>The desire to attract tech employers like Amazon appears to be more competitive than winning the bid to host the Olympic Games.
And for good reason! There aren't many companies that people would be willing to move across the US to join.
People tend not to move around too much after University of their first job. Having another magnet to bring in people for relatively little (compared to a university's for example) is a great deal for a city.
>"Amazon doesn’t need a large local labor pool. They get far more applicants than they need and plenty of people willing to move to work there."
Nonsense. It's far more efficient to be able to tap a local labor pool. Google, FB, et al set up shop in NYC for this ver And there are always people who don't want or can not relocate. Or who simply do not want to live in New York City.
>"And in most cities parking isn’t a problem so the transit isn’t necessary"
Please name just one top tier city where parking isn't a problem and mass transit isn't necessary.
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?
> However, most of the other cities on the list were either extremely crowded downtown, available sites were actually more out in the 'burbs, or the cities were far down in what a lot of people would consider "2nd tier" (or 3rd tier) cities.
Yeah, in Boston for example (where Amazon is actually doing some fairly heavy building and hiring in the Seaport anyway), the proposed HQ2 site was Suffolk Downs. That's not out in the burbs exactly but it is adjacent to old working class towns a little ways north. It's not what your typical techie would consider being in Boston.
I think Raleigh was somewhere out in industrial parks a decent way outside the city with no transit.
Etc.
We'll see if this story pans out but the DC area always had to seen as a leading contender. Yes, it's probably a bit pricey but one wonders how much latitude Amazon would have had anyway to pick a cheap location and provide much lower compensation than HQ1 to reflect that.
Even if the area doesn't check all the boxes, it checks a lot of them--including the fact that there's a ton of local tech talent and DC is, if not everyone's idea of a dream location to live and work, is at least considered tolerable by many.
> Underdog cities could and should compete by improving their offering for everyone
That's not necessarily true. A city may not want everyone, or they may particularly want Amazon. Competition is competing, one part of which is incentives to localize in an area. Since so many places want an HQ2, it is Amazon's market not that of the cities.
Cities can rail against having to compete in a competition, but those cities likely will not win the competition.
> 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.
Amazon doesn’t need a large local labor pool. They get far more applicants than they need and plenty of people willing to move to work there.
There are lots of cities with empty office space. And in most cities parking isn’t a problem so the transit isn’t necessary.
You gotta think like Amazon — most of those things weren’t huge benefits to them. They were benefits to their future employees but only in that city.
The main things they are looking for are tax breaks and rapid development without a lot of red tape. NYC was proving that rapid development was out of the picture and so was the lack of red tape.
>At the very least it makes NYC a less likely competitor to the Bay Area.
Nonsense. If the bay area were a competitor, that's where Amazon would have wanted put their new HQ, not New York. Amazon doesn't have an HQ in San Francisco.
Nevermind the fact that New York has been experiencing a tech boom for the last decade or more, with Apple, Facebook, and Google all buying campuses similar in scale to Amazon's proposed one, and without demanding bribes from the state before doing so.
> Though Toronto lost the bid, Amazon still opened a 113,000 square-foot office in the downtown core in December and said it would hire 600 new employees.
Wow, they really didn't do any research on this.
Amazon's first Toronto office opened almost 8 years ago. I moved to the office 7 years ago, when it was 25 people Growth has been constant or accelerating since then. We now have over 1000 full time employees- mostly devs, but also some AWS and Ads sales folks now too. Every department seems to have at least a couple teams here. There's two buildings, both running out of space.
And it's not like it's all "couldn't get a US visa, send them to Canada" either. Most of those folks, after a year with Amazon, could probably qualify for an L-1 and transfer to Seattle- but they don't. And a lot of the people being hired are local talent.
Like most of my coworkers, I could definitely get an increase in total comp if I moved to a US office. My wife and I don't want to live in America though- the culture isn't one we like, the politics are terrifying, the gun obsession and violence... Toronto's not perfect, but it's where we want to stay.
I find it interesting how many of these comments are sales pitches for their chosen cities. I don't have any preferences, since I have no desire to work for Amazon nor do I think my current city of SF is a good choice for reasons laid out in the article.
What I'm most interested in, however, is how you get around some of these problems. The article points out a number of issues:
Can even Amazon afford to pay 50,000 people on a New York or SF salary? That's going to be (almost) prohibitively expensive. They certainly can pay for a Michigan salary or an Alabama salary, but is the job market there in those places? The Philadelphia example from the beginning points out that while the city is large enough, the job growth hasn't been there for quite some time, implying that there might not be enough people to fill the needed jobs.
