I'm kind of shocked they tried. Tucson's in the middle of Saguaro national park, give or take, so i'm assuming the cactus in question was a Saguaro, but the sheer amount of paperwork, not to mention botanical effort, involved in moving an adult Saguaro anywhere is enormous. Most of them are microchipped, their root networks are huge and shallow, they're really cranky about being transplanted in adulthood.. the list goes on and on.
Unlike the condescending/facetious replies to your question that pretended people have a problem with progress and prosperity, I'll try to actually answer some of the concerns.
I live in Chicago, which is regarded as a strong candidate for AMZ HQ2. We have probably the second best public transport system in the country and an unsaturated housing market, amazing engineering and science schools, access to a good pool of candidates, and little competition from others in the industry.
However, the concerns we have are that Chicago would turn into another silicon valley with over inflated cost of living and insane real estate market inflation.
While Chicago wages are not comparable at face value to those on either the east or west coasts, once you take into account the price of housing, food, and travel, middle class Chicagoans don't have it bad at all.
The worry is that the SV effect will hit Chicago, and non-tech workers will be priced out of living downtown or in the Chicago metro area even. Also, Chicago has retained some of the qualities of the Midwest that Midwesterners tend to find desirable or endearing, such as few "celebrities" and a "salt of the earth" mentality. But overall, people are willing to give it a chance and hope for the best. Most everyone I know that expresses these sentiments would still appreciate the benefits of having AMZ in town, and the jobs and money it will bring along with the boost to the local economy (and maybe it'll put a damper on the growingly ridiculous efforts of Cook County and state Democrats st raising money from really dumb taxes disguised as social welfare projects as they try to tax their way out of decades of corruption and misspending, giving out ridiculous pensions to state and city employees whike passing the buck to the next generation).
Those are problems, but surely they're not purely caused by tech? As in, it should be possible for Chicago, being a fairly large city as is, to absorb new tech peoples without causing too much of a problem?
Probably not, most cities in the US purposefully restrict growth, and most of the affordable ones are only affordable through lack of demand and the slack from white flight, decades ago. Texas is the big exception, they have a ton of cheap land and very few rules.
It doesn't help the people currently there at all. The only people begging for it to come are those who can already afford to live in a place where rents are through the roof.
In Austin Texas, the historical legacy of racial segregation meant that there have been areas of the city that were predominantly hispanic or black, for generations. The modest homes in these neighborhoods were paid off long ago and passed down through the families.
When the development boom hit Austin, even the parts of these neighborhoods that didn't undergo gentrification have seen a massive pressure on the folks who did live there in the form of explosive property taxes.
For many of these folks, this has pushed them out from their family homes because they can no longer afford the taxes on their properties, despite owning them outright. Of course there is an argument to be had about why these folks can't afford the taxes but heavily under-girding that is the same neglect and marginalization their populations have always faced.
So even owning property is not always enough to insulate someone from the whims of explosive development aimed at those with extremely large incomes.
Sure it does. It benefits homeowners and businesses, and anyone who benefits from a broader tax base.
It DOESN'T help people who are on the margins, though, unless they can get a job at the new employer, or unless public services improve more quickly than housing costs go up.
I think it would depend on what you're defining as 'that city.' If you mean the legal entity that enjoys tax revenues then yes, but for the people already living there they won't be getting those $100,000 Amazon jobs. So that means a bunch of people from outside the area suddenly moving in with a lot of money to throw around.
Sure, there will also be network effects where service level jobs expand but having been priced out of their former neighborhoods, watching people with perhaps little respect for the local culture or history coming in and changing things, I don't think the prospect of Amazon's new HQ is really all that positive for a city struggling as you hypothesize.
Living in Chicago, I can say that at least the people I've talked to, and the feeling on r/chicago, is that people are really excited about it. Chicago isn't afraid to build big. There are already a few massive sites in former industrial wastelands close to downtown that have submitted bids. And there are currently tons of high capacity housing projects recently completed and soon to be competed, so no one is afraid the city is going to turn into SF. The only place you can't build big is in the park space by the lake.
I'm going to go against the consensus here and agree with you. Sure it would be great if Amazon moved to your city and added jobs, but that's not what they are doing. They are trying to start a bidding war between cities so that in the end the city gets as little value as possible and Amazon gets the most. This is especially true if you end up in a situation where Amazon gets some tax break for X years and the city expects a return in X+5 years, but Amazon just moved again after the tax break is gone.
Cities do better when they set themselves up to be attractive to companies naturally, not when they try to bribe an company to come to them
Also where does that bribe money actually come from? The answer, local shops and companys- constantly threatened by amazon- pay the bribe to give there enemy a free lunch.
Speaking for Chicago: f*ck yeah! I imagine your issues with Amazon evolve around traffic congestion and competition for housing... Chicago is a much larger city and one that experienced years of decline. Adding an Amazon will speed up the redevelopment of whatever part of the city they enter. Chicago is already second behind Seattle in construction cranes and building condos like crazy. Still, notwithstanding the tax breaks and cheap land coming Amazon’s way, there’s almost nothing but upside for this city, because the infrastructure here is that good. Perhaps some would argue against that notion, given that we have traffic too. I’d argue that past patterns of suburban development caused that. That’s why the city is sucking all the corporate jobs right back into the city (McDs, Motorola, et al).
