10 ms·
Chicago has decent public transportation and plenty of young, affluent techies. It's not SV or NYC but it fits the bill for a midwest city. Chicago, and IL, ha
by ok_coo 7y ago
Chicago has decent public transportation and plenty of young, affluent techies. It's not SV or NYC but it fits the bill for a midwest city.
Chicago, and IL, have plenty of issues to work through though so I get why they didn't want to setup a HQ there.
- whb07 7y agoChicago has a doomsday clock that keeps ticking down with its pensions and the state's pensions. Those governments might start raising the taxes more and more and fall into a tighter death spiral as it pushes people away, leading to less revenue.
- keenmaster 7y agoThe pension explanation doesn't make sense. Chicago would gladly offer tax breaks to any company opening a major HQ here, as it has in the past. It's had a streak of being business friendly. I also don't get the "violence" explanation. Violence is terrible and everyone in Chicago wants to end it, but the average person is far removed from any shootings.
- whb07 7y agoCan't exactly guarantee offer tax breaks if they are short on tax revenue, and while every government federal/local is always short Chicago/Illinois is deathly short. The tax increases have already begun and there have been weird talks coming out of the Chicago mayor's office essentially asking for a tax on the rest of the state to help out Chicago proper.
- keenmaster 7y agoIf tax breaks attract a large company, Chicago still gets tax revenue from all their employees. Property tax revenue, income tax revenue, and consumption taxes all go up. This is especially true if that catalyzes further development across the local economy.
- SilasX 7y agoAll of that was true of Amazon's move to NYC, but the locals still balked at the "massive tax breaks" given to the company.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]