals to them.
posted by backseatpilot at 7:22 AM on January 18, 2018 [4 favorites]


Eventually one of these companies will put their "HQ2" in Chicago (Apple just announced one too) -- Illinois graduates the second most computer science grads, and while Chicago has a robust tech sector, it doesn't have a major industry player. Whoever comes first will get to sweep up all the talent that isn't willing to move to the coasts. And the cost of living and cost of business is relatively cheaper than a lot of other big cities.

(Although I'd rather this happen AFTER I buy a house so prices don't shoot up $50,000 in anticipation of all that tech money.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:24 AM on January 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


On the other hand, I get a perverse sense of glee watching local tech companies move their offices from Cambridge to Boston and back again as each city offers sweeter and sweeter deals to them.

Y'know...There's a sweet business plan buried in there. Start a corp. Promise hundreds of new jobs to the winning city. Collect tax breaks (or, even better, outright cash) Profit. "Open" the business. Announce a plan to move the business again. Profit. Repeat.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:27 AM on January 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


There was something written recently (maybe posted here? I can't remember) arguing that the tax breaks cities offer to get companies to move there almost never end up benefiting the city. The increase in employment and other knock-on effects never come close to equaling the cost of the tax break.

I can't find it to save my life, but when the GE deal first broke, I went and did the math on the tax break they were given vs. expected income tax revenues for the state (totally disregarding the financial hit the city would take on property taxes). GE only gave an aggregate number of jobs they'd be bringing with them, which presumably includes every level from CTO down to the guy emptying trash cans. Over the ten years of the deal, the AVERAGE pay for those few hundred jobs would have had to exceed $400K for the state to break even. (Spoiler: the state's not going to break even)
posted by Mayor West at 7:27 AM on January 18, 2018 [10 favorites]


Mayors cage match.
posted by fairmettle at 7:29 AM on January 18, 2018 [4 favorites]


Since they're relocating because they want to pay their people less, I have to guess they're going to pick somewhere that housing costs aren't insane. That means Midwest, South, or Texas (not including Austin).

Atlanta
Chicago
Columbus, Ohio
Dallas
Indianapolis
Nashville
Pittsburgh
Raleigh, N.C.

Since they also want some cultural amenities for their folks, that gives the advantage to big cities and cities that swing above their weight culturally. I can see Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, and maybe Nashville (thanks country music!) and Pittsburgh (thanks Carnegie!) making the next cut.
posted by leotrotsky at 7:30 AM on January 18, 2018 [5 favorites]


I wonder if Columbus sent Amazon a copy of Ready Player One as part of their packet.
posted by Atreides at 7:31 AM on January 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


Goooooooooooooooooooo Pittsburgh!
- Dallas resident
posted by orrnyereg at 7:32 AM on January 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


Also, not looking forward to more local funds here being used to further these bids. I'm already unhappy that as much money was spent on it as it was. I hope we don't get it. We don't need yet another contributor to rising housing costs, higher traffic/commute times, and widening the economic divide.
posted by bowtiesarecool at 10:01 AM on January 18 [2 favorites +] [!]


Yes yes yes hard agree with all of this. I really do not want Amazon here (I live in Montgomery County and work in DC). I think we will give them a lot of money that benefits them but not us and I think everything will get more expensive. It's like with sports teams where cities pay for their stadia to get them to come because it'll be good for the city or whatever but the more expensive the stadium you promise to build the less good for the city it is. In order to incentivize them sufficiently to provide you with their benefits you have to outweigh the benefits you get.

What I ACTUALLY think would be good for the city is using money to support people who need it and not to support tech giants who pay so little that the government has to subsidize their employees so they and their families don't die. If we offer literally no tax incentives or help of any sort and Amazon moves here then I guess that's fine, whatever, but I am so so angry at the idea of groveling for the chance to give a company worth billions of dollars money that could be helping people.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 7:35 AM on January 18, 2018 [6 favorites]


Ctrl-F Philadelphia

GODDAMMIT

Watching mayors and governors debase themselves in this race to the bottom is quite the microcosm of late-capitalist democracy.

I'm genuinely hoping that the fact that Philly's mayor isn't quite promising to, say, help them set up a(nother) offshore tax haven and also give them a million bajillion and six dollars and never ask them to pay taxes or rent or anything ever and also rename Independence Hall Amazon Hall will keep us from being the final choice.

Lord forbid we should obligate them to put some money into the local economy and facilitate education from a primary school level and ensure they hire a non-white person once in awhile.

(I haven't even started on my housing prices and lack of affordable housing rant yet!)
posted by kalimac at 7:35 AM on January 18, 2018 [6 favorites]


There is no way in hell they are moving to New York City. This makes me think the whole thing is some cruel PR stunt. Just as Jeff Bezos' $33 million donation to a scholarship fund seems like a big deal until you realize it's the equivalent of someone making $50K donating $30, this whole thing moves the framing of a preditory company taking advantage of tax breaks into some corporate noblesse oblige.
posted by gwint at 7:36 AM on January 18, 2018 [5 favorites]


Y'know...There's a sweet business plan buried in there. Start a corp. Promise hundreds of new jobs to the winning city. Collect tax breaks (or, even better, outright cash) Profit. "Open" the business. Announce a plan to move the business again. Profit. Repeat.

Something like this happened in Appomattox and they made off with $1.4 million in taxpayer money.
posted by Jacqueline at 7:36 AM on January 18, 2018 [4 favorites]


I figured it would be Raleigh, N.C. just because 1) East Coast and 2) it doesn't snow.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 7:38 AM on January 18, 2018


Please no Raleigh. Please no Raleigh. Shit. This state would sell its own children for business incentives.

> I figured it would be Raleigh, N.C. just because 1) East Coast and 2) it doesn't snow.

And Raleigh is currently covered in snow.
posted by a complicated history at 7:39 AM on January 18, 2018 [12 favorites]



to say that HQ would be "bad for a city" in the same way that a giant rotting Olympics complex would be bad for a city seems like a super inaccurate false equivalency


Long, long ago I actually wrote an article about the kinds of tax breaks that corporations get when they "offer" to move something to a city. I interviewed a MPLS city planner, a non-profit urban planner and a couple of other people, and they were unanimous in saying that Minneapolis, at least, never made back what they gave away. The city planner, IIRC, tied tax breaks to the gentrification of downtown and its general move away from independent businesses - something that was only getting started when I wrote the article but that has produced basically a garbage, useless downtown devoid of anything but big restaurants, Target, CVS and the kinds of bars that people to go after work but not for actual fun.

IMO, this type of thing is a combination of graft and blackmail - there's a huge opportunity for wealthy developers and other people with ties to the mayor's office, and that's the graft. There's the "if you don't give us a lot of money, we won't give you any jobs", and that's the blackmail. If mayors nationwide sat tight and said "go ahead, build your complex in the middle of nowheresville and then try to recruit, we won't give you anything", these big corporations would still seek out desirable places to build their HQs and so on, because you need to do that to recruit and retain and have access to the latest infrastructure, and it's also a matter of prestige. But because of the benefits to wealthy developers and politicians, the graft works. What happens is that they dish out our taxes, and the people who benefit are big corporations and rich locals.

My other objections:

1. Rents go up when you get lots more professional-class people. Working people get driven out.
2. Priorities skew toward the rich - I wish I could find this article which I think was on Strong Towns, about how what tends to happen is that rich people push for things like private cars over public transit, fancy grocery stores and luxury facilities and then think that cities are bad or useless if they provide things that benefit the majority rather than the rich. Rich people think a city is doing the right thing if it provides the facilities which benefit perhaps 10% of the population, and use their disproportionate power to get those things while everyone else can just go hang.
3. Homeless people and marginal people get abused and displaced both as part of the audition process and as part of the "clean-up" for the new company. This has happened in Minneapolis for the stadium and now for the superbowl.
4. Market distortion, job distortion. I don't want too big a chunk of city jobs and so on to hinge on one corporation, because that corporation gets too much clout and there's too much risk.
posted by Frowner at 7:41 AM on January 18, 2018 [27 favorites]


>> I figured it would be Raleigh, N.C. just because 1) East Coast and 2) it doesn't snow.

>And Raleigh is currently covered in snow.


This is making me LOL. My house being full of kids on a snow day (also yesterday and more than likely again tomorrow) while I'm trying to get work done is not making me LOL
posted by NoMich at 7:42 AM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


How about some rural area where they could really use the money??
posted by Melismata at 7:53 AM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


Thrilled that Richmond, VA didn't make the cut.

Discovery just announced that they are abandoning their HQ in Montgomery County MD. I wonder if Amazon is targeting the Discovery Building?
posted by COD at 7:54 AM on January 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


thank god odds are this grift won't land in my state

my condolences to the winner
posted by entropicamericana at 7:55 AM on January 18, 2018 [3 favorites]


Melismata: "How about some rural area where they could really use the money??"

You can't really hire tech people in rural areas. Or even suburbs these days. Here in Pittsburgh almost all of the tech companies are right in the city because it's too hard to recruit engineers to work in the suburbs.
posted by octothorpe at 7:57 AM on January 18, 2018 [3 favorites]


Martin Austermuhle - former EIC of dcist - did some digging via open records request into DC's bid.
posted by everybody had matching towels at 8:00 AM on January 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


You can tell why Republican policies are so popular by reading these threads:

New residents are bad. My city is full. (I still get to live here)
New jobs are bad. (my current job is fine)
Higher home prices are bad (unless I get in first)
Cities are giving away taxes and don't spend them properly, but they shouldn't be higher (due to new housing or new residents)
The businesses that are currently here (the ones I like) are the correct ones and new ones are wrong.
Tax deductions are bad (how dare they get rid of my SALT deductions!)

