Bezos: Alexa, buy me a city, we need new headquarters.
Alexa: City acquired.
It's so crazy to see a company make cities apply for hosting them, instead of them applying for space in a city. But I guess that given the size of Amazon, it's actually worth more than most cities in the world anyway...
Why doesn't Amazon choose a city that almost meets their criteria and invest the wealth they generate there back into the city? Then we get more good cities instead of overinvesting into any single city.
> It makes me wonder if this is another negotiation tatic by Amazon to get the final city to shell out more incentives.
Alternately, Amazon has liked pitting cities against each other so much, that they decided to keep doing it forever. "City A, we're looking to start a major new project up. City B is willing to offer X, Y, and Z if we launch it in the City B office, are you willing to beat that for us to open it in your office?"
> The city is complaining that Amazon is making some of their citizens too rich.
The city would prefer that Amazon's presence has benefits for citizens as a whole - or at least didn't make their live worse - rather than enriching a few. Seems reasonable to me.
I think some of it Amazon doesn't work outside a vacuum of other tech companies. It has to compete against San Francisco and other major tech hubs now so having a developed city is a selling point for Amazon HQ2.
> what mechanisms can an underdog city use to ever compete
Instead of giving Amazon money (by say, funneling employee taxes back to them. really chicago?) they could promise to earmark those taxes towards overall city improvements that Amazon is also interested in. Transit, for example. In the case of tech companies you could also change your zoning to try and make things cheaper for the 10s of thousands of new employees who are going to move in.
That sort of thing. Be forward thinking and try to build a city that doesn't get crippled by housing shortages and traffic.
The article is asking what is the point? Why make cities compete for your presence. Amazons presence in a city brings along with it all the good things you mention above, as the richest man in the world and one of the richest companies in the world, the article is asking why be greedy and make cities grovel at your feet for the "good" you can bring, why doesn't Amazon just be an agent of good and bring good to the city? Not only because it is the ethical thing to do (doing good and not asking for repayment) but because in the future it will have positive repercussions for Amazon, rather than having people strike "bad" deals with Amazon cause Amazon has the upper hand now but then later on someone else uses it (The deal) as a campaign point to witch hunt Amazon cause the city made a bad deal. He is asking Bezos to Just be generous, everyone will gain.
I remember reading an article earlier in the year talking about how (1) No city is going to have every characteristic Amazon was asking for so (2) this is really about how much the city is willing to work with Amazon in long-term development plans.
From that perspective, some of the cities isn't surprising. For example, I grew up in Columbus, OH and I know that one of the AWS regions is located in the greater Columbus area. The airport is international but it is is not a major hub like Atlanta. When I lived in Seattle, I remember locals there complaining about the transit system -- yet it is way better than what Columbus has.
I do know that, Columbus is probably willing to change things about its city to accomodate Amazon. Not just in terms of tax credits, but likely extending all the way out to municipal and regional planning.
The same could be said about the other cities -- Austin, Newark, etc.
> Of course Amazon should be asking tough questions of cities akin to “and what are you going to do to support me” before spending $5 billion building a new campus.
Nothing. We exist to support our tax-paying residents and local businesses, and so you will have to work with everyone that's already here if you want something in particular. You can probably expect a new bus line, an extension of the road, sewer, and water system, one new police station, one new firehouse, two new elementary schools, half a middle school, and a new wing of classrooms at the nearest high school. The quality of all that will depend on how much your company improves the local tax base, so don't get too stingy, or the local news will have no problem airing all the dirty laundry for Amazontown a couple years down the road. The zoning board will be busy changing colors on their map so that your people can eventually spend money on drive-through coffee and dog-walkers without having to go all the way downtown.
Amazon needs to come to the table with the attitude "We're going to increase your tax base by $X. What's your plan for spending it?" The ideal city just has to blow the dust off the growth plan they already have and write new names and dates in all the blanks.
Any city that says, "we're going to give you a tax discount" is basically saying "we would rather you send your money off to Wall Street than actually spend it to improve the community that you intend to join here."
I suppose a city could also offer a bureaucrat dedicated to expediting issues related to the new HQ, like building permits and inspections and NIMBY lawsuits, if they wanted to pay the cost of that person's salary as a donation to the city. I just never quite understood the concept of offering discounts to rich people.
Amazon is more or less conducting an auction. Cities will bid on hosting their second HQ. The best bid wins. Or maybe a better analogy is the Olympics site selection process.
> Amazon's is the most ambitious gambit of them all. When its spheres and three surrounding towers are completed, the company will have 10 million square feet of office space in Seattle, more than 15 percent of the city's inventory, on a campus that occupies more than 10 square blocks.
15% of a city's commercial inventory seems like a lot. Any comparable levels to companies in other cities? Is this typical for one company to own/lease such a large percentage of commercial real-estate or is the statistic misleading?
> They'd be much better spending that money on their neglected public transit or their neglected public housing...
But some cities were suggesting that! They were going to invest in infrastructure, knowing that the extra income from Amazon in the area would pay for it. It was not a zero-sum game.
Considering they'll be hiring a lot of locals, and property values will most likely rise, and the associated peripheral startups will start flourishing due to Amazon expats, I don't see what your point is.
It's not like they're building a NFL stadium, which is almost always a huge boondoggle. Would you rather have Amazon HQ, a football stadium, or watch your city fade into irrelevance?
>> Throughout a bidding process that saw dozens of cities vie to be the next location of a proposed hydra-headquarters, there were murmurs that Amazon might really just be looking for a regular office, and rebranding it a “headquarters” to corner those tax breaks.
Based on the hilariously large stack of cities willing to bid on their presence, I'm guessing it'll be a while before that effect (to the extent it even exist) is a constraint.
On the flip side, there were municipal governments literally giving Amazon powers over taxation and spending[1] to get them to set up their headquarters in their city. I think this is quite a bit of political power myself.
It's so crazy to see a company make cities apply for hosting them, instead of them applying for space in a city. But I guess that given the size of Amazon, it's actually worth more than most cities in the world anyway...
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