Amazon HQ2 selected - and not Boston

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CSTH said:
Yeah, if only we had abundant affordable housing and top-notch transportation infrastructure with lots of spare growth capacity, just like [checks notes] ... New York City...
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I wrote the same thing in the comments. Renee Loth is giving Airhead Joan Vennochi a run for her money as the worst columnist in the Glob. Especially for business related matters.
 
^^

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So winning this competition turned out to be "how many huge chunks of empty single-owner office space did you have?"

Long Island City= 1m vacant in Citigroup building (+.4m in rest of building by 2020)
Crystal City = 2m vacant with one owner

stellarfun said:
Tim Logan of the Globe takes a tour of Crystal City, and is not impressed.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/busines...perfect-for/D9BgkSPROvGmdRFlcq3VxK/story.html

His takeaway. Crystal City was chosen because 1.) it has 2.1 million sq ft of vacant office space; 2.) rents that are a third of what they would be in Kendall; 3.) single property owner. (When Amazon expanded big in Seattle, they also were dealing with a single property owner, the late Paul Allen).
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WSJ says that the Citigroup building in Long Island City has 1.4m sq ft that Citigroup doesn't need or want (1m vacant now after Citigroup vacated, and another .4m that will be available by 2020 that'd been sublet since Citigroup has an option on it until 2020)

Landlord, Facing Loss of a Big Tenant, Pins Hopes on Amazon HQ2
Savanna hopes Amazon.com will put some HQ2 operations in its building, formally known as One Court Square, in Long Island City
 
thanks.
CNN Business said:
Throughout the process, Amazon skillfully obtained free data from cities across North America, including proprietary information about real estate sites under development, details about their talent pool, local labor cost and what incentives cities and states were willing to pony up to bring the company to town.

"Amazon was not going through this exercise to pick a single HQ2," said Richard Florida, a leading urbanist and professor at the University of Toronto. "It was part of a broader effort -- a corporate relocation strategy -- to crowd source a wide variety of data."

And the company itself has said it would use the information from the bids when considering where to open new facilities, such as warehouses and smaller corporate offices. Several cities that didn't make the final 20 have already seen an investment from Amazon, including fulfillment centers in Spokane, Washington, and Ottawa, as well as a new office in Vancouver with jobs in fields like machine learning and cloud computing.
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For a few minutes there NPR/Reuters was reporting Nashville... I thought maybe Amazon was just messing with the press a bit more. Which I suppose they sort of were. It is amazing to what lengths reporters will go to get "the scoop" when waiting 30 minutes for the actual announcement would actually be much more reliable and accurate.
 
Having two "HQ2" only increases my belief that Amazon wants out of Seattle, maybe not completely but a large portion. And given Amazon must have insane turnover it could just happen organically.
 
tangent said:
For a few minutes there NPR/Reuters was reporting Nashville... I thought maybe Amazon was just messing with the press a bit more. Which I suppose they sort of were. It is amazing to what lengths reporters will go to get "the scoop" when waiting 30 minutes for the actual announcement would actually be much more reliable and accurate.
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Someone along the line misunderstood:

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/a...s-will-also-add-nashville-facility-2018-11-13

Amazon confirms Long Island City, N.Y., and Arlington County, Va., as its 'HQ2' selections; Nashville facility announced

".....In Nashville, Tenn., meanwhile, Amazon said it would create a new Operations Center of Excellence" responsible for customer fulfillment, transportation, supply chain and other activities. Amazon said it will create 5,000 full-time jobs and invest more than $230 million.... "
 
This just gets juicier...


Benjamin Freed
‏Verified account @brfreed
1h1 hour ago

Under agreement between Amazon and Virginia, the commonwealth will give the company written notice about any FOIA requests "to allow the
Company to seek a protective order or other appropriate remedy"

https://twitter.com/brfreed/status/1062372347280269318

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i will say one thing.

if it had to be 1 tech giant that didn't come to Boston....

i'm glad it was these assholes.
 
Some have speculated that the long-range plan is to break up Amazon into two or three even four companies. That Bezos expects that Trump will seek to break-up Amazon, quicker rather than later.
 
stellarfun said:
Some have speculated that the long-range plan is to break up Amazon into two or three even four companies. That Bezos expects that Trump will seek to break-up Amazon, quicker rather than later.
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That makes more sense than having 3 "headquarters." 3 different companies can have 3 headquarters.
 
Just as many of us said earlier: Wouldn't it be funny if, over the next 30 years, A MIX OF SEVERAL COMPANIES grow far more in Boston than any of the 2 HQ2's?:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/busines...e-more-jobs/np33UXenStZPNfb98hT6oM/story.html

"........Verizon envisions what John Vazquez, the company’s senior vice president of global real estate, calls a “brain hub,” a place where developers and engineers will work on artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and other advanced technologies the company considers key to its future. Verizon will likely move about 400 jobs there from a research and development facility in Waltham, but Vazquez said he expects most of the roughly 2,000 people employed there will be new hires from Boston-area universities and other tech companies in the region.

“We believe this market has the educational prowess and brainpower we’re looking for,” he said. “You have 19,000 people with tech degrees graduating from college in Boston every year. The majority of them leave because they need a place to do creative work.......

.....Verizon is the latest in a string of blue-chip tech companies to launch major expansions in Boston and Cambridge. Amazon has hired hundreds of workers, with plans for at least 2,000 more at a soon-to-break-ground building in the Seaport. Google is in negotiations for a new building in Kendall Square. Wayfair, Facebook, Spotify, and several others lately have added office space and large numbers of new employees here.

Verizon also hopes its new building will help grow a new generation of tech firms. The company will devote five of the 16 floors it’s renting to space for coworking, incubators, and startup accelerators for smaller companies that it may partner with or invest in.

“We think of it as crowdsourcing, and crowdfunding, ideas,” Vazquez said. “Those ideas come from all sorts of companies.”
 
shmessy said:
Just as many of us said earlier: Wouldn't it be funny if, over the next 30 years, A MIX OF SEVERAL COMPANIES grow far more in Boston than any of the 2 HQ2's?:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/busines...e-more-jobs/np33UXenStZPNfb98hT6oM/story.html
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30 years? Try 8 months. A recent report shows that Greater Boston added 150,000 jobs regionwide since January 2017, more than any other region in the US except Dallas, TX. (source)

Let that sink in, and make sure to frame that context for others that don’t quite grasp the pace our region’s economy has grown. Verizon’s John Vazquez is right: “this market has the educational prowess and brainpower that <companies> are looking for.”
 
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