If Amazon moved to a Columbus, all the employees would be Ohio State graduates. I don’t think Amazon would want that.
OT: Amazon HQ2 - 20 Finalists
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Seattle has UW and what? I'm actually asking. WSU and Gonzaga are in the eastern part of the state.
As someone else mentioned, I think their target employee is not out of undergrad. Instead they are likely pursuing someone who has professional experience and possibly a graduate degree. Seattle is a destination city. Raleigh Durham and Columbus are not destinations.
Friend of mine's wife is a Havard MBA and they were living and working in Manhattan. She was offered a job at Amazon and they relocated to Seattle.
Raleigh-Durham is becoming a destination city. Fidelity, among others, has expanded operations there. It's not yet, and never may be, Seattle. But Amazon decided to establish a second headquarters and not expand in Seattle, and it's not some hick red state city in flyover country. The Research Triangle has been around for close to 50 years (skilled non-recent grads) and you have a great academic feeder system for the future at your doorstep. And as I said well above, housing prices 30% below most of the alternatives. Particularly Greater DC and the NYC area.
I wouldn’t be surprised if amazon through this process expands in multiple cities. One winner gets hq2 but a dialogue has been established with a bunch of other cities and the cards are on the table. For example amazon is already in Pittsburgh with a small office that only works on Alexa. Bunch of egg heads in a room working on machine learning. That city may lose hq2 but amazon may make an additional investment in that city to expand. Same could be said for other cities as well. Heck google is in like a dozen cities currently wirj satellite offices.
CRE? Commercial Real Estate?
So? It's not like Amazon is looking to get real estate options from a national firm .... they already have the proposals and they've narrowed it down to 20 choices. And even if they reached out to a real estate firm to get additional information, or for additional office space, how do you know that they didn't reach out to a different firm for options in some of the other cities?
We know Amazon is playing this close to the vest. There was no leaked information as they narrowed the choice from a couple hundred to 20. I doubt you'll see any leaked information until they make a final choice, or are very close to it.
IMO, Amazon always knew where they wanted to go and set this up so they could use it as leverage to gain more concessions from their desired city.
I really hope so - the state really needs it.
I don’t know anything for sure but have pretty good contacts nationally that I trust to be informed at least indirectly.
Heard rumor today that Newark may finish in top 5 but not at the top.
Would have added this to the Gateway Tunnel thread, but somehow that thread got all messed up (technical issue).
Google buys Chelsea Market for $2 Billion+.
https://therealdeal.com/2018/02/06/google-is-buying-chelsea-market-building-for-2b-plus/
These tech giants aren't necessarily concerned with cost of living and expenses like other companies. I think those factors as being overrated by folks trying to guess where Amazon H2Q may land.
Google buys Chelsea Market for $2 Billion+.
https://therealdeal.com/2018/02/06/google-is-buying-chelsea-market-building-for-2b-plus/
These tech giants aren't necessarily concerned with cost of living and expenses like other companies. I think those factors as being overrated by folks trying to guess where Amazon H2Q may land.
Growing & prospering as far as business and becoming a "destination city" are two different things.
everyone is watching whats going on with Delta! no way Amazon moves there now...its like HB2 was for NC. Stupid politicians doing really stupid stuff!
I read an article that excluded the red state finalists due to laws against LGBT even though they were blue cities in red states. It looks more like D.C, MD, Va or NY, Newark and Philadelphia.
There is no doubt Bezos is paying attention.
I thought Atlanta was the favorite, would be well deserved if some unhinged mouth breathing politicians cost Atlanta the opportunity and potentially cost them more jobs for the 0.001% of the state's population that uses the withdrawn discount for attending the NRA annual conference.
There is serious political opposition, including nomination of an anti-Amazon politician to a board that has to approve the project (the same board that killed the Jets westside stadium)
Hopefully it gets killed. That corporate welfare queen can go be a vampire somewhere else.
Truth be told, Amazon isn't being very smart about this. They're trying to extort a downtown zip code when they could really do much better with a site that is outside a large city yet still convenient to ground transportation, with a nearby airport that's currently under-utilized and looking to expand.
Very true, there are plenty of NJ locations that would be better than LIC. Even Amazon is only one fish in the NYC pond.
Some Amazon officials have said that the politicians in NY are trying to extort the company
And Jeff Bezos is accusing The Enquirer of extorting him.
Lets solve both problems and have the Enquirer move to the Amazon site in NY and then the politicians and The Enquirer can extort each other and leave poor Amazon alone.
And Jeff Bezos is accusing The Enquirer of extorting him.
Lets solve both problems and have the Enquirer move to the Amazon site in NY and then the politicians and The Enquirer can extort each other and leave poor Amazon alone.
I think Amazon's theory is that with 25,000 people, they need a location that has significant mass transit and they also have a preference for a location with enough residential density that many employees could walk or bicycle to work.
The selected locations just across the rivers from DC and Manhattan give Amazon access to those city benefits without a truly downtown zip code. The addition of 25,000 employees in those locations (despite the local opposition in Queens) is fairly easily absorbed by the existing infrastructure. Compare that to if they built in the former Ferren-site in New Brunswick or off of I-287 in Piscataway. Adding 25,000 employees there would require significant infrastructure improvements.
This is just dumb on the part of the local pols in NYC.
Always thought that Newark was a more viable option - as with fixes to the infra-structure it was more suitable.
Always thought that Newark was a more viable option - as with fixes to the infra-structure it was more suitable.
The combination of proximity to NYC, mass transit options, nearby housing options that could be developed and the fact that the company would be doing good from a social viewpoint is exactly why Newark should have been chosen. The company would get all the advantages that Long Island City offered but it would have had a much greater impact on Newark than this project would have on NYC.
No way now that Murphy and the legislature passed a tax surcharge on large corporations. And even before that the NJ corporate tax rate was well above the average among states. Basically saying to Amazon "Do Not Enter".
Wrong. Now there's little to no difference when NYC is included. That's a major disadvantage when Virginia, Tennessee, Austin or any of the other potential sites are considered.
Those corp tax rates would have gone away for Amazon with the incentives the State was offering
That is very true. The business climate in NJ is garbage and getting worse.
Newark’s infrastructure couldn’t handle 25k more daily commuters. Newark Penn Station/Homeless Shelter is already a commuting nightmare and should’ve been demolished years ago. You would need to rebuild the entire infrastructure of the city. Not that NYC subways are any better.
I don’t think that is what they care about here.
LIC’s access to the Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island is a major attraction and as we see with Google, tech firms seem to believe NYC is one of the best places to attract talent. I also believe as these firms continue to diversify in what falls under “tech” that being located in a city with broad range of industries is vital to their futures.