Amazon HQ2 RFP

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dshoost88 said:
Also, for the record, I've been amused at the way some people talk down the Suffolk Downs site as if it's a bad option, especially against a potential Northern VA site, for example. As the crow flies, East Boston is very comparably as far across Boston Harbor from Downtown Boston as Arlington, Northern Virginia is away from Georgetown/D.C. And both are well-connected sites via heavy rail subway, and close (depending on the Nor. VA/DC site) to the major international airport. If HQ2 does opt for a central DC location, the District-wide height restriction would make that site no higher than the FAA height restrictions at Suffolk Downs; however, Suffolk Downs does indeed have the large enough area to construct a campus in and a single owner.

Long story short: I'm tired of reading insipid diatribes knocking the strength of Boston's site proposals, especially Suffolk Downs.It bodes comparably well against who I see is our main competition.
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Suffolk Downs is in an almost entirely residential area surrounded by working class suburbs. It's at the end of a short subway line. It's not connected to any major highway. It is near the airport yes, and the pike isn't far. Still the pike is horribly congested at peak times.

If you look at where wealthy tech workers live (which is what Amazon employees would be) it's not near Suffolk Downs. A HQ2 would gentrify the area and make it look more like Southie, but as of today it's not there yet.

I think Assembly/Sullivan is much better connected to the rest of the Boston area and would be a better location.

It would also be interesting to see BHCC redeveloped. It's a very suburban looking campus in a one stop from downtown Boston. I think BHCC would educate students just as well in a collection of urban buildings as it would in its suburban like campus today.

All of Sullivan Square could be ripped up and rebuilt in my honest opinion, and some build-able sites could be found.

Suffolk Downs is the easiest site with only one order. However I think it's far from the best site.
 
tysmith95 said:
Suffolk Downs is in an almost entirely residential area surrounded by working class suburbs. It's at the end of a short subway line. It's not connected to any major highway. It is near the airport yes, and the pike isn't far. Still the pike is horribly congested at peak times.

If you look at where wealthy tech workers live (which is what Amazon employees would be) it's not near Suffolk Downs. A HQ2 would gentrify the area and make it look more like Southie, but as of today it's not there yet.

I think Assembly/Sullivan is much better connected to the rest of the Boston area and would be a better location.

It would also be interesting to see BHCC redevolped. It's a very suburban looking campus in a one stop from downtown Boston. I think BHCC would educate students just as well in a collection of urban buildings as it would in its suburban like campus today.
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FACT: As recently as five years ago, Boston Landing was sited in what many might have also called an 'almost entirely residential area surrounded by working class suburbs.' (call the confluence of Allston-Brighton millennials and upper-middle class Newtonians a hybrid demo comparable for this sake to 'working class suburb'). Today Boston Landing and Lower Allston are the budding hotbeds for millions of square feet of commercial real estate development.

FACT: The Blue Line (AKA 'short subway line') is not only longer than the Green Line's E, B, and C branches, but also handles more passengers than any one of those lines. AND it has the capacity to grow. But even so, the Suffolk Downs site is no further from Boston's downtown than the Harvard University campus or Lower Allston (*it's true, map it).

FACT: As recently as 10 years ago, there were scant luxury apartment opportunities available in Boston's own Downtown, Fenway, South Boston, and even East Boston neighborhoods. Today there are literally tens of thousands of luxury rental units that have been developed and appeal to 'wealthy tech workers' you may have been hard-pressed to see living anywhere but Back Bay, South End, and Cambridge.

Would it be cool to see Assembly/Sullivan and Charlestown thrive with an HQ2 campus? Yes. Would it be great if all of these areas can thrive economically across the city? Yes. And will they all eventually? Yes. But to say over and over again that a place lacks potential because something isn't there tells me one thing: you lack vision. Read up not only on the transformations that have happened in Boston neighborhoods over the years, but also on the transformation Amazon has had on the Seattle neighborhood(s) it has established itself in, and hopefully you will understand the possibilities that can happen when you learn to stop saying, "No" and start saying, "Yes."
 
dshoost88 said:
Would it be cool to see Assembly/Sullivan and Charlestown thrive with an HQ2 campus? Yes. Would it be great if all of these areas can thrive economically across the city? Yes. And will they all eventually? Yes. But to say over and over again that a place lacks potential because something isn't there tells me one thing: you lack vision. Read up not only on the transformations that have happened in Boston neighborhoods over the years, but also on the transformation Amazon has had on the Seattle neighborhood(s) it has established itself in, and hopefully you will understand the possibilities that can happen when you learn to stop saying, "No" and start saying, "Yes."
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From a transit wise Suffolk Downs and Assembly has 2 commuter rail lines running through it, so an infill station could be built to support additional lines. It's right next to I93, which while congested has more capacity then any of the roads near Suffolk Downs. It's a short hop down Rutherford from Route 1. It's on top of the orange line, which has more then double the ridership of the Blue Line and already connects to every other transit line.

