21–30 of 490 posts
In the long term, I'd like to see VCs not be so provincial in their investments, so that people can start companies where they are. But in the short term, having established companies put offices elsewhere is a great next step.
I actually hope this is a city where housing affordability is made more sustainable up front. Something to avoid the way New York and San Francisco have evolved into landlords and rent seekers drowning the wealth generation of incumbents
The challenge is that they can go to places where housing is cheap and there's a lot of capacity. Detroit, Las Vegas... But they'd probably still have trouble attracting a lot of tech workers to those areas. [ADDED: Although Michigan is better than people in the Web tech bubble think in this regard.]
Wow, $25.7 billion total employee compensation / 50,000 employees is $514,000 per employee. Err, that's not all in one year, right?
>From 2010 (when Amazon moved its headquarters to downtown Seattle) to 2017.
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/Anything...
The 2nd criterion is basically the total amount of sweet, sweet taxpayer dollars available to subsidize them:
Please provide a summary of total incentives offered for the Project by the state/province and local community. In this summary, please provide a brief description of the incentive item, the timing of incentive payment/realization, and a calculation of the incentive amount.
I'm no fan of high taxes, but holding this sort of reverse auction to see who will provide the biggest bungs rubs me the wrong way.
Austin, TX is a good candidate. Very strong engineering university attracting nationwide talent, better cost of living, they already have an office there so they must have some relationship w/ local govt, a good climate contrast to Seattle being much drier (barring the occasional hurricane), a Google Fiber city. $5B buys a lot more there than most places in the US.
> Why is Amazon choosing its second headquarters location via a public process? Because Foxconn got such an amazing deal and we want to get some of those sweet, sweet tax credits, too
Make it in Canada please.
Kitchener-Waterloo? edit: just thought it would be a suitable talent hub. Not sure why I'm getting downvoted. Maybe Toronto would be more suitable?
Let's say I'm the mayor of Detroit, and I want this. What incentives are in my power to offer, if I team up with the Guv'nor? Can I just gift them the land?
cost of land is probably the least of amazon's considerations in building a second HQ edit: to elaborate, what they care much more about, i'm sure, is ability to attract and retain talent in the area. which I'm not sure detroit could do much about. even if you could make it more desirable to live there there's so little talent in the area you'd have to spend a crazy amount of time and money relocating people