Charlotte doesn't have a good cost of living (or whatever the metric was)? Last I saw it was one of the best for wages/job ratio.
Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You
51–60 of 253 posts
Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You
#52Amazon made it clear that it was looking for "someplace in North America"... there are 2 other countries you've left out with metro areas that fit at least some of the criteria.
Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You
#53Boston has crumbling infrastructure. A Big NO
Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You
#54This really burns me. The Times compared the metro population of Grand Rapids (1 million) to Detroit's population (670,000) in order to disqualify the city in their first round. But metro Detroit has a population of 4.5 million so the Times either was sloppy with their criteria or they deliberately snubbed Detroit. Detroit may be a dark horse in this competition but with Dan Gilbert going all out to win I don't think…
Detroit was not eliminated due to population, everything on the first map qualified for the population criteria. It failed the job growth test.
(There's an argument about whether “stable business climate for growth" really can be boiled down to just "job growth". But is Detroit really going to do well on any kind of proxy for stable growth?)
Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You
#55Why not Australia? XD
Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You
#56I was thinking about this today and realized something about tech/finance/entertainment... hubs. The best way to get one is by having major players in the industry set up shop there. Cities hope the next big tech company will be in their city, but lots of the employees that switch companies to help startups grow come from top companies and it is way easier to get people to switch companies if they don't have to move.…
Is Amazon looking for a tech hub or a place for administrative functions. Recall Microsoft moving all of their admin stuff to the Midwest somewhere.
> Is Amazon looking for a tech hub or a place for administrative functions.
"The jobs will likely be broken down into the following categories: executive/management, engineering with a preference for software development engineers (SDE), legal, accounting, and administrative." [1]
SDE is clearly mentioned but who know the actual distribution.
[1]: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/Anything...
Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You
#57> We asked the economist David Albouy to rank these metro areas for us with an index he uses to measure how much people would be willing to sacrifice, in terms of housing costs and commutes, to live in desirable places. On that basis, we cut Charlotte, N.C. My experience being that neither housing costs nor commute times being horribly bad around CLT - this bums me out. It's actually a great city with lots of nature…
I spent the first 18 years of my life growing up in Charlotte during the 90s and 00 housing and bank boom, and have revisited friends there fairly often since. Can't say I am rooting for Amazon to locate a HQ there.
Downtown has never really had any appeal for an under-21 besides Discovery Place (is that even still around?) which is more geared for the pre-13 age group. Post-21 more recently it seems to have been revitalized but having been spoiled by Raleigh, still feels sterile and kind of bland. Even in NoDa, where all those creative people have already been priced out of that community.
I'm definitely still colored by my hatred of bland suburbia of that city, which afforded teenagers absolutely nothing to do except shop or watch movies in the theatre. It really is geared for the traditional suburban parent types through and through. Compared to other parts of NC with a diverse cultural scene (Asheville and Raleigh) Charlotte drops the diversity for an increased price.
It also has the unfortunate location of being inside NC, whose state politics have been anything but sane the past half decade, and the local college is also overshadowed heavily by Chapel Hill, Duke, and State in the Triangle area. That's the metro area I would expect Amazon to pick over Charlotte, as there's a lot of non-hip tech companies already established there. And even a few hip ones like Epic Games.
Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You
#58And those of us in Utah say... "Wait, no, we have Universities here, and could totally support Amazon." Then we think about the urban sprawl of SLC, and look at the outdoors and think about how crowded it has gotten already at Arches and Zion and say... "Yes, OK. Denver sounds good."
It wouldn't work in SLC for a variety of reasons.
Utah really needs some sort of excellence (lab/institute/etc...) in engineering/science/high tech research that's not just biotech, in addition to a more diverse workforce, to really be a next-level tech environment.
Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You
#59Why 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.
Because they want the most bang for their buck. This is not a goodwill gesture by Amazon, this is them looking to squeeze as much as they can out of their next location.
Re: Dear Amazon, We Picked Your New Headquarters for You
#60Absolutely love, despite the fact that it's mentioned numerous times that Amazon is searching all of NA for its second hq, that both Canada, and Mexico are completely ignored. This is despite the fact that Toronto is currently the continents fastest growing tech market due to a lot of factors that would be of incredible interest to a behemoth like Amazon. Feels a like a bit of a snub of the thumb by NYT on that one..…
As they explained in the article:
> (With apologies to Canada, we’ve set aside Toronto and several other large cities because they’re not included in most of the data sets we’ve used to determine which places meet Amazon’s needs.)