Somerville/Medford/Charlestown are already full of yuppies. The areas around Suffolk Downs for the most part aren't. I don't see why Amazon would want to change neighborhoods. If they were interested in being trailblazers then cities like Baltimore would have made the final 20. They want places that already have tech talent, not people that will move because Amazon is there. As it is now Revere and East Boston (besides Jeffries Point) is not full of highly paid tech grads.

Plus we need places where servers, cleaners, shop-workers, taxi drivers, etc live. The area isn't building enough workforce or affordable housing, and I don't want to see every corner of the Boston area gentrified.

In its current forum the Blue Line is full of working class people going to service jobs in the city (besides some of the new and renovated stuff around the waterfront). It's very inaccessible from most suburbs with top schools, or trendy gentrified city neighborhoods.
 
tysmith95 said:
From a transit wise Suffolk Downs and Assembly has 2 commuter rail lines running through it, so an infill station could be built to support additional lines. It's right next to I93, which while congested has more capacity then any of the roads near Suffolk Downs. It's a short hop down Rutherford from Route 1. It's on top of the orange line, which has more then double the ridership of the Blue Line and already connects to every other transit line.

Somerville/Medford/Charlestown are already full of yuppies. The areas around Suffolk Downs for the most part aren't. I don't see why Amazon would want to change neighborhoods. If they were interested in being trailblazers then cities like Baltimore would have made the final 20. They want places that already have tech talent, not people that will move because Amazon is there. As it is now Revere and East Boston (besides Jeffries Point) is not full of highly paid tech grads.

Plus we need places where servers, cleaners, shop-workers, taxi drivers, etc live. The area isn't building enough workforce or affordable housing, and I don't want to see every corner of the Boston area gentrified.

In its current forum the Blue Line is full of working class people going to service jobs in the city (besides some of the new and renovated stuff around the waterfront). It's very inaccessible from most suburbs with top schools, or trendy gentrified city neighborhoods.
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Suffolk Downs is 1.5 miles to I-90 and 3.5 miles to I-93. It's right on Route 1A and less than a mile to Route 1. It's less than a 45 minute commute on the T from most neighborhoods in Boston/Brookline/Cambridge/Somerville.

Can we please stop with the nonsense that Suffolk Downs is in the middle of nowhere and would be unattractive to tech talent? Within 5 years of Amazon choosing that site, it would become yuppie central. Just look at Assembly Row and South Boston five years ago compared to today.
 
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I think the big draw that Somerville has over SD is its accessibility to Kendall, MIT and Harvard. If Northpoint/innerbelt/sullivan/assembly was one huge shovel ready site with a single owner, you'd have a clear winner.
As it stands, I think Somerville is marginally more suitable than SD.
 
Can anyone confirm the rumor that Amazon has actually signed a deal for a million square feet in the Seaport? If it's been posted here I've missed it.
 
xec said:
Can anyone confirm the rumor that Amazon has actually signed a deal for a million square feet in the Seaport? If it's been posted here I've missed it.
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AFAIK they are shopping, but there isn't a closed deal.
 
dshoost88 said:
Two more:

HQ2 Cities by Transit Score by Derek Shooster, on Flickr

HQ2 Cities by Bike Score by Derek Shooster, on Flickr

(*RE Toronto: Walkscore didn't have bike data available for Canadian cities.)
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Thanks for these and the Walk Score chart. The only question is to what extent Bezos and the others involved in HQ2 selection will value such data. We here at ArchBoston think highly of such stats, but is that true for Amazon? I'd like to think so, but who knows.
 
This is the relevant language posted by Shawn a moderator on skyscraper.

....it's being heavily reported in the local media that Amazon just secured an additional 1 million sq feet of office space in the Seaport District. And that they're still looking for another million. That's 2 million sq feet leased by Amazon in Boston / Cambridge in the past 2 years - 3 million if you count what they're still hunting.

I don't think Amazon would be actively adding 2 million sq feet of leased space now in a city they're looking to set up HQ2 in.
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Shawn is a moderator who lives in Tokyo.

He appears to have conflated numbers. Three million square feet is 500,000 square feet less than the minimum buildout for Phases I-III, in Amazon's solicitation.
 
