I do think the concern about unforeseen infrastructure costs are warranted, especially if a city doesn't excel in urban planning or has problems with NIMBYism derailing good plans. But I think most of the cities on the shortlist are fair game and could handle a project of this scale.

how did you reach that conclusion?

The area around Yankee Stadium has always been a vibrant community. Yankee stadium was built in the 1920's

Not sure that you are a new yorker with those two statements... Shea stadium was never re-zoned, so re-vitalization was never its intended goal... Yankee stadium surrounding area has gone thru the usual cycles every other nyc neighborhood has, and the stadium location is almost 100 years old!

It's not though. You purposefully used examples of public or non-profit groups to make it sound like a benefit. But it's not. A more fair comparison would read:

It's like someone came to your town and I said, "I want to build a $20m McDonalds, Mobile Gas Station, WalMart and a Best Buy". I would hope your town says "good luck with that" and not "that's amazing, how should we corrupt the local market to make it easier for you to do that". Amazon is no different in any way except scale.

In a sane world, Amazon HQ2 would terrify cities, who will need to ensure they have extra taxes in place for Amazon, to ensure the city can handle the massive pollutions Amazon HQ2 will generate in the local housing markets, local economy, and local infrastructure.

> We’ve proven that this public/private partnership is basically the most effective growth engine we’ve got

Proven? Can you cite some examples? I've only seen "Public/private partnerships" used as a label to mask corruption and theft; as a way to socialize any losses but privatize any gains.

Back in 2004 when I was working at Microsoft, I remember sitting in a bar in downtown Redmond and tossing back some local brew IPAs. This guy sitting next to me was an older dude and longtime fisherman. He was going on and on about how in the 80's, the eastside (the collective suburbs i.e. Redmond, Bellevue, etc) was just farmland, and that Seattle's main industries were fishing and logging. He was both lamenting and boasting how Microsoft came in and transformed Seattle and surrounding area into the tech mecca it is today.

So you are right. All it takes is one anchor company to totally transform an entire city. Too bad they chose cities with established infrastructures and talent pools, and not a city like Milwaukee or San Antonio that would have had the same dramatic transformation as 80's Seattle.

I think the idea is that cities definitely should compete to provide the best services for the commercial enterprises, but that those service should not include breaks on taxes or land giveaways. If building a new transit station, boosting spending on public schools that the Amazon engineers would want, and restructuring building and zoning codes to increase the housing supply will make your city more attractive to Amazon, by all means go ahead, since those should redound to everyone, regardless of whether they work for Amazon. But Amazon seems rich enough to me that they would be just fine even without tax breaks on construction materials or payroll taxes.

Part of the problem here is the people negotiating don't really have much skin in the game. It's easy to negotiate with other people's money. There's virtually no recourse for their poor decisions. See: suburbia.

> At the 50-75 year timeframe we are talking about at least hundreds of billions of dollars of economic value, if not trillions

We're projecting what a theoretical second campus of a 23 year old company will be 50 and 75 years out? Please. Did we learn nothing from the nearly homogeneous business cities like Detroit and "coal country" today? Cities built around one industry or one company will fail.

> Of course city governments should be working hard to bring this kind of value creation and massive economic engine to their constituents

Amazon developed out of an existing city. Cities should invest their efforts to nurture their own businesses that one day may grow and provide jobs. Importing an existing business is a rather short-sighted proposition akin to a get rich quick scheme.

> Personally I think the cities that only have tax incentives to offer will not come out the winner. Amazon cares a lot more about the surrounding infrastructure and ecosystem than a short term $1 Billion.

Agreed. Amazon is going to go where they're going to go. Cities should stop clamoring over themselves to give bigger tax breaks to one of the biggest businesses on the planet.

Nothing. We exist to support our tax-paying residents and local businesses, and so you will have to work with everyone that's already here if you want something in particular. You can probably expect a new bus line, an extension of the road, sewer, and water system, one new police station, one new firehouse, two new elementary schools, half a middle school, and a new wing of classrooms at the nearest high school. The quality of all that will depend on how much your company improves the local tax base, so don't get too stingy, or the local news will have no problem airing all the dirty laundry for Amazontown a couple years down the road. The zoning board will be busy changing colors on their map so that your people can eventually spend money on drive-through coffee and dog-walkers without having to go all the way downtown.

