Amazon is looking for a second HQ. Why not, Pittsburgh? (Austin: sublease, job market)
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Administrative Assistants and receptionists are as common as human beings working manufacturing jobs. Amazon did a masterful job at raising expectations and creating a feeding frenzy.
You aren't kidding. The cities, media, and think-tanks are doing most of Amazon's research for them, at no charge.
A fascinating article in Politico about the transformation of a city due to Amazon.
Quote:
Thursday is the deadline for cities bidding to host “HQ2,” as Amazon calls its planned second headquarters, and the competition has been intense. More than a hundred would-be hosts have assembled generous packages with everything from multibillion-dollar tax breaks to free utilities to an offer to build Amazon its own city (also named Amazon) in the hope of enticing the online retail giant and up to 50,000 of its handsomely paid employees.
But as these cities go all-out to win Amazon’s affections, they might take a lesson from the city where those same affections have dimmed: Seattle. To be sure, the town’s business community is mortified to be losing so much of Amazon’s future growth to another city and has roundly blamed the city’s left-leaning “anti-business” politics. But many ordinary Seattleites seem relieved. Most would acknowledge the extraordinary prosperity that Amazon has brought to Seattle since Jeff Bezos and his startup arrived in 1994. But they are also keenly aware of the costs, not least the nation’s fastest-rising housing prices, appalling traffic and a painful erosion of urban identity. What was once a quirkily mellow, solidly middle-class city now feels like a stressed-out, two-tier town with a thin layer of wealthy young techies atop a base of anxious wage workers. As one City Council member put it, HQ2 may give Seattle “a little breathing room” to cope with a decade of raging, Amazon-fueled growth. A commenter on a local news site was less diplomatic: “Amazon = cancer.”
...
This self-feeding dynamic, known as “agglomeration,” has been a huge force in Seattle. In the past seven years alone—the period of Amazon’s most explosive growth—more than 20 Fortune 500 companies have opened engineering or R&D campuses here—including Facebook, Google and Apple, tech’s three other giants, plus newcomers like Uber. The city has gained 53,000 jobs (on top of the roughly 40,000 at the Amazon headquarters), some $17 billion in new wages, salaries, and other compensation, and $38 billion in new investment, according to Amazon’s own analysis. (Indeed, even since the HQ2 announcement, Amazon has locked up an additional 1.2 million square feet of office space in downtown Seattle.) Little wonder that other cities believe HQ2 will be “a transformational event,” as one consultant put it.
...
The influx of well-paid tech workers has helped drive up the median house price by 69 percent since 2012, and has added to income inequality: The average tech salary was $98,215 last year, while more than half of the city’s residents earned less than $50,000. And rich and poor alike must endure traffic congestion that is now the fourth worst in the United States. Such “negative externalities,” as economists call them, aren’t the fault of Amazon or any of its tech peers. Even pre-Bezos, Seattle’s housing market and transportation infrastructure had struggled under the city’s superstar status. Seattle’s new Amazon headache is simply what happens when a hyper-successful company meets an already popular city.
... Bezos has made clear he wants a city similar to Seattle—which is to say, a city that is already a magnet for the kind of person Amazon wants to hire. Such a city, says the University of Washington’s Vigdor, is almost certainly already in the red zone for things like affordability, which would only be intensified by “bringing in 40,000 highly paid employees to compete for the same relatively constant supply of housing.”
...
The problem, says Vigdor, is that neither the benefits or the costs will be evenly distributed. Although residents may well benefit from things like more school funding in the long run, he says, most won’t be getting any of those six-figure salaries. “But what they are going to find is that the price of many of the things that they have to buy is going to trend upward.” And if Seattle’s experience is any guide, Vigdor says, “it’s not just the poor who are getting squeezed out. It’s the firefighters and school teachers and a lot of other traditional middle-class occupations where a $600,000-dollar house does not look affordable.” This Is What Really Happens When Amazon Comes to Your Town - POLITICO Magazine
Hopefully Yac doesn't decide that I copied too much of the article. It is a long one, and I did want to include several of these points - and provide them in context.
This article made me eerily think of Pittsburgh. These conditions seem to mirror Pittsburgh to a T.
Pittsburgh, until four or five years ago was a pretty laid-back, egalitarian town - much as the article describes Seattle.
Pittsburgh also already has horrible traffic and a woefully abysmal transportation network - particularly for everyone who doesn't live along the Busway in the East End Center of the Universe, or along the T lines in the South Hills.
Pittsburgh has also been seeing rapid real-estate appreciation and huge fights already about affordable housing.
Amazon coming here is going to destroy the working class and middle-class in this city - and it's going to become even more-so a Progressive Utopia populated by our brogrammer and techie Übermenschen overlords and a fringe of African-Americans who the Progressive leadership will continue to throw peanuts at (ie - more $400k per unit townhouses to be given away, a la Skyline Terrace)... and the working class will get pushed out further and further, and evil places such as Cranberry (one of the Circles of Hell for oh so many posters on this forum) will continue to grow... and there shall be sprawl...
I don't know why so many people who are so against the cracker plant for its supposed danger to Pittsburgh are so in favor of Amazon, when it poses such a larger danger.
Based on the above, I'd say they are choosing Austin.
One reason for Seattle's housing costs is Asian speculators. They are buying properties in Seattle, London, and elsewhere, driving up the prices. Kind of sad because they are not living there. It's purely and investment. Might help if they would at least sublease the property.
but not a great selling piece. I hope Pittsburgh's proposal won't be deemed too "wordy". If I were Amazon, I'd be thinking..."oh, just get to the point! We've got 100 proposals to go through."
