Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You

Regarding the talent pool, as someone who works in the Philly area, I agree it has a lot of well regarded engineering schools nearby, but tech talent doesn't necessarily stay here in the quantities Amazon might find compelling.

Granted, it's a chicken-and-egg issue. The top talent tends to go where the top jobs are, and if the top jobs are in Philly, the top talent might be more inclined to stay.

A plan to expand it a few years back was killed by local opposition. There was supposed to be an alternative plan developed after that, but I'm not sure whatever happened to it.

I don't know what the time frame on an expansion would be or if the city would be willing to consider it, but as it stands the airport is a real Achilles heal.

Why would Amazon want that rule? Wouldn't it just mean there's more competition for employees? It strikes me as the type of rule put in to ensure their secret favorite gets chosen.

Philadelphia doesn't have tech scene like SF or Seattle, but it's well positioned for the next generation for several reasons.

Philadelphia has among the best, or the best, medical institutions associated with upenn and the children's hospital of Philadelphia, and both have signaled that they're very amenable to startups and new ideas. If you wanted to build a medical tech company that's not in San Francisco or Boston, it's great. It has a lot of extraordinary livability: extremely walkable, great public transit, and affordable. And while I'm not defending our politics per se, it agrees with the politics of many developers in NYC and the bay area. It has phenomenal art and food scene that's not copying other cities.

Developers in NYC tired of paying absurd prices for rent would move here in a heartbeat for the right job (and other opportunities if that fell through). In Williamsburg, my grad school roommate and I paid 2400 (plus broker fees) for a 500-700 sq foot apartment, each bedroom big enough to hold a queen sized bed + 3 feet, and a "kitchen/living room" (I'm being generous) that housed a loveseat and not much else. And it wasn't fancy, by any stretch: a five floor walkup with an alley view. It was still 30-80 minutes to work depending on the time of day. In Philadelphia you could live within walking distance to anywhere for half to 2/3 that in a much nicer apartment or townhome: check Zillow/Redfin/Apartments.com if you'd like a fair comparison. Good suburbs are 20-30 minutes by car and 40 minutes by trains that come every 10-20 minutes.

The biggest downside is that there are not as many backup tech jobs, but compared with Chicago, I see it much easier to bring developers here. The ease of moving here is not hard: I travel to NYC 2-3 days/week, the bus is 10 dollars and takes 2 hours to 6th/Grand, the train is 45 dollars and takes 70 - 90 minutes.

I've been hearing a ton about this because this crew has been steadily recruiting from there to Denver.

The comments they say when they are doing this:

Philly has worse crime by far. The weather (measured in number of sunny days) is obviously worse. Outdoor activities are limited. Yeah, you can get to pretty places, but it's a few hours drive for the beach or mountains. Culturally, it's not a place that jumps out on the radar. Denver wasn't either, but the weed legalization kind of helped highlight that this place is a tolerant, open-minded location to people who automatically thought of a redneck mountain town.

It'll be a uphill battle, but I think Detroit is a serious dark horse.

It's a huge gamble on a city that is pulling itself out of bankruptcy.

(There's an argument about whether “stable business climate for growth" really can be boiled down to just "job growth". But is Detroit really going to do well on any kind of proxy for stable growth?)

But ultimately they are probably right, Denver deserves it. Great quality of life, smart governance, good markets, healthy living and room to grow. Lots of people moving to Denver just like Seattle so it is very close to the same style of city. It is very, very easy to attract people to Denver.

PS - I actually currently live and work near Grand Rapids. I have 11 acres that didn't cost me a fortune, and I love it. GR would probably have also failed their 'amenities' filter, which I think is also wrong - any place with broadway, concerts, sports teams, good restaurants/breweries/bars etc. is probably good enough for most young people.

A failure to understand this leads to all kinds of ridiculous impressions and conclusions.

This is not the Detroit I went to grad school in, (mumble) 20+ years ago. Very different place, lots of investment. Ann Arbor is a dense tech mecca. East Lansing (90 miles away) less so, but between Wayne State, UofM's, MSU, Central Mich, MTU, and some of the smaller schools, there is a very strong engineering and computing culture. One that is frequently overlooked.

One thing I will note is a paucity of investment capital in the region, and a strong reluctance on the part of costal VCs to invest in fly over country.

However ... cost to hire/retain people here is very low compared to the coasts. Given how much the percentage of cost is in people, this should be a factor in any companies calculation on where to move.

Land/facilities are cheap. Transportation is ok ... we still have to work on local transit, as decades of mismanagement if not worse, have left the public transportation options in terrible shape. However, there are strong pushes from Dan Gilbert, the Illich family, and many others for modern regional transport. There are light and heavy rail all over here.

And, not for nothing ... we have 4 real seasons. Though, in my first few weeks out here (mumble) 30 something years ago, I surprised how they could all be on the same day ...

Detroit should be in the mix. As a leading contender. All of the rust belt should be.

It's easy to recruit people here. You fly them out (at any time of year, even winter) and the weather is typically sunny and pleasant. (yes, in the winter, it's usually sunny, dry, and mild temps)

Good luck doing that in Detroit.

And really, Pittsburgh is fantastic. Good schools, good commute even if you live in a suburb, great food and alcohol scene, with an arts scene and history to rival any major city (Carnegie and Warhol for starters).

Pittsburgh is probably really close to ideal. I can't really think of much of a downside.

It has a lot of universities, and the programmers are quite good (the ex-CTO of Modcloth? had a video where he pointed out that the Pittsburgh office was quite a bit better than the SV office). Your factory workers will be out toward the airport and your knowledge workers will be downtown. It's a very old city, so it is quite a bit more pedestrian friendly than most. And, because it's old, it has a really good arts scene. And Pittsburgh has a woefully underutilized airport.

