Amazon’s birthday is July 5 — and it could be an auspicious day for Jeff Bezos to announce the location of its HQ2, and its next Day One.
Will it? Won’t it? Why not?
To recap, the Seattle-based behemoth, which has tentacles everywhere, has winnowed 238 North American proposals down to 20 possible spots for its second headquarters.
In a January Bisnow article, I called the entire search a “sham.” This is merely an “Amascam,” as Bezos has used the search to uncover available sites and incentives for all his needs, while he already settled on the Northern VA/Montgomery County MD/Washington, DC, area for HQ2.
Some sites are better suited. In Montgomery County, partners in the 45-acre White Flint shopping center site, where a Lord & Taylor still sits, put their lawsuit beefs into arbitration after an Amazon visit. But the outcome of Wednesday’s election for county executive may be telling with one anti-business candidate on the ballot.
Maryland is offering $8.5 billion in incentives, and the site, on the DC Metro, is a 40-minute limo run up the traffic-clogged Rockville Pike from the Bezos family’s manse in the Kalorama neighborhood of DC — near both Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s and the Obamas’ similar abodes.
To the west, the DC Metro’s Silver Line expansion will run to both Dulles Airport and Virginia’s Center of Innovation with the center’s land as a proposed Amazon campus. The area has plenty of middle-class housing.
Another prime location is at Crystal City’s Potomac Yard, also on the Metro near Ronald Reagan Airport.
But sites offered up by DC, including on the Anacostia River, are better suited to distribution jobs.
Last year, economic development honchos and mayors salivated at the $5 billion Amazon proposed to invest while hiring 50,000 folks at average salaries of $100,000 (fine print notes it will be less in low-wage areas) while growing from 500,000 to 8 million square feet over a 10- to 17-year period.
While Amazon would bless the area with its largesse and spending power, politicians and locals were still required to offer tax breaks, perks and incentives such as infrastructure investment targeted to mass transit.
Unless Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo made a secret pact to fully fund the MTA should Amazon plant its flag, their own quibbling should knock the city out in a New York minute.
Besides, Amazon Alley already exists along West 34th Street, and 385 mostly brain-required jobs are open here already. The company doesn’t need to plant another flag in this tax-and-take-more place.