Amazon to Build Second HQ in North America | Hacker News Reader

Amazon to Build Second HQ in North America

amazon.com

300 pointsmartymatheny468 comments

The RFP is rather more interesting than the marketing page:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/Anything...

The 2nd criterion is basically the total amount of sweet, sweet taxpayer dollars available to subsidize them:

Please provide a summary of total incentives offered for the Project by the state/province and local community. In this summary, please provide a brief description of the incentive item, the timing of incentive payment/realization, and a calculation of the incentive amount.

Yeah, shocking huh? This is the only reason this whole thing is being done. It's basically a solicitation, and Amazon will go to the highest bidder. It happens all the time, it's just that this initiative is more public.

Amazon was built upon the competitive edge of pricing devoid of state and local sales tax. Now it is soliciting tax breaks from state and local governments.

That's not quite true. Washington state (where Seattle is) has no state income tax. The sales tax rate, however, is a whopping 9.5%. As a mail order/online retailer, Amazon only had to charge sales tax on in-state purchases. Washington state's low population made it more favourable relative to California with a much less worse tax structure, and Texas and Florida which also have no state income tax and the population centers necessary to support a growing business. Of course, I'm sure Microsoft's established engineering talent pool helped too.

This is exemplary of the type of sway which massively concentrated enterprises can have over governments, and will continue to have as more and more companies engage in M&A: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Brennan2016.pdf

Replace HRC with Jeff Bezos and "algorithm" with "consumer": https://busy.org/life/@blakemiles84/clinton-book-excerptish-...

At some point we're going to have to Bust the Trusts.

Teddy Roosevelt, where for out thou?

The trend, barring an exceptional individual, is for power to consolidate further in the hands of the megacorps.

> where for out thou?

Note: that’s a misuse of the quote; “wherefore” is, in moderns words, translated into “why”, not “where”. The quote “O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?” asks, in essence, “Why are you Romeo, and not someone else?”, i.e. someone without political baggage.

Yea, this is pretty clearly an RFP directed at politicians soliciting taxpayer money. That said, if given the choice between my city ponying up for a stadium (or datacenter that will support 50 total jobs) and an actual Amazon HQ that's comparable to Seattle, I know which way I'd lean. Unfortunately, a big reason politicians go for these kinds of proposals is that they sound great as "accomplishments" in stump speeches. Maybe its my cynicism, but my assumption is that most politicians go for these proposals, and at least this could actually support jobs long term.

Totally agree! 50,000 people making 100k+ per year is a lot of taxes, it will increase land values. Please come to my city so my house can double in value. Hm...

I'm hoping not, because I'm enjoying cheap rent in a metropolitan city (Chicago). I don't want to compete for rent with even more technies than already exist with, esp. when Amazon is going to pay above market wages.

Chicago would be another good candidate.

I think its one of the top ones, though i'm struggling to thikn of an area of the city that has 100 acres of greenfield to develop

Isn't Chicago's municipal government spectacularly dysfunctional?

Yes and no. Chicago has been really good at wooing companies to move their headquarters here: see Boeing, McDonald’s, ConAgra, GE transport, Kraft Heinz, the list goes on.

And anyone wonders why the USA does not have money for healthcare, higher education, high speed rail, etc. etc.

I am in West Africa and everyone continually asks about the corruption.

At least here it's up front and honest. The guy with the AK-47 just wants $5.

In the USA, it's the guys in suits getting billions.

Since when does the US not have money for healthcare and higher education? We spend more on both per capita than any other nation on earth.

We don't have money for high speed rail? Sure we do, we spend $7 trillion per year on government - 37% of our economy goes to government. Pick your priorities.

"We spend more on both per capita than any other nation on earth." this is very true regarding healthcare. That we have a very bad healthcare system specially compared to other nations that spend way less is a completely different matter.

> We spend more on both per capita than any other nation on earth.

Why are there tens of millions that can't afford higher education?

Why are people going bankrupt from health expenses?

The USA is just really bad at it. Therefore you need to spend more money just to come up to par with other developed countries. In that case, you need more tax revenue.

> Why are there tens of millions that can't afford higher education?

Tuition at the highly-rated community college near my house is $1,500 per semester. It's expensive to go away to a residential 4 year private university, but there are many other options out there.

Except the federal government pumps money into those AAU universities in research grants, therefore they are more prestigious and have better job prospects after you graduate.

The system is stupid. But it won't change. You won't see the public university in Memphis or Baltimore get more money federal money than a school like Stanford.

Or just stop being really bad at it. Other countries are doing it, so it isn't an unsolvable problem.

The whole point of the comment you're replying to is that we're picking our priorities poorly.

And a significant portion of that 37% goes straight into the pockets of connected contracting companies, especially DoD related ones. Usually staffed by people who constantly rant against how inefficient and evil government is.

Which is to keep you safe. Keep the US's dominance in Military, economy and high value technology going.

Plus food turns out to be cheap because you get oil for a pretty affordable price. And that happens to be possible thanks to wars and associated expenditure.

I mean, if you don't like the tax cuts your city government offers Amazon to try and get their headquarter, you can vote them out come the next election.

But as happened in Marietta Ga recently, the government officials had already committed the county to 600 million for a new stadium. They got voted out, but the county is still stuck with the bill.

Nitpick: it was Cobb County. But yeah the damage was done regardless, and now the county is left trying to find ways to pay for what it committed to, by increasing taxes and/or poaching money from other services like public schools.

Yeah not saying it's perfect. But it's better than those people staying in power, and with the AK-47s.

No, you can't; deals involving this much money are beyond local politics. For example, Washington's governor just vetoed a measure that would extend state tax cuts to manufacturing companies that aren't called Boeing, and he's not going anywhere.

And even if people do complain, all your mayor/city council has to do to win re-election is claim that all the jobs would disappear if they didn't offer the incentives. You can't do anything about this, it's just blatant corruption endemic to the system.

I'm not arguing for a ban, but here would be the argument: It's clearly unethical, undesirable behavior, but even if a particular municipality didn't like the game, it's tough not to play (much like taking corporate donations for political campaigns). So instead of trying to live the libertarian good life of "Our city is better than that" and losing because someone else has fewer scruples, it is proposed that the practice be banned.

I guess I would disagree with the "it's clearly unethical, undesirable behavior" part. I just don't think it's clearly good nor clearly bad.

I think it isn't in theory (jobs! tax revenue from families!) but how often do these things play out?

No idea ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The thing is, those tax cuts are largely offset by income taxes that those employees bring in, along with all of the $ that having a huge corporation like Amazon would bring into the area. It's not corruption, it's business.

Has this been shown to be true? I get the logic and it seems like it would make sense but I'm sure this has been researched. This would be a bigger deal than the datacenters being built with millions in tax cuts given it would be a long term and order of magnitude more jobs. Still I wonder if the calculus really does work out.

No.

Those tax cuts should be added ON TOP of the income taxes those employees bring in.

More business should be more tax revenue = better services for the citizens.

>It's not corruption, it's business.

When a business is able to make a deal that gets them out of paying taxes they otherwise would legally be required to pay, that's corruption. Sugar coat it all you want, it's regular citizens they are stealing from.

Unless money is being funneled into private politicians’ hands, it’s not corruption. The choice is between amazon + tax breaks and nothing. These cities clearly believe that they’re better off, net net, with Amazon and they’re probably right. This is not at all the same as accepting bribes. There are certainly bad deals out there, but mismanagement is not the same as corruption. Now if you can show that the politicians in question are getting kickbacks, that’s another matter.

You say "the choice is between amazon + tax breaks and nothing" like the legal and cultural framework in which these processes take place is a force of nature.

The choice is between those things because Amazon says so, and government chooses not to stand up to them by refusing to cooperate country-wide, or passing federal legislation.

Amazon is not an outlier here: this is how all deals of this size in the United States get done. It's a national embarrassment.

It doesn't have to be that way, and it isn't in many other countries.

Yeah this is a consequence of the mechanism design we currently have. Large companies can shop around for better tax breaks.

> is a force of nature.

Taxes are not a force of nature...

If you were to effectively prohibit all states from giving tax incentives to get companies to make their HQ there, you will fail in 2 important ways. The first one is that there will always be a way to bargain company-state-city wide. So even though the tax burden might be the same, the company could order for , for example,special infrastructure or whatever, to get extra value. And because the city wants to do it, its most likely going to. This result is worse than a tax break.

The other failure will come if you could, somehow, prohibit any thing like the one above from happening. That means that of 2 cities with similar demographics, where one of them has some sort of disadvantage, will be forever barred from having big companies set up shop. Why? Because if there is no tax incentive, the companies will only go to the best option available. If you happen to be that city, you would hit the jackpot. The rest, however...

Totally agree that there are real downsides and complications. I didn't mean to diminish those. My point is that the post I was replying to (and a lot of people I talk to in the US), operate under the assumption that it has to be this way, because this is the way it is in the country we happen to live in.

It's a race to the bottom. It results in one state or city that pollutes for the whole country. Governments should set things up so the whole economy benefits, sometimes that means banning defections so that game theory doesn't fuck things up for everyone.

I'm sure that the tax benefits are not the only criterion here. There are plenty of things cities can do to attract companies that aren't tax breaks — SF and NY and others are already there. Amazon wants a place that its employees would actually want to live, too. But that doesn't mean tax breaks and other incentives shouldn't be on the table. But my point isn't even whether they're good or bad, it's that they're not prima facie evidence of corruption.

It's good not to forget the toplevel posts, which quotes that Amazon ASKS specifically for money amount.

"Please provide a summary of total incentives offered for the Project by the state/province and local community. In this summary, please provide a brief description of the incentive item, the timing of incentive payment/realization, and a calculation of the incentive amount"

Read their RFP for more.

This is exactly what I've been saying about tax breaks people want for the film industry here in LA so they can compete w/ Atlanta and other places in the US when really they need to be competing on a national basis, if these benefits are actually useful (which hasn't really been the case for taxpayers).

Some businesses improve the business climate. A Whole Foods-headlined plaza has higher property value than a liquor store-headlined plaza. A city block with Four Seasons hotel is likely to be valued higher than a similar city block with a Motel 6.

Businesses don't want to be victims of their own success, where immediately after they plunk the money down for buildout and development they're reassessed at the value they themselves added.

> The choice is between amazon + tax breaks and nothing.

You're completely wrong. Amazon WILL build HQ2. This is a zero sum game from citizens/cities perspective. No city in the US should offer such taxcut, and then, surprisingly, this money is spent by amazon on taxes and effectively given to the citizens in one of the cities.

If you allow this, you put in place scenario I described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15193611

>>Amazon WILL build HQ2.

May be somewhere in India, where its cheaper for them to operate from.

Also given places like India want to attract investments, they will be more than happy to offer not only subsidies, but also provide free land and other perks like tax breaks and free electricity.

This might feel like blackmail. But that is what capitalism is all about. Companies do what is profitable for them.

> more tax revenue = better services for the citizens

Lol.

"When the government is able to collect tax and seize private property without just compensation, it is an indication that the public is ripe for surrender and is consenting to enslavement and legal encroachment. A good and easily quantified indicator of harvest time is the number of public citizens who pay income tax despite an obvious lack of reciprocal or honest service from the government."

--Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars

I think you make the fundamental mistake that businesses are people that pay taxes. People pay taxes, so when amazon pays taxes, either investors, consumers or employees pay those taxes.

So when amazon finds a way to lower its tax burden, either investors, employees or consumers, and most likely all of them,which are citizens, pay less taxes.

Taxes are not a means to reduce profits, if that were to be your desired result.

Many of these incentives go beyond tax cuts. The government will build the buildings, lease it to the corp for free. It will train employees for free, handle the recruiting for free, provide money to the corp for various projects, etc. It's business, sure, but pay to play. And at the end of the day, a lot of these places wind up leaving once their benefits run out.

Yeah, yeah, Amazon is doing it because they love us.

It's for sure simple mistake they specifically asks to calculate all this intangible things and reduce it to money amount they gets from citi.

So how about..... NO!

Quote from RFP: "Please provide a summary of total incentives offered for the Project by the state/province and local community. In this summary, please provide a brief description of the incentive item, the timing of incentive payment/realization, and a calculation of the incentive amount"

Well, that's the "party line" anyway. I'm not convinced that it's usually (or even ever) true in practice though. And even if it were, it's still a case of the government distorting the market in a way that is, IMO, not a valid role for government. And there will always be unintended consequences, quite often negative ones.