I wish I could find this article which I think was on Strong Towns, about how what tends to happen is that rich people push for things like private cars over public transit, Strong Towns regularly equates mass transit in major US cities to highway expansions, and advocates against both. They had an article earlier this year stating that the Federal Government should spend $0 on mass transit.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:05 AM on January 18, 2018 [13 favorites]


As a person who lives in the Boston metropolitan area, I wholeheartedly endorse Atlanta as the final choice.

As a Georgian, I must insist that Boston take precedence. It would simply be rude for us to take this opportunity away from y’all.
posted by TedW at 8:05 AM on January 18, 2018 [9 favorites]


Goooooooooooooooooooo Pittsburgh!
- Dallas resident


This illustrates my point exactly! Dallas is full? WTF? The city that can't afford its police, its roads, and has houses priced at less than $100k less than 5 miles from downtown.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:08 AM on January 18, 2018


My company recently HQ3d to Raleigh. Apparently it's the new hotness. The company found it was difficult to hire talent in it's ancestral Homeland which at one time was an industry hub until everything went electronic.

The thing they leaned was that it was a great way to reduce the number of older employees who would rather take severance than move their family or uproot from *their* cultural homeland. I am sure this resulted in cost savings.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 8:08 AM on January 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


AMZN has east-1 datacenter in NoVA

Locating HQ2 so close to their biggest data-center (and pretty much the center of the internet from many perspectives) would be a fairly bad move. If there's a natural or man-made disaster that affects NoVA, they would want the engineers who can mitigate, reroute and fix the outages to be a safe distance away. Obviously, there are engineers at HQ1 still in Seattle who could fix, but it still seems risky to dump HQ2 so close to Ashburn.
posted by rh at 8:08 AM on January 18, 2018


True, octothorpe, but that's awfully messed up.
posted by Melismata at 8:10 AM on January 18, 2018


Strong Towns regularly equates mass transit in major US cities to highway expansions, and advocates against both. They had an article earlier this year stating that the Federal Government should spend $0 on mass transit.

Then it wasn't Strong Towns, and that's probably why I couldn't find it by googling "strong towns"!
posted by Frowner at 8:11 AM on January 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


And how will getting HQ2 help Dallas with its financial problems when Amazon will be getting a ton of tax breaks? No revenue for the city + massively increased traffic/stress on already rundown infrastructure = nirvana? What are you smoking?

FWIW, I have no problem with taxes and think Texas needs a state income tax. And I rent, and have no hope of ever buying a house here.

has houses priced at less than $100k less than 5 miles from downtown
Gonna need you to show your work here. I live 3 miles from downtown. There's a 1920s bungalow 1 block away from me whose asking price is $450K. THAT'S what the market is like.
posted by orrnyereg at 8:12 AM on January 18, 2018 [3 favorites]


You can tell why Republican policies are so popular by reading these threads:

New residents are bad. My city is full. (I still get to live here)
New jobs are bad. (my current job is fine)
Higher home prices are bad (unless I get in first)
Cities are giving away taxes and don't spend them properly, but they shouldn't be higher (due to new housing or new residents)
The businesses that are currently here (the ones I like) are the correct ones and new ones are wrong.
Tax deductions are bad (how dare they get rid of my SALT deductions!)


Oh fucking please, this is disingenuous garbage nonsense.

-I do not think new residents are bad and I do not think my city is full. I think that paying a corporation that doesn't need the money is bad and it will not help either new residents or existing residents.

-I do not think new jobs are bad. I think that when the price of those jobs is higher than the money brought in them, and when you are paying that money to a corporation and not citizens, that is bad.

-I do think higher home prices are bad? In fact I own a house (I mean, LBR I own 20% of a house and the bank owns the rest) and I don't want prices to go up because it means that even if I can sell my house for more money it'll cost me more to buy another one and I need somewhere to live. Everyone needs somewhere to live and I'm against that costing a lot.

-Are people saying taxes shouldn't be higher? Also, cities giving away taxes, literally just giving them away to rich companies, IS DUMB AND BAD. When you spend them on services for citizens you are getting something, specifically services for citizens. When you give them to Amazon all you are getting is Amazon having more money which I do not care about one bit. Also, like, yeah, I think we should reconfigure our spending priorities but that doesn't mean I think we should just throw away the money. I also think that if we get new residents but the taxes they pay are less than we are giving to Amazon we're not gathering more tax revenue (which I think is what you mean here?)

-This is just nonsense. The businesses that are currently here that I like are "correct"? What the hell are you talking about? I think Amazon is bad because it underpays workers. I don't think we should give them more money. Some businesses are good and some are bad but like what the fuck even is this.

-Tax deductions are a way to incentivize behavior or make things easier or harder for people. I don't think all tax deductions are bad and I definitely don't think they're all good.

This is a terrible comment with no nuance and I have no idea how you decided that people objecting to giving money to a big company is support for Republican policies. What absolute effing nonsense.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 8:15 AM on January 18, 2018 [57 favorites]


Goooooooooooooooooooo Pittsburgh!
- Dallas resident
This illustrates my point exactly! Dallas is full? WTF?
You seem to be inferring an argument that was never made. "Full" is not something anyone has said, and certainly not in the comment you quote. Your other comment is similarly rather relaxed about interpretation of other people's comments.

It's probably going to be more useful to confine your objections to points that people other than yourself are actually making.
posted by howfar at 8:16 AM on January 18, 2018 [4 favorites]


I left Columbus, Ohio a couple of years ago and the writing was on the wall. I am fully expecting Amazon to pick them. The number of on-trend "luxury" apartment buildings put up there in the last 5 years is really astounding, and I was asking everybody I met "Who is going to live here?" They were playing the long game -- Amazon employees are going to live there.

I went to Seattle a few years ago and I was struck by how much it reminded me of Columbus. The "winner" will be Columbus, and I'll be even happier I left.
posted by dbx at 8:22 AM on January 18, 2018 [3 favorites]


1) For the love of Christ, why is everything a reality TV show now.

2) Jesus fuck three "Finalist" bids in the DC area, kill me. This place already has, if not the largest concentration of wealth in the country, then at least top-three, thanks to the sheer number of businesses and offices that must be located in or close to the capitol. It's the last place that needs an economic boost. And it also has the worst traffic in the country, which surely would not be exacerbated by an Amazon HQ.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 8:24 AM on January 18, 2018 [13 favorites]


Thrilled that Richmond, VA didn't make the cut.

Yeah, but if it lands in NoVA that might be the critical mass needed for us to assimilate you as an exurb.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 8:26 AM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


Minneapolis, for instance needs people to move here to sustain growth. If rents are twenty gazillion dollars and no one can buy unless they are making over $100,000 a year, we are not going to attract anyone but bankers and tech people, so we won't have, eg, teachers and cleaners and cooks, or else the teachers and cleaners and cooks will be even more immiserated because they will have to pay most of their income in rent or deal with three hours a day of driving for a commute, or eventually both, like in California.

One of the reasons Minneapolis has a relatively good economy is that we have a relatively large amount of mid-level jobs due to the colleges and the university and the medical device corridor. It's still hard if you're not making much money, but "not much money" in higher-rent tech HQ cities is, like, "less than $100,000" where here it's more like "less than $25,000".
posted by Frowner at 8:26 AM on January 18, 2018 [8 favorites]


How about some rural area where they could really use the money??
You can't set up your headquarters in a rural area, because there isn't a critical mass of people to staff it. If you can attract the right people, many of whom have specialized skills, then the area will cease to be rural, which creates its own problems. And while I am all for smallish cities (like the one in which I live) having more tech employers, I think it's way better to have a lot of small and medium-sized tech employers, rather than to be dependent on one big company that can pull out and destroy your economy.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 8:27 AM on January 18, 2018 [6 favorites]


I am surprised that three separate bids from the area (Northern VA, DC proper, and Montgomery County) were all selected as finalists.

It's not that surprising considering those are three separate jurisdictions and selecting them all as "finalists" gives them all an incentive to outdo each other to offer Amazon the most generous tax break package.
posted by ultraviolet catastrophe at 8:27 AM on January 18, 2018 [3 favorites]


And it also has the worst traffic in the country, which surely would not be exacerbated by an Amazon HQ.

I feel like if a big business like this came into a city and actually helped, everyone would feel differently. If Amazon said "we're showing up and, to show our commitment to the city and as a token of goodwill (and, incidentally, to help our employees) we will give WMATA a bunch of money which will ameliorate some of the issues with us coming here and fucking up traffic" I'd be cautiously optimistic. I wouldn't trust them because big companies lie a lot and do a lot of bad things but I'd be willing to have my mind changed. Instead, WE are expected to give THEM money! The Metro catches on fire a lot, we have fights about funding it and can't afford maintenance, it's possibly in a death spiral, and we're giving Amazon money to make traffic worse? It's madness!
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 8:29 AM on January 18, 2018 [18 favorites]


Tax deductions are bad (how dare they get rid of my SALT deductions!)