Amazon needs to come to the table with the attitude "We're going to increase your tax base by $X. What's your plan for spending it?" The ideal city just has to blow the dust off the growth plan they already have and write new names and dates in all the blanks.

Any city that says, "we're going to give you a tax discount" is basically saying "we would rather you send your money off to Wall Street than actually spend it to improve the community that you intend to join here."

I suppose a city could also offer a bureaucrat dedicated to expediting issues related to the new HQ, like building permits and inspections and NIMBY lawsuits, if they wanted to pay the cost of that person's salary as a donation to the city. I just never quite understood the concept of offering discounts to rich people.

No one has proven this. There is plenty of evidence pointing to the opposite conclusion.

> It’s completely irrational anti-capitalistic knee jerking to whine that cities shouldn’t be working hard to support HQ2 in their backyard.

On the contrary, it is 100% rational for cities to want to get HQ2 and give away absolutely nothing, and possibly even get some concessions from Amazon itself.

They have to have another headquarters, and there are less than twenty cities that make any degree of sense for them to move to. I would bet that there are only two or three serious contenders, and the only way they're not going to go with whatever first choice they have currently would be a truly enormous handout. The whole bidding war going on here is, in my opinion, to try to get a sweeter deal from whoever they've already picked.

It's possible that Amazon will be a drain on a region.

The cost of housing goes up for everyone.

The best and the brightest of the region get sucked back to HQ1

The startup ecosystem in the region gets drained to work at/for Amazon

This sounds very similar to the Garden Bridge project in London. It was eventually canned because it was going to take huge amounts of public funds and provide not a lot of benefit.

When the incentives cross the line from tax breaks to free stuff, it's capitalism, all right - crony capitalism. Not the type I and other libertarians care to see.

Never thought I'd see the day where I'd be nodding along to a Keith Ellison tweet.

They're arguing that the states are giving away money. Not that they aren't providing services.

And nobody thinks Amazon moving to their town will create a silicon valley 2. Plenty of cities host huge employers. They don't become magnets for that industry. They just get fat tax breaks.

Many cities actually get worse with these giant companies throwing their weight around. Under Armor is single handedly reshaping southeast Baltimore, which of course is not only upsetting neighborhoods but pushing people out, not to mention small businesses replaced by national chains.

Finally Amazon has hundreds of billions. They do not need a handout from a poor city.

It's completely capitalist loyalty to business above community to dismiss every concern about selling the farm to Amazon as "whining".

Doing things better and cheaper is the reason why our standard of living keeps increasing.

I for one would love to live in a city that said "we need to do more with the money we currently have."

What are you talking about? Put those numbers back where they came from - your ass.

>Personally I think the cities that only have tax incentives to offer will not come out the winner. Amazon cares a lot more about the surrounding infrastructure and ecosystem than a short term $1 Billion.

Agree but that's not the point. Amazon isn't really considering twenty cities, they're considering maybe three but they really want these cities to think they're on even ground so they can extract as much tax breaks as possible from one of the cities they would choose regardless. It's about maximum short-term extraction from their existing long-term choice.

>It’s completely irrational anti-capitalistic knee jerking to whine that cities shouldn’t be working hard to support HQ2 in their backyard. We are watching capitalism at its finest here folks

Let's not use 'irrational' this way, it's perfectly rational to be against this but...

You're right, this is exemplar of capitalism, it's also why I lot of people are turning their noses up at it. HQ2 really illustrates we've moved from seeing markets as a tool which are sometimes useful and sometimes not to being a market society which sees markets as the outsourcing of morality. No ideas have to be considered, the market will decide (and it's always right), it's a strange faith.

>and market efficiency driving negotiation and competition is creating significantly better outcomes than the “fuck Amazon they don’t need handouts” crowd would arrive at.