Outside of NYC, cities typically don't get a cut of employee income taxes. Payroll taxes on the other hand is one of the taxes that Amazon will looking to get a sweetheart deal on with the city in question looking to make up the shortfall and the infrastructure spending to cope with 50,000+ new residents via trickle down.

I've read in the past of how such deals (of factory/office X choosing to open location Y based on tax incentives) ultimately not benefiting the city involved, especially when the companies pull tactics like closing unexpectedly shortly after receiving incentives and moving elsewhere. Given this, I'm fairly sure that a wide-ranging study of such infrastructural deals would show that many (most?) communities involved are left at a net loss financially.

I believe you're thinking of taxpayer funded sporting events, e.g. NFL stadiums and Olympic games. There's a big difference between that and a legitimate business.

Nope, I was actually thinking of businesses e.g. automotive brands opening assembly/manufacturing plants.

Most such deals are a net loss for the community. Some of the bad ones have been for data centers, which employ very few people. Neither do manufacturing plants, which just don't need that many people.

Warehouses employ lots of people but they're the shittiest of jobs.

Its not realistically possible by very definition to scale high quality jobs with quantity.

In the US the cities don't get to collect personal income taxes, though.

Sure they do. Philadelphia calls it a "wage tax", but it's an income tax. https://beta.phila.gov/news/department-of-revenue/city-annou...

sorry but if i have to choose between a guy with an AK47 demanding $5 from me, and a shadowy power pulling the strings of a vibrant economy to extract 10% of my income, I know what I'd choose.

For me it's the AK-47 for sure.

Have you been coerced to give someone money or property under the threat of violence?

I have. I'm guessing you haven't since you think it's a bigger deal than it is - or at least was for me. It's not scary; these guys have practiced this 'sales funnel' hundreds of times, it is in their interest for things to go smoothly. You'll be fine, unless you decide to be "difficult".

Funny, that's what an Afghani co-worker and I talked about during the last election cycle. We just obfuscate things with lawyers.

It might be morally questionable but isn't Amazon doing what you're describing? Most companies shopping around don't publically announce their plans to move in exchange for tax breaks. Amazon, OTOH, is explicitly calling this out.

Of course the argument is also the employees are paying taxes. Besides, Amazon is notorious for pouring money back into the business and growing instead of reaping profits, so good luck taxing that. By any account that's exactly what a city should want.

This kind of tax cuts should be illegal. The problem is that taxation itself is some kind of extortion from the state. So morally speaking it is a bankrupt system from all sides.

Does it matter if the economic benefit of Amazon's presence in a city outweighs the initial tax breaks?

A tax break to a company that otherwise wouldn't be there at all is a lot different than a straight-up bribe.

How is it different? "If you want our business, pay up."

"If you want our business, charge us less."

what a year do I live in that governments must bow to corpos and politely submit RFP document asking for tax money .... reduction.

There was once a story on hackersnews why this (demanding tax cuts) its unethical on much larger scale than race etc. It went like this (forgive my memory, english, and feel free to correct it):

There were two states, neighboring, with similar budgets and number of people. They werent rich, there werent many benefits for citizens in each state, yet people managed to get by. Then one day, a company came to them and asked, who can give me corpotax subsidy ? I'll build a factory there and employ maaaany people. State A objected, while state B agreed. That was a 10 years deal. A lot of people from State A migrated to state B in search of work. 5 years into the deal, company thrived: no taxes to be paid = most competitors in both states are killed. Company is building another factory. Again asking both states of tax subsidy. This time, due to loss of population, being on verge of collapse, state A had to offer super deal. Company built second factory there. The pendulum is swinging the other direction. The rest of the cycle is left for the reader.

Because population is relatively constant, allowing this shenanigans is effectively allowing corpos to be tax free at the expense of states^H^H^H citizens. Because states or nations are WE, and asking for such reduction is a zero sum game.

This gains of capital because of amazon HQ2 WILL HAPPEN no matter what or where. Asking for tax deduction is abuse and effectively reducing total citizenhood wellness/capital in benefit of Amazon, payed by all other states where HQ2 is not built.

The best policy for all states and cities in USA is saying: no matter who will you choose, we will NOT give you a subsidy. And if you want to talk about offshore outsourcing, let me rephrase it: all countries in the world should show the A a middle finger in unison.

This has been going on forever. It is a natural consequence of free people acting in their own best interests. Giving an employer $1Bn in tax breaks knowing you will get more than $10Bn in increased tax revenue is good for the government and good for the employer.

Is it fair? No. But liberalism doesn't aim to make the world fair; it aims to make it free.

The bidders are also free to mention to Amazon that they were thinking of increasing the funding for their local anti-trust investigations, and maybe those funds wouldn't be available if they had to be spent on infrastructure improvements related to significant new construction in the area instead.

Ask for a bribe; get a threat. If a city can afford to blow a few million on tax breaks to get more millions in economic development, it can afford to blow a few hundred thousand on lawyers to get something in fines or settlements.

> The best policy for all states and cities in USA is saying: no matter who will you choose, we will NOT give you a subsidy. And if you want to talk about offshore outsourcing, let me rephrase it: all countries in the world should show the A a middle finger in unison.

If we could only get all governments together to conspire against third parties. How could that ever wo grong.

The EU tries to do that by banning Member States from giving targeted tax breaks (see the Irish-Apple affair), although with dubious results.

The US could just do what the EU does and ban sweetheart tax deals. Such tax deals are anti-small-company/unfair and it's a race to the bottom that no one will win.

Consumers, employers and investors would win. What are you talking about.

He means targeted deals for specific companies. That means that other employers of other companies lose out from unfair competition, which leads to monopoly that is bad for consumers.

Investors win, but not as well as they'd win in a fair competitive market.

OK, what are the options? Here's the list of the top 50 North American metro areas over the desired 1,000,000 population.[1] This gets down to the Nashville, TN area, at 1.8 million, so it's not the full list. Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba are probably out, both for political reasons and being islands. Mexico is probably out given the current administration's positions. San Juan is on an island and too remote, although the tax deal in Puerto Rico might keep it in consideration.

Amazon seems to want a city where they would be a Big Deal, maybe the dominant employer. In New York or LA, they'd just be another big business.

Weather is an issue. They'll want some place that doesn't flood or get snowbound, since their HQ city will include some distribution centers. That knocks out Minneapolis - St. Paul, Houston, Miami, and Tampa.

They probably don't want a super high cost area, which knocks out SF-Oakland-San Jose. Maybe Washington, DC, too.

Extreme high crime areas are out - that takes out Tijuana and Detroit.

Mass transit is a specified requirement. This takes out cities with weak transit systems.

Not too close to Seattle, since they want to be more geographically distributed. That probably takes out the West Coast cities.

So what's left?

    Chicago 
    Dallas–Fort Worth 	
    Toronto 	
    Philadelphia 	
    Atlanta 	
    Boston 	
    Phoenix 	
    Montreal 	
    Denver 	
    St. Louis 	
    Baltimore 	
    Charlotte 	
    Orlando 	
    San Antonio 	
    Pittsburgh 	
    Cincinnati 	
    Las Vegas 	
    Kansas City 	
    Cleveland 	
    Columbus 	
    Austin 	
    Indianapolis 	
    Nashville

I'm going to guess Austin or Nashville. Small enough that Amazon can be a big fish in a small pond, big enough to support the work force, liveable enough that people will come, good land availability.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_metropo...

Mexico is probably out given the current administration's positions

I don't think the current administration would complain if thousands of mostly liberal tech workers moved to Mexico.

I would disagree that Minneapolis is disqualified for the reasons you gave. They already have a fulfillment center about half an hour from Minneapolis and a small development office downtown. The real question is whether there is enough local talent here to fill their needs.

What about NJ? It's not really a city but it's the densest state and they could pick a location close to NYC. I read somewhere they want the place to be immigrant-friendly and NJ is that.

> They'll want some place that doesn't flood or get snowbound, since their HQ city will include some distribution centers. That knocks out Minneapolis - St. Paul

Snow removal in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan area is quite efficient and even heavy snowfall rarely causes issues. Plenty of large companies are headquartered here and do not struggle with this issue, ex: UnitedHealth, Target, Best Buy, and 3M.

As a former Orlandoan, I would pull Orlando from that list based on public transit.

Transit in Central Florida is basically non-functional, and not likely to change anytime soon. The region is entirely car-centric, and there is a strong cultural bias against public infrastructure of any kind.

You can surely look up a map with lots of bus lines drawn across the Orlando core (Lynx), but the service is so remarkably horrific, I never met anyone who used Lynx in the 21 years I lived in the region.

Roads are public infrastructure.

A few points not yet mentioned: - Increasing the diversity of the Amazon culture by having an HQ in a new city will help Amazon understand the customer better... the last election has shown how little we all understand each other. - Could Amazon be planning to eventually split the consumer and cloud divisions into two companies? - Is this an opportunity to flip a red state to a blue state by getting a lot of tech workers to be employed in a red state? Which cities/states are closest to flipping? Atlanta, Pittsburg/Phil, Detroit, Cleveland, Phoenix, Austin/Houston?

I've only seen Minneapolis really snowbound maybe once in my career. We just work from home when it happens.

Also, the city has the most sophisticated snow removal in the western world. Both downtowns have extensive skyway systems to avoid walking outside.

The Twin Cities have 18 Fortune 500s to draw talent from. Meanwhile, Saint Paul has recently opened up a ton of prime commercial real estate at the Ford plant site (130 acres), Arden Hills armory site (>400 acres), Hillcrest Golf Club (110 acres), and the old EcoLab, Cray, and Gander Mountain buildings in the skyway system.

Phoenix does not qualify the mass transit requirement in any way shape or form. Public transit here is shit.

Atlanta has Georgia Tech but would need to build public transport, picking Baltimore would let them be near the Acela corridor. Baltimore might be a safe bet methinks.

Austin, Denver, Chicago, Kansas City, St. Louis, would almost be shoe-ins if they weren't in the middle or on the west coast. All have some public transport, and good universities. It would be quite a coup if a smaller more "standalone" city got it like Charlotte, Columbus, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Nashville, Pittsburgh, Orlando, San Antonio, Minneapolis, or Detroit. Not sure which of these could build public transport fast enough.

I would agree they probably don't want to be near extreme weather, but I don't think they would necessarily discount a city because of snow. Not having good universities could be a deal breaker. Dallas is the definition of sprawl, sorry Dallas.

I think we can assume that Jeff Bezos saw how Elon Musk played the game in 2014 to find a location for Tesla's GigaFactory.[1][2][3]

The upcoming stories for Amazon's high-profile decision will probably play out in a similar way. However, the particular candidate cities probably won't be the same since Elon was building a site for factory workers whereas Jeff is building a campus for more software developers. Therefore, a location like Austin with U.Texas compsci students to recruit is more important for Amazon HQ2 than a Gigafactory.

The desire to attract tech employers like Amazon appears to be more competitive than winning the bid to host the Olympic Games.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/how-elon-musk-ingeniously-man...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelinemaynard/2014/02/27/the...

[3] google results of similar stories: https://www.google.com/search?q=tesla+bidding+nevada+texas

>The desire to attract tech employers like Amazon appears to be more competitive than winning the bid to host the Olympic Games.

And for good reason! There aren't many companies that people would be willing to move across the US to join.

People tend not to move around too much after University of their first job. Having another magnet to bring in people for relatively little (compared to a university's for example) is a great deal for a city.

Based on how many have moved to Seattle Amazon is one of them though.

How much of that is hiring straight out of University? I would wager that Amazon has the largest tech internship program in North America.

How much of it is senior engineers? The point is they have filled roles of all levels of experience. What is your point?

You have to consider that this may be a political move by Bezos. The term "anti-trust" has been brought up a lot lately in regards to 'Big Tech.' If Amazon becomes a big employer in a lot of low population states, it would effectively be buying itself those states's Senators and creating an 'Amazon Industrial Complex.'

On the other hand, Bezos might want to just move the margins and try to make a purple state blue. For a big state, that might make have a bigger impact and make more sense, especially since you're not going to find 50,000 software engineers in Montana.

I think Cincinnati could be a good choice. I don't know much about Cincinnati, except that it's in Ohio and borders Indiana and Kentucky, and that it's not a tech hub. But, I don't think it would be that hard to convince a lot of people to move there. If the move is really successful, it could create somewhat of a tech hub there, which would have spillover effects in those other states (giving them 3 for the price of 1?).

I would not be too surprised if the final decision was Columbus. There's no shortage of land, there's reasonable access to tech talent, a reasonably solid major research university, prices are comparatively low, and the city also has a positive reputation in a way that neither Cleveland or Cincinnati have. Further, the current governor and legislature of Ohio have really been going to bat in recent years to try to turn Columbus into a tech hub to generally revitalize Ohio.

