Virginia? Two cities? Chicago and Illinois ignoring HQ2 rumors, won’t give up on landing Amazon
https://trib.in/2D62bgS
Chicago is not going down without a fight… Lol…
On the local (Denver) news tonight, it said most likely VA/DC and Austin TX.
On national news, it was guessing VA and a second city (but I don’t think they meant Chicago as ‘second city’)
Lol, the earlier WSJ article included Dallas in consideration.
Either the media’s whacked or this is one big hustle to get everyone excited and buzzing…and you know my expression, “Look for who’s driving the Mercedes.”
Amazon is. Amazon in the spotlight, Amazon getting all the free attention.
And so the spin spins.
https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2018/11/05/business/05reuters-amazon-com-headquarters.html
Split headquarters - Virginia. And Long Island city
It sounds like they are about to ink the deal with Long Island city.
I think the split is a good idea. 50,000 new jobs in one location is too hard to manage. Infrastructure can’t handle that kind of short term huge growth (no city can handle that).
Having grown up in LIC, I can’t imagine what that’ll do for rents in the area. Now it’s a popular location because it’s so close to Manhattan for those who work there, but without Manhattan rent rates.
WSJ article is saying Amazon is doing the split because of the difficulty in finding that many tech employees in one city.
^^That’s just one of the selection factors, but the easiest to make public. (Kinda hard for Bezos to say he’s interested in TX bcos of its zero taxes, or DC/NoVa for political reason, such as to reduce chance of antitrust claims or labor issues.)
Nah, cynics in me thinks they wanted to get double incentives municipalities are putting up by splitting into two.
As my grandfather used to say, if you’ve got a big enough ass, you can sit on both chairs. :))
It’s really not a headquarter, right? there’s a big in Seattle that will remain the headquarter and two branch offices.
I hope we haven’t been sold the proverbial bill of goods. Or hill of beans. I’m starting to wonder who really wins.
It’s like two people won the lottery rather than 1. Exciting times for those two locations
@shellfell Agreed! Eventually You will have landlords not renewing leases in anticipate of the Amazon employee rental windfall.
Ha! He wants Amazon does the right thing and refuse incentives. Not gonna happen. They are getting double incentives from two HQ2’s.
^^hahahahaha
I called VA at the beginning of this process, for the reasons that the urbanist mentioned: Bezos lives in the hood, and the politics of antitrust, which wiped out WordPerfect back the day and cost Bill Gates hundreds of millions. I’m sure Bezos would have much preferred DC for the optics, but Va has lower taxes than DC and MD.
(I lived adjacent to Crystal City in a former life.)
Well now it’s officially official: (from the Bezos WaPo, lol)
I grew up in LIC and just recently moved to Arlington county, VA (though not Crystal City). Does that get me a prize from Jeff Bezos?
Being an Arlington resident now, I’m concerned about the impact on rents, infrastructure, traffic. Fortunately, we don’t really head in the direction of Crystal City unless we’re heading to the airport.