4 ms·

True, but the HQ will go somewhere, right? In fact retail will probably do pretty well near wherever the campus is built.

• toomuchtodo 9y ago
  If it’s going to go somewhere, why compete to give away tax breaks Amazon doesn’t need? It’s on par with competing to get a sports stadium.
  • nordsieck 9y ago
    Amazon is a giant vacuum cleaner that sucks up talented software developers from all over the country and spits them out into the local ecosystem after 2 years. That seems like a pretty valuable thing to have.
    • toomuchtodo 9y ago
      You’re assuming having a concentration of highly paid workers is a net positive, yet it’s worked out terribly for tech hubs. It drives up the cost of housing and strains infrastructure, with marginal tax base benefits.
      • wickawic 9y ago
        It is difficult to evaluate. In some sense a city is either growing or shrinking, and shrinking very negatively impacts municipalities because it is hard to 'scale down' the local bureaucracy. On the other hand too much growth makes the city less desireable for current residents--lots of new infrastructure gets built but most of it isn't for current residents. (Or in the case of SF no infrastructure gets built and the housing market becomes a knife fight in a phone booth.) In the long term I think that density is too valuable to large cities, and passing up an opportunity to increase density is short-sighted.