It's plausible. One of the things that protected Walmart for the last 25 years, was its high distribution among red states and mid to low population areas (blue cities have notoriously disliked Walmart and worked to keep them out). They overwhelmingly sought to appeal to the lower to middle classes in terms of their customer demographics and still have wide support there politically.

Have to agree that Amazon will go for either the mid-west or east coast as the hub. It's the logical political choice, to re-balance itself away from the west coast as a center. To compete with Walmart & big retail politically, it'll need far greater physical representation within states.

As a generalization, the people who want to work for Amazon tend to be more on the progressive wing, and an HQ in a heavily conservative region would make it harder to hire talent.

I would guess places like Denver/Boulder (where Google has a site coming), Boston, Portland, or Las Vegas are much more likely than Austin, Charlotte, or Salt Lake City

Although Austin is in Texas, it is famous for being independent. It's also fairly progressive.

Anybody who says People's Republic of Austin (ref: Bernie movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JREkqCvLzSo) is not on progressive wing is kidding.

Also, Whole Foods is head-quartered in Austin, so there could be "synergy" there.

Progressive islands in conservative states are almost worse

They just get diced up and have no voice in state or federal government, and you end up with things like the NC and Texas bathroom bills.

Why would a company like Amazon move to a state who's already so wrong on human rights issues? That's just asking for boycotts and mass resignations.

I'd wager it's vastly more likely Whole Foods will move away than Amazon moves in. I wouldn't be surprised if one of the main motivations for HQ2 was to move Whole Foods, and anyone else they acquire, into Amazon proper.

> Progressive islands in conservative states are almost worse

Progressive islands in conservative states is pretty much all there is, with the exception of California and New England.

Chicago is the progressive island that turns conservative Illinois blue on the map. Seattle is the progressive island that turns conservative Washington blue on the map. New York, Rochester, Syracuse, Albany, and a few others are the progressive islands that turn conservative upstate New York blue on the map. Houston, Austin, Dallas as the progressive islands that have not yet turned Texas blue on the map. etc... etc...

> Progressive islands in conservative states is pretty much all there is, with the exception of California and New England.

California is hella conservative the second you get out of the major cities...

I agree with you, but I would argue the opposite. If you wanted to tip over Texas (and make it blue), moving 50,000 progressive jobs is a great way to do it. I'm in Dallas, and we're a lot closer to doing this than you would expect. Dallas, Houston, Austin are already blue.

If you can turn Texas blue, it's game over.

> Progressive islands in conservative states are almost worse. They just get diced up and have no voice in state or federal government

Not always. If it's a small area, sure it may get split apart, except packing is a thing as well and just as big of a deal. But Austin proper has nearly a million people. The metro area is more than two million. You'd need to split it into 6-8 districts even to have a shot at creating solid Republican representation for Austin. There are 4 districts covering the city, and you'd need at least 2 for equal representation.

I'm not saying gerrymandering isn't an issue, I'm just saying that any implication the people of a city like Austin have no voice at the state or federal level is flatly wrong.

Gerrymandering is an issue. Please see https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/map, and zoom in on Austin.

Austin is a part of the following Congressional districts: TX-21, TX-25, TX-31, TX-17, TX-10, & TX-35. Of these districts, only one (TX-35) is Democratic.

On the other hand, Lamar Smith (TX-21) is one of the Representatives for the Bluest city in the state.

> > I'm not saying that gerrymandering isn't an issue

At least two of the districts you mention represent suburbs and not the city proper, which is what I was talking about.

Human rights are things like voting, eating, drinking, and rule of law.

The bathroom bill is an embarrassment, it's discrimination, and it needs repealed. However, it's impact is not on the same level as those other things, or even on the same level as a broad denial of service ala "Whites Only" - in part because it's completely unenforceable.

Furthermore, even under your definition of human rights, what other rights are denied uniquely in the state?

>Why would a company like Amazon move to a state who's already so wrong on human rights issues? That's just asking for boycotts and mass resignations.

Amazon is more concerned with regulatory and tax burdens, labor costs and what kind of deal they can strike with a local government than with "human rights issues." Their labor practices are already infamous, and they have warehouses in Texas already, and no one cares enough about any of it to boycott them.

To this end, Texas is attractive because culturally it's pro-business, anti-regulation and anti-labor (and very much pro-kickback.)

Why do you think that Ohio (Cincinnati) is a conservative stronghold? They are typically considered a swing state.

I dont think it's political.

Seattle is a competitive market, which is slowly trending towards SV, SFO.

A 2nd HQ makes a ton of sense for Amazon.

> For a big state, that might make have a bigger impact and make more sense, especially since you're not going to find 50,000 software engineers in Montana.

I bet you would if you announced next month that Amazon was opening an 8,000,000 square foot facility in Montana and would be hiring software developers at Amazon wages.

Have you seen any evidence that Bezos is willing to trade the interests of his company for a beneficial impact on society? I haven't, and it doesn't seem in keeping with what I know about him. He's going to look for the best place for Amazon in the medium and long term.

Of course personally I'd love it if they chose a swing state and added 50-100,000 progressive-leaning voters to its population...

He was willing to (personally) buy the Washington Post, but I agree that it doesn't mean politics will factor into his decisions at Amazon.

Come to Atlanta! Great schools, great weather, downtown is under utilized, decent mass transit. One of the fastest grow tech locations in the country.

We offer, no hurricanes, no earthquakes, no tidal waves, no forest fires, no flooding, and once every 10 year snow storms. We are on the opposite coast which protects you from N Korean actions. Plus you can fly anywhere from our airport!

Agree. Atlanta is a great choice.

Except that I want to live in Atlanta even less than I want to live in Seattle. It has a kind of psychic oppression field over it that makes me want to immediately turn around and leave.

Atlanta looks good on paper. It always does. But actually being in the city tells me a different story.

That said, I think only Atlanta, NYC, Chicago, or Boston could absorb the extra demand for skilled employees without sucking the wind out of the other local businesses' sails. The Texan cities could, too, but I don't think Amazon will go there, for some reason.

If Amazon plopped down in Chattanooga or Harrisburg, or even Indianapolis or Detroit, it would exhaust the local talent pool immediately, and cause a local inflation bubble.

What rubbed you wrong with ATL?

As an Atlanta resident, I find it a terrible place to visit but a great place to live.

Great cities have (1) cool places to visit; and (2) lots of hidden gems - parks, restaurants, etc. - that take years to discover. Atlanta lacks the first, but has plenty of the second. That combined with good weather, great housing options and a Delta hub make it pretty nice to live in.

I feel the same way about Atlanta. And the money that I save by living here as opposed to a cool place to visit means I can actually afford to visit those places.

Nobody's going to Chicago. The state government is in shambles, and taxes are going way up. The state is flirting with insolvency.

Boston and NYC are all developed expensive. Atlanta still has undeveloped area inside the city limits or old industrial areas that can be removed and replaced.

Chattanooga wouldn't work because they want an international airport and major university.

Atlanta has the world's busiest airport and Georgia Tech (engineering), Emory (business, medicine). Atlanta is also a huge transportation hub of the Southeast.

Detroit is a cesspool, but does have the added advantage of everything being cheap, lots of places to develop, and lots of transportation infrastructure, but no international airport.

It looks like Amazon wrote this RFP for Atlanta.

Detroit has a rather large, comfortable, and underutilized international airport. U Michigan is close by, widely considered a top ten CS school.

Shit, they could probably buy the whole city!

And then change their name to Omni Consumer Products?

Georgia State is a reasonable school as well, not as glamorous as GT or Emory though.

I'm certainly bias as I grew up in ATL, but the RFP seemed to be written for Atlanta to me.

I'm sure Georgia State is reasonable, but it's just as reasonable as any other good state school in any other state. Georgia Tech and Emory are at the top of the list for their specialties though, engineering, computer science and business -- all things Amazon would find enticing.

> Nobody's going to Chicago.

Maybe nobody you know is going to chicago but 75% of my friends from the midwest have all congregated to chicago. I moved out west for the better tech jobs but I would instantly jump on the chance to move back to chicago to be close to friends and family.

I meant companies. They are going to steer clear of Illinois. Illinois is at the start of an economic death spiral. Roads are hugely underfunded. State workers' pensions are extremely underfunded, as in, state taxes are going to have to increase significantly beyond the tax increase passed this year for them to not default on their obligations and their other loan payments. Once they default on their loan payments, Illinois' ability to issue debt for capital expenditures like roads, road repairs, bridges and other infrastructure is limited to high risk / high interest loans.

Companies don't want to move to a state whose economic future and viability is in question.

They could always set up in Gary in Indiana or Kenosha in Wisconsin. Metra commuter rail goes out that far, so anyone wanting to live in Illinois proper could do so and commute outward instead of in.

Maybe I'm biased because I live here, but Chicago seems like a complete slam dunk for Amazon. We've got: good public transit, plenty of space for development, an educated workforce with a a decently sized tech talent pool already developed, easy draw from Big 10 schools and the University of Chicago, and a (relatively) low cost of living when compared to comparable cities. Yes, the state and city have financial problems, but watch how fast the gridlock disappears when an opportunity like this presents itself. As I said in another comment, the city has been really good at getting companies, both from the suburbs and from out of state, to setup headquarters in the loop.

Also, the blatant trolling for big bribes would fit right in with the local political culture.

> That said, I think only ... could absorb the extra demand for skilled employees without sucking the wind out of the other local businesses' sails.

This is a bad thing? Wouldn't that work in favor of Minneapolis-St. Paul where they would outbid their top retail competitors for tech talent?

> "no hurricanes"

Don't jinx it.

What about Chattanooga? It's in the same area with a rapidly-growing startup/tech scene, but it has gigabit municipal internet and a slightly cooler climate.

Chattanooga is great! Just not sure if they have the infrastructure to handle that big of a corp. And Gigbit is kinda passe by now.

Oh, I doubt they'll be worried about that. Seattle sure doesn't have the infrastructure necessary to support them!

They recently put a giant fulfillment center in Chattanooga- which really would make Atlanta an even better choice for HQ2

Atlanta was one of the top places that came to my mind given their requirements. It's really compares favorably with Seattle for size, access, tech talent.

Having grown up in ATL and moved to SEA I don't think there's a lot of tech talent in ATL, but there's tons of potential for that to change. GT's college of computing has ~4k undergrads and masters. There's also ga state and emory within a short drive.

Right now it seems like mailchimp is getting as much of the graduates as they can.

Atlanta is also subject to the whims of a state legislature that passed a "religious freedom bill" that required the governor's veto as recently as last year.

and sadly, a number of the gubernatorial candidates have indicated they are in favor of this bill.

Indeed. but metro Atlanta area itself is very progressive.

True, but I'm not referring here to whether the local community is politically progressive. The issue isn't whether there is nice record shops and an NPR affiliate.

I'm referring to the real possibility that Atlanta might become subject to laws that pretty much every corporation in America would consider a major downside when choosing where to site a HQ. I assume this is what they are referring to in the CFP when they talk about the "political stability" of a region.

That probably excludes anywhere outside of the NE or West Coast.

Even then, the metro areas are blue, rest of the states are red, like everywhere else in the country.

> That probably excludes anywhere outside of the NE or West Coast.

ding ding ding! My bet would be on Pittsburgh. Maaaaybe Minneapolis, Madison, Detroit or Philadelphia.

probably not madison considering the government there.

I'm also betting on pittsburgh or perhaps minneapolis.

I am not familiar with Pittsburgh, but I was born in Minneapolis area. Great government, great people, but damn the winters are COLD.

> and an NPR affiliate

Just one NPR affiliate? We've got 2!

Some of our politicians are from the stone age though.

Georgia is home to 17 Fortune 500 companies and a burgeoning film industry, it's not as "politically unstable" as you think. Mostly, money talks.

A reasonable choice to be sure, but I do disagree on the weather and mass transit part. Atlanta's urban sprawl means that fewer residents live near a transit stop than in most cities of comparable size. And the weather - obviously that's a personal choice, but for me the heat and humidity in summer is debilitating.

Summer is hot for sure. But in a world of AC I find it doesn't bother me as much. I go for a bike ride at 7 am when its 73 outside, and work all day!

As for the sprawl, there is a huge building boom going on inside the city, 10's if not a 100 thousand new apartments going up. Bike lanes being added, its actually becoming civilized!

ATL does have marta it's just that white people neglected it for most of it's history.

The last year I lived in ATL I took marta to work as my commute.