To be clear, these are not "tax deductions." These localities are cutting a deal with Amazon saying if the company chooses to build its headquarters there it will get a special exemption from property taxes, wage taxes, etc. that other companies don't get.
posted by ultraviolet catastrophe at 8:32 AM on January 18, 2018 [5 favorites]


I am hoping that Pittsburgh doesn't "win" this. I'm not quite a member of the "Keep Pittsburgh Shitty" brigade but I really don't want us to turn into an Appalachian Seattle. I was in Seattle ten years ago and really didn't like it at all; everything there looked like it had been built in the last five years and the 21st century isn't really a great time for architecture. From what I understand, it's gotten even worse there in the last decade.
posted by octothorpe at 8:32 AM on January 18, 2018 [4 favorites]


Pardon me while I set up a straw man to knock down.

See, Metafilter is just like Republicans!
posted by tobascodagama at 8:33 AM on January 18, 2018 [10 favorites]


You can tell why Republican policies are so popular by reading these threads:

i don't think public entities should be subsidizing the business of the richest man alive. crazy, i know.
posted by entropicamericana at 8:38 AM on January 18, 2018 [28 favorites]


Announce a plan to move the business again. Profit. Repeat.
That is exactly what is happening in Kansas City, Mo and Kansas City, KS.
posted by soelo at 8:42 AM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


I left Columbus, Ohio a couple of years ago and the writing was on the wall. I am fully expecting Amazon to pick them. The number of on-trend "luxury" apartment buildings put up there in the last 5 years is really astounding, and I was asking everybody I met "Who is going to live here?"

So it’s just like all the other cities on the list?
posted by Sys Rq at 8:58 AM on January 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


Pretty sure this list is about what you'd come up with if you had an hour-long meeting at HQ1 and asked them to come up with their top 20 picks for HQ2, without the rigmarole of having the "competition" between the cities.

Of course then you'd miss the chance to make the cities abase themselves and compete to throw money at you, so.
posted by katemonster at 9:00 AM on January 18, 2018 [10 favorites]


If Amazon said "we're showing up and, to show our commitment to the city and as a token of goodwill (and, incidentally, to help our employees) we will give WMATA a bunch of money which will ameliorate some of the issues with us coming here and fucking up traffic" I'd be cautiously optimistic. I wouldn't trust them because big companies lie a lot and do a lot of bad things but I'd be willing to have my mind changed

This isn't unprecedented. Boston just opened its first commuter rail station in decades, up in a part of town that's criminally underserved by public transit. The impetus? New Balance was building their corporate HQ, and wanted to be able to recruit in the city, and decided it was worth the infrastructure costs to work with the city to build a train station. This is a common model in southeast Asia; you get corporate-branded subway stops, sure, but we already have corporate branding on every flat surface on the MBTA and it's still crumbling to shit. Go ahead and name the new Blue Line Extension "The Amazon Line", IDGAF, just so long as it gets built and provides public transit accessibility to Southie or whatever.

Instead, we get these horrible races to the bottom where cities bend to the will of capital, rather than using their own political muscle to get concessions out of companies who actually need the land more than the city needs a big corporate citizen. (Like someone said upthread, good luck recruiting those precious 22-year-old MIT grads when your headquarters is in Walpole instead of Fort Point)
posted by Mayor West at 9:00 AM on January 18, 2018 [9 favorites]


Since they're relocating because they want to pay their people less, I have to guess they're going to pick somewhere that housing costs aren't insane.

My thinking is that Toronto is in the running on pay-people-less grounds. Sure housing isn't cheap, but they wouldn't be paying for healthcare, which is a huge employer expense in the U.S.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 9:08 AM on January 18, 2018 [3 favorites]


So the wind last night was the entire city of Orlando heaving a great sigh of relief.
posted by Splunge at 9:11 AM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]




Also, Toronto is a much more stable and predictable environment for immigration. If you want to bring the world's tech workers to you, you're much better off not being in the US for the foreseeable future.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 9:13 AM on January 18, 2018 [11 favorites]


Maybe Amazon will settle in Canada. Reasons:

1) The sitting Canadian King doesn't have a personal hate-on for Mr. Bozos.

2) Canadian developers would love to spice things up by focusing on something other than programming IOT intelligent maples, automatic poutine, and in-app apologies.

3) Canada is committed to net neutrality, which means Amazon can have dominion over all without incurring extra fees.

4) I wouldn't have to wait so long to have my mukluks delivered.

5) Gorgeous weather 40% of the year!

6) Convenient access to snow deserts, taiga and open land in the event of the south turning too unruly. Canada's got the biggest bolthole for post-civilization parties with your friends and neighbours, with a low incidence of Mad Maxism.

7) Toronto is a very empty and sleepy place, and having a business building there would probably raise up the local economy from swap-meets to money.

8) Public racism is illegal, which may sweeten the relocation deal for those who may be white supremacy challenged.

9) Parental leave is real, which may sweeten the relocation deal for human beings who are reproducing.

10) Universal healthcare is refreshing, which may sweeten the relocation deal for human beings who are actively decaying or at war with something biological, or plan to be in the future.

11) In French, one doesn't fully pronounce the final "N" in Amazon, which is more efficient because there are fewer sounds. (Technically the "N" is pronounced, of course, but it's pronounced in a way most English people can't hear, so it's still a solid aural discount.)

12) If America suffers serious difficulties, it's good to know the flow of cheap international goods will continue with minimal interruption.

13) Cold things will be shipped colder. That's savings you can take to the bank.

14) More apologetic customer service.

15) Butter tarts.
posted by Construction Concern at 9:14 AM on January 18, 2018 [38 favorites]


I am not and have never claimed to be a logistics expert, but NYC just seems like a bad place to do this from Amazon's POV. Like wouldn't someplace that isn't a bunch of incredibly expensive and crowded islands be a better choice for this?

I wouldn't be at all surprised by Raleigh though. Their public transit sort of extremely sucks but everything else is on point, and I imagine Bezos would like to take credit for moving a bunch of young liberal techies into a swing state.
posted by showbiz_liz at 9:25 AM on January 18, 2018


Screw Amazon's dog and pony show.

Detroit had already given ungodly amounts of tax breaks and incentives to billionaires like the Ilitch family, Dan Gilbert and Tom Gores, enriching their already money lined pockets. Yet, they didn't learn. Detroit didn't make the cut, but the city and state government were more than willing to sell even more their souls to Jeff Bezos despite our crumbling infrastructure and numerous other issues.
posted by bawanaal at 9:29 AM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


Yeah, but if it lands in NoVA that might be the critical mass needed for us to assimilate you as an exurb.

Plase, god, no. I just moved here from Fredericksburg VA specifically get far enough away that nobody could consider me a resident of the DC area.
posted by COD at 9:30 AM on January 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


i don't think public entities should be subsidizing the business of the richest man alive. crazy, i know.

And in Chicago, it means Amazon's own employees paying taxes back to their employer instead of funding public programs. Yay for late stage capitalism!
posted by hexaflexagon at 9:30 AM on January 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


Isn’t this post kind of contributing to the gross over hype companies create around headquarter moves as an effort to solicit tax breaks and hand outs at taxpayer expense?
posted by cyphill at 9:32 AM on January 18, 2018


Yay! The Twin Cites isn’t on the list. Amazon already poaches enough people from here, and they’ve got a software development office in Minneapolis, so it seemed horrifyingly logical that they might consider it. Go wreck some other city.
posted by Autumnheart at 9:32 AM on January 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


If it lands anywhere in DC, move closer to your job. The roads are already the worst or second worst in the country. I cannot imagine what another 20,000 people plus support will do to the roads and metro.

Especially when they all decide that they just have to live in Loudon/Frederick and commute to Rockville/Tyson's Corner. (No I'm not bitter that route 200 and route 28 weren't brought to their logical conclusions at the Potomac or that express buses from 270 to 495 in VA are non-existent)
posted by Slackermagee at 9:36 AM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


And also, the reason I personally don’t want Amazon here is because they are famous for horrible work environments and for doing the whole Bruce Wayne “You can’t kick me out of the hotel because now I’m buying it” schtick, and I definitely don’t want that kind of attitude, or people who support it, coming here to poison the business culture for the rest of the metro.
posted by Autumnheart at 9:38 AM on January 18, 2018 [3 favorites]


To be clear, these are not "tax deductions." These localities are cutting a deal with Amazon saying if the company chooses to build its headquarters there it will get a special exemption from property taxes, wage taxes, etc. that other companies don't get.

It's the same thing. And somehow Toronto's bid didn't include subsidies, but they are in the list.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:51 AM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


You seem to be inferring an argument that was never made. "Full" is not something anyone has said, and certainly not in the comment you quote. Your other comment is similarly rather relaxed about interpretation of other people's comments.

It's probably going to be more useful to confine your objections to points that people other than yourself are actually making.


No I'm catching everyone' intent quite clearly. The intention of a Dallas resident cheering for Pittsburgh (explicitly stating they are a Dallas resident) is pretty obvious.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:58 AM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


The implication is not "Dallas is full" but "hosting an Amazon HQ would obviously cost any city more in subsidies than it would receive from new residents and business, so I hope some other suckers 'win' the prize."

On the other hand, I will gladly declare that NoVA is full, and will remain so until the Pentagon relocates.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 10:00 AM on January 18, 2018 [5 favorites]


The implication is not "Dallas is full" but "hosting an Amazon HQ would obviously cost any city more in subsidies than it would receive from new residents and business, so I hope some other suckers 'win' the prize."

