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Comment by Overtonwindow | Hacker News Reader

It may be true that no city fits what Amazon wants, but I think Atlanta comes very close. It has plenty of housing, low cost of living, major airports, universities, a large population, and a decent rapid transit that could be expanded given a catalyst like Amazon. I think Amazon should opt for a low cost, big city, and let that city build around Amazon.

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>It has plenty of housing, low cost of living, major airports, universities, a large population, and a decent rapid transit that could be expanded given a catalyst like Amazon.

I live in Atlanta and all of these things are true except that last one. MARTA has neither the coverage or the competence to qualify as 'decent'. Even if they plopped the HQ right on top of Five Points (as is being proposed), most employees are still gonna drive, and encounter that world-class ATL rush hour traffic.

That said, Atlanta is still definitely in play, and our department of economic development (which I used to work for) is one of the most effective in the country. They brought Hollywood to Atlanta already, Amazon shouldn't be that much harder. Culturally, I expect it would encounter a mixed reception.

MARTA has neither the coverage or the competence to qualify as 'decent'.

Compared to New York, Chicago, DC, Boston, or SF sure. Assuming Amazon isn't going to expand to a more expensive city, the only competing subway system is in Philadelphia. MARTA is unpopular, but cleaning it up and buying new trains is cheap compared to digging new tunnels through an existing city. No one points out that the Gulch site is currently a wasteland because we all know that if Amazon shows up, it won't be.

The gulch is next to Phillips Arena and MB Arena- imagine the traffic during a weekday ATLUTD game and a hawks/concert. It's alot of wasted vertical space for now, but useful for temporary gatherings; we used it as a basecamp for a film shoot a couple weeks ago. I suppose they could rip out and replace Vine City with Amazon-friendly housing, but that would cause some issues.

If Amazon moved to the Gulch, employees would probably live in O4W, Decatur, Midtown, or Buckhead, and take MARTA in.

Imagine if Amazon built something in the southwestern part of the city, that desert Sylvan Hills, or Lakewood Heights. Amazon would gentrify south Atlanta faster than a parking ticket on Edgewood.

MARTA coverage is only a problem if you don't choose your work place or housing with it in mind.

500k people ride MARTA every week day. As long as Amazon builds their HQ close to a station plenty of the workers will have the option to live close to one, or drive to a park and ride as opposed to dealing with the traffic.

FWIW when I lived in midtown and worked in Dunwoody I had excellent MARTA usage. It took my daily commute to a very predictable 45 minutes door-to-door.

Now that my walk to marta is 20 minutes and on east-west line I am using it less, but would if I worked downtown. <shrug>

see you on reddit/r/Atlanta :)

I thought MARTA was shit until I went somewhere other than NY / Chicago / SF. Denver's light rail blows

I have a home in Atlanta, and so I share in your pain about Marta. There's a lot of societal resistance to Marta, for various reasons I won't get into because I sense you know them already. With a major player like Amazon, the city (and counties for that matter) could afford to ignore the people and plow ahead with expansion. Imagine a giant, beautiful parking deck, a-la-Lindberg up in Cobb County somewhere.

Park and rides are extremely expensive, and provide little capacity. At $20k to $50k per parking spot, filling trains that move 20k people per hour becomes a very expensive proposition!

Much more likely is transit oriented development, where the 5 to 6 blocks on either side of each station is built up to let people live a short walk from transit.

I disagree. I found your statistic buried in a report but it isolates that statistic to "metro Atlanta" which is, indeed, significantly higher.[0] Building a transit station with garage parking outside the perimeter, particularly up 75 towards Kennesaw, would cost less.[1] About the same up into Douglas County, and some of the more blighted, lower income communities outside the perimeter. [2] Additionally, I don't think you're fully accounting for AMAZON. Let's say for talking purposes Amazon chose Cobb County as the place for its new HQ. If Amazon placed a requirement on the State that there be a transit station for the HQ, I think it would be very hard for the state to say no for that. Look at the boondoggle, sorry, the elevated highway, they just built down 75. Nobody really asked for that, or saw that it was really a necessity, preferring instead for Marta, but the State plowed ahead none the less. My original point is that suburban Atlanta offers an excellent opportunity for Amazon already, but the state will come along, they will build the infrastructure, and they will appease Amazon's needs.

[0]. https://www.itsmarta.com/uploadedFiles/More/Transit_Oriented... [1]. http://www.myajc.com/news/local/braves-land-purchase-may-sol... [2]. http://www.celebratedouglascounty.com/view/global/viewdownlo...

Huh? Unless your in the middle of nowhere, the prices I quoted are the going rate for building park & ride spots all over the West Coast, from Seattle to Portland to San Diego, you literally cannot build parking cheaper than that. The land costs what it costs, then you have to pay someone to improve said land, either paving it, building a parking structure, (which is how you end up with $50k parking spots) and then maintain said facilities for the next decade.

Also, no way Atlanta is getting Amazon to build out there. The car culture is stronger than Austin, and the cops in ATL make Texas and Seattle cops (which are under federal consent decree for brutality and racial bias) look downright nice.

Never, ever ever let a cop catch you with any substance of any kind down there either, or you'll catch a felony quicker than you can blink. I can fill both hands counting former Atlanta residents who moved to Seattle after getting felonies for minor amounts of marijuana, those prosecutors down there are crazy.

