Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

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...

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.

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.

> 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.

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 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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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