Nothing Is Too Strange for Cities Wooing Amazon to Build There
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
*1 https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2017/09/08/amazons...
> Even if only a few of these assumptions about Amazon’s interests were correct, they would limit Amazon to only one to three places. Amazon already knows that, and given what we know about the company and the site selection industry, it most likely has a favorite.
I think I can guess what they are thinking, but it would be nice if they just named those 3 likeliest metro areas.
But, it would have one hell of an airport.
Although, I will add, the immigration benefits here are over-stated, we've always had more controls on immigration than the US has, and we still do.
> workforce that can't simply move to the US
Or won't. Maximizing income is not always the top priority for workers. There's a plethora of reasons why Canadian residents would want to live there beside inability to move to the US.
It's barely 10 minutes from the airport, about the same to downtown, a couple hundred metres from light rail, right next to Carleton University. The list goes on.
Under your scenario it would be "where else _did_ you have" that much farmland near Ottawa.
While I am biased, it's better for the city to preserve farmland. Especially long-term, as climate changes. Y'all might need that farmland. Or at least your grand-children might.
But the answer is: there are a lot of things governments shouldn't be able to do. _Especially_ to benefit corporations. Corporate subsidies almost never pay off for individuals, but saddle cities with unmanageable expenses later on. They tend to actually hurt the poor, as well.
This isn't as obvious as you'd like to make it.
Very good problems for a city to have.
We could all move, but that's out of my control.
I live in Chicago, which is regarded as a strong candidate for AMZ HQ2. We have probably the second best public transport system in the country and an unsaturated housing market, amazing engineering and science schools, access to a good pool of candidates, and little competition from others in the industry.
However, the concerns we have are that Chicago would turn into another silicon valley with over inflated cost of living and insane real estate market inflation.
While Chicago wages are not comparable at face value to those on either the east or west coasts, once you take into account the price of housing, food, and travel, middle class Chicagoans don't have it bad at all.
The worry is that the SV effect will hit Chicago, and non-tech workers will be priced out of living downtown or in the Chicago metro area even. Also, Chicago has retained some of the qualities of the Midwest that Midwesterners tend to find desirable or endearing, such as few "celebrities" and a "salt of the earth" mentality. But overall, people are willing to give it a chance and hope for the best. Most everyone I know that expresses these sentiments would still appreciate the benefits of having AMZ in town, and the jobs and money it will bring along with the boost to the local economy (and maybe it'll put a damper on the growingly ridiculous efforts of Cook County and state Democrats st raising money from really dumb taxes disguised as social welfare projects as they try to tax their way out of decades of corruption and misspending, giving out ridiculous pensions to state and city employees whike passing the buck to the next generation).
You really don't think Amazon opening a campus in a city with stagnating or negative job growth would be good for that city?
It's called NIMBY.
Related reading: "..cries of Not In My Backyard are quietly costing the United States economy trillions. " => https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2015/07/30/ni...
This only ends up helping the already wealthy.
How? Care to elaborate?
In Austin Texas, the historical legacy of racial segregation meant that there have been areas of the city that were predominantly hispanic or black, for generations. The modest homes in these neighborhoods were paid off long ago and passed down through the families.
When the development boom hit Austin, even the parts of these neighborhoods that didn't undergo gentrification have seen a massive pressure on the folks who did live there in the form of explosive property taxes.
For many of these folks, this has pushed them out from their family homes because they can no longer afford the taxes on their properties, despite owning them outright. Of course there is an argument to be had about why these folks can't afford the taxes but heavily under-girding that is the same neglect and marginalization their populations have always faced.
So even owning property is not always enough to insulate someone from the whims of explosive development aimed at those with extremely large incomes.
There is nothing to say that a city with a better handle of its zoning issues wouldn't improve from a business bump.
It DOESN'T help people who are on the margins, though, unless they can get a job at the new employer, or unless public services improve more quickly than housing costs go up.
Sure, there will also be network effects where service level jobs expand but having been priced out of their former neighborhoods, watching people with perhaps little respect for the local culture or history coming in and changing things, I don't think the prospect of Amazon's new HQ is really all that positive for a city struggling as you hypothesize.
Cities do better when they set themselves up to be attractive to companies naturally, not when they try to bribe an company to come to them
As a software developer, it would be nice to be able to get a job in the engineering group, rather than in a standard IT shop.
I was still shocked, though, when I looked at the prices of the new condos being built and almost all of them were > $1M. Yeah, I know, it's the very very upper end of what's being built, but it was still surprising :)