Hacker News Reader

Comment by unexpected | Hacker News Reader

I can't see Amazon moving to Austin.

Austin is a very popular "2nd Campus" for tech companies, but it's not a great "HQ".

1) Poor airport connectivity 2) Seriously bad traffic options, with limited ability for build out 3) Not a lot of great public transit options 4) Limited ability for free land/property tax abatements/government handouts

Austin is a strong candidate because of UT Austin, but UT Austin students primarily come from Austin or Dallas (not like they are trapped on an island) unwilling to move out.

View on HN

Austin's airport is fine, if a bit small. It's got plenty of room to grow, though, and it does pale in comparison to Houston and Dallas airports. However, let's not lose the big picture: Austin is a hub of tech talent. Tech talent wants to be in tech hubs. Neither Houston nor Dallas are seen as tech hubs. Austin is. Austin has a critical mass of hardware companies (Intel, AMD, TI, NI, Dell) and software companies (Apple, Google, IBM, Oracle, Indeed, Facebook, HomeAway, Atlassian, Blizzard, etc.) all have substantial offices here. Even Amazon already has an office here. Despite the lack of great public infrastructure, Austin is a great fit for Amazon HQ2. Would love to have them here, especially if they poured money into infrastructure. Austin is the fastest growing major city in the U.S. with or without Amazon. Better to have them here and help build up the infrastructure than without them.

>Neither Houston nor Dallas are seen as tech hubs

Dallas isn't a tech hub? It's called the "Silicon Prairie". There's more tech jobs in Dallas than there are in Austin. TI? TI's headquarters are Dallas. IBM, Oracle, McAfee, HP, Intuit, Microsoft, Match.com, Nokia, RIM, Alcatel-Lucent, AT&T, Cisco, EMC, vmware....

Amazon has a substantial AWS office in Dallas as well.

>Austin is the fastest growing major city in the U.S

And Dallas is just behind them, 3rd fastest.

It could very well be Austin, but Dallas is actually a bigger tech hub than Austin is.

On the other hand Austin is the headquarters of Whole Foods Market which owns a lot of real estate. Until recently they built stores with cash and often owned the shopping centers their stores were built in.

Texas has no state income tax which wouldn’t be a public reason for the choice but is obviously going to be a factor.

Austin is also a good culture fit with Seattle and is a startup hub.

I'm from Texas; I live in Dallas. I think Dallas is a much stronger option than Austin.

Building a grocery store is far different than building a corporate campus. The interesting thing is that Amazon already has a presence in a lot of these cities, so they're intimately familiar with the day to day workings. There's not going to be any "sugar coating" by city officials.

1) Austin - Whole Foods 2) Newark - Audible 3) Dallas - HUGE Amazon logistics hub 4) NoVa - AWS location

and on, and on, and on.

Austin has horrible traffic issues right now - look at the other guys on this thread that are from Austin. None of them are eager to have Amazon move there. I would welcome Amazon with open arms.

I wonder if they meant the city of Dallas itself. I'm not really sure where they'd even put a large HQ campus. Frisco/Plano/etc? absolutely. But in the City of Dallas proper?

Hmmm.

Dallas proper had ~8 different sites that fit the criteria Amazon cited.

Amazon doesn't require it all be contiguous space - they have buildings all over Seattle.

Downtown has a lot of parking lots that could become buildings, Exposition Park could fit the whole thing, Victory Park submitted a proposal, and Midtown near the Galleria also submitted one, with a few others.

Valley View Mall is one option that was proposed. There are plenty of spots.

Ah. I had thought I read previously that it was going to be a sizable campus. Perhaps it will be smaller than I had originally thought.

635/DNT would probably be a decent place for it, now that I think about it...

I think you misunderstood me. Whole Foods was unusual because it would buy the land and build shopping centers for its stores. The idea was that they could be their own landlords and rent out the rest of the space to other companies that have similar products and services. That’s why you’ll often see a natural pet food store or an organic restaurant next to a Whole Foods. They attract customers to each other.

Over the years they’ve bought real estate based on the number of college graduates who live nearby. Having started in Austin decades ago they most certainly own a lot of land there in prime locations.

So, now that Amazon owns Whole Foods, it might already own a lot of the land it needs to build its new campus. If it builds elsewhere it might be much more costly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com