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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Crystal City really has so much going for it:

1. As you point out, right next to Pentagon and federal government. 2. Good transportation: right on the Metro and literally across the street from National Airport. 3. If you're going to have 2 headquarters, having them be on opposite coasts makes sense. 4. And I think another one that is pretty unique to Crystal City is that Amazon and their employees definitely want to be in a downtown, urban environment. However, most of the other cities on the list were either extremely crowded downtown, available sites were actually more out in the 'burbs, or the cities were far down in what a lot of people would consider "2nd tier" (or 3rd tier) cities. Crystal City is basically an urban suburb of DC that you could easily see having a great "vibe" for an HQ2, but still has room for Amazon to build out.

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Another major advantage of Crystal City is that it is full of empty real estate. It was built up to house major federal agencies and their contractors, but all the agencies have moved out, and so have most of the contractors.

The Patent and Trademark Office had 5 huge buildings; they moved to Alexandria. The Dept of Defense is moving a lot of its employees to Fort Belvoir, and the contractors are following.

It's really kind of crazy to have such a major business district so deep in a major metropolitan area, with such low average occupancy.

I knew the USPTO had moved out. Those buildings are half a century old. Does Amazon plan to tear down and rebuild?

I wish I knew what Amazon was going to do!

I do believe they have said they want some folks working out of HQ2 in 2019, so that means using existing buildings, at least at first.

The USPTO buildings have a lot going for them: pretty close to Metro, dedicated parking garages, and a great view out over the airport. I had occasion to work in one of them in 2011 and it was in fine shape.

But even if Amazon does choose Crystal City, it doesn't necessarily mean they'll go after those USPTO buildings specifically. There are plenty of empty floors and buildings in CC to choose from.

I mean, Crystal City is pretty soulless, but a bunch of AMZN cash will make that millenial ready in no time.

Also, some nyt writer that’d never been there called it the Brooklyn of DC which was hilarious.

Lol @ the notion that Amazon cash will give a city “soul”

People who think amzn cash will bring soul, also think....

I think the poster above meant to be a little facetious. I tend to read “millennial ready” as building out a supply of tiny, $2000/mo studios with loads of flashy amenities and terrible quality construction.

Don't forget the cookie cutter restaurants, properly styled and stippled to create an illusion of not just being yet another bland chain.

Edison bulbs, wood, microbrews, and board games on hand. See you at trivia night!

I just involuntarily started grinding my teeth reading this entire comment chain, having escaped one such of those kinds of cities in Central Texas.

/walks away from the keyboard to avoid ranting about why I got the ever loving hell out of Austin yet again.

I’m going to poke the bear: why did you move out of Austin again?

You're a monster.

Honestly the city just felt very superficial in a lot of ways. I was there almost a decade and a half, and in that span of time I came to appreciate different things about the city for what they were, but that pervading sense that there wasn't really much substance beneath the surface ever left, and the direction of the city just stopped aligning with my long term personal goals of buying a house.

Once I went from "passively thinking about buying a house" to "making a five year plan to buy a house" I sat long and hard and thought about if I wanted to make central Texas my home. It's gorgeous here, the weather is great, yes The Lege absolutely sucks but find me someone who can't find some gripe about their state government and I'll find you the next Buddha.

I decided to leave and return to the midwest.

Adler's City council fought the state on bathroom bills and bag bans, many teeth were gnashed, garments ripped and sackcloth torn-but aside from a few annoyed editorials and longform pieces from the usual local columnists, when city council abandoned CodeNEXT (a critically needed rewrite of city zoning laws and building codes that would have allowed for greater density and eased pressure on a stunted housing market) once again caving to neighborhood associations that could give a damn about anything outside of their borough and continue to hold council hostage at the expense of development and well design urban planning, I threw up my hands and left.

Very interesting, thanks for the write up!

>I decided to leave and return to the midwest.

I’m actually in the Midwest right now and has Austin at the top of my places to move to. However, I do want to buy a house in the next 5 years, so this is making me have second thoughts.

Look don't take my word for it, okay? You can still buy a house there, if your personal finances allow and still really, thoroughly enjoy yourself. Austin is great for that, I will definitely go back for ACL Fest and sxsw (becoming one of THOSE people heh) because at its heart it is a very fun city. My personal priorities just changed as I grew older.