Amazon needs to locate west / southwest in / just out of the city. It will be very convenient to the airport, existing MARTA lines, inject new life into that part of town, and it would be cheap for Amazon.

"Decent mass transit" huh...

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Pittsburgh yet. uber did some early self driving pilots there. CMU is there. Google has a large office there. Amazon has also started hiring software engineers for an office in Pittsburgh too. Cost of living is very cheap. Many upsides to Pittsburgh. I don't know what the city could afford in terms of subsidies though.

PA Corporate tax is one of the highest in the country. Though it's not a terrible option.

Effective rate, or published rate?

9.99% net income. It's flat so there is no "effective" rate.

How does that affect a company like Amazon that cam claim its primary HQ in another state, and its actual realized revenue as mostly in other states? What part of Amazon's profits would get taxed in PA?

Most states have tax nexus rules where that doesn't matter as much anymore. They'd certainly pay PA corporate tax on PA income, then PA payroll on every employee.

Philadelphia has gross receipts tax. It is a no go.

So does Washington State though.

Apple and Microsoft also have a presence here.

Pittsburgh was my first thought. Northeast near DC/NYC, colleges, low cost (for now), a city with good bones

I have mixed feelings about this for Pittsburgh. The main con is 50,000 tech jobs in this city means a lot of new people. Being conservative, we can call it 30,000 new families. I think that will cause chaos in the housing market and increase the cost of living. I'm not sure about it.

There is real estate downtown that (I believe) is still undeveloped and unplanned where the Igloo was. The biggest issue I see is travel. There are no direct flights almost anywhere from PIT.

They mention at-site transit in the RFP, and the transit in Pittsburgh seems light.

It's pretty light in Seattle too

As a Seattlite, I kind of wonder if this isn't in response to our lack of transit. We have some possibility of improvement, but it is almost 20 years out for my neighborhood and Amazon is growing super fast. Since they can't stem the growth to the rate of infrastructure development, maybe they can offset the growth to another city. And that city needs infra already waiting. Of course this narrows down city choice significantly.

To the suburbs, yes. Just a few park-n-ride lots.

Inside the city to downtown is pretty good though. Lots of busses to downtown and oakland from the most popular neighborhoods (East Liberty, Shadyside, Lawrenceville, etc).

Philly sits halfway between NYC and DC, via Amtrak or I-95. They could get in on the new project to cap the rail yards next to 30th Street Station and find themselves situated between the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel campuses, with Temple University a stone's throw away and Princeton accessible via NJT/SEPTA regional rail.

There's also available suburban sites in Southern NJ and Malvern, PA that are accessible via mass transit, the Navy Yard (which desperately needs a subway spur) and tons of developable/reclaimable industrial space in North Philly.

Given how accommodating PHL has been with Comcast, I'm sure Amazon could get what they need.

Agree, when tech company choose sites, they tends to locate near schools. Somewhere in Midwest is no go, since Amazon would find it difficult to recruit people. I would say Pittsburgh is a reasonable bet.

Why not put HQ2 in Vancouver?

Okay, yes, house prices are unrealistic, but hear me out:

1. Not in the US (helpful for any non-American employees who can't get a visa or don't want to live in the current political climate in the US)

2. Relatively easy for Americans to work in Canada

3. Close proximity to Seattle

4. Canadian salaries are typically lower than America, so this could be a huge boon to Canadians working in tech that they're finally paid similar to US counterparts and/or Amazon can save a bundle on salary costs by paying the Canadian market rate...

Salaries are lower in Canada indeed. Plus, their are substantial credits both at the federal and provincial levels to recuperate developer salary costs (30%+). Ubisoft and other studios have their R&D in Montreal just for this reason. There is a big talent pool in and around Montreal. Would be an ideal location.

> There is a big talent pool in and around Montreal. Would be an ideal location.

True, Montreal is also a great potential city for HQ2. They already have quite a tech presence there (OVH data centre, game studios, some media production)

Taxes are too high in Quebec. Also, not sure people in Montreal want to be dominated by Amazon and have it turn into some new Amazon-centric tech hub. It is doing relatively well without a megacorp there.

I believe it's the opposite, taxes for companies are lower in Quebec than in the US (did not factor in R&D credit, etc). Individual taxes are higher in Quebec.

pretty sure they want to be further from seatlle on purpose (east coast ? south ?)

Why not? Because the single greatest threat to Amazon's business continuity is a major quake in Seattle. Vancouver sits on some of the same tectonic plates.

It's likely that this move is, in part, an attempt to address the business continuity risk.

Ottawa is an excellent candidate for this as it sits squarely on the Canadian Shield.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Shield

Not only that but the public transit is undergoing rapid modernization (ie: light rail) and the software industry is spiking.

All the top students from uOttawa and Carleton end up going to Silicon Valley or Seattle anyways. A few go to Toronto. What's left in Ottawa are largely mediocre government employees. On top of that, you're going to have a tough time convincing people to move somewhere with -40 degree winters.

>you're going to have a tough time convincing people to move somewhere with -40 degree winters.

But there's all that sweet, sweet Rideau Canal beer and poutine.

Aside from that, Ottawa is home to a [small, but] thriving startup and tech community. Prices as compared to SV or Vancouver or Toronto would be lower, while quality of life remains high. Even if it's less exciting. I don't think it's a terrible suggestion. (And I'm saying that from Toronto!)

Ottawa doesn't have more than 1 million people though. [0]

Ottawa city limits are already huge, so I can't imagine what else qualifies as the "metro area" Kingston perhaps? Or they're counting Gatineau as a separate city but within the metro area?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa

Canadian market rate and Vancouver housing prices already kind of turn me off from this

Amazon's page says they'll bring high-paying jobs though, so I don't think that would be a major issue.

Housing in Vancouver is so incredibly expensive that even a great low six figure salary of the sort an Amazon software engineer is likely to have is not really enough to purchase housing.

The median price for a condo in the City of Vancouver is approaching $1 million, and $3 million for a detached home.

http://www.vancourier.com/news/vancouver-s-median-condo-pric...

I agree with these points, but I think the property costs are going to be a non-starter. I know housing is expensive in Vancouver so I'm assuming, possibly incorrectly, that office space will be at a premium as well. This puts Vancouver at a disadvantage since another metro can offer an insane tax deal plus cheaper property.

Amazon has had a development site in Vancouver for more than 6 years. It's one of the larger North American outposts today. The area probably doesn't have enough locally created talent to be the second HQ, and cost of living isn't favorable if you need to relocate large numbers of people. Doubling down on the PNW doesn't do much for cultural or geographic diversity, imo.

companies in Vancouver compete for a lot of the same talent that companies in Seattle do. Amazon already has a large office in Van and the local universities don't generate enough software eng. talent to justify having it so close.

I'd imagine a city like Windsor might be better suited. There's tonnes of space for the HQ, it's close to the border, it has relatively easy access to Detroit Metro Airport, and has its own local airport for those flying within Ontario.

I'm sure every medium sized Canadian city will be clamouring for this.

Amazon already has a fairly sizeable office in Downtown Detroit, and a huge number of Canadians from Windsor working there. Would it make more sense to expand that?

They need it to be in America due to the current political climate here. Many politicians are looking at Amazon with an unfriendly eye. Investing Billions in the US and hiring tens of thousands helps remove that pressure. Doing all of that in a foreign country would be political suicide for them right now.

If we are looking at Canada, Montreal could be attractive. Lower labor cost, large amount of schools churning out tech talent (including strong AI programs). Eastern timezone. Still reasonable housing prices.

Obviously there are down sides, perpetual construction, governmental corruption, and Airport kinda sucks but it's still not too hard to access. Visa situation for US workers isn't too bad under NAFTA most of their (US and Canadian citizen) employees could transit between the two at will with a simple VISA

They would probably get the incentives they want if they did move there too from the provincial and federal level.

How about Calgary?

1. Huge amounts of Vacant office space.

2. > 1 Million People

3. No earthquakes

4. Educated population

5. Commuter rail (green line will make this even better)

6. Low corporate tax rates

7. Way lower cost of living then Toronto/Vancouver

8. Cheaper salaries

9. A very willing government

10. Close to tons of outdoor activities (similar to Denver here)

Calgary has major towers being built with < 50% vacancy, amazon here would be supported by almost everyone.

And there are already more than 1000 Amazon employees in Vancouver. A couple warehouses that have easy access to China/Pacific shipping.

And the False Creek Flats are going through planned urbanization at the moment: http://vancouver.ca/files/cov/false-creek-flats-plan-2017-05...

Why I wonder? While they're gobbling up DT Sea, they only have 1 building in Bellevue. Isn't there room to set up shop in Fremont or Kirkland and poach more engineers from Microsoft/Tableau/Expedia etc and reducing commute times? Not seeing the upside. This is a major management overhead, managing culture between both, all hands, IT infrastructure.

Austin, TX is a good candidate. Very strong engineering university attracting nationwide talent, better cost of living, they already have an office there so they must have some relationship w/ local govt, a good climate contrast to Seattle being much drier (barring the occasional hurricane), a Google Fiber city. $5B buys a lot more there than most places in the US.

I think many Seattlites would be OK with Amazon not gobbling up even more of the local economy.

As far as some of the outlying areas, I think it comes down to signaling around tax breaks from the governor[1] and available office space inventory.

[1] https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2017/07/07/inslee-v...

Perhaps they're working to help recruiting. It might be easier to attract top talent in a different area (for example, if they situated in Pittsburgh as another commenter mentioned, they could more easily recruit CMU grads/professors).

It also can't hurt their business to reduce their dependency on a single state/local government's policies.

Amazon is a frugal company and competing with FB/Uber/Snap/Lyft/literally every SV/SF startup was never part of the plan. Seattle used to be the cheap amazing engineering secret. Then everyone caught onto this and moved to the region. Once engineering salaries started to creep up into California territory it was only natural they'd want to leave for cheaper pastures.

> Why is Amazon choosing its second headquarters location via a public process?

Because Foxconn got such an amazing deal and we want to get some of those sweet, sweet tax credits, too

Yup. "Amazon seeks a city to provide cushy tax credits in exchange for vague, unenforceable promises of job creation" would've been a more accurate headline.

I understand (and largely share) the annoyance about these sorts of tax breaks, but as a software developer, it seems obvious that having an Amazon headquarters in my city would result in lots of job opportunities for me - not just at Amazon, but at other software companies that locate nearby over time due to the increased concentration of workers. So I don't understand your skepticism at the "job creation" part.

It will also greatly increase prices for good/great developers.

The skepticism is that the US is a place where the government isn't supposed to pick the winners and losers. If we want to go down this road, we should do what what many Asian countries do and offer incentives for anyone to open a facility in a given geographic region.

Skepticism over the job creation part is because there are usually no guarantees with how many jobs the company ends up creating. In the Foxconn case, they could make the factory fully robotic and end up employing very few people. There will still be increased economic activity, but there seems to be better ways to generate it than singling out one company.

If there are better ways to generate it, then I'm sure they'll come to the fore. I agree that the practice is unfair and the government should pass some laws preventing it, but for the cities themselves, there's no better way to generate such job/tax growth.

If you've seen Amazon's crazy hiring for the past few years, you wouldn't doubt that they'll create a lot of jobs.

Most of those jobs would've still been created without tax breaks, though. These incentive packages are a race to the bottom, transferring taxpayer money into major corporations with dubious returns.

This is true in absolute terms, but not true at the level of each locality. Those jobs will still be created without tax breaks, they just likely won't be created here (for nearly everyone's definition of "here"). I totally agree that these incentives are yucky, but I don't think down-playing the benefits to the "winning" locality is the right way to argue against it.

I don't think a megacorporation should be having its jobs (which it was going to create anyways!) subsidized by the taxpayers of relatively small, desperate localities engaged in a race-to-the-bottom against other similarly small, desperate localities.

I don't disagree at all! But that is a larger point than the question of whether it will improve the job market in that locality for people with the right skills: it definitely will. What I'm saying is that I don't think it is wise to downplay the job creation aspect when arguing against things like this. You have to make the counter-argument despite the job creation potential.

Amazon is more or less conducting an auction. Cities will bid on hosting their second HQ. The best bid wins. Or maybe a better analogy is the Olympics site selection process.

I'd argue Research Triangle Park (RTP) is better choice than Austin. Instead of using one feeder school Amazon could pull from three excellent schools: Duke University, North Carolina State University, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For those that are unfamiliar RTP is a major tech center.

Edit: Changed "RTP" to "Research Triangle Park" in initial comment.

Forgive my ignorance, what is RTP?

Trying to figure that out too. I assume they're talking about the "Research Triangle" area, but I can't figure out what the P is.