What is that outcome? That Amazon locates where it would have located regardless but with enough tax concessions that it's benefit to the community is substantially reduced? That Amazon's size allows it to pit cities against each other to lower costs, achieving economies of scale that upstarts just won't be able to match and further entrenching it? That Amazon shareholders get a nice dividend next year, funded directly from the concessions that Toronto or Atlanta gives them?

>If someone came to your town and said, I want to build a $20m community arts center with a theater, coworking space, parks, gardens, and playground — would you want your town to say “good luck with that” or would you want them to say “that’s amazing what do you need from us to make that happen?!”

If someone came to your town and said, I want to build a $20m sports stadium — would you want your town to say “good luck with that” or would you want them to say “that’s amazing what do you need from us to make that happen?!” Just because Amazon happens to be for-profit, their presence in your city is an extraordinary asset and it makes perfect sense to entice them to come.

Giving a bunch of concessions to Amazon isn't going to benefit the average Atlantan. Lots more people but without the corresponding taxes to keep public services up. Just like stadiums, this isn't a company working to benefit the surrounding community in the best way possible like some PR might tell you, it's Amazon trying to save as much money as possible, nothing else. Benefits to the surrounding community is a side-effect, a leakage and Amazon has every incentive to plug that leak wherever possible, here it happens to be taxes.

>In fact, you can’t even consider building at anywhere near HQ2 scale without an intimate partnership with the host city which is, in one form or another, going to require somewhere on the order of dollar-for-dollar public investment to match the private investment.

This is just sick, it's corporate welfare. If I'm paying for Amazon, then I want part of the profit.

>We’ve proven that this public/private partnership is basically the most effective growth engine we’ve got.

It's also a significant contributor to our inequality problem. Growth at all costs isn't the answer so neither is making Amazon's costs public but allowing it's profit to remain private.

I believe you and would like to learn more. Do you have some sources I can look into?

In all honesty, unless Amazon was going to go to Mississauga or Markham or something like that, I'd rather not have them. We need more jobs in the burbs, not more pressures on the inadequate Toronto infrastructure.

Which is the reason this competition happens. The top few candidate cities could all call truce and trust that they'll come out ahead over many iterations, but cities that expect they're not in the running without perks will never win the collective bargaining game. So they put up money, and the original strongest players respond to secure their positions, and the race begins.

A city like Seattle would be comfortable for existing employees. It would do nothing to attract talent that dislikes that political climate.

If I'm being totally honest though I don't think there is much advantage to any of the cities to give Amazon incentives to picking them. I also think that Amazon has already decided.

Except 3: Montgomery County, Washington DC, and Northern Virginia.

If Virginia gets Amazon, the other two benefit with increased commercial activity. Even if the taxes aren't directly collected from Amazon HQ2, the increased shopping, increased services, and all that will lead to major benefits for the entire region.

There's one group that can collectively bargain, and benefit even if its rivals win over. That gives that particular group a major edge.

Its unusual that three of the top20 positions are within a 20-mile radius. Amazon must be really considering that area.

https://i0.wp.com/www.thedailychronic.net/wp-content/uploads...

"Northern Virginia" is basically Arlington. As you can see, Arlington / DC / Montgomery County are literally next to each other.

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Newark NJ and New York City are the other city-grouping that could work together on the Amazon deal.

I'm shocked to not see this objection in the article or elsewhere in the comment section. If the shortlist were final and cooperation could be enforced, collective bargaining would still only work if the top 20 cities all had a similar chance without perks.

As is, some of the cities would obviously be out of the running in a no-perks race, so collective bargaining (even over many iterations with many companies) is a clear loser for them. That undermines the entire proposal. It could be repaired if strong contenders like DC agreed to let weaker contenders offer perks up to parity with the strongest players, but that's vastly less plausible or easy to calculate than "no perks".

There is also data showing that unionized workers get about 1% more of a scheduled raise each year.

Sure you're comparing like for like? For people on the high end like software devs you can definitely get paid more in the US, but in most of the developed world no one serving fries is crying out for US wages. It's the latter that are more likely to be unionized.

You have to look at total compensation.

We don't go bankrupt in Canada from medical bills.