I was someone who got to Austin in the very early 2000's after leaving the military up the road at Ft. Hood, enjoyed it for a few years, and slowly watched it evolve into something that just didn't excite me anymore. My experience shouldn't sour yours.

(But seriously, if you're gonna buy a house, and want to actually enjoy having a bit of land, but still be close enough to Austin to do Austin-y things, Pflugerville, Round Rock and Georgetown to the North are blowing up, as are Buda, Kyle and San Marcos to the south, with Bastrop to the east. To the west is where Michael Dell and probably Lance Armstrong lives. That's all I'll say about that)

p.s. if you absolutely feel like you have to have Franklin BBQ, don't be a rube and stand in line for 4 hours. Get some friends over, pool your money together and call in, they'll do pick up orders for anything over $40 I think and you can skip the line-or call my buddy Mark, his brisket is better anyway :P

Yes plus restaurants with life affirming phrases written in script on small signs and strings of Edison bulbs.

I'm going to invest my money in a company that ships avocados and beard conditioner in bulk to Crystal City.

Seattle is soulless according to you? I’ve lived in Seattle and worked for Amazon when the headquarters was in a creepy old hospital up on beacon hill, and yes there has been change in Seattle, most of it for the better.

Anyone that tells you South Lake Union neighborhood was better pre Amazon is full of it. It was a bunch of warehouses and run down.

Do you have experience of Seattle over the past decade, or are you just repeating platitudes?

You only have the stresses of major homelessness and an extremely large heroin/meth problem, directly due to the endless growth Amazon and other large companies had on this city, with the "top minds" of Seattle having absolutely no clue how to solve it. I've seen multiple people die since I got here, and I've seen people with guns to their heads over drugs outside of my Capitol Hill apartment. Seattle's population willfully ignores everything wrong with the city too.

I live in Seattle. Things like the Showbox reportedly in serious danger of being demolished for luxury condo's are just showing how soulless this city is becoming in the name of 'growth'. The entire city population has been replaced by tech bros and their significant others, tech bro culture, ubers, the food is boring and most restaurants are over-hyped, costs are insane, the people are selfish and rude, there's nothing to do except drink and ride a bike to look at Puget Sound yet again, there's little culture or diversity, and the politicians work entirely in Amazon's favor. I have a decent stable job here, but I'd move if the opportunity was to arise.

During what era was the Showbox culturally significant and to whom?

It's been culturally significant since 1939 and still is. There are still packed shows there almost every night. Music is one of the few places Seattle really has culture.

>Founded in 1939,[4] the Showbox has hosted a diverse offering of music over the decades. From the Jazz Age to the Grunge Era, the ballroom has featured shows by Duke Ellington, Muddy Waters and the Ramones — as well as local artists such as burlesque performer Gypsy Rose Lee, and grunge bands Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Mudhoney, TAD and Screaming Trees.[5]

>Other acts to perform at The Showbox have included Al Jolson, Mae West, Nat King Cole, Jimmy Durante and Dizzy Gillespie, The Police, XTC, X, Blondie, Gang of Four, Iggy Pop, Devo, Dead Kennedys and Jerry Cantrell.[7][8] More recent performers include The Weeknd, Snoop Dogg, Dave Matthews, Kanye West, Lorde, Robbie Williams, Modest Mouse, Death Cab For Cutie, Public Enemy, PJ Harvey, Wilco, The Flaming Lips, Daft Punk, Kasabian, Old 97's, Elliott Smith, Peter Murphy, Guided By Voices, Built To Spill, Billy Idol, David Bazan, Bebel Gilberto, Cat Power, Spiritualized, Sleater-Kinney, Minus the Bear, Coldplay, Bright Eyes, The Roots, Sir Mix-A-Lot, Dita Von Teese, Maroon 5, The Shins, The Melvins, My Morning Jacket, LL Cool J, DJ Shadow, Scissor Sisters, TV On The Radio, Ke$ha, Kimbra, Marina and the Diamonds, B-52's, Lady Gaga, Ice Cube, Paul Simon, Macklemore, JoJo, (Kpop group) A.C.E and many more.[9][5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Showbox

I'll note that this is very much pre-Amazon:

