Amazon Picks 20 Finalists For 'HQ2' Second Headquarters Location (nbcnews.com)

bigpat writes: Amazon took in hundreds of proposals and narrowed it down to twenty places for its "second" headquarters, with up to 50,000 new jobs promised in the next 15 years and millions of square feet of office and research space. The cities include: Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Columbus, Dallas, Denver, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Miami, Montgomery County, Maryland, Nashville, Newark, NJ, New York City, Northern Virginia, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Raleigh, Toronto and Washington D.C. Amazon said that it will now work with the candidate locations to examine their proposals more closely and request additional information to "evaluate the feasibility of a future partnership that can accommodate our hiring plans as well as benefit our employees and the local community." The company said it would make its decision later in 2018.

Comments

I don't understand why cities compete

[Actually, I do RTFA]

I don't understand why anyone would want their city to win this. Your taxes will go up to bring in Amazon, and that gets you... what?

The way the EU has structured things, with incentives for relocation being illegal, seems far superior.

Re:I don't understand why cities compete

[hey!]

It brings in jobs, and the workers pay taxes. At least that's the theory.

Re:I don't understand why cities compete

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Well, it's not secret. They post videos of their new robots (I'm guessing once the patents are issued).

But that's not relevant to this particular topic. This Amazon facility is for the engineers, not the supply chain workers.

Re:I don't understand why cities compete

[Anonymous Coward]

The theory would be if you happen to be in the city that wins HQ2, it will be a good time to buy a house - if Seattle is anything to go by. Once the momentum gets going, and other tech companies start rolling into town to leverage the growing talent pool, things will start to take off.

Even If you buy something some distance away, people will eventually start overflowing looking for more affordable houses. One can ague that cities like Tacoma have "benefited" in terms of house values rising.

They key is finding a sweet spot, namely with reliable public transit into the city that hosts HQ2, and by reliable I mean rail, because traffic is going to get bad, leave the car at home.

Personal story: Blew into Seattle nearly 4 years ago with a job offer, ended up buying a house 35miles south of Seattle because thats all we could afford, and my #1 criteria was I had to be-able to use reliable public transit to get to work, that means rail. This narrowed down the search areas a lot quite easily - had to be near one of the Sounder commuter train stations. 3.5 years later house values have gone up 50% around here, traffic that was already bad is even worse now. And you better hope pot is legal in which ever state HQ2 goes to, because everyone is gonna need a little to stay chill.

As for Seattle HQ2 may be a good thing, because it'll take some of the pressure off.

That's the excuse

[rsilvergun]

the reason is bribes, which are essentially legal here in the form of Political Action Committees, campaign donations and jobs handed out after completion of a term in office. If we were sane we'd regulate PACs, only let people donate to candidates they can vote for and even then limit the amounts and give anyone who served a significant public office a pension for life and require them to retired without owning stock.