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Amazon announces candidate cities for HQ2

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Re: Amazon announces candidate cities for HQ2

#741

Post by jrnichols »

mschout wrote: post #727
jrnichols wrote: post #694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if they meant the city of Dallas itself. I'm not really sure where they'd even put a large HQ campus. Frisco/Plano/etc? absolutely. But in the City of Dallas proper? Hmmm.

Valley View Mall is one option that was proposed. There are plenty of spots.

Ah. I had thought I read previously that it was going to be a sizable campus. Perhaps it will be smaller than I had originally thought.

635/DNT would probably be a decent place for it, now that I think about it...

Re: Amazon announces candidate cities for HQ2

#742

Post by usaar333 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #732
Arzh wrote: post #731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah usually from taxes around home ownership. People who rent have this hit them less.

> Yeah usually from taxes around home ownership. Real property in general, not just homes (and even moreso, not just owner occupied homes.) But also can be sales taxes. > People who rent have this hit them less. Wrong. Property taxes (even those limited to residential property) hit renters at least as much as people living in homes they own. Sure, the landlord gets the tax bill, but that immediately goes into setting…

> Wrong. Property taxes (even those limited to residential property) hit renters at least as much as people living in homes they own. Sure, the landlord gets the tax bill, but that immediately goes into setting rent.

To a degree; see the argument for land value tax which is close: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax#Efficiency

If the supply of homes are relatively inelastic, the landlords are already maximizing the rent the market will pay. So they can't pass tax increases on to renters -- as they are already charging the maximum renters would pay!

(This starts to break down only if new housing is no longer built due to lower returns or owners devalue their housing to cut taxes)

Re: Amazon announces candidate cities for HQ2

#743

Post by crx087 »

pwinnski wrote: post #721
crx087 wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with ABIA? It's a reclaimed airforce base with new facilities and better service ratings than LAX or JFK.

Nothing's particularly wrong with it. I'm just not sure it's major enough to support Amazon. I mean, I definitely hope it is, because Dallas doesn't need Amazon setting up shop here. But Chicago and Dallas seem like they have more infrastructure to support a major project like Amazon's HQ2.

I grew up in a small town and have a hard time understanding why it's so contentious to add another major facility in a big city like Dallas or Austin.

It makes almost no impact on things like traffic or social services at a population scale. (In reality, even a HQ1 type facility is just another +0.3% for DFW or +1% for ATX, which is equivalent to hastening net growth by a few months at most.)

Re: Amazon announces candidate cities for HQ2

#744

Post by justin66 »

p3llin0r3 wrote: post #655
justin66 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the fact that their employees would need to sell their organs in order to afford single-bedroom apartments. But I'm curious, have they actually publicly stated that they want a lot of geographical distance between the old and new HQ? It's an assumption that informs a lot of what's being said here.

I see this sentiment coming a lot from Portlanders. I understand that rent is rising in your area. That is awful. But you do realize that Portland's rent is comparable to the rent in many other US metros? In fact, it's cheaper than quite a few! With better infrastructure and poverty rates! I'm from Chicago, and the rent in Portland is pretty comparable. You can find cheap rent in Chicago if you don't mind commuting 4…

I see this sentiment coming a lot from Portlanders.

I understand that rent is rising in your area. That is awful.

Did you intend to post this as a reply to someone else? Someone from Portland?

Re: Amazon announces candidate cities for HQ2

#745

Post by pwinnski »

crx087 wrote: post #743
pwinnski wrote: post #721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing's particularly wrong with it. I'm just not sure it's major enough to support Amazon. I mean, I definitely hope it is, because Dallas doesn't need Amazon setting up shop here. But Chicago and Dallas seem like they have more infrastructure to support a major project like Amazon's HQ2.

I grew up in a small town and have a hard time understanding why it's so contentious to add another major facility in a big city like Dallas or Austin. It makes almost no impact on things like traffic or social services at a population scale. (In reality, even a HQ1 type facility is just another +0.3% for DFW or +1% for ATX, which is equivalent to hastening net growth by a few months at most.)

That's a great observation! I'm making a few assumptions that I think are pretty safe, namely that an HQ2 would not be distributed geographically around the city in many small buildings, and that the single campus would not be built in various areas of the city that are unlikely to meet the requirements.

Because of those assumptions, I'm not thinking of an influx of employees being mixed among the millions of existing residents. I think it's much more likely that the HQ2 would be built in a northern suburb of Dallas, like Frisco. There are roughly 160k people in Frisco right now[0], and it's already dramatically driven up property values, commute times, restaurant wait times, and construction delays.