But that is completely false for a city like Dallas (and Boston which is not funded by state income tax but rather by property tax). Even in a sprawl city like Dallas 50,000 new employees represents like 15% of the existing downtown jobs population. They aren't building a Wal-Mart with 500 minimum wage employees.

There is also an implication that your city government isn't smart enough to do some basic math to determine what income is going to bring to the city and that it's all 'graft' and 'corruption'.
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:05 AM on January 18, 2018


They’re not paying for the huge drain they would put on Dallas’s infrastructure, either, which is paid for by property taxes too.
posted by Autumnheart at 10:09 AM on January 18, 2018


They’re not paying for the huge drain they would put on Dallas’s infrastructure, either, which is paid for by property taxes too.

Neither is anyone else in Dallas, hence why they *currently* can't pay for their police or roads.
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:10 AM on January 18, 2018


Vegetables, I am the Dallas resident whose mind you claim to be reading. Zarquon is correct, and you are talking utter rubbish.
posted by orrnyereg at 10:11 AM on January 18, 2018 [5 favorites]


There is also an implication that your city government isn't smart enough to do some basic math to determine what income is going to bring to the city and that it's all 'graft' and 'corruption'.

City and state governments regularly prove this exact point in how they bid for stadiums and the Olympics, so I'm not sure why I shouldn't believe it.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 10:11 AM on January 18, 2018 [10 favorites]


I wonder how much they are weighing the fact that OH and IN routinely race the "who can make more anti-gay, anti-woman state policies" track in terms of attracting women and LGBTQ tech workers. As a lesbian sort of dipping into techy analyst roles, Amazon could not pay me enough to move to fucking Indiana.

(Yes, I know a lot of cities in red states are quite liberal, but if the state govt keeps actively working to 'punish' them for that...)
posted by nakedmolerats at 10:13 AM on January 18, 2018 [8 favorites]


Exactly what Holy said.
posted by Autumnheart at 10:13 AM on January 18, 2018


Just six days ago on Metafilter: Jeff Bezos, Welfare King. "a good chunk of the jobs are so low-paying that workers have to seek federal assistance". I imagine these underpaying jobs strain the state's social safety net, too. Presumably the HQ2 folks will be paid a lot better than the folks packing orders. But still the vision of cities and states falling over each other offering tax incentives is a bit galling.
posted by Nelson at 10:14 AM on January 18, 2018 [6 favorites]


Especially when many of those same states are making huge cuts in their social safety net under the thin veneer of budget concerns. Like okay, you can pay $2B to let Amazon hang out for free, but you can’t buy lunch for poor school kids? Or provide health care access to poor women?
posted by Autumnheart at 10:17 AM on January 18, 2018 [7 favorites]


Between the exchange rate and lower local salaries in general, I think Toronto has a real shot even with offering any sort of major tax incentives. if each employee on what is sure to be a massive campus is making 50%-75% of what they would be making in a major US city it could easily be seen as a big bottom-line win for Bezos.
posted by thecjm at 10:18 AM on January 18, 2018


Brian Alexander, The Atlantic: The Problem With Courting Amazon

"When cities compete to attract big employers, the country as a whole suffers."
There are no doubt perks to being home to a huge, stable employer. But the way most cities pursue that goal—by offering to forfeit enormous amounts of tax revenues—produces outcomes that have worried many economists for years.

And while the competition that Amazon has put on is unique in its scale and fanfare, forgoing tax revenues is an all too popular way that cities try to attract even much smaller companies. In a 2012 series on incentives, The New York Times concluded that states, counties, and cities provide companies $80.4 billion per year through these arrangements. The practice of luring businesses with incentives such as tax breaks, grants, free land, and low-interest loans has become so ingrained it’s now a rote drill, complete with specialty consulting firms that help companies negotiate such giveaways.
posted by ZeusHumms at 10:20 AM on January 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


Like okay, you can pay $2B to let Amazon hang out for free, but you can’t buy lunch for poor school kids? Or provide health care access to poor women?

Like I've said before, if you do the math Wisconsin just basically signed up for a make-work UBI program.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 10:22 AM on January 18, 2018 [4 favorites]


somehow Toronto's bid didn't include subsidies, but they are in the list

It would be very un-Canadian to make your subsidies public. Why, then we'd have to reveal all of our side-deals!
posted by scruss at 10:25 AM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


From the Atlantic article:

And the mayor of Fresno, California (no longer in the running), told Amazon the company would pay taxes alright, but 85 percent of those taxes would be poured into an “Amazon Community Fund” that would be half-controlled by Amazon’s own executives. Several other cities’ proposals haven’t been made public.

So why exactly should these executives, not elected by locals and not accountable to them, have so much sway over so much semi-public money? How is that democratic? It's not, it's just oligarchy and kickbacks and fuck that.
posted by Frowner at 10:46 AM on January 18, 2018 [7 favorites]


Really, please don't come to Canada. Any such suggestion pains me. Amazon is a taint, whatever city it picks will create an inequity, advantageous for the corporation, not the community. No city should want to be picked by a capitalist parasite to host it.
posted by polymodus at 10:47 AM on January 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


Tax deductions are bad

lol this is one of the stupidest trolls i've ever seen on metafilter which is saying a lot.

YES, ACTUALLY, TAX DEDUCTIONS TO MULTIBILLION DOLLAR CORPORATIONS ARE BAD, exponentially so when they are at the expense of a city's infrastructure and well being.
posted by poffin boffin at 10:50 AM on January 18, 2018 [14 favorites]


Watching mayors and governors debase themselves in this race to the bottom is quite the microcosm of late-capitalist democracy.

the fun thing is the actual shortlist is probably somewhat shorter than this, since there's a bunch of obvious non-starters there - sorry, LA, it will not be West Coast - so a lot of the absement will be for nothing. Here's hoping nobody commits to anything lasting for this.
posted by Artw at 10:51 AM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


I think even Kingston tried to bid for this--we are positioned between three major Canadian cities--and I just laughed. Like, "No way, guys."

I know TO has been lobbying hard, but I can't see how Amazon would make anything better by being there. Things are bananapants enough for housing and COL.
posted by Kitteh at 11:01 AM on January 18, 2018


I am actually surprised that Austin is on the list, because as I recall our local officials were and are pretty anemic on the idea. The going wisdom was that Austin really isn't particularly interested in hosting Amazon, not when we already have a ton of tech money and the city is booming with some of the most rapid growth in the nation and honestly struggling to keep up with it all. And I hear we aren't offering any local incentives, which sounds about right. Props, incidentally, to San Antonio, which considered sending a bid and then publicly told Bezos that "blindly giving the farm away isn't our style."

(That's where the "aw, fuck, don't move to Austin" sentiment you'll see among residents is coming from--not "new people are bad," but "goddammit we don't have the infrastructure yet, shit, also my rents keep rising ffff." Which is true, actually--when I first moved here, I rented my one-bedroom apartment for $529/mo; now, five years later, the same place is going for $799 bare minimum. I got $50 or $100/mo hikes on my rent every time it changed over as a matter of course; so did everyone I knew. It was an awesome deal if your rent stayed about the same year to year.)

Even back in October, our city council was on the public record saying "uh, excuse me, what the hell was in that offer?" and being openly annoyed with the Chamber of Commerce over it. Our mayor's statements on the matter have been pretty ambivalent, and Christ knows Austin doesn't need the extra growth to keep moving. If they come here, it will basically be a slap in the face to every municipality that played this game and bent over backwards--and I hope that if they come here we will continue standing up to them in the same way we stood up to Lyft and Uber a few years ago and told them that if they wanted to throw a tantrum and take their toys away, they were welcome to do so.

(Local update on that: Lyft has since quietly slunk back into the city, although Uber has not. Good riddance. Me, when I use rideshares I use our local notforprofit RideAustin exclusively. It needs more advertising but it's always worked very well for me, and the drivers I've ridden with (most of whom drive for a whole bunch of outfits at once) usually tell me it pays the best on their end.)
posted by sciatrix at 11:01 AM on January 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


It seems weird to me that the most northerly location is Toronto, 4° south of Seattle, where the climate regularly swings 10° more extreme in both directions. Of all the listed locations, it looks like it’s maybe just Boston that doesn’t get super sweltery in the summer. Is temperature control no longer a concern for massive data centres?

For that and other reasons (e.g. proximal Harvard/MIT prestige, geographical symmetry, already expensive as fuck to live in so Amazon can’t be blamed for that, and this zippy nickname I made up), I’m betting on the Reverse Frasier.
posted by Sys Rq at 11:03 AM on January 18, 2018


I just moved here from Fredericksburg VA specifically get far enough away that nobody could consider me a resident of the DC area.

Wow, I'll stay inside the beltway if you'll stay outside it.
posted by aspersioncast at 11:05 AM on January 18, 2018 [3 favorites]


"The New York Times concluded that states, counties, and cities provide companies $80.4 billion per year through these arrangements."

This is going to take a federal solution, although I'm not sure what ... maybe like a reverse SALT where city/state tax breaks to corporations are federally-taxable income that the corporation must pay taxes on, that can't be offset by losses or deducations.

Particularly galling to see Illinois offering $1.4 billion in tax credits when Chicago Public Schools are running a $1 billion yearly deficit.

"There is also an implication that your city government isn't smart enough to do some basic math to determine what income is going to bring to the city and that it's all 'graft' and 'corruption'."

