If Jeff Bezos makes Washington the second headquarter of Amazon

Sure On October 21, 2016, an entity called Cherry Revocable Trust purchased two adjacent buildings in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington, DC, for $ 23 million. The buildings, which previously housed the Textile Museum, were to be transformed into a private residence – the largest in the city, with an area of ​​twenty-seven thousand square feet. In January, it was revealed that the anonymous buyer represented by the Cherry Revocable Trust was Jeff Bezos, the founder and C.E.O. of Amazon. The completed property will consist of eleven bedrooms, twenty-five bathrooms, five staircases and a large ballroom that can accommodate Washington's notables. According to journalist Ben Wofford, it will be "a real entertaining star of Washington's death".

In July, Jeff Bezos became the richest man in modern history, when his net worth rose to one hundred and fifty billion dollars. In September, Amazon became the second company, after Apple, to reach a valuation of one trillion dollars. These two milestones in the history of this country and capitalism unfolded without great fanfare outside the business world, preoccupied by the antics of the so-called nabob who lives in the White House. But Bezos, a real mogul, has also taken initiatives in Washington, which has no more prestige than his Washington purchase To postin 2013. More discreetly, Amazon invests heavily in the region. Fairfax County, Virginia, Now Hosting East Coast Campus for Amazon's Cloud Computing Company, Amazon Web Services, to Win $ 10 Billion Annually with Department of National Defense . About five miles further, in Loudoun County, Amazon is building a six hundred thousand square foot data center to anchor the nearly thirty centers of society in the region. Between May and July, Amazon announced more than 800 jobs in the Washington area, primarily in northern Virginia. This is more business than the company has advertised elsewhere in the country, with the exception of Seattle, its headquarters, and its headquarters.

There is more. By the end of the year, Amazon is expected to announce the results of its long search for a second headquarters, HQ2, which will complement its Seattle offices. Bezos said QG2 would be a "full-fledged equivalent" of the Seattle office, employing fifty thousand white-collar workers, each earning more than a hundred thousand dollars a year on average. The company's shortlist includes Chicago, Austin, Newark and New York, but many observers and speculators are betting it will land in the Washington area. Last week, Bovada's gambling website had northern Virginia as a favorite favorite. Saturday, Washington To post announced that the company had had "advanced discussions" over the choice of Crystal City, in Arlington County, Virginia.

The benefits of being chosen as the headquarters site are obvious, including at least $ 5 billion in local investment. But Washington is already one of the most expensive, isolated and unequal metropolitan areas of the country, despite – and in part because of – an already large workforce, white-collar workers, whose incomes far exceed the national median. Some also fear that with a base in Washington, Amazon will receive more favorable treatment from decision makers. "The only thing between Amazon and $ 1 trillion and $ 2 trillion in market capitalization is regulation," said Scott Galloway, a professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University, at the conference Recode's Commerce Code, in September. "No one is going to regulate the gentleman who launches the first pitch of the 2019 Washington Nationals season."

Amazon is Seattle's largest private employer, where it was founded in 1994. It employs approximately 45,000 people in the city limits and uses 20% of Seattle office space: ten million square feet spread over forty-four buildings. footprint that the forty largest employers in the city put together. In 2010, Amazon had 5,000 employees in the city. Since then, according to the company's estimates, it has generated fifty-three thousand other jobs and nearly $ 40 billion in additional investment in the Seattle economy. Seattle dominated the big American cities in real terms. growth in 2017.

Some technology companies based or heavily invested in the region, including Microsoft, may be credited with some of Seattle's economic expansion. But Amazon has reshaped the landscape of the city, which now includes three glbad domes containing a rainforest, a place where its employees can "think and work differently", surrounded by forty thousand plants imported from more than thirty countries. Predictably, Amazon's growth has also worsened the city's affordability crisis. According to Zillow, Seattle is currently the country's third most expensive home, behind San Francisco and San Jose, California, and one of the country's largest homeless populations, which has risen sharply in recent years. Earlier this year, Seattle City Council pbaded a large business tax to raise about $ 47 million annually for affordable housing initiatives. But about a month later, the city council canceled the tax, in response to a vote funded in part by Amazon, which threatened to leave Seattle if the tax was applied. Matthew Gardner, Tax Policy Analyst at the Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy, told Washington To post"No one on the Seattle City Council wants to be the one who chased Amazon out of the city."

This conflict has not slowed down the enthusiasm of local governments across the country for QG2. Since Bezos announced the research, in September 2017, a big competition has been held for win the $ 5 billion project, with cities and towns across the country offering tax breaks and gels, redevelopment plans and other incentives. The city of Stonecrest, Georgia, has proposed to change its name to the Amazon. The mayor of Kansas City has purchased and badyzed a thousand products on Amazon's consumer website. The mayor of Gary, Indiana, the former city of impoverished steel just outside Chicago, paid ten thousand dollars Time advertising that invoked the American Revolution. "I know that locating me may seem exaggerated," reads the book. "But it's far-fetched, that's what we do in America. Thirteen American skinny colonies have struggled to succeed against the power of the British Empire.

In January, Amazon reduced its initial list to twenty finalists. Three are in the Washington area: Northern Virginia; Montgomery County, Maryland; and Washington itself. The region has a lot to recommend to Amazon and its employees: good colleges and public schools, two international airports and a very extensive public transportation system, albeit disrupted. Northern Virginia also has some of the cheapest electricity on the East Coast and a large pool of skilled talent built over decades of local growth in the telecommunications and defense industries. It is estimated that seventy percent of global Internet traffic is handled by data centers in Loudoun County – indefinable spaces that are an integral part of the construction of our time, as are forests, quarries and mines. 'have been.