I might be letting my skepticism of the entire concept of an "HQ2" color my impressions of the economic impact of an HQ2, but a history of sports stadium construction in this country, and the various incentives cities have paid for them combined with the never-quite-what-was-promised results suggests to me whichever city ends up giving away a pile of money for Amazon's HQ2 will likely someday regret it.

[0] http://www.friscotexas.gov/578/Population-Estimates-Projecti...

Re: Amazon announces candidate cities for HQ2

#746

Post by hosh »

stevenwoo wrote: post #689
hosh wrote: post #333

I remember reading an article earlier in the year talking about how (1) No city is going to have every characteristic Amazon was asking for so (2) this is really about how much the city is willing to work with Amazon in long-term development plans. From that perspective, some of the cities isn't surprising. For example, I grew up in Columbus, OH and I know that one of the AWS regions is located in the greater Columbu…

Austin has one rail line and buses - what solution could they come up for mass transit?

Columbus has zero rail lines and busing is anemic.

It is a rust-belt metropolis with some world-class research facilities, (OSU, Ohio Supercomputing Center, Battelle, Chemical Abstracts), a lot of banking (Bank One had its headquarters there before Chicago First bought them out, and there is still a huge IT presence). Columbus is often a test market to try new product lines -- it is large enough and _boring_ enough.

Amazon coming in with an HQ would inflect the whole metropolitan area. Everything in Columbus right now pivots around the Ohio State University and the network of research centers, but that center of gravity will probably shift to Amazon if they come in. That is, Amazon would have a huge say in how they want the city to be developed.

As for rail: One thing from Atlanta's playbook: create greenspaces out of old rail right-of-way. Some of those may be converted into light rail. Columbus's High St. (the central corridor running down the spine of the city) used to host a trolley line. It's been the target of gentrification, from the Downtown core, through the Short North, and into the OSU campus area. Restoring a light rail line there is not out of the picture, particularly if it is extended to the airport.

I only know all of this because I grew up there, and my 6th grade social studies course was on Ohio history. That is local knowledge.

I don't know whether Austin can do anything, but I'm pretty sure there are some unique local features that can be just as much of an advantage, things that the locals know but is not so apparent for anyone else.

I still think it has a lot more to do with how willing the city is to have their development plan influenced by Amazon more than anything.

Re: Amazon announces candidate cities for HQ2

#747

Post by BookmarkSaver »

wfo wrote: post #671
BookmarkSaver wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Would you take one at Amazon, knowing that it's one of the worst software jobs out there because of horrible working conditions? Source? It is consistently ranked as one of the better places for software engineers to work, despite NYT hit pieces. >Would you last significantly longer than the average 1 year turnover rate at Amazon? Amazon's turnover is almost indistinguishable from Google's. It's an industry issue (a…

> It is consistently ranked as one of the better places for software engineers to work Where? By whom? I looked for a while and I couldn't find a single source to suggest this. There are plenty of lists of good software workplaces, Amazon shows up on none of them. People like working there because it is a great resume-booster. Work a couple years at Amazon, kill yourself for work, then move on to a real company with…

>Where? By whom?

LinkedIn, for one.

>Here's a quote from an article from an employee that I think captures it: “Amazon is a culture of self-driven workaholics”

You are quoting a subjective statement from an article, in support of the article's veracity? That makes absolutely no sense.

Amazon employs tens of thousands of people. Hundreds of thousands have worked there over the past 20 years. The NYT article was a collection of anecdotes.

"Accurate reporting"? Lol, I for one am shocked that out of the hundreds of thousands of current and former employees they were able to find a handful that had bad experiences. I mean, what are the odds? Amazon must be the worst.

"Accurate reporting"? From what I remember, not a single individual references worked in software development, they were exclusively in marketing and bureaucratic levels.

>If you join the cult and agree it's a good idea to work yourself to death, it's a good place to do that

Again, based on a few anecdotes you've reached the conclusion that it is a cult? It's really obvious that you've decided Amazon is evil a priori, and are using circular logic to rationalize this, because your evidence so far is anecdotal (from an article based on anecdotes).

>It's not a good place to go if you want to be a Seattleite, participate in a community or have a life at the same time.

I work 40 hours a week, average. So does nearly every engineer I know here. I love Seattle and my work-life balance is awesome.

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