If by some miracle it would come to Columbus, OH I would be thrilled. We definitely have an underutilized pool of talent here. And plenty of people graduating from Ohio State every year that would prefer not to move.
I visited Columbus on a business trip (from SV) last year, and really, really loved it. Stayed across the street from the conference center, so just on the southern edge of the Short North. Had lots of great nights wandering around to wonderful bars and restaurants, ran along the river at 7 every morning (when the weather was ALMOST tolerable!), and was really lucky that the baseball team was in town so I got to enjoy the perks of a really really nice intimate ballpark for bargain basement prices.
I was still shocked, though, when I looked at the prices of the new condos being built and almost all of them were > $1M. Yeah, I know, it's the very very upper end of what's being built, but it was still surprising :)
I don't know about that. Can you imagine the hissy fit trump would throw if Amazon put 5 billion into a city outside of the US? He already doesn't like Bezos because of WaPo. I'm surprised he hasn't already tweeted a threat about it.
Then why not hedge your bets? Also, it's not like moving to Canada is ever done to skirt laws, avoid taxes or outsource. It's done to find talent, see Ubisoft Montreal, EA Vancouver, there's an IBM campus a few blocks away from me right now, a few other companies also have a presence here.
Hear, hear! I'd love to see more tech jobs in Canada to put an upward pressure on salaries. That said...
> workforce that can't simply move to the US
Or won't. Maximizing income is not always the top priority for workers. There's a plethora of reasons why Canadian residents would want to live there beside inability to move to the US.
There's though that they won't chose a Canadian city due to wanting to not lose favor with America's Gov't. Especially with the complexity of Amazon dealing with the Gov't.
I know it's a pipe dream but I want to see Ottawa's Central Experimental Farm sold to Amazon. Where else do you have over 4km^2 of farmland in the core of a million person city?
It's barely 10 minutes from the airport, about the same to downtown, a couple hundred metres from light rail, right next to Carleton University. The list goes on.
Under your scenario it would be "where else _did_ you have" that much farmland near Ottawa.
While I am biased, it's better for the city to preserve farmland. Especially long-term, as climate changes. Y'all might need that farmland. Or at least your grand-children might.
The Elon Musk battery plant went through a similar bid process, although I don't know if it was on the same scale. I think Nevada and Buffalo won that bid.
How ridiculously good is Amazon at getting free press? They have already likely decided on where to put the new HQ (1), and will get featured in these overwhelmingly positive articles for months to come. I'm also reminded of that 60 minutes segment on drone delivery that just happened to air right before cyber Monday a couple years back. Still waiting on that one, although I do actually think it will happen eventually.
> Even if only a few of these assumptions about Amazon’s interests were correct, they would limit Amazon to only one to three places. Amazon already knows that, and given what we know about the company and the site selection industry, it most likely has a favorite.
I think I can guess what they are thinking, but it would be nice if they just named those 3 likeliest metro areas.
I still think Bezos wants a headquarters near DC and mostly wants nearby suburbs to outdo each other offering the biggest bribes. However, in addition to the free press I suspect Amazon will make use of the long list of cities most willing to offer large bribes since they are already building other stuff accross the country...
This is so unsettling. Cities bribe companies/sports teams/etc all the time, but Amazon's gall in publicly pitting governments against each other to get the best deal ... just makes me sad.
No, using public funds to subsidize a private entity should be illegal for local governments. Based on past history, the most likely way that governments will attempt to woo Amazon will include tax breaks, cheap bonds, and preferential spending of infrastructure dollars. These are all benefits that are almost certainly not going to be made available to other private companies resulting in a huge advantage being handed to one private entity at the expense of other private entities and the local government.
That's so simplistic there's not really a good discussion to be had.
But the answer is: there are a lot of things governments shouldn't be able to do. _Especially_ to benefit corporations. Corporate subsidies almost never pay off for individuals, but saddle cities with unmanageable expenses later on. They tend to actually hurt the poor, as well.
Makes me wonder if the city has already been picked, and this is just a smart way of Mr. Benzos to get the absolutely best conditions without having to even negotiate..
IIRC Bezos chose seattle not just for available talent but also the fact that there are no income / corporate taxes in the state of WA.
I believe this factor will be also significant when they choose the 2nd HQ. Texas / Florida / Nevada are the competitive places that come to mind that have no income tax. Perhaps Austin (availability of talent pool) seems likely ?
I think Amazon should have gone the exact opposite way: buy a small, failing city to become Amazon's. There are plenty around the US and the world. Bring in your people. Pay people to relocate. Allow the spouses of those employees to create small businesses. Essentially make Eureka.
Any city owned and run by Amazon wouldn't be Eureka, because that's not what in Amazon's interests. It would be a company town straight out of last century, and most of its citizens would be little more than slum-dwelling wage slaves.
It’s not due to cost of living, most of the software engineers straight out of school (in my cohort, at least) want to be in NYC or SF. Amazon does the bulk of their recruiting from new grads, so a large contingent of their workforce is disincentivized from working outside those areas.
Interesting. I hope to get a chance to visit the area again before too long. My entire childhood was spent in Keystone Heights; right up to adolescence when we left Florida. Wasn't sure if I was mis-remembering the paper mill :)
According to their government relations team they've already chosen a city, architect, and have everything planned. What the strategy here is really to force all of these cities to come to Amazon, hat in hand, so they can also lobby them on their major issues. It's pretty much a scam.
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