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Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

Further underscores how much of an immense scam the HQ2 sweepstakes / city talent show was. It should always be brought up the next time a company, sports franchise, or other organization tries to get sweetheart deals to build somewhere. Amazon should be forced to wear this millstone around its neck every time it tries to extort a community for land.

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Does it? Amazon chose NYC because it wanted to be in NYC.

The whole point was to show what the movers and shakers actually think of Middle America and every culturally irrelevant place on this continent. It succeeded.

Were any of those places whoring for yield ever in the running?

No.

But amazon DID go around announcing plans for HQ2 and making a big deal about it, to get tax breaks etc.

As far as Amazon’s DC metro area location I don’t see why amazon wouldn’t have considered locating in the DC or MD parts of the region if the incentives and pitch were right. Making the three jurisdictions bid against each other seems like a reasonable strategy even if there was a secret plan to end up somewhere in the region in the end.

But they ended up in the place that offered the least incentives.

Because thats where they wanted to be. Its not that confusing.

Amazon was playing Tag the Sponsor to reveal all the municipal whores for fun.

The incentives that MD or DC offered probably weren’t enough to make up for the deficiencies of the areas.

I’m not sure about DC but it seems like businesses are frequently choosing to locate in NoVA rather than MD. https://www.bisnow.com/washington-dc/news/neighborhood/camer...

The things Amazon wants and needs -- particularly, desirability by young, affluent techies -- don't really exist in "middle America".

For example, public transit. Only a handful of US cities have decent public transit at all, probably the only cheap city in that group is Philly. You're not gonna find good transit in Cleveland or Phoenix or Nashville, because they've chosen not to seriously invest in it. Is that Amazon's fault somehow?

Chicago has decent public transportation and plenty of young, affluent techies. It's not SV or NYC but it fits the bill for a midwest city.

Chicago, and IL, have plenty of issues to work through though so I get why they didn't want to setup a HQ there.

Chicago has a doomsday clock that keeps ticking down with its pensions and the state's pensions. Those governments might start raising the taxes more and more and fall into a tighter death spiral as it pushes people away, leading to less revenue.

The pension explanation doesn't make sense. Chicago would gladly offer tax breaks to any company opening a major HQ here, as it has in the past. It's had a streak of being business friendly.

I also don't get the "violence" explanation. Violence is terrible and everyone in Chicago wants to end it, but the average person is far removed from any shootings.

Can't exactly guarantee offer tax breaks if they are short on tax revenue, and while every government federal/local is always short Chicago/Illinois is deathly short. The tax increases have already begun and there have been weird talks coming out of the Chicago mayor's office essentially asking for a tax on the rest of the state to help out Chicago proper.

If tax breaks attract a large company, Chicago still gets tax revenue from all their employees. Property tax revenue, income tax revenue, and consumption taxes all go up. This is especially true if that catalyzes further development across the local economy.

All of that was true of Amazon's move to NYC, but the locals still balked at the "massive tax breaks" given to the company.

Chicago alone is a glaring exception.

- It's not constrained for space, rent is relatively cheap

- Good public transit and airports

- Great food scene

- Cultural mecca

- Young people love it

- Several great universities are either in it or nearby

- Pedestrian/biker friendly

- Each of the many neighborhoods is like a different town with its own character

Google and Facebook recently made minor expansions into Chicago, but why the trickle? I get that in the short-run the elite want to be "where it's at" i.e. SF and NYC, but Chicago has so much to offer. Tech companies would get a lot for their money if they start a virtuous cycle of investment and employment here. Many STEM students from UChicago, Northwestern, and UIUC would rather stay home but the opportunity in California is too great to pass up.

- They will tax the crap out of anything that moves because of impossibly high, undischargeable pension obligations, and techies will be an attractive target.

The weather is worse, there is less of a gravity effect. Tech workers attract more tech workers because of the liquidity of the employment market.

I agree but Chicago has a bit of a commute issue still. I'm assuming most execs and more senior employees would want to live in the north shore area like new trier and new trier->loop is a bit more of a commute than los altos->mountain view.

Also I think people unfamiliar with Chicago don't understand the nature of its crime issues (namely that it's just as safe as other big cities as long as you avoid the worst areas).

One other potential issue is that a lot of the good software engineers in Chicago are working for reasonably high incomes at trading companies which maybe big tech doesn't want to compete with or has culture concerns

And municipal corruption. But other than all those it's great

In Ancient Rome, where your namesake hails from, wouldn't a superwealthy individual(corporation) be considered obligated to use that accumulated wealth in part to provide for the public infrastructure?

Yet the Bay area has a mediocre public transit system that does not provide convenient service to major employers like Facebook, Google, or Apple. Transit service in the Bay Area is so bad that the major tech companies run private commuter buses to make up the gap. Somehow that has not stopped tech companies from building new offices around the Bay.

In some ways, Bay Area transit and traffic woes may be a root cause for the invention of ridesharing.

Santa Barbara’s was

That's the high-level version, but here's the detailed version.

If you look at a VTA (local bus) map, it's oriented around the Lockheed campus (plus Yahoo, Marvell and Juniper.) That's because Lockheed told the VTA to do that.

25 years later, when Google approached the VTA, the VTA said no. Hence the private buses with wifi.

Since Google is buying all of Mountain View's office space, they would really need to reroute the entire VTA now.

Cleveland is largely the state of Ohio’s fault, and Phoenix is investing in light rail.

> For example, public transit. Only a handful of US cities have decent public transit at all

That’s a weird criterion given that the Bay Area has awful transit.

It acted as a kind of ruse to get these places to signal how far they would go to be “connected” to the tech world that they, rightly or wrongly, feel is leaving them behind.

I tend to agree that what Amazon did was pretty cheap and low class, though.

yeah it was a cheap shot and hilarious, all of us "coastal elites" were scratching our heads during the whole charade looking at each city in the running wondering how the likes of Little Rock Arkansas, Nashville Tennessee, Pittsburg, Columbus etc would ever be desirable places, let alone if any of us would run the risk of being sent to one of those doldrums if we worked for Amazon, all for the conclusion to revert to the norm of coastal elite decision makers at Amazon echoing our preexisting sentiment because they are one of us after all

trolling level: phenomenal

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