That ... is exactly correct and is covered by regional media and state good government watchdogs year in and year out? States routinely hand over $400,000/job for jobs that pay $50,000 or whatever. States and municipalities are either remarkably bad at math or -- more likely -- respond to a set of incentives that makes unemployment an immediate and personal problem for the voter (who will then vote for your opponent who promises jobs) but a decimated tax base a diffuse and long-term problem, the effects of which may not show up until you're out of office anyway.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 11:08 AM on January 18, 2018 [11 favorites]


What Amazon Does to Wages.
posted by koavf at 11:10 AM on January 18, 2018


I don't believe that they will choose Chicago, and, yes, if they did, corruption, kick-backs, bribes and the like would abound, but:

1.) That amounts to another day in Chicago.

2.) Chicago is a North side and a South side. The North side is booming, burgeoning, money and glitter flows like wine. The South side, umm, not so much. Very much not so much, in fact. If Amazon relocated to this part, to, say, the old Michael Reese hospital campus, even if the material gains would be mostly illusory, even the illusion of hope and progress would be monumental.
posted by Chitownfats at 11:12 AM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


There is also an implication that your city government isn't smart enough to do some basic math to determine what income is going to bring to the city and that it's all 'graft' and 'corruption'.

lol I live in Chicago, it's not an "implication". The city government here is a morally bankrupt clownshow. Bezos and Amazon can take HQ2 and jam it up their ass. If Amazon wants to come here and pay taxes and be a normal corporate citizen, that'd be great. The city doesn't necessarily "need" more people in Amazon-type jobs, but jobs are good to have, and Chicago's big enough that they won't take over the city like they have in Seattle, and lots of the engineers I know actually live in the city and pay taxes here. But that's not the proposal. Chicago's proposing to hand over billions in tax money while increasing the number of people utilizing the city services that tax money would pay for. That's bullshit, especially in a city that's perpetually crying poverty when it comes to things like providing a high-quality education for kids in poor neighborhoods.
posted by protocoach at 11:14 AM on January 18, 2018 [5 favorites]


Indianapolis is an intriguing inclusion, because -- yeah -- I'd think it would be difficult to recruit tech talent in large quantities to Indiana, with its crumbling public services, shittily conservative state government, and not-great existing tech sector. (Let me pause to say, I like Indiana, and I LOVE Indy, I think it's a great city! The anti-LGBT cast of the state government and the hyper tax-unfriendly climate where schools and roads barely get paid for just makes it tougher to recruit professionals than a lot of places. I'm bagging on Indiana politics, not Indiana and certainly not Indianapolis.)

But Indy would be a really logical place to put your HQ2 if it was going to manage a lot of logistics and shipping, and there's a lot of that expertise already in the city, because a lot of national shippers base (at least some of their) operations out of Indianapolis because it's such a convenient highway transit hub and land is fairly cheap for warehouses/truck lots/etc. FexEx and Cargolux have hubs there; there's room for the airport to expand; I don't know about their train-freight shipping but they're not far from Chicago anyway.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 11:16 AM on January 18, 2018


Between Illinois state government and Chicago's inherent nature, I'm surprised any company would want to move there.

For that matter, I wonder about rising sea levels and the viability of any business in Miami.
posted by ZeusHumms at 11:16 AM on January 18, 2018


Yow, protocoach, I think we are two cynical sides of the same coin.
posted by Chitownfats at 11:17 AM on January 18, 2018


Since they're relocating because they want to pay their people less,

Ya no, this is a SECOND headquarters. There will probably be an asian and european and even african hq later in the assimilation.
posted by sammyo at 11:18 AM on January 18, 2018


the fun thing is the actual shortlist is probably somewhat shorter than this, since there's a bunch of obvious non-starters there - sorry, LA, it will not be West Coast

Even the remotest possibility of LA "winning" Amazon HQ2 after "winning" the Olympic bid fills me with a sense of dread I'm not ready to handle before lunch.
posted by joechip at 11:18 AM on January 18, 2018


Between Illinois state government and Chicago's inherent nature, I'm surprised any company would want to move there

I mean, it's still the best city on earth, third largest in the country, with easily-tapped pipelines of talent for nearly any industry you care to name. Chicago's amazing and I wouldn't live anywhere else.

Yow, protocoach, I think we are two cynical sides of the same coin.

I agree. If there was a firm committal to putting HQ2 on the South Side, and the city set local and diversity hiring targets that used the tax breaks as a combined stick and carrot, I'd probably still roll my eyes at the debasement, but we would at least be getting something more out of it. But I'm pretty sure that, if they show up, they'll base themselves somewhere downtown or a north side neighborhood (or even worse, in a suburb) and we'll have eaten all this shit for nothing.
posted by protocoach at 11:26 AM on January 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


More than anything else, the whole Willy Wonka bullshit competition makes me want them to skip Nashville. 20 "finalists"? Seems to me to be a pretty clear stunt to keep the hype going to get maximum concessions when surely there are only 3-4 realistic options and Jeff Bezos already knows what they are.
posted by ghharr at 11:30 AM on January 18, 2018 [9 favorites]


Discovery just announced that they are abandoning their HQ in Montgomery County MD. I wonder if Amazon is targeting the Discovery Building?

The estimates I've seen are that HQ2 will need something like 8 million square feet of office space, and the Discovery Building is allegedly about half a million. The consensus (I'm not sure based on what exactly) is the Montgomery County's bid is probably for something around White Flint.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 11:59 AM on January 18, 2018


No whammy no whammy no whammy
posted by spindrifter at 12:20 PM on January 18, 2018 [6 favorites]


it feels like a list of who's gonna lose when amazon chooses them.
posted by Annika Cicada at 12:22 PM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


I'm going to be surprised if they select Raleigh due to the batshit state legislature. Amazon has its negative features but I'm not sure at a corporate level that it wants to be beholden to a government that's hostile to LGBT and minority rights.
posted by Candleman at 12:33 PM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


The Bezos Booby Prize.
posted by orrnyereg at 12:35 PM on January 18, 2018


I'd also be surprised if they pick any of the notorious bad traffic cities (Boston, NYC, DC area, Atlanta) just because that's something that chases the top tier employees away.
posted by Candleman at 12:37 PM on January 18, 2018


I have thought all along Atlanta would seem obvious, but the traffic is a pretty big downside.
If they're outside the perimeter though it it wouldn't necessarily be that bad, depending.
posted by bongo_x at 12:52 PM on January 18, 2018


Downtown Seattle is entirely constructed of traffic chokepoints so TBH on that front anything will be an improvement.
posted by Artw at 12:54 PM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


There's a sweet business plan buried in there. Start a corp. Promise hundreds of new jobs to the winning city. Collect tax breaks (or, even better, outright cash) Profit. "Open" the business. Announce a plan to move the business again. Profit. Repeat.

You mean the Bass Pro Shops (and the like) plan?
posted by bongo_x at 12:55 PM on January 18, 2018


I'm a bit skeptical of the "traffic chases top tier employees away". People are traffic; the places with traffic are also the places with people, which means it's easier to recruit there than a place without people.

I've worked on this problem and doing tech recruiting for positions in DC itself or on Metro is easier than non-Metro suburban N. VA, which is easier than Baltimore (for developers; Baltimore is better for biotech stuff), which is easier than Aberdeen, which is easier than central New Jersey. I have never actually recruited for NYC really, but I assume it gets easier there, as long as you're willing to pay market rates. Recruiting is fundamentally a numbers game, when viewed at a high level.

Looking over the list, it seems like Chicago or somewhere in the Chicago area really makes the most sense within the US, in terms of an untapped talent pool, although I'd have a hard time not arguing for Toronto for the jurisdictional diversification and access to different immigration pool than is likely to be available in the US. Depends on what their recruiting strategy is, I guess.

Of interest to DC area people: the "Northern Virginia" bid is likely for Loudoun County's Center for Innovative Technology campus, located near Dulles Airport. It's basically a bunch of empty land, one unique-looking building, and a gravel pit (owned by Virginia Paving, but I think they have to give it up at some future date) at the end of the Toll Road near the airport. Technically in Herndon, I think. Not on Metro at present, but it's planned to have a stop on the Silver Line in the near future, so that probably figures into it. It doesn't seem like a bad place to have a big corporate headquarters, but it also doesn't seem like a location where you really need to kick in a bunch of tax incentives to attract a company, either.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:09 PM on January 18, 2018 [5 favorites]


For that matter, I wonder about rising sea levels and the viability of any business in Miami.