P = Park

Research Triangle Park- between Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Triangle_Park

Best guess: Dallas Forth-Worth?

I'd agree, Raleigh area would be a great choice. It is growing with lower cost of living than other tech centers.

I agree. There's a huge tech workforce in RTP, very good universities, affordable costs of living (which I suppose translates to affordable business property). Another indication: Take a look at the size of the Triangle AWS Meetup group on Meetup.com. It has 879 members.

I've been to Pittsburgh too, and I do think that a possibility. One advantage that Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill has over Pittsburgh is weather. Amazon is very fault-tolerant minded. There's not much chance they'd need to close the facility in Raleigh because of a blizzard (although it has happened a few rare times).

That would be great! However a number of companies (like PayPal) cancelled their plans to move to the area last year because of the HB2 debacle. Not sure how Amazon feels about that. Good thing is that the situation seems to have normalized now with a democrat governor and some big companies (like HSBC) moving here this year.

If you take their transit and airport requirements seriously, Atlanta and perhaps Miami are top contenders. I'm biased, but the list of requirements looks like a description of a currently undeveloped area of downtown Atlanta that has been targeted for redevelopment:

https://atlanta.curbed.com/2017/6/30/15900526/downtown-atlan...

http://atlantaintownpaper.com/2017/08/lawmakers-want-revive-...

Looking at the RFP, minus the mass transit, it seems like it was written for Atlanta. And Atlanta has so many urban infill areas available for development.

Silicon Slopes? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Slopes

- Population > 1,000,000

- Serviced by 2 great universities (UoU, BYU)

- Utah is a top 5 state for # of Unicorn Companies

From the wiki I shared: "The Utah Governor's Office of Economic Development allows a variety of grants and tax incentives to companies willing to either relocate or expand their enterprise"

Note: I live in Seattle, not Utah.

Utah could be a great fit based on Amazon's preferences for a site if they build something along the I-15 corridor. It's within 30 miles of a population center, within 45 minutes to the airport, directly off a major highway, front runner rail stations run along I-15, and you might be able to find 100 acres of space - especially if they were to put it out where the prison is now (it's moving soon).

I live in Salt Lake City, Utah. I do AWS security consulting. I would love this. I've lived all over the US (Boulder, SF, Austin, DC, and more) and because I do remote work I can work anywhere, and I chose to move here as the best place for my interests.

I wonder if SLC would be disqualified because it would harm rather than help Amazon's diversity efforts.

Not building an HQ somewhere because of race sounds like racism to me. This is the problem with considering race at all for hiring decisions. Race != diversity.

If their diversity efforts are for the sake of new thinking, it would benefit their diversity efforts. If their diversity efforts stop at skin color, then yeah, you are right.

I think it's fine to consider attractiveness to a diverse workforce. It's not racism to pick a city that is more diverse than another. It just says we want to make it attractive to the most different type of people possible. It's not just race, other factors make SLC possibly less attractive to minority groups beyond race. And to be fair I don't know how true those concerns are for SLC just making a general point that considering diversity and location isn't a problem

Socially, Utah could not be more different than Seattle. SLC is one thing, but that's one small slice of a much bigger state.

You'd be able to attract people who live there already, but there's 0 chance someone like me would be interested in living there.

Note: I work for Amazon, but have no input at all in this process. This is the first I'm hearing about it.

> Socially, Utah could not be more different than Seattle

Its called diversity of thought.

I completely agree with that generalization

The people who want to work for Amazon wouldn't like living in Utah, and the people living in Utah wouldn't like the people who work for Amazon

I've been in tech in Southern Utah for almost 20 years, and it's extremely difficult to find qualified people.

If I didn't have a house I love, and family around, I would have left a long time ago.

Southern Utah is way different/smaller than northern. Is there even a $1billion company HQ'd in southern Utah? I'm in Seattle but my company is HQ'd in Utah Valley. There is lots of tech talent in Northern Utah. Heck, Angular Conf and React Rally are in SLC every year for a reason.

No tech companies that I know of yet (finger's crossed), but they're taking steps to try to attract more: https://www.stgeorgeutah.com/news/archive/2017/08/22/mgk-big...

The only billion dollar company HQ around here I can think of is SkyWest (https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/SKYW:US)

Qualtrics, Domo, and InsideSales are in Utah Valley. Vivnt and Workfront are down there but aren't quite a billion yet.

None of those are in southern Utah. Utah Valley and SL Valley are Northern. Something like St. George would be southern.

Gotcha. I saw you mention Nothern talent and SLC and assumed you meant relatively close to that area. I guess my mind was stuck on rational options. I drive to/from SLC and PHX a lot and there's a whole lot of nothing in between. :)

True, to an extent. You are right in that that residents of SLC (plus similar areas like Park City and Ogden) are politically disenfranchised due the state being something of a theocracy.

However, SLC itself is actually pretty liberal and has a lot to offer. It's far from perfect (mainly: air quality issues in winter and the political issues), but anywhere you choose has a different set of compromises. Is it right for you? Probably not, but I promise it's a better place to live than it looks from the outside.

This is unrelated to the social issues, but I have visited SLC in the past and I don't think I'd move there due to the lack of "urbanness" of the city. The downtown grid makes the blocks so large that it's unwalkable.

The density is 1,678.0/sq mi vs 8,398/sq mi for Seattle, and I consider Seattle already frustratingly spread out.

I live in SLC, Utah and I generally agree with this. I'm constantly shut down because I say that "Happy Valley" will never be able to attract high quality individuals, mainly because it so horrible out there.

Shutdown like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/SaltLakeCity/comments/6yqfgw/after_...

gasp You forgot UVU!

I know you want to pitch SS but saying UoU and BYU are great universities is just wrong. Indeed, attracting talent in Utah is going to be one of Amazon's biggest challenges if it opens an office there.

> I know you want to pitch SS

Frankly, I don't care either way. I work in downtown Seattle in Amazon's back yard. I just know SS has a healthy tech scene and not a lot of people know about it.

> saying UoU and BYU are great universities is just wrong

What? Am I missing something?

Here are the top eng colleges in US: https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-engineering...

Do you see UoU and BYU there in the top 50? I don't either. For contrast, 2 of Silicon Valley's univs are in top 5.

Ok, they are both top 100 for engineering and top 50 for business programs.

I think you are confusing "great" with "top" or "prestigious". They are great universities.

And college rankings aren't everything. Those universities put out a high volume entrepreneurs, more than most of the top 50 engineering schools. For example, I don't see most of the top engineering schools on this list: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DHB_9l_UAAE8Fzn.jpg

I suspect this is a Utah cultural affect. Mormon attitudes and community culture VERY strongly promotes entrepreneurship. Missions are good sales experience too.

Here is the the list of top Computer Science programs:

https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science-sch...

#40: University of Utah.

Staying close to SLC is the only way this can happen.

I'll suggest a dark horse candidate: Indianapolis. Indy is close to two top 5 engineering colleges (UIUC and Purdue) and one top 10 business school (IU). Purdue has a unique product history with Amazon [1] and Amazon has four warehouses within an hour drive (though to be fair, that's true of a lot of cities). The city has seen major investment from outside tech companies like Salesforce [2], IAC [3], and others in recent years. Real estate and cost of living inside the city is ridiculously cheap, and there are hundreds of undeveloped acres [4] startlingly close to city center. The city has proven itself capable of hosting 400,000 people in a single day at the Indy500 every year. The state and city has a history of giving large tax incentives to outside tech companies [5].

[1] https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2014/Q3/purdue,-ama...

[2] http://www.indystar.com/story/opinion/2017/05/20/why-salesfo...

[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-01/iac-to-ac...

[4] http://www.indystar.com/story/money/2017/05/02/550m-gm-stamp...

[5] https://www.ibj.com/articles/58486-salesforce-to-invest-40m-...

Unlikely. One of the requirements is daily direct flights to/from Seattle. Indy does technically have that but it's exactly 1 flight with poor timing for business considerations. They list a few other destinations as must-have nonstop flights, but I'm not sure how good those are. They're also putting a lot of stress on public transit, which is pretty abysmal in Indiana. They also don't want to sacrifice on some of their values surrounding renewable energy, recycling, composting, etc. I lived in Indiana for over 10 years and can't say I've ever seen a compost bin at a restaurant, and can count on one hand the number of places with recycling bins (for public use anyway, most places would recycle their boxes at least).

That said, moving some place in the midwest would be very interesting. Amazon has a lot of employees that are from those areas, so if they want to start moving teams it would probably not be too hard.

The flights will come as soon as the demand is there.

Having lived in Indianapolis for about 15 years, I also say it is unlikely. The talent pool is too shallow, because tech employers just haven't been there. I had to move to Chicago after graduating in order to get a [decent, career-advancing] job as a software professional. The majority of my high school friends also moved out to find jobs after college.

And parent confirms some of the other problems I have with Indy. Unigov overwhelmed the urban core with township voters, so city-county government is atypically conservative for a Midwestern city, which has a major impact on statewide politics. (Still less conservative than where I am now, though, and trust me when I say that being liberal or libertarian in a conservative state is like rubbing a cheese grater on your soul every time you visit the polls--no good options, and sometimes you don't even get two whole evils from which to choose the lesser.)

If you want to fly anywhere, you have to connect through ORD (American, United), MDW (Southwest), or ATL (Delta, Southwest). The direct flight to anywhere probably only runs once a day or less.

Also, all the tech people with kids will undoubtedly cluster in southern Hamilton county, and Washington or Lawrence townships, which won't be great for traffic, because there's no limited-access highway to downtown from anywhere on the north side. And what public transit? I might have seen a bus once or twice, while visiting downtown, within a 5-block radius of the circle. And the hospitals have a monorail since the merger, I guess. Beyond that, you're driving or walking.

The state government has very recent precedent of subsidizing nonstop flights [1], because it recognizes that they are key to drawing external investment in the city. This year, taxpayers voted to add a new north/south rapid transit line [2]. Maybe more importantly; public transit isn't as important in indy as it is in other cities. Substantially lower cost of living and a more sparse downtown allows driving to be more affordable, the city has some of the best traffic [3] of any major metropolitan area worldwide, and it is very bike friendly [4] with the downtown trails and a growing downtown core.

[1] http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2017/09/06/delta-indi...

[2] http://www.indystar.com/story/news/local/marion-county/2017/...

[3] http://www.indianapolismonthly.com/the-hoosierist/hoosierist...

[4] https://www.rewardexpert.com/blog/studies/2017s-best-destina...

The direct flight requirement is odd. Adding flights is trivial, and it will happen if Amazon is buying the tickets. Airlines like to make money.

It always amuses me how stunningly bad Amazon really is at making standalone pages on their web site. This one is totally unresponsive, has images for headings, and a slightly blurry image for the table. Here's Amazon Locker, which is even more dismal: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Click-and-Collect-with-Amazon-Locke...

I guess they must have to produce all this stuff within the constraints of their CMS, but it really does make me wonder why they can't build better standalone pages outside of it if the occasion arises.

That page is actually responsive, just based on user agent rather than viewport dimensions

That is usually referred to as adaptive design.

You'll notice the same applies to Amazon's mobile apps too.

I think they just prioritize functionality over aesthetics. In a lot of cases you can claim aesthetics lead to higher customer satisfaction and conversion, but I'm certain they've A-B tested the crap out of every decision for maximum purchases.

> totally unresponsive

You mean it's not weighed down with tons of JavaShit and annoying transition effects?

They still serve you the product carousel at the bottom of the post.

Most responsive sites use media queries which involve CSS, not JavaScript.

You can also notice that this page loads 112Mo for images...

Amazon has many examples where they execute so poorly as to verge on the incompetent. Take the ads on the Kindle for example: why advertise books to me which I already own and purchased from Amazon? And then there is Prime video streaming, which is unwatchable through some client devices in the same house where Netflix is consistently excellent quality. I think they just have big areas where they don't give a rat's ass about doing any better than "meh".

Amazon has "frugality" as a core cultural value. They take pride in not doing any better than "meh" if anything more than "meh" costs more money.

Oh wow, the JPEG block artifacts in the big orange buttons on that Amazon Locker page are really something. Thank you for sharing!

I don't know if they've changed the table image on the HQ page since your post, but at the moment, it looks to me like the blurriness is mostly due to the way my browser is scaling the image down to 1280x320 px dimensions. The JPEG is large (6250x1653 px and 655 kiB) and looks sharp enough at 100% scale.

This seems like a case where using vector graphics would be more appropriate, or at least not scaling the image down by a weird factor like 4.88.