If Amazon and 50k good paying jobs is a bad thing, I often wonder what people would consider to be a good thing? What if Amazon had come here with out using this RFP process? Are people angry that the city is courting good paying jobs, or angry that tech is where the good paying jobs are now? Or is this all just an exhaustive exercise in “punching up” against well paid people and bemoaning low income housing? Perhaps the problem isn’t Amazon or the low income, but just general fist shaking. Thankfully our weather is cloudy, so those against everything can spend a lifetime yelling at the clouds.
If Amazon and 50k good paying jobs is a bad thing, I often wonder what people would consider to be a good thing? What if Amazon had come here with out using this RFP process? Are people angry that the city is courting good paying jobs, or angry that tech is where the good paying jobs are now? Or is this all just an exhaustive exercise in “punching up” against well paid people and bemoaning low income housing? Perhaps the problem isn’t Amazon or the low income, but just general fist shaking. Thankfully our weather is cloudy, so those against everything can spend a lifetime yelling at the clouds.
assuming you don't have the skills to get a job with amazon, how would your life benefit from having amazon come to town? i am generally positive about the prospect but i am wondering what your stance is.
but to answer your question, i think many are okay with what they have at life and see this as hurting their quality of life.
A fascinating article in Politico about the transformation of a city due to Amazon.
Hopefully Yac doesn't decide that I copied too much of the article. It is a long one, and I did want to include several of these points - and provide them in context.
This article made me eerily think of Pittsburgh. These conditions seem to mirror Pittsburgh to a T.
Pittsburgh, until four or five years ago was a pretty laid-back, egalitarian town - much as the article describes Seattle.
Pittsburgh also already has horrible traffic and a woefully abysmal transportation network - particularly for everyone who doesn't live along the Busway in the East End Center of the Universe, or along the T lines in the South Hills.
Pittsburgh has also been seeing rapid real-estate appreciation and huge fights already about affordable housing.
Amazon coming here is going to destroy the working class and middle-class in this city - and it's going to become even more-so a Progressive Utopia populated by our brogrammer and techie Übermenschen overlords and a fringe of African-Americans who the Progressive leadership will continue to throw peanuts at (ie - more $400k per unit townhouses to be given away, a la Skyline Terrace)... and the working class will get pushed out further and further, and evil places such as Cranberry (one of the Circles of Hell for oh so many posters on this forum) will continue to grow... and there shall be sprawl...
I don't know why so many people who are so against the cracker plant for its supposed danger to Pittsburgh are so in favor of Amazon, when it poses such a larger danger.
this is a pretty good article.
overall, i think i just don't understand how people champion social progress, culture, vibrant historical neighborhoods, and equality while writing off any criticism of offering up the world to a company like amazon.
A fascinating article in Politico about the transformation of a city due to Amazon.
Amazon coming here is going to destroy the working class and middle-class in this city - and it's going to become even more-so a Progressive Utopia populated by our brogrammer and techie Übermenschen overlords and a fringe of African-Americans who the Progressive leadership will continue to throw peanuts at (ie - more $400k per unit townhouses to be given away, a la Skyline Terrace)... and the working class will get pushed out further and further, and evil places such as Cranberry (one of the Circles of Hell for oh so many posters on this forum) will continue to grow... and there shall be sprawl...
I don't know why so many people who are so against the cracker plant for its supposed danger to Pittsburgh are so in favor of Amazon, when it poses such a larger danger.
1. Why should city leaders have to give anything including peanuts? Anyone can be priced out and I certainly think the amount of section 8 that we sadly have to build isn't "peanuts". It is extremely expensive.
2. Amazon is the future no matter what, so do you want Pittsburgh to be a part of the future, or do you want it to decay. I would rather Pittsburgh expands and gets stronger.
3. Pittsburgh's city proper used to have a population of around 600K and now it is a little over 300K! We have PLENTY of room to expand. Tons of empty lots in the Hill and other neighborhoods that are turning to weeds.
assuming you don't have the skills to get a job with amazon, how would your life benefit from having amazon come to town? i am generally positive about the prospect but i am wondering what your stance is.
but to answer your question, i think many are okay with what they have at life and see this as hurting their quality of life.
I am by no means a defender of Amazon, but there would be knock-off effects for the entire regional economy.
1. Amazon has been semi-explicit that HQ2 is going to involve moving a good deal of their back office/less "tech" positions out of Seattle. There should be many people in the Pittsburgh area already who have the skill sets to have random white-collar office jobs.
2. There will be lots of blue collar jobs created as a result of the move - everything from the temporary construction jobs to build out Amazon's campus to the increase in service-sector jobs needed to provide services for another 50,000 workers.
3. While a lot of people will move in from the outside, this will invariably result in a tighter local job market, which will drive up local wages.
4. Real estate prices will rise, which will benefit every homeowner.
6. In turn if real estate prices rise, that means that the city and school district's financial crunch would lessen. More tax revenue means better public services, and the possibility of tax cuts as well.
There are certain people who would undoubtedly be hurt by Amazon moving to Pittsburgh - basically the same people hurt by any sort of urban revitalization - those who are low income and marginally attached to the workforce if at all, given they will eat the cost-of-living increase, don't have equity as homeowners, and won't see much of an improved labor market. But overall I think it's impossible to argue that adding 50,000 jobs to a metro the size of Pittsburgh is a bad thing.
I agree with the points above, but with the caveat that Pgh, like other cities had many more people on average per household, when the city had 600K+.
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