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Sounds like good transportation with terrible urban planning.
Yes, it's always inconvenient and disillusioning when people refuse to live where "urban planners" think they should live.
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Why not Detroit? They could remodernize Detroit in a massively good way.
Amazon is not interested in altruistically revitalizing a once great city. They want to make money and will make their choice solely based on that factor (although there is certainly some nuance that goes into that decision - talent aquisition, politics, etc).
Just a stones throw away from Washington DC, imagine that. I’m sure it’s no coincidence that Amazon is in talks to do billions of dollars worth of work with the DOD and that the location choice of the second headquarters might have a lot to do with that.
Yeah, congratulations to everyone who called it ages ago or pointed out that a CEO is going to put HQ2 near an already established home. Good work on 6+ months of press and making cities embarrass themselves for what seemed obvious from the start. https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/real-estate/news/a...
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As though it's a binary choice. Washington DC metro, or the boonies.
Yeah, there are a lot of medium sized midwestern and southern cities that would have had the best of all worlds except 1) presumably a lot of software developers amazon wants to hire don’t want to live in these places and 2) related to 1, there aren’t a lot of software developers already there. I wish they had considered more cities like Cincinnati, Nashville, or Cleveland. Those are actually fine places and they hav…
That, in turn, requires the presumption that a lot of software developers want to live near DC.
This is clearly a DoD play. The federal government as a whole is thirsty for cloud services and having a services provider like Amazon literally at their doorstep is going to win them a lot of work. If they do bring good experts to government work instead of what the typical government contractors in the area provide this will be a good thing for taxpayers.
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I think that's exactly backwards. I think you review data to use your intuition to form the hypothesis or question, and then look for empirical data to try to falsify it. Putting intuition at the end of the decision making process is a pretty solid way to screw the entire thing up.
Falsification is part of the data review - the first step is always to eliminate solutions that obviously ie provably won’t work. The decision making process, both for Amazon HQ is inherently subjective / has too many dimensions to make an objective decision. i.e. the process is for selecting out of the final 20, that have been fully vetted and feasibility established. Or for deciding among three finalist engineers w…
This is clearly a DoD play. The federal government as a whole is thirsty for cloud services and having a services provider like Amazon literally at their doorstep is going to win them a lot of work. If they do bring good experts to government work instead of what the typical government contractors in the area provide this will be a good thing for taxpayers.
Seems like an admission that they have nothing new to do so they are seeking growth through federal contracts. Northern VA is the poster child of what happens when you have tons of growth over decades, but absolutely no planning, or worse, lots of nimby preventing infrastructure.
Arlington, VA probably did the best job of any post-WWII high growth city in America. The orange line corridor is actually urbanizing what was once pure suburbia. Crystal City/Pentagon city is built pretty densely and has space for even more high rise buildings. Every other city in America that grew post wwII would have just built strip malls and single-family homes. There are new high rises going up in Crystal city…
This is clearly a DoD play. The federal government as a whole is thirsty for cloud services and having a services provider like Amazon literally at their doorstep is going to win them a lot of work. If they do bring good experts to government work instead of what the typical government contractors in the area provide this will be a good thing for taxpayers.
People keep saying this and I really don't follow. Why does the DoD care where the headquarters of the parent company of their contractor is located? Are they gonna pop in and ask questions about the Amazon retail site? Sure AWS needs a sales office in the region. And a datacenter. And a lobbying shop too. Pretty sure they got all that covered already.
Plus when trying to make a sale or negotiate a deal I'm sure it makes people on the other side feel better if someone says "And the people to support you or jump when you say how high are going to be 5 minutes away rather than 2 timezones away." It's almost at the point where subcontracting out is similar to just having all the work done in the same building you're already in. Seems like that would make people feel more comfortable.