^ Any of us who've worked for large companies can attest that real estate deals don't necessarily all move in tandem with an enterprise-wide strategy. You may have expansion for the Alexa team while the HQ2 team is in a completely different series of planning meetings.

99 percent of Amazon employees know as much about this selection process as we do.

A speculative expansion in Boston for some projects could, for example, get discarded once the PMs learn that same city has been picked for HQ2.
 
After reading this article in the NY Times, I am leaning more than ever that HQ2 will peak at 20,000 employees, and the other 30,000 will be placed at existing or future satellite hubs.

....The company did not realize until it saw the application from Louisville, Ky., the person said, that there is a large pool of technical talent within 200 miles of the city and a local public-private partnership that helps train students to become entry-level software developers.

The Montreal submission stood out, the person said, with its thinking about attracting foreign talent to the region.
......

Amazon alluded to the upside of the information last week when Holly Sullivan, its head of economic development, said the rejected locations could receive a consolation prize of sorts.

“Through this process we learned about many new communities across North America that we will consider as locations for future infrastructure investment and job creation,” she said in a statement.
.....
He believes Amazon also “has something in mind” for the 20 places still in the game — including Indianapolis, Miami and Columbus, Ohio. The company is talking to all 20 and getting even more information from them.

“What is a better distribution hub than Columbus or Indianapolis?” Mr. Florida said. “What is a better Latin America headquarters than Miami?”
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/28/...ml?rref=collection/sectioncollection/business
 
that article makes me more optimistic about Boston winning HQ2....

but at less huge size.

[needless to say, it would be spectacular].
 
Any chance the T could sell or give up their bus hub near Sullivan and move it, possibly to Medford, and give the land were the bus hub sits to Amazon. Also build a small bridge or two and connect that area to grand union at assembly creating a street grid.

That plus the Middlesex development and additional assembly blocks and you could have a good chunk of your Amazon hq2 without too much disruption.

Plus the state could possibly give up the parking at Sullivan square. Of course rip up that whole area and redesign. That should be done weather Amazon comes or not.

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This is taken from a BTD meeting from November.

I would love to see Somerville, Boston, and the state come together to create a plan that connects these new Sullivan parcels with assembly. I would love to see Arlington Ave connected to Grand Union in Somerville.
 
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stellarfun said:
This is the relevant language posted by Shawn a moderator on skyscraper.



Shawn is a moderator who lives in Tokyo.

He appears to have conflated numbers. Three million square feet is 500,000 square feet less than the minimum buildout for Phases I-III, in Amazon's solicitation.
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I believe Shawn is from Boston and still posts to this board occasionally.
 
Hey guys, it's quite possible I screwed those numbers up - I'm often posting on the fly at SSP in between meetings at work and I don't proof my stuff as well as I'd like. I'm pretty sure I pulled those numbers from this very thread, but looking back it seems I've double counted.

The more I reply in SSP to the Amazon thread the more I think New York City makes the most sense. I've talked myself into believing HQ2 is very much about enhancing Amazon's overall media and data capabilities, and not so much about finding a new R&D hub, logistics hub, or a second fully-autonomous HQ.

To summarize all my SSP posts in as few words as possible: Amazon's profitability comes from just two areas - cloud computing and media. Selling FMCGs or white goods on an e-com platform is just a means to an end: user data aggregation and monetization. Amazon is one of the world's largest buyers and sellers of premium digital media; Amazon is the world's largest consumer purchase data provider. Amazon relies on a complex media-ad tech ecosystem to monetize all of this. Amazon's relationships with global media owners / publishers, global ad tech platforms (the infrastructure by which Amazon monetizes media and user data), and to the global media agency holding companies which gate-keep the $hundreds of billions of tier 1 brand marketing spend are the most important business relationships the company has.

All of the global media agencies are either HQ'd from or have their North American HQs in New York City.

About 80% of the global ad tech partners Amazon most relies on - the DSPs, SSPs, ad exchanges, DMPs and CRM platforms, etc. are out of New York City.

All of the global media ownership groups are either HQ'd from or have their North American HQs in New York City.

My guess is that HQ2 will be the EMEA-facing media hub, while Seattle gets to refine its focus on APAC. Given the EU's new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes online May 25th of this year, and given how these stricter regulations will invariably impact Amazon's core capabilities throughout such important markets, this just makes sense.

Granted, I've spent my entire adult career in media and probably have a lot of bias in what I think Amazon will emphasize. I also work quite a bit with Amazon's Japan and APAC-wide team down in Singapore, and they're hiring ad tech and media services people like mad in both markets.

