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Instead of choosing a site, Amazon has chosen two. The decision will allow the company to tap the labor markets of New York and Washington and maintain bargaining power with two localities for decades. At the same time, the major new sites will make Amazon one of the largest private sector employers in the East Coast technology sector and could, even very slightly, help move technology talent eastward, away from Silicon Valley. and Seattle.
The company announced that it would begin recruiting in New York, Virginia and Tennessee in 2019.
Amazon announced its research in September 2017 on what Mr. Bezos said would be "a total equivalent of our Seattle headquarters." Nearly 240 sites submitted bids. They used marketing gadgets – Tucson tried to send a giant saguaro cactus – and official proposals like training programs and billions of tax incentives.
In January, the online retailer reduced the list to 20 sites, with sites in nine of the 10 largest regions of the country. In the end, Amazon chose to locate in two wealthy areas with many highly skilled talent – and where Amazon already employed more corporate entities than anywhere else outside the Bay Area and its hometown, Seattle. Mr. Bezos also owns homes in the two new areas.
Both places have parallels. Both are sitting right in front of a river from the heart of an iconic metropolis. Both are also considered to have a lot of unfulfilled potential: Crystal City is a neighborhood filled with office buildings developed in the 1970s for defense contractors, but experienced a high number of vacancies following the reorganization of the Pentagon in the years following the 9/11 attacks. Long Island City is a mixed neighborhood that is home to new apartment towers, low-rise buildings and the country's largest social housing complex.
As research continued, anticipation sometimes turned to antipathy and anxiety, with residents concerned about how their region might manage a housing shortage and a lack of housing. congestion can lead to an influx of well-paid workers. Many regions have also asked if one of the world's largest companies, led by the richest man in the world, needed taxpayer funds.
Although Amazon's criteria clearly showed that attracting a large and educated workforce was of paramount importance, its public competition and the $ 5 billion investment promise proved compelling for elected representatives and development officials of the country. Only a few places, including San Jose, California and San Antonio, have publicly refused to throw millions of dollars at the giant. In private, even among the 20 cities on the shortlist, some officials admitted that it was unlikely they would disembark from headquarters.
Amazon has always chosen the best job market, but the "genius of the HQ2 process" is the competition that has allowed it to remove more incentives, said Margaret O'Mara, a historian at the University of Washington.
"This has been the hallmark of Amazon and other technology companies since the very beginning," she said. "They did not want to pay a tax unless they were absolutely obliged to, and they took advantage of their market power and the psychic place that they occupy Turns the page."
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