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Amazon In 'Advanced Talks' To Open Headquarters In Washington DC Area (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Amazon is in "advanced talks" to open its second headquarters in the Washington DC metropolitan area, the Washington Post, a paper owned by Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos, reported on Saturday. Amazon, which is headquartered in Seattle, is seriously considering an area known as Crystal City, a large residential and office complex in Arlington, Virginia, just south of Washington, the Post reported, citing unidentified sources. The Washington metropolitan area has long been considered a top contender. As well as owning the Post, Bezos has a home in the area. When the company announced a list of 20 top contenders in January, it included Washington and Montgomery county, Maryland, which is just north of the city. Crystal City is served by a mass transit system and major highways, both qualifications Amazon has said are required.
Won't have to fly to them or fly them to you.
dedicated fulfillment center for the bureaucrats, the media and their politicians. Anything they want delivered to their door.
;)
Just my 2 cents
Bezos was once known as a libertarian. You remember those small government folks.
Now he's become part of the big government problem. Just another hog feeding from the $4 trillion trough.
This can't possibly be for quality of life of the employees, given some of the other finalists. Nor is it likely for the largest subsidies, given how places like Newark were ready to throw everything plus the kitchen sink at them.
Perhaps it's for an employee base more amenable to CIA/NSA work
I don't blame them.
I'm still stuck on shotgunned 128K ISDN in 2018.
To continue to be as disruptive as they are, Amazon must wield significant political influence for the foreeable future. This requires close proximity to DC and its lobbyists and owned Congress critters. MD offers a high-tax, anti-business environment (despite the best efforts of its moderate governor over the past four years), and DC itself is a slowly-gentrifying pit with high crime rates and little room for expansion or infrastructure. That leaves Northern Virginia, and Crystal City / Arlington is indeed perfect: it's an under-utilized area immediately across the river from downtown DC, it's directly served by the Metro (yes, I know the DC Metro has its flaws), it has its own major airport (Reagan), and taxes are lower than Maryland or DC proper (for now). The "competitive process" was likely just to gain leverage to see what concessions VA was ultimately willing to throw into the pot. I feel a bit bad for the VA taxpayers who are going to directly pay for a big part of this with higher taxes at least initially, and in perpetuity with even more insane traffic than they have now, but who knows? Maybe they'll actually see some of that massive economic impact of so many additional high-skilled jobs that Amazon has been preaching.
Amazon is the creepiest fucking company on earth.
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
SCAMazon needs to be closer to the Pentagon and CIA HQ in order to cooperate more closely in destroying the privacy of Americans and people abroad (i.e. everyone in the world). On the plus side, maybe they'll first lease space in a building that will collapse in a stiff breeze and Bezos will be visiting that day :D
who will be paying for this in the form of higher taxes to cover all the subsidies. It's like the Olympics, no sane person wants it in their city.
OTOH the other cities seem to have told Amazon to take a flying leap when they came calling ala Foxconn asking to be paid by the local government for a few hundred jobs, maybe DC isn't gonna roll out the money carpet.
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>"When the company announced a list of 20 top contenders in January, it included Washington and Montgomery county, Maryland, which is just north of the city."
So when it is just south of Washington DC, it is "Washington DC", but when it is just north of Washington DC, it is "Maryland"? This is the third article/summary I have seen say the same thing, from different sources.
And here it is in reverse, listing Virginia, but not listing Maryland:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/1...
Since it seems to have as many 'heads'-quarters as such a beast.
If only the government could get office suppies by Prime the taxpayers would save billions.
Under the AbilityOne program established by the Javits-Wagner-O'Day act, the U.S. government prefers to buy office supplies made by blind people as a subsidy for their employment. Do Skilcraft and other manufacturers employing blind people sell on Amazon?
Total chaos will ensue when amazon starts sending stuff to the wrong Washington.
There might be a logic to having it as many time zones apart as possible though.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
>To Open Headquarters In Washington DC Area
Much easier to buy legislation/legislators when the deals can be made verbally, up close and in person,
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Does Crystal City (or at least, any part within sane walking distance of the Metro station) actually HAVE undeveloped land suitable for new development? The last time I was there, it already seemed to be pretty "built out".
The only advantage Crystal City seems to have compared to the area between Tysons Corner & Dulles is service by two metro lines (esp. yellow) into DC that *aren't* both completely choked.
The last time I visited Rosslyn, it was almost impossible to board the train at Rosslyn station, because every single outbound train from DC was packed to the point where you couldn't get on, and nobody actually GOT OFF at Rosslyn to make room for the horde at Rosslyn to board.
Frankly, I have no idea how Rosslyn station can possibly deal with Silver Line traffic ON TOP OF Blue & Orange, because it was 100% saturated years ago just by Blue & Orange alone. I'm guessing that the Rosslyn chokepoint was a major factor against a site near the new Silver line and/or Dulles... Metro isn't really useful as a travel mode in or out of DC proper if you can't actually BOARD at a station due to inadequate capacity.