I thought the same thing, not to mention the increasing strength of hurricanes, and that Miami traffic is already pretty crappy. Plus the gigantic mall that’s supposedly being built and also going to dump tons of traffic into the area. And for what, so the whole thing can be underwater in 20 years? Doesn’t seem like great civic planning to build a big expensive HQ at the edge of a swamp that’s 20 feet above sea level, in the area that is almost certainly going to be among the first and most dramatically affected by climate change.
posted by Autumnheart at 1:16 PM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


I'd also be surprised if they pick any of the notorious bad traffic cities

Access to mass transit routes is a core requirement, though. If employees can get to and from work without a car, traffic becomes less important. Which makes me think Chicago and DC/MoCo are ahead of the game (MoCo has stations on the DC Metro system, a light rail line under construction that connects the spokes of the system, and a BRT plan in the works).
posted by everythings_interrelated at 1:26 PM on January 18, 2018


Assuming Amazon hires mostly young people, and young people usually vote left, would 50k young people injected into any of these states (OH, VA, PA, FL) be enough to significantly affect how they vote?
posted by yeahwhatever at 1:28 PM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


Well if it's either PA city, the young people would be living in gerrymandered districts that are already overwhelmingly blue. Trump won PA by about 60K votes in 2016 so having 50K new young folk couldn't hurt.
posted by octothorpe at 1:35 PM on January 18, 2018


I'm a bit skeptical of the "traffic chases top tier employees away". People are traffic; the places with traffic are also the places with people

The amount of traffic in a city of any size is determined by the structure and functionality of the city's transportation network (including both roads and public transit), not simply by the number of people who live there.
posted by showbiz_liz at 1:39 PM on January 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


Assuming Amazon hires mostly young people, and young people usually vote left, would 50k young people injected into any of these states (OH, VA, PA, FL) be enough to significantly affect how they vote?

Obviously there are many factors that fit into this, and presidential elections aren't the same as local elections, etc., but of the states you mention the 2016 popular-vote margin of victory was within 50K only in Pennsylvania:

- Pennsylvania - 2,970,733 (Trump) vs. 2,926,441 (Clinton) -- difference of 44,292
- Florida - 4,617,886 (T) vs. 4,504,975 (C) - difference of 112,911
- Virginia - 1,981,473 (Clinton) vs. 1,769,443 -(Trump) difference of 212,030
- Ohio - 2,841,005 (T) vs. 2,394,164 (C) - difference of 446,841

FWIW, Alaska, Minnesota, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Michigan, Maine and Nevada all had popular vote margins of less than 50K (as did Maine's 2nd district and Nebraska's 2nd district).
posted by andrewesque at 1:45 PM on January 18, 2018


I'm a bit skeptical of the "traffic chases top tier employees away". People are traffic; the places with traffic are also the places with people

Plus, everyone thinks that their city has the worst traffic.
posted by octothorpe at 1:50 PM on January 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


Maybe it's just my circles, but I know a lot of senior tech people that have either left the DC area or would like to and no one that's moving there. The traffic (and accompanying high cost of living) is enough stress and wasted time getting around that it's just not worth it to a lot of people.
posted by Candleman at 1:52 PM on January 18, 2018


Jersey is not great for corporations. There's a reason Verizon has slowly pulled out and moved the bulk of their operations to Texas. AT&T is exiting the state as well.

If Verizon is noping out, I'm not sure Amazon will rush in.
posted by 80 Cats in a Dog Suit at 1:53 PM on January 18, 2018


Yep. Austin's traffic, for example, is getting worse and worse, and we are not a megacity near the size of, say, DFW or NYC or Atlanta. Our traffic is bad because we have expanded very very quickly, and because we have jack all in terms of convenient public transit. I guess we have metrorail, but it doesn't fucking go anywhere, and we have like two good express bus lines.

Everything else is standard North American city transit, which is to say slightly unpredictable buses that come once an hour, take winding, sprawling routes, and can get you wherever you want to be at perhaps two to three times as long as it would take to drive. There's a reason rideshares do a roaring trade here.

But our highway infrastructure can't actually support that many cars all trying to get somewhere at once. So: congestion. Public transit done right reduces the number of people on the roads and the number of conflicting travelers. It organizes the flow of humans. But it doesn't work when transit doesn't get invested in enough to be more convenient than driving, either for monetary reasons, racist or classist reasons, or both.

That is why traffic is such an issue in some large cities and less so in others.
posted by sciatrix at 2:16 PM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


traffic + "can I do interesting things after suffering this shit traffic twice a day" is my personal combination of "cities I want to live in" Traffic alone, no, traffic is everywhere. It's what lies where my car parks that interests me.
posted by Annika Cicada at 2:18 PM on January 18, 2018


I would be really interested to know where they would build the HQ2 in Pittsburgh.
posted by nakedmolerats at 2:22 PM on January 18, 2018


The Almono site in Hazelwood would be my best guess for a Pittsburgh site.
posted by Stacey at 2:41 PM on January 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


Welp, my hard-up city spent half a million on their bid, and didn't even make it past the first round. Half a million, most of which the city had to borrow to spend on this lottery ticket.

We didn't even meet the basic criteria. And we went in the hole to go after it. And we didn't even make the first cut, that's how great we were.

I love my city, and it's coming along, but everything that's been accomplished here in the past decade has been in spite of city hall, not because of it.
posted by Capt. Renault at 2:55 PM on January 18, 2018 [5 favorites]


I realize how far this is from the status quo, but it would be nice if there were some sort of federal authority to:
(a) prevent this sort of competition among cities. Cities should compete with each other by making their cities as nice as they can, not by giving away the largest piles of cash.
(b) encourage/incentivize/require companies to do such big projects in areas with especially low employment, surplus road capacity, and low housing costs. Putting Amazon in, say, the Bay Area or NYC would be actively harmful. But in Detroit, Birmingham, Memphis, or Stockton, it could anchor needed economic growth.

I think people on this thread are generalizing too much about the impacts of these big employers. Yes, big tax credit handouts generally don't pay off, and sometimes fail miserably. But cities need jobs, and an influx of 50,000 high paid jobs, as Amazon (credibly, I think) predicts would do a lot of places good.

Gentrification is an important concern when housing is expensive and scarce. It is a less valid concern where underemployment is the norm and houses, subdivided lots, or formerly sprawling factories lay empty.

Also, the point about how Amazon warehouses lower wages is not a valid concern when considering its HQ2. Amazon is going to open highly automated, taskmaster warehouses no matter where its headquarters are, and there is no practical way to stop that, save perhaps better regulation of the labor market overall. And if Amazon weren't automating away retail jobs, someone else would be, so I think holding that over Amazon's head is pretty cheap and not salient to this thread.
posted by andrewpcone at 3:41 PM on January 18, 2018 [4 favorites]


Stacey: "The Almono site in Hazelwood would be my best guess for a Pittsburgh site."

Or the Civic Arena site in the Lower Hill. It's not like the Penguins are doing a damn thing with that.
posted by octothorpe at 4:12 PM on January 18, 2018


the "Northern Virginia" bid is likely for Loudoun County's Center for Innovative Technology campus, located near Dulles Airport

Not a bad choice, literally next to the airport. Plenty of room for additional sprawl, although I-66 is already bad enough that I think commuting by plane might be a valid option.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 4:25 PM on January 18, 2018


"7) Toronto is a very empty and sleepy place, and having a business building there would probably raise up the local economy from swap-meets to money."

What?

I can see advantages in a Canadian city, but Toronto seems like a poor choice. It's traffic really is unbearable, it's cost of living is seriously high, although quality of life is reasonably good. I imagine concessions they would want would be ease of immigration of US employees (which Canada would probably give them, as they do with other large corporations).

I find it interesting that cities that didn't engage in blatant bribing are still on the list. I imagine tax 'concessions' are a consideration, but probably not an overwhelming one. They might want the city to greenlight infrastructure improvements they need, but I don't think it will be a make-or-break part of the decision. Cities are all trying to bribe Amazon out of reflex, as that's what they are used to doing to attract large companies.

I'm thankful that my area of the country didn't get on the shot list. Mostly it's because it would eat up our labor pool, and we are experiencing a lot of high-tech hiring and new companies (as is Austin); having an 800 pound gorilla eat up all the employees would be bad for the job market here (IMHO).

I wonder if they'll demand to set up shop in the heart of a city though - because they really have transformed Seattle's downtown area, and not for the better (again, in my opinion). Until Amazon, I never appreciated Microsoft's decision to locate far away from the heart of the city.

As far as the bribing game, I place the blame entirely on the local governments - Amazon might not even determine their decision based on the bribes. I hope that they call out states that have hostile state governments in regards to LGBT rights as a reason why those don't get chosen; it really will have an impact on recruitment.

Amazon could actually improve the city they decide to move to; if they demand that public transportation gets improved, for example (which they might want/need if they locate outside of the heart of the city) - lots of young tech folks don't want to spend an hour plus a day commuting. Microsoft contributes to public transport (each employee gets a transport pass regardless if they are going to use it, or they did when I was there), and they have more than one bus line going directly to their campus.

I'm not going to argue that Amazon is a great company, but I'll hold out on judgement regarding their HQ2 based on what city they choose and the details of the arrangement.
posted by el io at 4:29 PM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


Do it to LA! Do it to LA! With the Olympics! Immanentize the eschaton!

My lazy-ass guess is going to be Austin. It's just big enough, it's techy enough, and the transit would catch up pretty quickly.
posted by loquacious at 5:17 PM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


Columbus isn't really all that far-fetched. It's an incredibly underrated city with an excellent quality of life. And it's got the state capital, which I imagine is important for an Amazon HQ as it makes lobbying the local government so much more efficient. It's already got a handful of distribution centers and AWS facilities sprinkled around the city and state, and Amazon already owns a bunch of wind power interests in the state and just negotiated a bulk power contract with the regional power company though the terms and scope of that agreement aren't public. Columbus has long been and continues to be a major transportation hub. It used to be canals, then the railroads but has since become a major US logistics center for road, rail, and air. Not so much with the canals anymore.