And homelessness can, in fact, be reasonably construed as Amazon's problem (or a problem caused by Amazon if we're a city thinking of letting Amazon in). The exacerbation of homelessness is an externality caused in part by Amazon's concentration of high-wage jobs in a small city and the subsequent skyrocketing of property values combined with mindless gentrification. So it's both a cause for concern when courting Amazon, and it's a form of pollution that they bring to town that it is not a priori unreasonable to hold them accountable for (to the extent that they are responsible for it).

Not directly, no. But Amazon is based in a city that has a large homeless population. It is in the interest of their employees to see that population fall, therefore it also ought to be in Amazon's interest.

> Automation is good. Do you want us to ride horses to work?

Of course it is. But I see this reaction a lot - that anyone asking questions about our automated future is some sort of regressive idiot who hates technology. Far from it. You can see and be in favour of the obvious benefits automation brings, while also questioning what society looks like when a lot of the jobs people currently have don't exist. That doesn't mean "stop automation", it just means "think about the effects of it while we do it, ideally before".

80% of corporate stock is owned by a mere 1% of the population. That 1% are the people who, right now, benefit from automation.

If we reach a world where corporations are replaced by worker cooperatives, or a 90% top marginal tax rate (and similar wealth tax) support a generous basic income -- then automation will be good. Right now it's an acute danger to the survival of most people.

Amazon had 135B revenue and 540k employees in 2016. By comparison (according to the UN) that would have made Amazon the 60th largest economy in 2016, after Hungary (138B / 9.5m people) and before Ukraine (132B / 42m, which has been dropping considerably since).

That is an insane amount of wealth to throw around to influence all manner of people for the sake of a corporate charter. Not only that, but they are only "responsible" for 540k people versus the millions other countries of comparable scale have.

I'm not saying companies should act as governments. I am saying having businesses of that scale is highly distortionary in how governments around them behave, and since the aim of a public corporation is to profit, distortions will be made in the name of profit.

The fact that Amazon is almost certainly more influential on the international stage than Hungary or Ukraine should be horrifying, because nations are at least usually responsible to their people. Amazon is in no way responsible to its employees, nations it operates in, or even its own executives. Its only responsible to the largest stakeholders that own it, and that is terrible for the rest of us.

It is great that we are improving productivity but automation also furthers concentration of wealth by distributing fewer profits to workers.

It is not simply good. If we don’t understand the negative effects we are more likely to become victims of those effects. If we do understand the negative effects we can make sure to prepare ourselves for the change in the landscape.

I will challenge you on this.

Automation is efficient.

The problem is that maximally efficient is minimally robust.

Cars are wonderful, unless something disastrous happens to your roads. Then horses are better.

Amazon just-in-time delivery is great. Until everybody needs the same thing--at which point local grocery stores with inventory matter.

Efficient doesn't always equate to good.

But it is the problem of the city. They absolutely need to keep this in mind while negotiating with Amazon, who has a reputation for driving housing prices sky high, thus exacerbating the homelessness problem.

"Automation is good. Do you want us to ride horses to work?"

Automation is neutral, as it does cost people jobs, not all of whom can be retrained for something else. It also drives down wages. Hell, productivity has been skyrocketing for the past 30-40 years due to automation, yet workers have seen a pittance in rising wages.

As things are currently going, I might. Horses are not polluting the environment (in the extent cars do), they don't track me and they can't be turned off remotely if I declined to renew my subscription.

There are plenty of countries without automation. And many allow anybody to immigrate to them. But don't expect air conditioning You'll have to hire a person to wave you with a fan.

And don't expect those job-killing tubes to bring you your water. Hire a water carrier like everybody else.

And in the truly pure countries, be prepared to drag your stuff with you without labor saving wheeled contraptions like the wheelbarrow.

No, but it's not an uncommon opinion in these parts that riding to work on anything other than a bike is a flaw in our land use.

Regardless of whether or not you agree, both a bike and a car replaced a horse, but they had drastically different effects on society.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/king-coun...

Basically, its the red rural areas around these cities exporting their problems to the cities that actually provide services to deal with them. Couple that with kids from these areas with little education going to Seattle to make it, and not making it.