The short list includes ten of the fourteen largest metropolitan areas in North America. Since New York has two and Washington has three sites, that’s 13 of the 20. It’s clear that they’re going to pick a huge metro area. Siting it in any of the smaller cities will disrupt their economies, and more, it would pull in all the jobs from all the other cities near them. Putting 50,000 extra jobs into Nashville or Columbus would create Ross Perot’s giant sucking sound as people moved out of surrounding cities.
The three areas in greater Washington are where I’d place my bet. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. He also bought the largest private house in Washington. He wants national-level juice and influence. He’d have access to every power broker in D.C. And he wouldn’t be above sticking his jobs up Trump’s nose.
None of that would happen if he went to Raleigh, and it would be totally counterproductive to go to Toronto where he’d be the poster boy for jobs leaving the country. Apple wouldn’t do those calculations for their HQ2 but Amazon… Absolutely.
Conventional wisdom says if you’re a company heavily dependent on policy from Washington, have a big office in or near Washington. This obviously applies to big govt contractors, all the big defense contractors have big offices in the area though not necessarily their ‘no 2 hq’ which a lot of companies don’t formally have anyway. But any company as big as Amazon has gotten, not to mention how big it might eventually seek to be, is going to be heavily influenced by policy from Washington.
I don’t know enough about Bezos to know if he thinks he’s somehow above or beyond this, or has it covered already (by owning the WaPo, etc.). But good point.
Also this move would create some backlash about raised rents* in a smaller place. I don’t think the pain of people moving away from places near a small city Amazon hq. would be concentrated enough to register. But stories of raised rents in that hq city might ruffle feathers. The DC area’s high property values of recent decades are all about big govt (for better or worse) and Amazon wouldn’t move the needle much there, as it wouldn’t in even much bigger NY.
Newark NJ is part of the New York area, but in practical terms more of a separate economic entity than say Hudson Cty NJ, Westchester or Nassau Ctys in NYS, let alone Brookyln or Queens. There would be a big impact on that rundown town if it somehow won. It depends on Amazon’s real motives whether that’s at all likely. By conventional motives, hard to imagine choosing Newark when you can choose anywhere else (I live in NJ, no NJ joke intended, you just don’t see a lot of big new business investments seeking out the business climate of NJ let alone seeking out Newark: it would show motives other than what you or I might assume).
*ie raised property values, though as we go over in every ‘gentrification’ thread, homeowners whose property values spike generally don’t complain, they usually manage to swallow this affront to social justice.
My wife pointed out that one reason to have a large D.C. mansion is that Washington culture runs on parties and dinners, and stuff gets done in private. MacKenzie Bezos is not the socialist/hostess type but I’m sure she’d done her share over the past decades.
And she founded an anti-bullying organization. So she and Melania could bond.
Please, please, please make this happen.
I’m unpopular amongst Detroiters, but I’m glad we didn’t get it. Corporate giveaways are not the right way to conduct business. The Pizza Pizza stadium still pisses me off.
My cynical assumption is that the also-rans (Columbus, Nashville, etc.) are on the list because they’ll offer an extreme amount of graft to win something like this, which Amazon can then take to the cities on the real shortlist in hopes of getting a match.