The only downsides are weather: 1) Lack of sunlight--Pittsburgh is almost as bad as Seattle in that respect and 2) Winter--Northeast winters SUCK.

Downtown has never really had any appeal for an under-21 besides Discovery Place (is that even still around?) which is more geared for the pre-13 age group. Post-21 more recently it seems to have been revitalized but having been spoiled by Raleigh, still feels sterile and kind of bland. Even in NoDa, where all those creative people have already been priced out of that community.

I'm definitely still colored by my hatred of bland suburbia of that city, which afforded teenagers absolutely nothing to do except shop or watch movies in the theatre. It really is geared for the traditional suburban parent types through and through. Compared to other parts of NC with a diverse cultural scene (Asheville and Raleigh) Charlotte drops the diversity for an increased price.

It also has the unfortunate location of being inside NC, whose state politics have been anything but sane the past half decade, and the local college is also overshadowed heavily by Chapel Hill, Duke, and State in the Triangle area. That's the metro area I would expect Amazon to pick over Charlotte, as there's a lot of non-hip tech companies already established there. And even a few hip ones like Epic Games.

I agree that it should stay in the running. I'd like to see more tech in the south - there's too much on the West Coast.

The nature around Denver definitely beats CLT though, especially if you like mountain sports, but NC also has beaches.

I used to live in North Carolina. My son was born there, and it's where I met my wife.

Charlotte is a terrible place for Amazon.

The weather isn't remarkably good, gay employees can't get married, the public schools are shit thanks to the state, the traffic is bad, and it's culturally not noteworthy. Sorry. It's just not a good location. Raleigh could do it, but isn't big enough, and again, not a culturally attractive spot.

In fact, I think the lack of gay marriage rights kill both Austin and Charlotte.

Additionally, I think this is a game. They've already decided where, they just want leverage to get a better deal there. This isn't like the Giga factory where they just need manual labor so anywhere would work. I'll be interested to see where it ends up though.

Cell coverage would certainly be fixable, though, if the local officials commit to reasonable planning approvals, and can convince carriers to play ball.

Recall Microsoft moving all of their admin stuff to the Midwest somewhere.

Traffic is still a nightmare and housing costs are pretty bad compared to most cities, but there is a lot of tech talent here and wages seem lower than NY, Seattle, and the Bay Area.

NOVA is liberal, but Virginia is business friendly, unlike DC and MD. There is already the big NE Virginia AWS here, and I'm pretty sure most of the governments and intel communities AWS infrastructure is also housed close by.

It's an AWFUL place to build an HQ, but Amazon might do it anyway.

1) Salaries are artificially inflated by competition from the Govt and Govt contractors.

2) Traffic is nightmarishly bad.

3) Housing is incredibly expensive

4) Tech skills aren't as high as the stats indicate. The gov't and contractors have an amazing way of creating people whose titles indicate they know what they're doing, but they don't. See healthcare.gov fiasco for an illustration. A senior data engineer in DC is someone who knows SQL and Informatica, as opposed to someone that can actually do real tech. The intelligence agencies have awesome talent, but they have enormous salaries inflated by their security clearances and you're not going to get them.

5) Weather fucking sucks. I lived there 8 years, it sucks.

6) Quality of life just isn't good. Average commute times and cultural amenities are bad.

> (With apologies to Canada, we’ve set aside Toronto and several other large cities because they’re not included in most of the data sets we’ve used to determine which places meet Amazon’s needs.)

The weather is terrible compared to Vancouver or ANYWHERE IN THE US. Yeah, it's easy to bring in immigrants, but that's not enough for a 50,000 strong hq.

Let's not forget that they are in the midst of a huge, epic housing bubble that dwarfs anything seen in the US in 2007. Toronto is insanely expensive for the privilege of living in a city whose weather is approximately (less snow, but still) like that of the cities in the US that are known for their terrible winters. (Buffalo, Erie, Cleveland)

Utah really needs some sort of excellence (lab/institute/etc...) in engineering/science/high tech research that's not just biotech, in addition to a more diverse workforce, to really be a next-level tech environment.

- UT (@Austin) means a large pool of fresh grads from a top-10 CS program they can recruit.

- Existing presence of both Amazon itself and other tech companies (Google, FB, MS, etc) means they don't have to relocate workers, and it's a lot easier to convince SDEs from other companies to jump ship.

That fact that it is now under 10ft of water probably had nothing to do with it.

I think Portland is great, but I think it would be a mistake.

1) The lack of sunlight in Portland is the same as Seattle. There are a ton of people who just won't live in places like this. It's actually allowed my company to easily recruit people from places like LA who won't consider cloudy, rainy places due to Seasonal Affective Disorder.

2) Portland has bad traffic. Shockingly bad for it's size.

3) The airport is nice, but small. Flights aren't often direct.

The Albany-Schenectady-Troy MSA is about million people, and it's barely a top 50 market. There are definately a lot of other markets in a bunch of different places that can compete for this.

Also "Boston"!= Boston...which is basically a euphemism for Eastern Massachusetts, Northern RI, and Souther NH. You could do this project in Nashua, Worcester, Providence, Waltham, outside 128, and it would make double or triple the cost sense of downtown Boston/Cambridge/Somerville.

A huge one: Seattle is starting to feel a bit like a company town. This has all sorts of practical considerations, like labor cost and real estate availability.

For example, from https://www.geekwire.com/2017/how-seattles-office-market-bec...: Amazon "takes up approximately 20 percent of Seattle’s office inventory, one of the highest concentrations in the country by a single corporate entity," and Amazon anticipates 50% growth in square footage between 2016 and 2020.

tl;dr: the strongest reasons for 2 HQs aren't political.