@gunnerz: Finally a realistic assessment.
The Top 6 are:
Northern Virginia +240
Washington DC +350
Austin, Texas +400
Boston, Mass. + 450
Toronto, Ontario +500
Atlanta, Georgia + 900.
The only one that I have trouble accepting as a likely location is Boston, Mass. No definite reason for my opinion, however, other than that I think the other 5 locations all have more to offer.
@twoinanddone I learn something new everyday… Traffic engineer? Is that part of Civil? Also send her to Chicago please. The new Amazon headquarters here can use her expertise. 
Yes, her degree is in civil engineering. She somehow latched on to transportation and traffic (really didn’t like sewerage and lift stations). I think right now she’s counting cars going through intersections, on ramps to highways, etc. and writing up data.
I know a woman who was responsible for a highway interchange by our elementary school. I think of her every time I go through that intersection. I only swear a little as I try to understand how anyone could think the tangle that takes place UNDER the highway, with double left turns to get on and off in every direction, was a good idea.
Just saying: a friend’s civil engineer daughter also does traffic, but long distance transportation solutions and enhacements, rail lines, etc. Must be fascinating.
Thought this was an interesting article:
https://www.geekwire.com/2018/amazon-staffing-hq2-finalist-cities-second-headquarters-decision-nears/
It’s going to be DC or the surrounding area.
Last year JB bought a pad for himself and his family in D.C. … I wonder why.
He does own the Washington Post, after all.
Although I agree that a DC suburb will be the winner, I don’t think that recent hiring is a viable indicator of where HQ2 will end up. Most of this hiring is to beef up very specific efforts (AWS for example) and fill spaces which Amazon has recently leased in these cities.
Excellent article just published in the Times…in a nutshell, nobody knows anything.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/technology/amazon-hq2-finalists.html
The Atlanta City Council nixed Mayor Bottoms’ proposal to develop the Gulch. Her response to their refusal to vote on a $5 billion project that her office negotiated pretty much in secret and would have involved $1.75 billion in public financing, was that they just need more time to understand the sheer awesomeness that is herself. Or something like that.
I’m curious, is the gulch a bad location for an amazon location?
@partyof5, the Gulch is bad because it is in Atlanta. Between the traffic (which this would make worse) and the corruption, yes, the Gulch, which is smack dab in the middle of Atlanta, is a bad location for anyone. The only way that an Atlanta’ish location makes any sense might be if it is in a suburb of Atlanta, well outside the city limits. Atlanta government hates to be reminded of this, but the city of Atlanta has well under 500,000 residents. Fewer than 100,000 voters participated in the the last mayoral election; and, yet, the mayors act like they are major players in international politics. It is a ridiculous amount of power to vest in such a small number of voters.
@planit yes I am familiar with the location I was just curious as to why it was a bad location from someone who is local. I spend a lot of time in Atlanta but I don’t know the politics of the Gulch.
This is the first piece of news about HQ2 in recent weeks that strikes me as actual new information that we didn’t have before (as opposed to opinion pieces hashing over the same data) http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-amazon-hq2-chicago-visit-20180926-story.html
Also, on the note above noting that the city of Atlanta only has 500,000 residents…honestly, that’s about par. With that population, it’s the 10th largest city in the country…larger than Denver, Miami, San Diego, etc.
@SouthernHope, No, the population of the city of Atlanta proper is estimated at 486,290 as of 2017, making it the 38th largest city in the country, in the same ballpark as Kansas City, Long Beach, Omaha, and Raleigh. It is slightly larger than Miami (463,347) but substantially smaller than Denver (704,621) and only slightly over 1/3 the size of San Diego (1,419,516).
But I’m not sure the size of the city proper matters so much, except perhaps for its implications for the fiscal capacity of the city government. Atlanta is the nation’s 9th-largest metropolitan area with a population of nearly 5.8 million in the Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell MSA. That’s just slightly smaller than Miami’s 6.1 million, and much larger than San Diego’s 3.3 million and Denver’s 2.9 million.
The metropolitan area figures are a better indicator of the size of the local workforce, and I would think that should matter more to a company like Amazon than the population of the city proper which can be influenced by many different factors including the size of the geographic area claimed by the central city before it got hemmed in by surrounding suburbs, how easy or difficult state law makes it to annex neighboring communities, housing density permissible under the zoning code, and depopulation of the central city due to factors like taxes, schools, crime, white flight, quality of the housing stock, etc.
A family member who has some insider knowledge in commercial real estate is guessing DC area; he mentioned Crystal City.
@bclintonk that is interesting data and I thank you!
Interesting new brick and mortar amazon store that just opened in NYC https://www.cnet.com/news/a-visit-to-the-new-amazon-4-star-store-store-in-manhattan/