I read somewhere that as a stopgap measure, they were exploring the idea of making Silver-line trains ~50% longer than the platforms... the idea being that middle cars would stop at every station, but cars at the front or rear would only stop at alternating stations (and lengthened platforms at suburban stations, which are mostly above-ground to begin with & fairly cheap to extend compared to mined-out stations underground).
Other than just the DC area. That mention was kind of irrelevant as it suggests the others dont.
Amazon has been cattle calling most of the US dragging IT people in to Seattle to become engineers at 100-120k. Nevermind that most of them were making way more than that when adjusted for cost of living. Now they can do it to their bumpkins again and ship them to DC for 150-180k in a town than you need about 250k to live equivalent to 80-100k in 'normal' US cities.
I never understood how or why they want people who suck at math and economics... It has backfired somewhat with turning Seattle somehow even more socialist and politically stupid to the point Amazon needs options. At least DC can't get worse with socialism... right?
I'm disappointed that Miami isn't likely to get HQ2... but I'm still optimistic that we're going to eventually end up as a major Amazon business outpost anyway, if only due to our status as the de-facto business capital of Latin America and Jeff Bezos' own personal ties to the area.
My personal theory is that Miami was never really a serious contender for HQ2, but Amazon used it as somewhat of a bait & switch operation to get Miami to pull out all the stops and offer its best deal, which Amazon can NOW try to grab for a lesser outpost. If Amazon had been up front and said, "we're thinking about building a major outpost in Miami, what can you offer?" Miami would have been delighted... but it wouldn't have literally gone nuts and bent over backwards. But now that the work is done, failing to close the deal on a consolation prize would be seen as a TOTAL loss, compared to closing the deal on a major outpost.
Two major things in Miami's favor:
1. Opportunity to build Amazon's future equivalent of the Sears Tower. Miami DESPERATELY wants to have the tallest skyscraper in America so badly it hurts, and will do just about anything in its power to find Amazon a suitable site & get it approved. As luck would have it, one of the few places where the FAA wouldn't object to a supertall skyscraper is the area around the Brightline station (there are other areas where the FAA wouldn't object per se, but Dade County and Miami International Airport might object because planes would have to take off at steeper angles & burn more fuel... Amazon is probably one of the few companies that actually COULD get them to grudgingly approve it).
2. Brightline. Daily transit aside, Brightline ALSO makes it possible to have afternoon business meetings in downtown Miami involving people who normally work in downtown West Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale without totally pissing them off or stressing them out. Pre-Brightline, NOBODY would willingly agree to be at a meeting in downtown Miami before 10:30am or after 3pm due to the outrageous gridlock in and out. Tri-Rail wasn't a serious alternative, because the transfer to and from Metrorail added another 30-45 minutes to an ALREADY somewhat-slow trip (and wasn't really up to the standards of senior executives anyway). In contrast, Brightline hauls ass and leapfrogs over everything, allowing you to get from Miami to Fort Lauderdale in a little under 30 minutes... with first-class service, to boot. Thanks to Brightline, an afternoon meeting in downtown Miami is NOW seen as a pleasant opportunity to grab lunch somewhere different, do the meeting, and comfortably leapfrog over all the traffic that would have OTHERWISE turned your 30-minute jaunt into 90+ minutes of stop & go gridlock.
In a few more years, Brightline will make it possible to casually make painless day trips between Miami and Orlando (approx. 3 hours end to end), with an extension to Tampa practically confirmed at this point, and an extension to Jacksonville regarded as overwhelmingly likely to happen within the same time frame as well (Brightline's parent railroad, FEC, already owns the tracks all the way to Jacksonville... and more importantly, owns a staggering amount of real estate adjacent to the tracks IN Jacksonville... compared to the amount of new construction necessary to launch service to Orlando, launching service to Jacksonville would involve little more than the same kind of signal upgrades & station construction they did in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and WPB). At that point, an Amazon outpost in Miami would be as accessible to Orlando as an Amazon HQ in Crystal City would be to New York. Extend Brightline to Tampa & Jacksonville, and both would be the same travel time to Miami as Boston is to DC via Acela.
That's why Florida's business community have all gone nuts over Brightline once it convinced them that they're in business for the long haul & fully intend to Make It Happen, and why Rick Scott (never exactly known for being a fan of passenger rail) suddenly got Ne
You should tell them that, what with the highest median income in the country. They seem to be doing just fine.
Meanwhile in Kansas. I mean, when even Forbes calls you out on going too far into trickle down...
I don't think anyone threw in the pot though. I think they smelled the shit-sandwich that would be tax breaks and subsidies in exchange for very, very few jobs. You need Scott Walker grad levels of corruption to get away with that. It's like the Olympics. It's a disaster all around unless you tell them to take a hike and make them pay for their own stuff like everybody else does.
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We already know it's going to be in the Ashburn/Sterling area. Just get it over with.
and hence welcome our new (rich) overlords. I'm hoping to time the exit of the startup I work for, with the bump that those execs will cause in the NOVA real estate market.
In other words, this is part of the takeover. Eventually, Bezos will be removed from Amazon, and the government will be under corporate control. When that happens, Benie Sanders will be in hadcuffs as a Russian agent before he even gets in the door but he is already a sell out so who cares.
Opportunity awaits the caravan