"In the early 1990s, the rise of the grunge alternative rock music and subculture in Seattle brought media attention to the use of heroin by prominent grunge artists. In the 1990s, the media focused on the use of heroin by musicians in the Seattle grunge scene, with a 1992 New York Times article listing the city's "three principal drugs" as "espresso, beer and heroin" [4] and a 1996 article calling Seattle's grunge scene the "...subculture that has most strongly embraced heroin".[5] Tim Jonze from The Guardian states that "...heroin had blighted the [grunge] scene ever since its inception in the mid-80s" and he argues that the "...involvement of heroin mirrors the self-hating, nihilistic aspect to the music"; in addition to the heroin deaths, Jonze points out that Stone Temple Pilots' Scott Weiland, as well as Courtney Love, Mark Lanegan and Evan Dando "...all had their run-ins with the drug, but lived to tell the tale."[6] A 2014 book stated that whereas in the 1980s, people used the "stimulant" cocaine to socialize and "...celebrate good times", in the 1990s grunge scene, the "depressant" heroin was used to "retreat" into a "cocoon" and be "...sheltered from a harsh and unforgiving world which offered...few prospects for...change or hope."[7]

Leading grunge band Alice in Chains had a song "God Smack", which included the line "stick your arm for some real fun", a reference to injecting heroin.[5] Seattle grunge musicians known to use heroin included Kurt Cobain, who was using "heroin when he shot himself in the head"; "Andrew Wood of Mother Love Bone [, who] overdosed on heroin in 1990"; "Stefanie Sargent of 7 Year Bitch[, who] died of an overdose of the same opiate in 1992...[and] Layne Staley of Alice in Chains [who] publicly detailed his battles with heroin...".[8] Mike Starr of Alice in Chains [7] and Jonathan Melvoin from The Smashing Pumpkins also died from heroin. After Cobain's death, his "...widow, singer Courtney Love, characterized Seattle as a drug mecca, where heroin is easier to get than in San Francisco or Los Angeles."[8]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin_chic#Grunge

How did Amazon cause the heroin problem in Seattle? There's been a growing heroin and homelessness problem all over the country. Did it cause this too?

Lol @ the notion that Amazon cash will give a city “soul”

When I lived in Seattle, South Lake Union was pretty much a wasteland. Now Amazon is there and I hear it's a millennial/tech paradise.

Yeah - my thought was "Oh good, Crystal City. That way Amazon won't suck the soul out of a city, since the defense industry already left it a husk."

>Also, some nyt writer that’d never been there called it the Brooklyn of DC which was hilarious.

Meanwhile, Columbia Heights and Eastern Market will probably see their gentrification rapidly accelerate since they're a short Blue or Yellow line ride away on WMATA. H street will probably be safe since Washingtonians seems to have a pathological fear or switching lines during their commute and it's closest to a Red line station (Union Station).

> H street will probably be safe since Washingtonians seems to have a pathological fear or switching lines during their commute and it's closest to a Red line station (Union Station).

What if the gentrification spreads out from Union Market?

> However, most of the other cities on the list were either extremely crowded downtown, available sites were actually more out in the 'burbs, or the cities were far down in what a lot of people would consider "2nd tier" (or 3rd tier) cities.

Yeah, in Boston for example (where Amazon is actually doing some fairly heavy building and hiring in the Seaport anyway), the proposed HQ2 site was Suffolk Downs. That's not out in the burbs exactly but it is adjacent to old working class towns a little ways north. It's not what your typical techie would consider being in Boston.

I think Raleigh was somewhere out in industrial parks a decent way outside the city with no transit.

Etc.

We'll see if this story pans out but the DC area always had to seen as a leading contender. Yes, it's probably a bit pricey but one wonders how much latitude Amazon would have had anyway to pick a cheap location and provide much lower compensation than HQ1 to reflect that.

Even if the area doesn't check all the boxes, it checks a lot of them--including the fact that there's a ton of local tech talent and DC is, if not everyone's idea of a dream location to live and work, is at least considered tolerable by many.

> Good transportation: right on the Metro

Found the guy who doesn't live in or around DC...

I lived in DC and rather liked the Metro...

And to its credit, Crystal City is actually pretty rad. It’s full of highly educated people who can’t say where they work or what they do. But they do have good taste in restaurants.

My biggest complaint about crystal city is that the restaurants are pretty bad. One one's above the Crystal City Shops are mostly chains you find wherever business hotels. And the ones on 23rd street are just mostly bad.

If I were going to work in HQ2, I'd live in Del Ray, though its more single-family focused. But it has some nice local restaurants.

I don't know. Compared to other areas around the country maybe. But with NoVA there are just better places. I remember going there twice maybe and just never had a reason to go back Crystal City.