Yep or Detroit. Detroit has lots of real estate with no use. I say this as someone from NM and would love them to go there.

Detroit would be a tough sell to six-figure earners. Huge crime rate, terrible schools, dysfunctional bankrupt government, lack of local talent. Maybe an affluent suburban community outside Detroit, but those aren't going to be supportive of a huge new corporate HQ with all the traffic, construction, etc.

I come from neighborhoods that are close to Detroit standards... I would move there as long as properties don't come with tax liens (which I remember reading was an issue a couple of years ago)

The problem with Detroit is they would have to import nearly every worker. Plus you need to convince all of those workers to move to Detroit. There may be some overlap between former autoworker and whatever it is Amazon wants, but there's still going to be a gap.

There are a lot of places around Detroit for people to live if they weren't comfortable in Detroit. There are some extremely nice suburbs that you can commute to/from in 30-45 minutes which is still somehow an acceptable commute time compared to most other large cities in the US. You also have to consider that you can live in a 3k sq/ft house with a nice yard for 200-300k. That's very appealing as a tech worker looking to get out of SV or other "hot" tech areas.

As for importing workers, I think you'd be surprised how many tech companies are in the city already, I've seen a lot of people who suggest that Detroit is a top 10 city in the US in terms of work, one example is here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2017/03/16/technolog...

I think it’s a fallacy to say it’s hard to move people given today’s tech and capabilities. Also given the over crowding of current tech centers.

You also have to see it from Amazon’s stated goal. They said they want a viable second Headquarters. They want some place that could function if the other place went down. Detroit fits that.

Detroit has one of the largest concentrations of engineers in the country. Granted I'm sure a significant percentage of those are specialized in fields Amazon isn't interested in, to say they'd have to import nearly every worker is a bit extreme. Amazon even has a small office in the city already.

Who's to say there's not a secret AMZN Automobile in the works?

Do you mean the actual city of Detroit?

There is little to no way Amazon is going to be able to import their workforce to live in the city of Detroit. A whole lot of the housing options there are extremely outdated or require extreme renovation, the city’s infrastructure is in crumbles, and blight is still a problem.

Source: I have some friends that live in Detroit. Like, the actual city, not the Detroit Metro area.

Also, IIRC, a lot of the "cheap" property in Detroit has substantial back taxes any new owner has to pay on top of the hassle that comes with basically replacing a house from the foundation up.

That's a fixable problem - if Detroit wants Amazon, they can simply forgive/defer the taxes.

That’s the first thing they wipe out if they want amazon. In fact they should wipe it out right now regardless.

Housing is not the issue in Detroit. There's no major city with more room to grow housing / office space than Detroit.

The only thing that would hold us back is infrastructure. We have virtually no public transportation, and the influx of all the Amazonians would take traffic to hellish levels. But to me, I see that as a positive. We need a wakeup call to finally overhaul our public transport.

Source: I live in Detroit.

As sfbay demonstrates, merely creating very high need for good public transport does not come close to guaranteeing said public transport will be created.

I don’t think we disagree with each other.

Room to grow housing and office space requires a whole lot of development to happen. My greater point is that there is very little incentive for most people to move to Detroit compared to other locales that are further along on actually having a lot of the type of housing that is popular on the west coast, some semblance of working public transport and infrastructure, etc. The M-1 Rail is a good start, but I think we are still years from Detroit being a truly viable choice.

There are better options than Detroit for this largely just because Detroit is very far behind other cities that can offer some of these needs now and grow into the future ones. Detroit is still at the stage of needing to grow a bit more to support the influx.

I don't see any lack of incentive outside of poor infrastructure but hey, it doesn't seem to stop LA.

The M-1 rail is a joke. It goes from New Center to downtown, which is like a 4 mile stretch. It's the People Mover 2.0, public transportation lip service. It doesn't connect the burbs to the city, which is what we need. Not a personal shuttle for Quicken Loans employees living in midtown.

Our problem is that the northern suburbs get to vote on public transportation and they always vote against it. People who live in the burbs closer to Detroit (Ferndale, Royal Oak, Oak Park, Hazel Park, Roseville, etc) want to be able to ride something into the city so they don't have to deal with traffic and parking.

I can't say I care very much one way or another wether Amazon comes here, I just disagree with the sentiment that Detroit is unworthy of it.

Nevermind that rail in LA waits for cars, cause we can't delay cars more than 50 seconds, oh no!

Seems ridiculous to me, when a train approaches an intersection, you should have bollards come up and the train should always take priority. Moving hundreds of people is a higher priority than moving a few dozen, but yet the train is the lowest priority in LA intersections, and grey crossings aren't properly defended against idiot drivers crashing into trains.

Merely being difficult to do does not mean something should not be done. Having a root canal done is hell but it’s better than the alternative. The economy has been pushing resources where its easiest. That’s why Detroit lost its industry and ultimately at root of all the economic struggles in the US. It’s much more easy to advocate to locate somewhere difficult than any UBI implementation, as an aside.

Further, to my understanding of Detroit's current situation, the city/local government could grant Amazon entire zip code blocks of commercial/industrial real estate for its purposes. Repurposing and renovating/rebuilding already existing structures will always be cheaper than going from the ground up.

As one senator once said. “I don’t need you when it’s easy if I don’t have you when it’s hard”.

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