(yes, I'm from Mass - Foxboro to be exact - and I've lived in Tokyo for the past 16 years, working for one of the media agency holding companies HQ'd in New York I mention above)
 
Shawn,

Thanks for posting. I would agree that if HQ2 is centered on digital media production and distribution, Boston might as well be Montpelier.

And Amazon doesn't need Boston for its cloud infrastructure, or its products logistics and distribution.

Bezos correctly anticipated how Amazon's computing and data infrastructure could be turned into supporting and promoting the cloud, and as you point out, to greatly benefit Amazon's bottom line.

But looking down the road 5-10 years, and trying to anticipate one of the next big things highly dependent on computation power, I would look at proteins.

Proteins are the most multifaceted macromolecules in living systems and have various important functions, including structural, catalytic, sensory, and regulatory functions. Rational design of enzymes is a great challenge to our understanding of protein structure and physical chemistry and has numerous potential applications. Protein design algorithms have been applied to design or engineer proteins that fold, fold faster, catalyze, catalyze faster, signal, and adopt preferred conformational states. The field of de novo protein design, although only a few decades old, is beginning to produce exciting results. Developments in this field are already having a significant impact on biotechnology and chemical biology. The application of powerful computational methods for functional protein designing has recently succeeded at engineering target activities. Here, we review recently reported de novo functional proteins that were developed using various protein design approaches, including rational design, computational optimization, and selection from combinatorial libraries, highlighting recent advances and successes.
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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3962203/

Forbes estimates the total, global cloud computing market to be about $400 billion in 2020. By 2020, U.S. health care spending alone is projected to be about $4.6 trillion, nearly 20 percent of GDP.

De novo protein design and production can readily be applied to agriculture and animal husbandry.

.....If an average protein is 200 amino acids long, then there are theoretically 20200 [20 to the 200th power] possible amino acid sequences of which a protein could be made, but nature has only sampled 1012 [10 to the 12th power]. De novo protein design uses all nature’s building blocks, but goes beyond nature’s limits by computationally sampling all possible combinations to give rise to brand-new proteins. Using de novo design, we can create artificial (or “synthetic”) proteins that act as vaccines, for example. Another recent breakthrough in de novo protein design is the development of a synthetic enzyme that can break down gluten, which could make a huge improvement in the lives of patients suffering from Celiac disease. Both of the above are real-world examples that originated in Dr. David Baker’s laboratory.

Dr. David Baker, a professor of biochemistry and Director of the Institute of Protein Design at the University of Washington in Seattle, is considered the pioneer of de novo protein design.
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http://berkeleysciencereview.com/protein-design-new-frontier/

And what university is practically next door to Amazon, and Jeff Bezos' office? That doesn't mean that Amazon would locate a center for protein design in Seattle, because I would expect you would want a location with a much larger pharma, medical, bioscience base. :)
 
Big implications for HQ2??????
SEATTLE — Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase announced on Tuesday that they would form an independent health care company to serve their employees in the United States.

The three companies provided few details about the new entity, other than saying it would initially focus on technology to provide simplified, high-quality health care for their employees and their families, and at a reasonable cost. They said the initiative, which is in the early planning stages, would be a long-term effort “free from profit-making incentives and constraints.”

“The health care system is complex, and we enter into this challenge open-eyed about the degree of difficulty,” Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, said in a statement. “Hard as it might be, reducing health care’s burden on the economy while improving outcomes for employees and their families would be worth the effort. Success is going to require talented experts, a beginner’s mind, and a long-term orientation.”

In the statement, Mr. Buffett added: “The ballooning costs of health care act as a hungry tapeworm on the American economy.”
....
The announcement on Tuesday again highlighted investor worry about Amazon disrupting the health care industry. Shares of UnitedHealth were down 5 percent in premarket trading,while Anthem’s were down 3.5 percent, erasing many of the gains such companies have made over the past 12 months.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/30/...180130&nl=breaking-news&nlid=10059472&ref=cta
 
Agree about NYC and have been saying repeatedly that its bid is being overlooked in favor of places like Atlanta. In terms of the least disruption you can put Amazon HQ in NYC and it would blend right in. That could be a blessing or a curse depending on whether or not Bezos wants his 2nd HQ to be the biggest fish in the sea or not. Boston's advantage perhaps would be that its more similar to Seattle in terms of size and scale if Amazon is just looking for the closest East Coast version of what it has out west (and in truth DC or Atlanta would also qualify).
 
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