Edit: I transposed some digits when typing into the calculator and initially thought height and width were being scaled by different factors.

The fact that the table is in image is just lazy web development - which is pretty disappointing coming from a major company like Amazon. I understand this isn't a major client-facing site, but it would still be nice to put some effort into it.

A skilled front-end designer/developer could convert that to an HTML table in a few minutes. Instead they throw up a 672KB 6250 × 1563 JPG image which manages to appear blurry when downscaled.

Minnesota. Budget surplus, tons of F500 companies / large companies to recruit from and a strong university system, with lots of other states to draw from, being the largest city in the area, save Chicago.

This is one of the most likely locations I've read of so far. Minneapolis, Austin, Boulder in that order.

Denver possibly, but absolutely not Boulder. Boulder is a complete failure when it comes to transportation -- no light rail connection to Denver's system, although they collected sales tax for years claiming that was going to finance it; also, adding 50,000 new workers in a city of 100,000 would simply crush the existing infrastructure. Plus the local city council has been on a quixotic quest to confiscate electric utilities (distribution without production). The local developers have been giddy for the last few years that Google is bringing one thousand workers there, that's how strained housing already is.

Lots of retail in that area. BestBuy HQ, Target HQ, and a host of others. A lot of their suppliers have satellite offices in the area as well. Seems like a solid choice.

It's also very affordable, with public transportation.

Amazon has a small, but growing technical office in Minneapolis, as well as a DC in the suburbs.

I think an East Coast city definitely makes the most sense. Realistically though, they probably can't get enough land in the ideal spot of NYC/Jersey meaning the next best options are DC, Philly and Atlanta. Baltimore could be a dark horse candidate. There's already a lot of construction going on there courtesy of Under Armour building out a new HQ. Charlotte could be an option as well.

Was thinking the same thing. I'll be a little surprised if it's NOT Atlanta just between the city, airport, public transit and Georgia Tech.

My money would be on D.C. Lots of access to government agencies that could add a lot of AWS business, a major concentration of highly-skilled tech workers and colleges, close to the Washington Post, and a lot of up and coming neighborhoods in the southwest/southeast quadrants of the city. Also wouldn't hurt that it's on the opposite side of the country to add some geographic diversity.

As someone who lives in DC: I'm with you on the DC metro making some sense, but DC itself is probably out. There's not enough green space to build a campus the size of their Seattle HQ anywhere in the city, given how the severe building height limits here would balloon the total required acreage. They might have some options someplace in the suburbs (maybe Arlington, or out along the Silver Line), or they could look at Baltimore: still pretty close to DC, but much cheaper, and with a lot more industrial land ripe for repurposing.

The height limitations are a good point and also they probably wouldn't get the tax incentives they're looking for in DC, but Nova a possibility.

I'd be surprised by Baltimore because it would probably be difficult to attract top talent there in large numbers.

I'd include Boston in there too. They already have a large presence in the area.

Building a 50,000 person campus in the Boston area would be challenging and expensive. Areas that have the space are very, very pricey, and they're all outside the city. Public transportation is on the poorer side, and once you're out in suburbia many streets are too narrow to comfortably fit a bus, so the logistics just get harder.

Baltimore would be a great choice. Easy to draw talent from DC area -- housing prices much lower. Plenty of land both right in town (sad, actually) and in the suburbs. Would be a very big fish in town, and could do much to revitalize an entire city. World-class university in-town. Has a subway. DC right next door to lobby like crazy. And don't forget that Bezos has purchased a house in DC himself.

Thinking about what cities should lay out the red carpet, if I were a city official in, say, St. Louis or Detroit, I'd be putting together an incentive plan worth billions. Amazon could turn around an entire mid-size city.

Columbus, Ohio seems like a good choice. I do agree with St. Louis and Detroit too.

And then have it (the city) by the balls forever, to the detriment of the human inhabitants who are supposed to be the ones in charge of deciding what government does.

Have a look at what St. Louis offered to keep the NGA in the city:

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/st-louis-prepares-f...

Amazon announced plans to open up a Detroit tech office a few years ago [1].

[1]: http://www.freep.com/story/money/business/michigan/2015/09/2...

Excellent. I think we've gone too far in trying to put all the tech work in the spots where early tech companies happened to spring up.

In the long term, I'd like to see VCs not be so provincial in their investments, so that people can start companies where they are. But in the short term, having established companies put offices elsewhere is a great next step.

> A stable and business-friendly environment and tax structure will be high-priority considerations for the Project. Incentives offered ... will be significant factors in the decision-making process.

It's a race to the bottom. Don't fall for it. Pro sports teams, recently Foxconn, they're all running the same game. You will all end up overbidding in order to win the deal and your constituents will foot the bill.

This is far from true. Jobs bring sales taxes, property taxes etc etc. Football stadiums pale in comparison. People in Seattle complain that there are "too many high income people around spending too much on stuff, raising the prices". If youre a city wanting growth, adding one of the largest national employers seems like a good bet.

I think it's possible Amazon is not so much shopping for a second HQ as it is looking to move work from the high rent, pro union Seattle area. Only, they saw how much negative press Boeing received after making their true intentions known for moving work to southern states. Amazon is being sneakier. If all works out, long term I imagine much of their high end development work may move from Seattle.

Are unions affecting Amazon?

Unions would affect warehouses and jobs like shipping/delivery, not HQ office jobs.

From memory the reason Amazon was based in Seattle was that it was close to book publisher warehouses, that is no longer a good reason to remain there.

Also the initial business plan of Amazon was in large part trying to benefit from not having to pay sales tax on out of state shipments.

I don't think they would gain much negative press if they said they were moving jobs out of Seattle. The people who care about union jobs generally see software engineers as gentrifiers and would prefer that they left and stopped driving rent up.

To me, this screams Philadelphia.

45 minutes to NYC, 2 hours to DC, two of the biggest talent pools in the country, in a city of 2 million that has been making significant steps forward in the last 10 years.

It is cheap, offers all the urban amenities one could desire, it's close to the beach, I would absolutely move back if I got a good job offer.

If Bezos is into politics, Philadelphia is in a purple state. He will have a massive influence there.

I used to live in Philadelphia, I really loved my time there. It is a hugely underrated city IMO, and probably the most urban feeling in the country behind NYC and Chicago.

Philly is as multicultural as you can get, try taking a walk in Center City and you'll see what I mean.

Comcast has made a home in the city, and I know that they have made an excellent deal with the city government considering the massive investments they are making in Center City.

I know there are other options, I really don't see anything more fitting that Philadelphia though besides maybe Denver or Twin Cities.

-Current DC resident dreaming of moving back to Philadelphia

RFPs are due by Oct 19. My first reaction was "there's no way city and state governments can work together to produce incentive packages that quickly".

On second thought, it makes me wonder if they're shopping for local governments which can be that responsive with an eye on getting stuff done efficiently in the future (permitting, zoning).

I actually hope this is a city where housing affordability is made more sustainable up front. Something to avoid the way New York and San Francisco have evolved into landlords and rent seekers drowning the wealth generation of incumbents

Something tells me housing will suddenly become a little less affordable after Amazon comes to town.

Manhattan has been expensive for a very long time in spite of growing housing significantly.

The challenge is that they can go to places where housing is cheap and there's a lot of capacity. Detroit, Las Vegas... But they'd probably still have trouble attracting a lot of tech workers to those areas. [ADDED: Although Michigan is better than people in the Web tech bubble think in this regard.]

counterpoint: How many developers will move to Ohio to work for Amazon?

If Amazon decides to build housing and includes below market rate housing for low income people this could work, but given the focus on subsidies and tax breaks in the RFP, I highly doubt this will happen. My guess is that this will only increase strain on whichever housing market receives the HQ.

Chicago: Plenty of tech talent, cheap, nice city, convenient transportation, easy to fly all over. For employees with kids, top notch schools in the area, both private and public.

I'm not from the US, but as an outsider it would probably be a good idea for this second headquarter to not be on the West Coast. A little diversity wouldn't hurt :)

That, and somewhere that doesn't have volcanoes and earthquakes.

Seriously, they should look in New Jersey. Lots of tech talent from NYC that doesn't want the commute or insane prices of the city.

selfishly, i agree completely. But where could all this fit, and cost of doing business here is painfully expensive.

They probably won't. NJ's corperate tax rate is higher than california's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_St...

Amazon is planning to hire another 20,000 people in Seattle within 3 years, on top of the 40,000 they currently have there. Then another 50,000 HQ office workers at HQ2, so overall HQ staff is expected double within 5-10 years. (Even if some of the Seattle headcount shifts to HQ2, it'll still be close to a doubling.)

It's mind boggling to me that they foresee their HQ staff doubling; I lack the imagination to guess what all those people are going to be doing. Aside from physical retail, what markets might they be eyeing?

Transportation, including logistics and deliveries of course, but also innovative infrastructure to move people.

Also, vertical farming.

Bezos: Alexa, buy me a city, we need new headquarters. Alexa: City acquired.

It's so crazy to see a company make cities apply for hosting them, instead of them applying for space in a city. But I guess that given the size of Amazon, it's actually worth more than most cities in the world anyway...

It's all about tax breaks. This is a blatant attempt by Amazon to get years of taxes abated in order to provide the increased regional economic benefit of... doing exactly what they'd do anyways if they didn't get the break. US city and state then competes against other US cities and states in a battle to provide the larger tax break.

It's an odious practice in my opinion, and I wish lawmakers would do something to curb it. But being able to tell your constituents "Hey, look at me, I got Amazon to come here!" makes for great campaigning.

It's not that one sided, and I think you're missing a key component here. 50k decent paying jobs means more money in the local economy to be returned through sales and property taxes. Plus, having Amazon put a headquarters in your town gives it a status that attracts other companies, who don't have the muscle to demand such huge incentives.

I'm not a fan of Amazon's business practices, by any means, but they are correctly using their assets here.

It's only exactly what they'd do anyway if the chosen location was getting their new HQ anyway. While I don't necessarily agree with it on a personal level, this is a pretty basic "supply vs demand" situation.

Companies do sometimes indulge in incentives brinkmanship by threatening to move if they don't get the right offer. But, assuming this isn't Amazon just playing that game with Seattle, they do have pretty open options. Like it or not, companies do go after tax incentives and local job creation is pretty important to politicians. And it's not clear it shouldn't be given that's pretty central to the economic health of a city or area.

It's also worth noting that Amazon isn't just a tech company; they're a huge retailer. Walmart has no particular problem having their headquarters in Bentonville Arkansas.

NW Arkansas airport also has a surprising amount of service for an airport in that location - American, Delta, and United regional affiliates. serve most of their hubs from there. Presumably a lot of this traffic is either Walmart corporate or suppliers that have located an office in Northwest Arkansas to be close to Walmart. I'm not saying that Amazon would pick a place like that - Walmart has always been in Arkansas. But air service will come if necessary.

That makes me wonder about Pittsburgh and Raleigh-Durham, which both have underused airports (PIT as a former US Airways hub, RDU a former American hub).

Let's say I'm the mayor of Detroit, and I want this. What incentives are in my power to offer, if I team up with the Guv'nor? Can I just gift them the land?

cost of land is probably the least of amazon's considerations in building a second HQ

edit: to elaborate, what they care much more about, i'm sure, is ability to attract and retain talent in the area. which I'm not sure detroit could do much about. even if you could make it more desirable to live there there's so little talent in the area you'd have to spend a crazy amount of time and money relocating people

I think you are under-estimating the amount of tech talent that supports the automotive and satellite industries in the Midwest.

> there's so little talent

Citation needed. For example, the University of Michigan's engineering school is well ranked in many areas, grants 3,000 degrees a year, and is an hour away:

https://www.engin.umich.edu/about/facts/

I'd be quite surprised if Amazon hires less than 3,000 software engineers a quarter. U Michigan may be a good or great engineering school but if it's an hour away it rounds to part of the national market.

I went there, along with several of my friends. Most of them now work for Amazon, several in the extant Detroit office and commute there from just outside Ann Arbor. You'd be surprised at how easy an hour commute is in South-east Michigan, esp. compared to Cali or Jersey traffic.

Stanford and SF are a similar distance, and I don't think anybody would say that Stanford "rounds to the national market" for SF companies. I certainly know plenty of U of M grads who have ended up in Detroit, so I suspect your theory needs some work.

Relocation is a relative drop in the hat if you can otherwise attract talent--potentially at a lower salary than the West Coast.

Jobs in remote locations make it hard to attract people who know what a BATNA is.

I mean, how am I supposed to negotiate with my boss for a $5,000 raise if he knows changing jobs will cost me $20,000 in relocation costs?