Columbus also has OSU, a powerhouse research institution with very strong logistics and business analytics programs. And the state just won a huge grant from the federal DOT to create an autonomous vehicle corridor, and to fund a bunch of autonomous delivery research. The UAVSA just opened an office there, as did the Tesla Foundation. And where they opened those offices is interesting too. They opened them in the Franklinton neighborhood in Columbus. Franklinton is the once blighted part of the downtown separated by a river from the heart of a thriving and rapidly growing center of the city. There's no logical reason for the huge amount of available property in that neighborhood to remain empty anymore. Racism is what had ostracised that part of the city in the past. But the growth of the rest of downtown won't allow it to continue to be ignored. And the falling domino that could lead to the sudden and explosive growth of that part of town just fell. One of the city's major hospitals, which sits in the heart of that neighborhood is shutting down, and the demolition scheduled to begin this summer will level several square blocks right in the middle of the city. Sound familiar, Seattle?

Columbus seems to me to be ripe for the kind of rampant and existential gentrification that an Amazon headquarters could offer. I hope they tell Amazon to fuck off, but I doubt that will happen. Instead, they've offered to turn the state income tax that they collect from Amazon's Ohio employees back over to Amazon.

I hear the city is also very keen on this spunky little VR and ISP startup called IOI.
posted by Stanczyk at 5:28 PM on January 18, 2018 [3 favorites]


It’ll take years to build the HQ even after they’ve publicized their decision (assuming it does, in fact, get built and occupied) so you wouldn’t need to predict the choice of city in order to make money. They’d have to find a site, and then hire contractors to build it, and reroute traffic, and all kinds of other zoning and housing junk, so there’s plenty of leeway to speculate, no crystal ball required.
posted by Autumnheart at 7:14 PM on January 18, 2018


There was something written recently... arguing that the tax breaks cities offer to get companies to move there almost never end up benefiting the city.

The Local Economy Solution, published a few years ago, makes that point over and over. (Another take on the book.)

Such deals most often do absolutely nothing for the national economy, and create almost no new jobs whatsoever: “In fact, as companies crisscross the country, all the turmoil and upheaval that economists blithely call ‘transaction costs’ – moving expenses, mothballing old factories, constructing new ones, putting laid-off workers on unemployment, hiring new ones – constitute a net drag on the economy.” And from a local perspective: “the winners are almost always losers... almost all the promised benefits are illusory [and] with thousands of communities chasing a handful of companies... the game is rigged...”

“Too many [politicians and developers] don’t care...at all,” author Michael Shuman says, “because in the end their mission is not about developing their economies. It’s about generating headlines and protecting [their jobs]. By the time a community realizes that the deal under-delivered and public dollars were wasted, those responsible have happily moved into other private-sector jobs or retired.”

“One of the perversities of economic development is that its practitioners laud the free market, harangue about taxes and regulations, and then happily dole out subsidies that violate the free market and constitute a textbook example of government overreach,” Shuman adds. “Indeed, it’s not far-fetched to suggest that the best way most communities can ‘develop’ is by abolishing their economic development departments altogether.”
posted by LeLiLo at 7:21 PM on January 18, 2018 [6 favorites]


Ha ha Columbus.

Love, Cleveland

p.s. we debase ourselves enough already, it’s your turn.
posted by bitter-girl.com at 7:38 PM on January 18, 2018


My lazy-ass guess is going to be Austin. It's just big enough, it's techy enough, and the transit would catch up pretty quickly.

Noooooooope. The roads are already 20+ years behind and the recent "upgrade" of one of our major north-south arteries is several years behind schedule because, among other things, the engineers apparently failed to plan for the fact that they were building on limestone. Which the entire city is built on. And the university's buildings are largely made of. And literally every gardener can tell you about.
We have no significant east-west corridors, and no room for them or for widening the north-souths without serious eminent domain takings -- which would inevitably result in years of infighting, hiring of consultants, and study groups. Probably an endangered species or two, protests about gentrification, and an eventual no-bid contract to a crony of the governor that also has major cost and time overruns.
Not to mention the public transportation is lacking and, many of us are convinced, deliberately being spiked by the powers that be. Besides the light rail only having one line, it only runs very limited hours (i.e., not after 6 o'clock at night except at weekends) and not enough trains (by the time it gets to the third stop in the morning it's usually packed). Demand is high, people are willing, wanting, and waiting to ride public transportation, but it's wildly insufficient for current demand and they show no signs of expanding to meet said demand. Bus routes keep being "improved" to make them less and less usable by concentrating their locations -- improving interchanges, but ruining the utility for getting to several sections of downtown. We used to have a free circulator bus (actually several routes) downtown that were great, but they did away with that a decade or more ago.
Austin has long been victim of the belief that it they don't build new capacity, people won't show up. It has never worked yet, and it may indeed not work now. Amazon may settle on Austin for its "cool" factor, the tech-savvy workforce, and so forth. But I have little to no faith that Austin would meet increased demand for transit at all, much less quickly.

(If you want a quick illustration of Austin transit policy: In 2016 President Obama came to speak at SXSW. Things are already a mess during South By, with the influx of thousands and thousands of people trying to get around, and the presidential security overflow was going to be just too much. So the mayor told basically all city employees to work from home that day and encouraged everyone who could to stay off Mopac (aforementioned north-south road under years of construction) for the day. People took it seriously -- if they couldn't work from home, many took the day off, left early (including doctors doing rounds at the hospital early so they could get out by lunch), or otherwise avoided Mopac. The mayor was so thrilled with how well it worked, he tried to recreate its success a couple of months later. From the mayor's website: "Today Mayor Steve Adler challenged Austin commuters to find a way to work that avoided rush hour traffic on May 11. This is an attempt to recreate the traffic flow when people stayed home because the President came to town for SXSW, and Austin saw traffic times drop by half on MoPac and by about half that much on our downtown streets." Literally the transit policy is, "Mopac works great if no one uses it!" and "Hey guys, maybe stay home?")
posted by katemonster at 8:11 PM on January 18, 2018 [3 favorites]


God, all of that, katemonster. I don't know what the fuck is wrong with Austin, and I'm actually impressed that damn light rail gets any use at all given that (from what I, a person living in east central) can tell, it exists to ferry people in from fucking Leander but is completely worthless for getting around town proper. I suppose it's good if you commute, but I only occasionally even see the tram cars--hilariously short and tiny, all of them--pass by on the tracks from my cars and buses.

For comparison, I lived in Athens, GA before I moved to Austin. This is another college town, except it basically exists to serve the University of Georgia and not much else--hell, the university more or less ate an entire county. The Athens metro area, such as it is, has maybe 200,000 people, with about half of those residing in Athens proper, and of them a solid 40,000ish are college kids. Austin, by contrast, has nearly 1,000,000 people in it now in the city proper, and about 2,000,000 people in the metro area. So it has, approximately, about ten times the people. And the city of Austin is less than three times the city of Athens, too, so it's a hell of a lot denser on top of that.

The transit systems in the two cities? They're roughly fucking equivalent, at least from the perspective of a casual user, in terms of things like convenience and functionality. That's insane! It is absolutely inane. Capmetro also keeps pulling shit like closing shuttle routes because of "lack of interest" when they're well filled, and generally employing few enough buses on weird enough routes that their "route schedules" bear approximately zero resemblance to reality, which is a bit of a problem when most of the routes come once an hour!
posted by sciatrix at 8:48 PM on January 18, 2018 [5 favorites]


Montgomery County, Md.

Presently, there's a sign up where Urban Country (the store) is relocating from in Bethesda, to indicate Amazon is coming in there--at the corner of Arlington Rd. and Bethesda Ave., an area that doesn't need more traffic. It's about 6000 square feet of space, and seems on the surface like a done deal. Whether or not they actually move in there is to be seen. But if Marriott has made a bid to put their 800,000 square foot office in at Cordell Ave. and Wisconsin Ave. then nothing's impossible. And downtown Bethesda was designed by people who hate beauty and harmony in architecture.

There's an Apple store across the street, to give you an idea of how crazy the vehicle and foot traffic can get.
posted by datawrangler at 9:23 PM on January 18, 2018


>And Raleigh is currently covered in snow.

Okay, not in the US at the mo and didn't check Accuweather until now...hmmm a foot of snow it says... but high today of 49 F. Okay, snows and goes away fast was what I should've said.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 10:13 PM on January 18, 2018


I imagine concessions they would want would be ease of immigration of US employees (which Canada would probably give them, as they do with other large corporations).

Under NAFTA, most Amazon employees would be eligible for a work permit as professionals (this is reciprocal, I can show up at the border and get a US work permit.) Even if Trumps scraps NAFTA, Canada would be relatively easy for a US professional to work in with a guareenteed job. I think Toronto is a long shot though (unless this somehow ties into Google's Sidewalk Lab's plans for the massive waterfront Port Lands downtown. I'm very proud Toronto did NOT offer any tax incentives and is not investing a lot into the bid.
posted by saucysault at 5:15 AM on January 19, 2018


I'm just shocked there aren't more Canadian cities on the list for all the bet-hedging and immigration-related reasons listed above, really.

If I ran amazon, I would not be putting all my eggs in the USA basket, that's for sure.
posted by mosst at 7:09 AM on January 19, 2018 [2 favorites]


Grand Rapids was on the long list for the new AZ HQ. While it would have been cool to have a tech company like that here in town, the fact that they are basing a greater than 0% part of the final decision on tax breaks makes me cheerfully say Fuck Amazon!
posted by JohnFromGR at 7:11 AM on January 19, 2018


Presently, there's a sign up where Urban Country (the store) is relocating from in Bethesda, to indicate Amazon is coming in there--at the corner of Arlington Rd. and Bethesda Ave., an area that doesn't need more traffic. It's about 6000 square feet of space, and seems on the surface like a done deal. Whether or not they actually move in there is to be seen.