Could a city like Birmingham, AL or Gary, IN or Lincoln, NE support 50,000 new jobs? Are there enough available homes to house all those people? Parking spaces? What about the support jobs? For every N employees, you need M doctors or dentists or accountants or fast food workers or maids or auto mechanics to support the growing population. Are those jobs there? Are there people qualified to take those jobs? Can the new traffic be handled smoothly? I think the answer is "yes" to the above in the long term, but is Amazon going to put their HQ in an up-and-coming town and just deal with the growing pains in the short term? Or would they rather go to a larger city and skip those problems?
What about international airports? That limits it to a dozen or so cities around the country. Can Amazon survive in a place like Nashville, TN? Why or why not? Are there ways to mitigate potential problems of not being able to fly to London or Paris direct?
IMO, the potential cities themselves are much less important and much less interesting than the problems that moving a 50,000 person HQ to almost any city would cause.
> Yes, some people will move into NYC for these jobs, but many of them will just move from another NYC firm to Amazon
But if those other companies then have to fill the vacuum by hiring even more, then it's still a + per job; and arguably more because increased liquidity in the job market results in more competitive salaries.
> Amazon doesn't employ cleaners and other low skill workers. They contract those jobs out
Is this any different from how other companies do it?
> they'll be taking jobs from other organizations, like small businesses, who can't afford to compete with Amazon.
How many small businesses in LIC are competing with Amazon for business/workers? Does LIC even have tech jobs? I lived in NYC for 5 years working in tech, and I don't recall ever interviewing for a tech job in LIC.
> So, what's the benefit to new york?
25,000 jobs with $100k+ salaries. I get that there aren't enough native native New Yorkers to fill the jobs, but since when is NYC not a city of transplants? Amazon or not, this is already the state of things, and I don't see that changing. I mean LIC is already a ghost town of glass luxury residential apartment towers.
> the choice isn't 25000 jobs or no jobs. Its 25000 jobs with amazon and some number of jobs from other businesses. Other businesses will employ those high skill workers because there aren't enough to go around.
Is there a strong demand to build out jobs in LIC matching the 25k that Amazon would've? I'm not being facetious, genuinely wondering. I only went to LIC a few times, and my impression was that it seemed like a ghost town of glass luxury residential apartment towers. I don't recall seeing a thriving office/commercial center. Seems like everyone just commutes into Manhattan to work.
> "The company may be having similar discussions with other finalists."
The article sounds very speculative. I don't know anything about this place, but if it's expensive like people here say it is, then I don't see the point of Amazon moving there. I think a place like downtown Chicago would make more sense. (if only the winter was not as cold and better public schools...)
A good amount of hiring in these sectors is for people straight out of college, who generally have no family and are expecting to make new friends anyway.
Also, if that's your argument, it makes a lot more sense for Amazon to open several small new offices through the country instead of a single new HQ in one city. (In fact another commenter is trying to argue against me on the grounds that people would be moving to NYC to take these jobs, and the lack of such moves is harming the NYC labor market. Perhaps the two of you should argue with each other.)
> I'm sure that there are other unintended consequences, such as higher rents, but who knows.
For Amazon's reputation for internal cost-cutting (such as displaying the pricing on computer peripherals in vending-machines in their SLU offices), Amazon makes me scratch my head for building-up their HQ in one of the most expensive cities to buy land in the world - ditto Facebook in Menlo Park. Why didn't Amazon choose Kent or Auburn instead - or Facebook building in the north-east of the Bay rather than the hyper-expensive south-west? Given Facebook's propensity to attract and hire young twentysomethings then surely their exact location in the Bay Area is immaterial (similarly, Amazon attracts a lot of ex-MSFT folk from the Seattle Eastside).
> Sure, but having a great university down the street means they get first crack at interns.
I can't imagine an Amazon HQ in Cincinnati would have trouble recruiting interns from Columbus, Cleveland, etc. They already attract interns to Seattle from all over the country.
For every Skyline rec (which is, indeed, a shitty thing to do to a visitor), there's a Graeters one. :-p
Embrace remote work and try harder to attract talent in secondary cities. They've got the money and the influence to make that happen, see Amazon's HQ2 bid.
> This is good for tech in the east coast. Fin-tech firms WILL HAVE TO compete against Amazon for (supposed) west coast wages, and could help build a much stronger tech industry than NYC has atm.
Amazon will represent a tiny portion of NYC's tech industry. Just a drop in the bucket. It won't move the dial much. Also fin-tech firms already compete with tech companies and they pay very well ( better than amazon ).
> Cornell tech much be so happy with their choice to open office on Roosevelt island. I can see them being the biggest winners out of this whole set of events. NYU is probably also happy, having acquired NYU poly a few years ago.
Neither cornell nor NYU needs amazon. It won't make a difference. The biggest winner will be amazon as they gain more political influence. That's what this move is about after all. Political influence in the two most important political centers of the US and the world.
And for good reason! There aren't many companies that people would be willing to move across the US to join.
People tend not to move around too much after University of their first job. Having another magnet to bring in people for relatively little (compared to a university's for example) is a great deal for a city.
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