There's a fair amount of engineering talent out here. However, it's mainly focused in the auto industry which has never been seen as a sexy industry until the recent push into self driving cars.

Fair amount is an understatement when talking about the whole field of engineering. IIRC Metro Detroit has the largest population of engineers in the US. Granted a big portion of those jobs are in Auburn Hills, Dearborn and Warren rather than Detroit proper.

Edit: just checked the BLS numbers and apparently it's #4, beaten by Houston and edged out by NYC and LA.

Amazon already has a (albeit relatively small) office in Detroit, so they must not be so skeptical of the talent pool.

Click through into the RFP and there's a section touching on this:

  Incentives 
  –
  Identify incentive programs available for the Project at the state/province and local 
  levels. Ou tline the type of incentive (i.e. land, site preparation, tax credits/exemptions, relocation 
  grants, workforce grants, utility incentives/grants, permitting, and fee reductions) and the amount. 
  The initial cost and ongoing cost of doing business are critic
  al decision drivers.

I'd imagine it would be along the same lines of what movies / studios get to shoot in certain cities -- relief from various tax types, priority in various permits, etc

You wouldn't be able to gift them the land, but you would probably be able to waive property tax on said land. I know Detroit has a city income tax, so the mayor may be able to waive that for all Amazon employees if they committed to moving their headquarters within city limits.

tax incentives are most common. (i worked in the business development office of a state government for a very short duration)

St. Louis recently offered up this footprint to the NGA to keep them in the city:

https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/stltoday.com/co...

That area has lost so many buildings over the last 30 years that it's practically an urban prairie, but they did use eminent domain to get the few remaining residents out.

In short, yes, land is on the table.

What city would you move to so you can work at HQ2?

Pittsburgh

Austin

Las Vegas

Salt Lake City

Buffalo

Vancouver

Research Triangle Park, NC

Denver

Cleveland

Atlanta

Phoenix

DC Area

Columbus, OH

Indianapolis

I'm already in Austin. I'd stay here. Though realistically they'd open an office way north and I wouldn't want to commute up there.

San Francisco without a doubt.

Los Angeles

Memphis

Chicago because that's where I grew up and most of my friends and family are still there.

While I think it's true that this is at least partially motivated by potential tax-incentives, it's also a smart diversification move by Amazon. Right now they're at the mercy of the Seattle voter, which is a dangerous place to be for a large corporation. Diversifying headquarters creates competition and gives them leverage.

Amazon making corporate welfare so sexy. Make those cities beg for it Jeff. Make 'em fight each other for it Jeff. Jeff, they want you and that hot HQ2 so bad.

sigh

You are not the city you live in.

Some of my tax dollars go to the city I live in.

Austin seems like a strong candidate, since it's a major high tech hub and Whole Foods is already headquartered there.

Everybody (except Amazon) will probably end up worse off. See Thaler's famous paper on the "Winner's Curse." http://econweb.ucsd.edu/~jandreon/Econ264/papers/Thaler%20JE...

I'm not sure what to make of this overall. The Federal Government should probably regulate this kind of behavior or at least sweeten the payoff of state cooperation. Our anti-trust regulators are really asleep at the wheel.

Canada... 'nough said. If we don't do what we can to bring Amazon North then I have absolutely zero faith in our ability to ever take tech seriously beyond the wall. I don't care where the HQ ends up so long as it's on this side of the boarder. #YYZ (Toronto) #YVR (Vancouver) or, the most likely spot, #YGK (Kingston/Waterloo) are all great options. Talent could once again stay here instead of the decade(plus)-long brain-drain to the South.

#YOW (Ottawa) should be considered a strong contender.

Totally! Space & cost might be the biggest issues or reasons against putting the HQ in #YYZ or #YVR; #YOW might be a great location.

Should be interesting to see if they decide to go with an east coast presence. Something like Atlanta would make a lot of sense with Georgia Tech there.

Make it in Canada please.

Kitchener-Waterloo?

edit: just thought it would be a suitable talent hub. Not sure why I'm getting downvoted. Maybe Toronto would be more suitable?

Wouldn't really make sense, an HQ would need to be in an actual city, not a sprawling suburban bedroom community. Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa, Montreal.

Why would it need that?

How many big tech HQ's meet that criteria?

Why? Tons of huge multinationals have headquarters that are not in a downtown. And Silicon Valley isn't exactly an "actual city." [ADDED: In fact, I'd be a bit surprised if they end up in a downtown core--certainly of a "hot" city where real estate is scarce and expensive. For example, while they're putting in a Boston office, it's about 2% of the 50K employees number.]

But Amazon is part of a generation of companies which see some value in pushing back against this trend.[1] Microsoft moved to Redmond; Amazon moved downtown. If they really want a second HQ to mesh with the first culture-wise, they are likely going to look to put it close to a downtown core. (Although if they are going to attract 50k workers they probably want a bit of land adjacent to the core, similarly to how in Seattle they located in what used to be a not-so-developed area where Paul Allen had purchased a lot of real estate to try to create a park, and Amazon has really made it part of downtown on their own.)

[1] https://www.amazon.com/p/feature/4kc8ovgnyf996yn ("we made a conscious choice to invest in downtown Seattle—even though it would have been cheaper to move to the suburbs")

The RFP explicitly states that they prefer "Metropolitan areas with more than one million people", but that the site does not have to be "An urban or downtown campus".

Great. The population of Kitchener, Waterloo, and Cambridge combined is just over 500k [1]. Disqualified, then.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tri-Cities_(Ontario)

KW is not a bedroom community. It's sprawling, yes, but it's too far from Toronto to function as a bedroom community. KW stands on its own.

Sorry, you're absolutely right. I misspoke about it being a bedroom community.

RFP says 45 minutes to an airport with direct flights to Seattle, SF, NYC, and Washington DC. I don't know the area but it seems to me that YYZ is too far away to qualify

Seems easy enough to make a list of all those airports.

Alright, I did it, based on OpenFlights route data (https://openflights.org/data.html). The list is:

Albuquerque, Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, San Antonio, San Diego, St. Louis, Toronto.

Both Chicago airports are on the list, as are Fort Lauderdale (FLL) and Long Beach (LGB), but this is about metro areas, not airports. I also manually filtered out Honolulu.

So long as airport infrastructure is in place, it's trivial for airlines to add routes based on demand. There are a lot of airports, such as former Air Force bases, that could handle significantly increased demand. You can find a lot of fairly large city pairs without non-stops but that's usually because neither are hubs and there isn't quite enough demand.

That's true. But is Amazon going to be big enough to create enough demand that airlines would make those additions? (Not a rhetorical question.) Sure, Pittsburgh could have a flight to Seattle. But it doesn't right now. Is the increased demand from an Amazon HQ2 in Pittsburgh enough to convince Alaska or Delta to start running those flights?

there is an international airport in Kitchener-Waterloo (YKF)

> In choosing the location for HQ2, Amazon has a preference for:

> * Metropolitan areas with more than one million people

There are 10 cities in America with one million people:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

> > * Metropolitan areas with more than one million people

> There are 10 cities in America with one million people:

Metropolitan areas are not the same as cities. By one definition (MSAs), there are 53 such areas with a population over 1 million.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Metropolitan_Statist...

Portland, Philadelphia, Atlanta based on what Amazon wants / needs.

I'd also say the research triangle, Salt lake city, Austin, Chicago, the twin cities, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati

Cincinnati isn't a good choice. It has a modest tech scene and no great CS/CE universities. Columbus is a far better choice.

> modest tech scene

Anywhere Amazon puts a HQ is going to have a pretty decent tech scene pretty rapidly.

> no great CS/CE universities

Columbus is 90 minutes away, and Amazon recruits internationally. Close proximity to a good CS program is hardly a strict necessity.

Sure, but having a great university down the street means they get first crack at interns.

The biggest problem with recruiting tech people to live in Cincinnati is that most people are unimpressed when they visit. Cincinnatians like nasty food and get excited over utterly boring events. So when visitors come, people recommend they try Skyline and go to the fireworks or something and it generally leaves a bad taste in the visitor's mouths.

Columbus seems like a better choice.

> Sure, but having a great university down the street means they get first crack at interns.

I can't imagine an Amazon HQ in Cincinnati would have trouble recruiting interns from Columbus, Cleveland, etc. They already attract interns to Seattle from all over the country.

For every Skyline rec (which is, indeed, a shitty thing to do to a visitor), there's a Graeters one. :-p

I could definitely envision a Philadelphia location. Comcast is building a new skyscraper as we speak with a ten year tax abatement. The local city government would easily grant them the same deal.

Portland suffers from the same cascade fault as Seattle and Oregon was much later to the party in terms of realizing they had a risk and addressing it.

CEOs always locate headquarters were they want to live.

Gates moved Microsoft back to Washington, his childhood home. Does Bezos open an office in Miami?

This year's hurricane season will give people second thoughts about Miami.

IIRC, about 80% of the time that a company moves its headquarters, the headquarters move closer to where the CEO lives.

I hope something like that is the case. He was born in Albuquerque. That city does have some tech talent and support but would hugely benefit from an HQ. plus the sunsets are amazing and the COL low.

I will "officially" hope AMZN chooses ATL (as leverage for a bigger raise) but ATL has problems.

1) traffic -- not sure it's possible to get to ATL airport in 45 min during rush hour, without using MARTA rail.

2) transit -- how much "developable" land has a mass transit stop on-site? AMZN would either have to buy a developed site or have a MARTA rail spur built.

3) ATL airport -- a certain airline has way too much power there.

But anyway, I found the perfect spot for AMZN if they can swing it - it meets their core requirements (it's even built over a MARTA rail stop) -- http://www.midtownatl.com/view/atandt-building

"ATL airport -- a certain airline has way too much power there."

And that airline is increasingly big in Seattle as well.

I wonder if this will eventually be the main HQ. Amazon is a mass market company which competes on the lowest costs. Seattle is too expensive now. Most big retail stores are not based in expensive cities Walmart is based in Arkansas, Target in Minnesota etc.

But isn't Seattle expensive because of Amazon being there?

I wish it'd go somewhere in the Deep South. It seems where tech jobs are most lacking.

The RFP says that sustainability is important. I would think Amazon would consider climate change as a factor. Miami and other South East coastal cities would be affected in the future by the increasing risk of flooding and hurricane winds.

Given how important the Dulles corridor is to aws and how big their presence is there already, and how important amazon's interaction with the federal government is getting, it seems like Northern Virginia should be in contention.

Why not in the D.C. area, perhaps near Amazon's own data centers in Ashburn? It's one of the richest, most educated places in the U.S., has huge quantities of technical talent and plenty of high quality nearby schools with strong technical programs and lots of people looking for opportunities outside of the Fed space but don't want to move to the West coast. It also is within the D.C./Baltimore/Philadelphia/NYC mega-city/region.

Ashburn hits pretty much all of their RFP requirements right away with the development of the new metro line as well.

If I had to guess, the D.C area might already be too big? They'd be competing with all the military contractors/consulting groups that exist out here for talent, housing, and transit access. Their best bet is a city that hasn't been "techified" to having exorbitant rents.

Also, any city willing to participate must have the following...

Top of the line medical centers, big ones! Fantastic sports teams, many of them. Amazing universities, state college required. Seasons, a little of everything for everyone. A small traffic problem, so it can get worse. Cheap real-estate, so it can get more expensive. A port, you know, the ones with access to shipping lanes. Land for more suburbs, so you can run out of land.

I'm sure the list is longer for the reasons why Silicon Valley and Seattle are what they are, but that's a start.

The federal government should pay Amazon to open an HQ in either Memphis, or New Orleans.

Or let's say any metro area over 30% African American and over 1 million people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._metropolitan_area...

The major issue is that typically states ignore the needs of critical infrastructure in those cities like Tier One Carnegie Classification Universities.

This could be aimed at a specific powerful senator/congressman that can change policy.

What federal rule hampers Amazon, and if unleashed would cause great profit?

Privatize USPS Internet tax? Transportation (own roadways)

What policies?

> We are looking for a location with ... [a] business-friendly environment

Translation: we want lots of subsidies to move to your city. Because only the little people should pay taxes.

If they're after tax breaks and cheap land they can follow companies like Sprint and Garmin and build open headquarters somewhere in East Kansas.

Sprint and Garmin have always been in Kansas. They didn't move here from somewhere else.

Small qualified developer pool to draw from and hard to attract outside talent. I grew up in eastern Kansas and left in part because of dismal career prospects.

They'll end up choosing an up-and-coming city (i.e., positive population growth).