Tons of empty office space for sure though. I think proximity to DC itself is probably the main selling point.

Absolutely. Government is a huge customer for AWS. Being literally walking distance to the Pentagon is valuable.

It's debatable whether Metro will be able to handle another few tens of thousands of daily commuters going through the downtown core to get to Crystal City. The system's already crammed up at rush hour and nobody has the budget for capital improvements to start to put more tracks through Gallery Place, Metro Center, and L'Enfant Plaza.

It would be interesting though, if Amazon was prepared to invest in capital improvements for Metro...

Judging from Seattle's experience, Amazon is not really prepared to do anything other than garner support from the business community and support a token streetcar. And Metro's capital needs are probably much bigger than Seattle's and are politically more complicated due to three jurisdictions that are frenemies in the best of times.

More like twelve jurisdictions. The various counties and cities also get involved. It’s quite Fun.

I was just talking about the board.

It's worth noting that Seattle and DC have vastly different representations on their boards. In DC this is two representatives picked by the governments of DC, VA, MD, and the feds each, and in some cases not even appointed by elected officials. In Seattle, this is a board consisting almost entirely of elected officials of counties and municipalities.

Seattle's method works because the responsibility of elected officials is quite clear and their voting records are transparent, whereas a diffuse chain of responsibility via appointment is not.

"It would be interesting though, if Amazon was prepared to invest in capital improvements for Metro..."

Narrator: Amazon wasn't.

Metro rideship is down from its peak, overall. The system handles over 600,000 rides per day now; it handled around 750,000 per day between 2008 and 2012.

Riders commuting from downtown DC to Crystal City would be going against the prevailing flow into the city. Plenty of room on those trains in the morning.

Riders in MD would have a hard time, but a person would have to be pretty dumb to move to MD for a job in Crystal City.

> ridership is down from its peak

Because Metro's reputation suffered when operations couldn't keep up with rising ridership. What will prevent Metro's operations from suffering again when an influx of Amazon employees stresses the system again? Would it be better if those workers got onto the already-jammed freeways?

> against the prevailing flow

Only if they board the trains between the downtown core and Crystal City. Odds are, if they're boarding from the northwest or from newly gentrified neighborhoods, they need to pass through the downtown core to get to Crystal City, which puts them on the same trains as people commuting in from the suburbs. They may get on pretty close to where the suburban commuters get off, but there's still an overlap. Not to mention the overcrowding on the downtown core platforms themselves. Keep in mind as well that Crystal City-bound trains from the downtown core stop at the Pentagon first, which has its own non-negligible share of commuters - those trains may not be full, but they sure aren't empty.

I love how easy it is to get to National on the Metro. I took public transit to Dulles once, and that was notably less easy.

Dulles will be connected to Metro in 2020.

It will still take forever to get there...

I lived in Crystal City for a few years. Perfect place for it.

> 2. Good transportation

Surely, you jest. Yeah, it's on a metro line, but hardly anyone lives near a metro line. That area is consistently rated as the #1 or #2 worst traffic in the country for years.

Sounds like good transportation with terrible urban planning.

Yes, it's always inconvenient and disillusioning when people refuse to live where "urban planners" think they should live.

Demand for Metro-convenient housing is enormous. Builders are having trouble keeping up.

That would make sense if urban planners were the ones telling people not to live near transit stations, but it's generally existing residents opposing new housing.

Though, perhaps to your point, I also am not a fan of almost all planning. The nicest places to live, walk, etc. tend to be ones that arose before planning was widespread. Of course, they existed before the car, too.

What are you talking about that no one lives near a metro line?

It’ll be on the same line as Shaw which is one of the most desirable neighborhoods for 20/30 somethings in DC right now.

Metro serves a tiny fraction of N. VA. Sure, if you're in DC and commuting out, it's probably ok, but people don't tend to stay in DC very long. Once they have kids and realize there is no hope of reasonable public education there, they move.

Your comment about "nobody lives near a metro line" though - I mean, come on! With the orange line and silver line extension there are lots of places in NoVa near the metro. Yes, the car traffic is horrible, but the car traffic is horrible in SF, LA, Boston, NY, Austin...

As another commenter pointed out, there is actually a ton of empty real estate in Crystal City itself and no doubt a ton of it will be built up as apartments/condos now.

Inside the beltway is very different from outside the beltway.

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