You know they're closing the Barnes and Noble, right? Without that Amazon store there'd be no bookstore in downtown Bethesda.
posted by leotrotsky at 7:35 AM on January 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


Since they're relocating because they want to pay their people less,

Ya no, this is a SECOND headquarters. There will probably be an asian and european and even african hq later in the assimilation.


FFS, co-locating then. The motivation is still the same; they want to get people out of expensive-as-fuck Seattle so they can pay them less.
posted by leotrotsky at 7:39 AM on January 19, 2018


You know what really irks me about the employee state income tax transfers to Amazon that the Columbus, Chicago, and a few other sites offered in their packages is that it creates a perverse incentive for Amazon to actively lobby state legislators to raise state income taxes as they'd be huge beneficiaries of those tax increases.
posted by Stanczyk at 7:48 AM on January 19, 2018


In Illinois those credits are capped. They're stupid and wrong, but raising taxes doesn't get Amazon more money. The credit says like $6 million in EDGE tax credits and the employer keeps the first $6 million in taxes collected and remits the rest to the state. It's a little bit more complicated than that and there are moving targets involved, but the system isn't amenable to gaming in that way. I know the gentleman who manages these credits and I can ask him, but I can't really come up with a way to game the system except for maybe $50 on the margin, and you'd basically have to commit to keeping a job around 10 years.

(Also, Illinois needs to raise taxes like whoa, if local corporations would lobby for it, that'd actually help.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:05 AM on January 19, 2018


Everyone knows the only metric that will determine who gets the HQ is how many servants the city can promise Bezos in the afterlife.
posted by The Whelk at 8:33 AM on January 19, 2018 [2 favorites]




(Also, Illinois needs to raise taxes like whoa, if local corporations would lobby for it, that'd actually help.)
Does Illinois still have a flat income tax? Of all the things that pissed me off about Illinois politics and policy, and there were many, the flat income tax was one of the biggest.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 9:27 AM on January 19, 2018


From that Amageddon article:

As housing prices rise, so has the city's homeless population.

Mary's Place, a Seattle nonprofit that operates several homeless shelters, said in September that it was on pace to fill 170,000 beds at overnight shelters in 2017. That's up from 2,300 beds in 2010, The Boston Globe reports.


So there are 73 times as many homeless people using these shelters as there were less than ten years ago. (And that doesn't count any people using other shelters, or people who don't go to shelters, of whom there are probably plenty based on MPLS). Obviously all of that can't be laid at the door of Amazon, but still - what a fucked up thing!!! What a backwards society we have!!!!
posted by Frowner at 9:46 AM on January 19, 2018 [5 favorites]


I think that must be nights per bed, or a typo. As far as I know there are about 11,000 homeless in Seattle right now. Although that may be unhoused homeless, and the number using shelters and other housing services is likely higher. It's awful, but it's not 20% of the population awful.
posted by another zebra at 9:54 AM on January 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


There’s a lot going on in Seattle regarding homelessness and it’s all very fucked up, and though I don’t think anyone has a complete handle on the causes of what is happening I suspect just shrugging and saying “Amazon” is both reductionist and not particularly accurate.
posted by Artw at 9:58 AM on January 19, 2018


the man of twists and turns: "Seattle's 'Amageddon' crisis should terrify the city Amazon chooses for HQ2"

Trulia data shows the median four-bedroom home in Seattle now costs $847,00, up from $756,000 last year and $510,000 five years ago.

This is exactly why I really hope that they give Pittsburgh a pass. Our housing costs have gone up lately so while you can't buy a mansion for $50K anymore*, the median home price is still only $170,000. Actual normal people can buy houses in nice neighborhoods here.

*If you don't mind an hour commute from Beaver Falls, there's an open house at The Moltrup Steel Mansion tomorrow which can be had for $49,000. Needs a little TLC.
posted by octothorpe at 10:10 AM on January 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


As someone who currently lives in Seattle, and who wants to move back to Pittsburgh in the near term, the one thing that would put me off that path is Pittsburgh getting the HQ2. I can't see how it wouldn't destroy Pittsburgh. But I also can't see Amazon looking at the infrastructure problems -- the broken water system, the terrible road capacity, the behind-the-times public transit system -- and thinking it's their best choice.

And, yeah, my Seattle house is up 30% in two years. That's bananas. This place isn't healthy.
posted by another zebra at 10:30 AM on January 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


The motivation is still the same; they want to get people out of expensive-as-fuck Seattle so they can pay them less.

That might be a nice side-benefit, but I believe there's a more fundamental motivation. Amazon's growth is still increasing, and Seattle is growing about as fast as physically possible at this point. Adding another city gives the company a smoother way forward to handle their expected growth.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 10:48 AM on January 19, 2018


It's smart for Amazon to look at an option outside the United States. The US hates immigrants, hates social goods like education and healthcare, hates civil rights, and hates maintaining infrastructure. All of which are requirements for a healthy, thriving democracy and economy. The political environment has been corrupted by dark money and a foreign government and so there's little chance of things getting fixed when needed. A base in Canada makes sense as the US progresses inexorably towards a third-world oligarchy.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 10:54 AM on January 19, 2018 [6 favorites]


The motivation is still the same; they want to get people out of expensive-as-fuck Seattle so they can pay them less.

I worked for a company that opened up an administrative headquarters in a medium-sized Midwestern city with the goal of reducing costs, but the savings on staff salaries from expensive coastal cities wasn't that much. I think they cut the salaries for the position I was in by 10% or so, and I'm not sure it would have been possible to drop it by that much more and still get remotely qualified candidates. That was a couple million bucks a year for the company, which isn't a whole lot for a company big enough to consider something like that, and probably not by itself worth the extra problems moving into a new space in a new state comes with and all the administrative difficulty of having important functions in a site 3 states away from any other office. The real motivating factor was that office space was something like 90% cheaper, and that's where the real savings are, plus whatever ridiculous tax breaks they can squeeze out of the city.
posted by Copronymus at 11:33 AM on January 19, 2018


"Does Illinois still have a flat income tax? "

Yes -- flatness is in the state constitution. Getting a graduated income tax will require amending the constitution, which requires 3/5 majorities in both houses of the legislature, and then the voters have to approve the amendment at the next general election. Past attempts have never been able to coordinate approval from all three groups, but the "millionaire tax" is pretty popular with voters right now, basically all legislators agree we need to raise taxes and the flat tax is dumb, and hopefully next year there will be 60% majorities in both houses to vote for the amendment and Rauner will be gone and won't be gumming up the works by campaigning against it. Nobody wants to waste their political capital on a failed constitutional amendment (especially related to taxes!), so the House, Senate, and governor will all have to be on the same page, and it'll have to still be polling well with voters. Fingers crossed!
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 12:53 PM on January 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


Denver is a horrible option. We get 10 feet of snow every single day, to get anywhere, from anywhere, it's all uphill, very steeply uphill, and legalized pot has created evil pot consuming monsters who kill anything that moves.
true story.
Plus socialism.
posted by evilDoug at 1:05 PM on January 19, 2018 [3 favorites]


Think that'll work?
posted by evilDoug at 1:06 PM on January 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


Denver seems to be doing pretty well on managing mass transit systems.
posted by ZeusHumms at 1:12 PM on January 19, 2018


The Moltrup Steel Mansion

I've got stars in my eyes. Why hasn't this been snapped up and turned into some handyman's lifelong labor of love?
posted by orrnyereg at 1:28 PM on January 19, 2018


ZeusHumms, stop helping.
posted by evilDoug at 1:38 PM on January 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


orrnyereg: "The Moltrup Steel Mansion

I've got stars in my eyes. Why hasn't this been snapped up and turned into some handyman's lifelong labor of love?
"

There's thousands more like that in hundreds of rusty little towns in Western PA. Like most of those towns, there's just not much going on in Beaver Falls and even if $50K sounds like a bargain, it's going to need $100K+ to fix and then you're stuck with it because no one is ever going to buy it. As I said, it's 45 miles from there to Pittsburgh so it's out of normal commuting range to decent paying jobs and other than a kickass donut shop, there's nothing to do there.
posted by octothorpe at 1:46 PM on January 19, 2018


Denver seems to be doing pretty well on managing mass transit systems.

Not as well as it ought to be. Seattle's doing much better. I could hope Amazon would force Denver to work harder at getting transit right, but that's rough going in a city that often lacks adequate sidewalks.
posted by asperity at 3:09 PM on January 19, 2018 [1 favorite]




Coda: How Amazon Benefits From Losing Cities’ HQ2 Bids - Nick Wingfield, NYTimes
...[The hundreds of losing HQ2 bids] gave Amazon a hidden benefit: free research that the company can mine when picking spots for future warehouses and satellite offices.

Amazon asked every city and state applying for its second headquarters for details about local resources, like available talent and transit options. Local officials were also prodded for tips on local education programs and tax incentives.

The answers — most of which have not been released publicly — essentially do Amazon’s homework for it, providing valuable information that the company otherwise would have needed to dig up on its own or obtain through one-on-one negotiations.
posted by ZeusHumms at 6:20 AM on January 30, 2018 [2 favorites]


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