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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.
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.
Crystal Meth City is actually in Virginia, not DC proper. Virginia loves corepirate welfare even if it means cutting services to actual humans living in the state. So there's that.
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).