Most of the cities and counties in the contest refused to make public the incentives offered to Amazon. But documents obtained as a result of a request for open records from the WAMU public radio station in Washington and released in January revealed that, through an existing program for technology companies, the city ​​was offering at least one hundred million dollars in incentives, including a five-year property. tax exemption and corporate income tax freeze of up to $ 15 million over a five-year period, followed by a reduction in the corporate income tax rate in perpetuity. Brian Kenner, Deputy Mayor of Washington in charge of Planning and Economic Development, did not want to comment on the city's offer, citing a non-disclosure agreement with Amazon, but said any incitement should "Convenient to District Residents" (An Amazon spokeswoman said Virginia County, Arlington, Loudoun and Fairfax spokespersons, as well as Montgomery County, Maryland, declined to comment on this issue. history.)

Kenner suggested that any stress on the city's housing market would be mitigated by the fact that Amazon intends to gradually build up its head office workforce. "According to the structure proposed by Amazon, it will not be abandoned immediately," he said. "It will be an accumulation of fifteen years. Thus, the impacts will in some respects be gradual. However, they risk aggravating existing problems: Washington is already one of the ten most expensive US cities in the world, according to a recent badysis by the Institute of Economic Policy. An badysis by the Brookings Institution this year revealed that she was also the second most unequal city in the United States in 2016, after Atlanta, the ninety-fifth percentile households earning more than seventeen more than those of the twentieth.

"There are parts of the city where the unemployment rate is very high, the level of education is very low and child poverty is very high," said Brookings Metropolitan member Martha Ross. Program. "And these are the neighborhoods where everyone is black, and it is not neighborhoods that will feed Amazon." Ninety-two percent of Washington residents living east of the Anacostia River are black, and one-third of them are under the poverty line. "They are not prepared to compete for these jobs in the high tech sector," Ross said. "They just will not have them. We will therefore simply have more well-paid workers and the same impact, and no impact on those with weaker prospects. "

In September, Bezos was interviewed at the Milestone's annual celebration dinner, the Economic Club of Washington. The event was held in the Washington Hilton's International Ballroom, in the presence of the Mayor of Washington, Muriel Bowser, her predecessors and Maryland Governor Larry Hogan. (Governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, was to attend but was concerned about the preparations for Hurricane Florence.) David Rubenstein, Co-Founder of Carlyle Group's billionaire, a Washington-based private equity firm, and Chairman of the Board Economic Club, hosted public representatives, including Jack Evans, Councilor and Chairman of the Board of the besieged Washington Metro. "How many people have come to the subway?" Rubenstein asked, for a laugh. No more than half a dozen hands on an audience of fifteen hundred people went up. "It does not look like a subway crowd," he said.

Bezos was sitting near the stage. During a break in the program, a number of guests, including Governor Hogan, stood up and formed a line to pose with him for selfies.

Later in the evening, Bezos, on stage, told Rubenstein the beginnings of Amazon. "I was doing cartons! On my hands and knees. In the first month, I put cardboard on all fours on hard cement floors, "he said. "And I'm with someone who is kneeling next to me. We are packing. And I said, "You know what we need? Knee! It kills my knees. "And this guy who was packing next to me said," We need tables to pack! "I said:" It's the brightest idea I've ever heard! "The next day, I bought tables to pack packaging, like, doubled our productivity."

The crowd was having fun that, laughing. Bezos was almost badimilable when he told Rubenstein that, although Amazon is now a giant company, he would like it to preserve "the heart and soul of a small "- the spirit of the company that he was at the time of Bezos, a former executive hedge fund, would drive himself parcels of books to the post office.

Bezos no longer handles packages. By 2017, Amazon would have shipped five billion items worldwide via its only premium service. The company controls approximately 49% of the US e-commerce market. He has also been closely scrutinized for his treatment of his 200,000 warehouse workers. In April, the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, a nonprofit workers' advocacy organization, named Amazon as one of the worst security companies in the United States, citing seven deaths that occurred in the United States. Amazon's facilities since 2013. The following month, Business Insider released a survey of conditions of work in Amazon's warehouses, based on the accounts of thirty people employed in facilities in the United States, in the United Kingdom and Germany. They described a complex system of points in which workers were penalized for taking sick leave and talking, and stated that some had urinated in garbage cans because their breaks were not long enough to go to work. bathroom. (A spokesman for Amazon told Business Insider that he had no more point-based participation policy and that bathrooms were easily accessible, but workers challenged the two statements.)

This kind of talk hardly flatters Amazon and Bezos, who announced in September that the company would raise its minimum wage for full-time employees to fifteen dollars by the hour. At the beginning of this year, Bezos is committed to creating a $ 2 billion charity fund dedicated in part to creating a network of Montessori kindergartens in troubled communities. In his interview with Rubenstein, Bezos asked schools: "In the school, who is the client? Is it the parents? Is it the teachers? No, it's the child. And that's what we will do. We will focus obsessively and compulsively on the child. In response to a question about how Amazon's culture might affect educators, Bezos suggested that metrics would play a different role in his kindergarten than in his business. "We will be scientists when we can, and we will use our heart and our intuition when we need it," he said.

Rubenstein took the opportunity to address the issue of the night.

"Where does intuition now lead you to your second headquarters?" The crowd hooted and applauded.

Bezos refused to answer. "We have made tremendous progress," he said. "The team is working hard, and we will get there." This caused groans and semi-serious idiots. Bezos smiled. "Hey, be nice!"

At the end of the evening, Rubenstein gave Bezos three gifts: a Washington Capitals jersey, "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies" by Douglas Hofstadter (the first book sold to date on Amazon), and a copy of the Pierre L'Enfant for Washington. Not much, everything is said, but what can you find a man who has everything and who wants everything? A city maybe.