Northern VA would be nuts, imo, for the traffic and already immense school competition. Montgomery Co MD is intriguing.
@thumper1, Yup. I was pointing out how easy it must have been to eliminate a sizable proportion of the applicants. Some of them seemed to be shots in the dark. Can you imagine Brunswick ME, with a population of around 20,000 trying to suddenly absorb 50,000 Amazon employees?
My top three would be:
1 Dallas
2 Pittsburgh
3 Philadelphia
I can’t believe Austin is even still on the list hope they spend sometime driving on MOPAC, and west 290 before they make up their minds!
@SouthernHope You’re not alone with that thought.
https://slate.com/business/2018/01/amazon-is-totally-putting-hq2-in-d-c-right.html
Any place that involves the beltway in the greater DC area is a nutty choice!
Imo, only the beltway closest to or heading into DC. A lot of it is outside the beltway.
From my prediction I think they will narrow it down to: Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, Indianapolis, Nashville, Raleigh. I also want to say Toronto but that is sort of my personal bias.
Maybe from there they will narrow it to Atlanta, Austin, and Raleigh, and from here I’ll let y’all decide which city Amazon will choose from these three.
I like the top 3 thing…okay, I will say Pittsburgh, Boston, Atlanta.
Vegas odds currently favor Atlanta.
https://www.geekwire.com/2017/betting-man-put-money-city-amazons-hq2/
That was from October 2017. Here is what appears to be the odds for the finalists. Boston is the favorite (sorry lookingforward).
Oops. Thanks for the correction!
Toronto.
Excellent quality of life, a short hop to major NE cities, 4.5-hour direct nonstop air travel to Seattle, oh and there’s always their healthcare system…
As @alwaysamom pointed out, they didn’t offer much in the way of tax incentives. They don’t need to because as It turns out, they have an incentive that none of the other contender cities can offer:
Immigration
Bezos probably will go for a city that has no state tax. I say somewhere in Texas or Florida.
^^^Nashville would fit that. I don’t think we’ll get it and I don’t want it!
I think many people would have like to have seen Detroit on the short list. Amazon seemed to be aware of this and reached out to the city to let them know why they didn’t make it.
https://www.freep.com/story/money/business/john-gallagher/2018/01/18/detroit-amazon-headquarters-finalists/1043624001/
It’s going to be Dallas, Austin, or Atlanta. My vote would be for Dallas.
Please, not Austin.
Dallas makes more sense than Austin
The Washington Post has an analysis that says Amazon didn’t follow its stated criteria all that closely in selecting its 20 finalists. According to this analysis Minneapolis-St. Paul would have been in the top 5 if you went strictly by the stated criteria, but they didn’t make the 20-city cut. Others strong on paper but not making the cut: Baltimore, Houston, Portland, San Francisco, San Jose. Some of these you can eliminate for fairly obvious reasons. Portland is too close to Seattle. San Francisco and San Jose are already choking on tech companies and traffic congestion, and Amazon is looking to be a big dog wherever it goes, which it wouldn’t be in Silicon Valley.
Meanwhile, many cities that aren’t particularly strong on the stated criteria did make the cut, including Austin, Columbus, Indianapolis, Nashville, Pittsburgh, and Raleigh.
So what gives? My guess is that Amazon really just has two criteria, despite what it says. First, it wants a major city that offers amenities and a lifestyle that will appeal to the types of young tech workers Amazon wants to attract. And second, it wants boatloads of financial incentives. Minneapolis-St. Paul ruled itself out on the second of these criteria, saying it would offer $3 to $5 million tops, while others were offering billions (e.g., Chicago says $2 billion). I can’t believe places like Columbus, Indianapolis, and Nashville are ultimately all that appealing on the lifestyle question, so I don’t think they’re serious contenders, But Amazon probably wants to keep enough competitors in the game to intensify the financial bidding.
As a resident of St. Paul, I say, “Good riddance!” We actually don’t need the jobs at this point, we certainly don’t need the traffic and upward pressure on housing costs, and we’re absolutely not going to pay billions in bribes to get them.
@PacNWparent said: “I think many people would have like to have seen Detroit on the short list.” I am from the Detroit area, and I did not support the push to get Amazon here, for many reasons. I won’t go into them, because it’s a moot point, but I don’t think it would have been as good for the city as some seem to think.