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Comment by kohanz | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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)

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.

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