I'm pretty sure the Kansas City Metro (where Sprint, Garmin, and Cerner are located) has positive population growth.

They've got Google Fiber now, though.

Perhaps many years ago? Eastern Kansas has a pretty massive tech sector now. So do some parts of Kansas City metro.

To be clear I'm not saying there's no tech economy in eastern Kansas (though I think all involved would dispute a description of "massive"). Just saying that dropping Amazon there won't magically make 50,000 qualified applicants appear.

“There are simply not enough workers in the area with the technical skills to meet the demand of our region’s companies,” the report commissioned by the KC Tech Council said. “This number will not decrease unless our region does more to support tech workforce development.”

http://www.kansascity.com/news/business/technology/article14...

I'm too late for anyone to see this, but they could probably take the Qualcomm Stadium site in San Diego's Mission Valley. It's right on a trolley line and a very easy drive to the downtown airport, not to mention an easy flight from Seattle. UCSD is a great supplier of young talent and Qualcomm and Viasat offer engineers they can poach.

Wow, $25.7 billion total employee compensation / 50,000 employees is $514,000 per employee.

Err, that's not all in one year, right?

Think the table is listing figures since 2010 for the Direct column.

That's in the "Direct" section which has this footnote:

>From 2010 (when Amazon moved its headquarters to downtown Seattle) to 2017.

Some employees earn more than others, such as EVPs and upper management, but this number shouldn't seem surprising - lots of people at $300k and a few at $800k.

If there's a second HQ they can offer lower salaries compared to Seattle, then drive Seattle salaries down by threatening to move the HQ1 jobs to HQ2.

The research triangle[1] feels like a strong candidate. Excellent schools, close enough for flights to the North East, accommodating southern state government.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Triangle

Newark, NJ.

Audible is already located there. Easy access to NYC and their many distribution centers in New Jersey.

I hope RTP bids for them! It would be great to have 3 of the Big4 in the area.

Texas has the inside track, too.

Wonder what city though... Austin's already too crowded as it is but has a great talent pool. Could be better off somewhere like San Marcos or Georgetown.

Dallas/North Dallas (Plano/McKinney/etc.)

Haven't seen it listen much but it is probably one of the top contenders. There is a reason Toyota, along with many others, moved their (U.S.) headquarters here.

North Dallas is getting crazy crowded, though. Enough that housing supply for their potential workers really should be a concern for any additional company looking to relocate there.

That said, engineer availability should be fairly good when compared to most places outside of more traditional tech hubs (the area is served by TCU/SMU/UTD directly, UT/Texas A&M/additional Texas schools indirectly, is already near EDS and Perot Systems/whatever those two call themselves these days) and the local authorities have shown both a desire and ability to attract major company retractions. You would have to think the North Dallas area is on the shortlist.

While North Dallas is exploding (huge growth in population for the past decade, maybe the most in the country?), it is far from being overpopulated. There is absolutely no shortage of land/property.

My first thoughts on this would be the Frisco area just north of Dallas. I believe it has been touted as one of the fastest growing areas in the country. The local gov't there is giving away the city just to attract business. Toyota just moved there, the Dallas Cowboys just relocated there, there are others that I'm not recalling and more is in the works. They are close to DFW airport (one of the largest) as well as smaller Lovefield (very appealing after the Wright amendment has been lifted). This airports already offer the required direct flights. As for colleges, there are so many to feed into it, that it's not really a concern. Cost of living in North Texas is very cheap, and other than the occasional tornado, environmentally it is very stable.

Why not Houston? It's major city, but it's still inexpensive. I know that Harvey and other storms would scare people away, but it's not as bad as it looks in the news. Houston area is huge and majority of the area are not affected much.

San Marcos already has the SAT2 fulfillment center, I'm not certain the city would benefit from another big Amazon presence.

I think when all is said and done this will be less about tax credits and more about choosing a city that's easy to work with on core issues like transit, development, and infrastructure. There are only a few cities who can really qualify in terms of having existing talent pools and being an attractive relo destination. This isn't putting an auto plant in bumfk. But working with Seattle's leaders ain't easy for anyone--sure, would be nice to get some tax credits, but ultimately those are just one way a new HQ partner could signal that they're seriously motivated to work well together. We'll see.

My guess is that Amazon will want to effectively "own" whatever city it selects. Not only will they get incentives from government, but they'll want to have primary influence over the business and educational communities. So that when Amazon wants something, the city will go along. This will give them a laboratory for all sorts of experiments, which is both fascinating and scary.

While a city like my hometown Atlanta makes sense on paper - transportation, great schools, awesome cost of living - there are too many other big players here. I think they want a next-generation "company town."

They can come to St. Louis. Everybody else left. They can have the AT&T tower downtown, it's empty.

Already claimed by the Free Republic of Annheuser-Busch-land. How about East St. Louis? I think the Spivey Building could use a new tenant...

Buffalo NY.

Pros: -Dirt cheap, so lots of land for Amazon

-Also means employees can afford their own houses, practically unthinkable for a new hire in Seattle. Bigger perk than foosball tables!!!

-Scores of Upstate/Midwest colleges and universities to recruit talent from

-Proximity to major markets of the East Coast, the Midwest, and Ontario.

Cons:

-Snow

-New York State taxes; abatement not as likely as in other states

-Erie County population not quite 1 million

-Snow

-The Bills always blow it, it's like they're cursed.

-Did I mention snow?

Buffalo might not be the best location for Amazon, but it very well could be a good place to grow a company without spending half of your money on expensive property, and the other half on salaries high enough to afford exorbitant rents.

"A stable and business-friendly environment and tax structure will be high-priority considerations for the Project. Incentives offered by the state/province and local communities to offset initial capital outlay and ongoing operational costs will be significant factors in the decision-making process."

I'm no fan of high taxes, but holding this sort of reverse auction to see who will provide the biggest bungs rubs me the wrong way.

I think they'll end up in Providence. Very close to Boston & NYC, cheap land, reasonably close airport.

Doubtful. Just like Worcester is also doubtful. Amazon's not hurting for money to lease or buy land and TF Green is too small (not enough direct flights) compared to Logan.

The Phoenix area would be a great option.

To add to that, they already have an engineering office in Tempe.

I suspect both Phoenix and Tempe will be strong contenders.

Positives: - Affordable housing - Affordable corporate real estate - Construction boom in both cities - Local governments interested in wooing corporations

Downsides: - No deep CS university pipeline - No strong tech presence, complicating hiring - Will need to offer incentives to get people to move - Public transport is lacking

Mississauga, Ontario, Canada is probably the best place for Amazon to place its HQ.

It has a huge international airport which has tons of undeveloped land, good road networks (HWYs, well-built roads), rail road connections, a harbour (Port Credit) that can be expanded and the land prices aren't surreal. Combine all this with a well educated local populace and a low crime rate.

wow, that only leaves 10 cities with a population over a million: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

Looks like Amazon is looking at metropolitan area instead of city limit.

your right. 53 is much more reasonable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Metropolitan_Statistic...

They got tax breaks with their customer service centers, but that might have been a bad bet for the city http://www.inforum.com/business/3978404-questions-linger-aft...

It should be in NYC, there I saved them a ton of time asking for proposals.

I'm going to make the case for Toronto, for New York, and for SF / SV. The reason I don't make the case for Vancouver is that it's essentially just a Toronto with a smaller talent pool to draw on from Amazon's perspective. It's like buying the non-M version of a BWM when you're a multi-millionaire. I guess you could do it, but why? Also, I don't understand the Texas or DC tech scene but there might be options here too. Lots of NSA programmers running around and they're working on some complicated datasets.

I think the Toronto case is the strongest, but I think any of the three are good choices.

1. Toronto is the most multicultural city in the world. It is in a country with a flexible, predictable, but different, immigration system, and with a fairly robust financial sector and infrastructure. If Amazon can't get a candidate into America, they can try getting that candidate into Canada instead. This is key. America makes up only 5% of the world's population and politics aside, is no longer an ideal place for a large percentage of the world's population due to racism and hostility towards immigrants / immigration. To attract international talent (including from New England, a short flight away which can be critical for taking care of aging parents) Toronto is by far the best choice in North America. It's more expensive than Ottawa, but more fun and has a number of high quality Universities near by (Waterloo, Toronto, Queens, and others) and compared to NYC or SV much, much cheaper. Vancouver wouldn't be a terrible choice, but there's less of a talent pool to draw from and the housing market is worse there. Toronto's current mayor is very friendly to tech companies, and there is growing focus on bike lanes and mass transit which means commuters from all corners of the GTA could make it into work. Most of the cultural elite (influential journalists, actors, etc) in Canada live in Toronto, which has subtle benefits like getting Amazon into TV shows or interviews through personal connections. Playing outside in the winter kinda sucks in Toronto though, Vancouver area has it made here.

2. New York has a huge pool of highly skilled developers with experience at firms where microseconds are critical. Nobody outgrows New York. It's also a place that has international prestige. An immigrant moving to Seattle or Portland is "moving to America" according to their family whilst an immigrant to New York is "moving to New York" Americans might not understand the huge distinction between the two, but to people in Pakistan or even Canada being able to make a living in New York is proving that you're one of the best in the world. It won't completely make up for the Trump presidency, but it would be a meaningful difference. Also, right next to banks and many important regulators and press people. Tons of American cultural elite as well. One downside of going NYC is that Amazon would have less bargaining power. The city is so huge that the injection of cash and talent matters less than in Toronto or Vancouver, so special concessions are harder to come by.

3. SF / SV is the easy, pricey case. The best machine learning developers live here. Machine learning is critical to Amazon's survival. They have success hiring here, but it would be better if they had HQ2 here. Salaries are much, much higher here, however.

I think the Twin cities has a strong chance to get this.

I don't think the city or the state would be too interested in giving the type of incentives that Amazon is looking for, unfortunately.

>We expect to invest over $5 billion in construction and grow our second headquarters location to be a full equal to Amazon’s current campus in Seattle

Is this laying the groundwork for Amazon to pull a Boeing?

If Atlanta gets it I'll eat my shoe polish

SFO Bay Area - You will get everything world class. More importantly, great talent from your competitors!

Who else thinks they might just put the second headquarters in Redmond? It meets all of their criteria.

It's gonna be Denver

Let San Francisco win!

Is there a place that is so appealing it doesn't need to offer a discount?

NYC? Boston?

Probably depends on priorities, the big cities will give you greater access to talent, but would require flexibility on how a campus could be built out and how quickly it would happen.

It's likely possible to build out a campus the way you want in a large urban center. Universities do it, but they do it opportunistically over a long time.

Fun round-up of local city subreddit threads:

- https://www.reddit.com/r/StLouis/comments/6yn4lz/amazon_seek...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/philadelphia/comments/6ymtng/imagin...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/Atlanta/comments/6ymz3i/amazon_in_s...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/washingtondc/comments/6yn1ni/amazon...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/chicago/comments/6ymtgy/what_are_th...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/baltimore/comments/6ymu85/amazon_se...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/kansascity/comments/6ynkoh/amazon_s...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/6ynba4/amazon_annou...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/cincinnati/comments/6yoew7/could_ci...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/pittsburgh/comments/6ynqbr/amazon_s...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/indianapolis/comments/6yo34a/amazon...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/Cleveland/comments/6yn5p3/amazon_is...

My city (Louisville) would be a prime candidate due to proximity to UPS WorldPort, and Amazon already has a bunch of facilities here.

That said, screw these guys. I'll make sure to have my voice heard if my city tries to offer them tax rebates to come here. Everyone needs to pay taxes, especially gigantic corporations. I hate that companies like this even have the nerve to expect these sorts of breaks.

Everyone needs to pay taxes

Why is this different than New Hampshire competing with other states by having no income tax?

Honestly, because it's a race to the bottom. On top of that, there have been many instances of companies negotiating massive tax breaks only to relocate again after a few years.

Those tax dollars are better spent making the city more attractive to people and improving the universities. This will provide for more organic growth through startups founded by people anchored to the city by their social network.

I could see why a city wouldn't want to pay real money and then have the company move, but what's the problem if they agreed not to tax Amazon and then Amazon relocates?

The key here is that the incentives appear to be for a certain company and are not fairly applicable to all companies. Giving those with the best economy of scale yet another advantage. People are often against unfair advantage.

Doesn't it say population > 1m?

Louisville has a local payroll tax, even if Amazon Corporate gets property or other tax breaks, 50,000 highly paid employees would bring in a lot of local tax revenue.

Translation: Whoever gives us the biggest tax incentives gets some of dat amazon internet money

Reply on news.ycombinator.com