Downtown or SoCo !

Wow what an amazing building. Super jealous of you guys

Austin is one of the cities I'm interested in moving to (From San Jose) but it's tough for me since I've lived in California my whole life and all of my family members are here. I'm very interested in visiting sometime in the future though!

The developers of 600 Guadalupe are not messing around. The site plan was filed last week.

LINK

One of the Gensler architects working on the 600 Guadalupe project posted an Instagram video of the model. Here's a still from the video:

http://i.imgur.com/7IzDJb1.png
https://www.instagram.com/p/BX6Kq1qD4i7/

Here are some photos of a model for 600 Guadalupe.

http://i.imgur.com/4mvVNKW.png
http://i.imgur.com/2nHlMHN.png
http://i.imgur.com/eIyLnWN.png
http://i.imgur.com/HohWft0.png
http://i.imgur.com/KpNpCbb.png
https://www.instagram.com/blume_george/

We've been hiding this Homewood Suites Hotel disaster in the Austin sub-forum, but I'll go ahead and share it with everyone else. It's been topped out for a few months, but fortunately the facade is not in place yet.

http://i.imgur.com/xXFcZRj.png
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenn-weyand-23652715

Straight Outta 1986. Yikes.

I don't know why, but I don't completely hate it.

eeew!

Come on Austin, we got this right?

https://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/?node=17044620011

Not sure what locations they're considering, but in my finite mind, Austin could be a great fit to their business culture. It certainly would be a huge win for Austin and the whole metro area.

This 79 acre project being referred to as "Project Catalyst" just SE of Downtown and adjacent to Oracle's U/C corporate campus, just happened to be marketed as a corporate campus opportunity prior to the Amazon HQ2 announcement. It's a freaking city unto itself and could easily be home to 50K workers.

https://i.imgur.com/SoIJHiJ.png
https://i.imgur.com/Z9wCXaq.png
https://i.imgur.com/6CoI5wO.png
https://i.imgur.com/CaBhn9o.png
https://i.imgur.com/sZkHx3P.png
https://i.imgur.com/W05pOVP.png
https://i.imgur.com/0t1z5f6.png
https://vimeo.com/182609285

Surely they would include "light rail" from the airport up Riverside into downtown in the proposal. The one major item Austin is totally lacking on Amazon's "checklist" for the potential location, is mass transit.

I hate to break it to everyone but there is zero chance Amazon picks Austin. They are going to DC. They own the Washington Post; Bezos apparently recently bought a $20M+ house in the DC area; and he is interested in getting more involved in politics / national policy. This "competition" is designed for one purpose, and one purpose only: to pressure DC into giving as much public money as possible to Amazon to "lure" Amazon to where its already going. It's really an unfortunate fact of life that local governments around the country are falling all over themselves to give taxpayer money to companies who don't need it.

All that said, I love the tech district concept -- with or without Amazon. Very nicely done.

Bezos bought a house in DC. Same neighborhood as Ivanka Trump and the Obama's.

Bezos bought the Washington Post for 250 million.

He then bought Whole Foods in Austin for 13.7 billion.

Seems like a much bigger investment in one city over the other..... but when you are worth 83 billion I think neither investment will mean too much when deciding Amazon's 2nd headquarter.

In recent years Whole Foods did buy and piece together several nice chunks of real estate in downtown Austin... most of which have yet to be redeveloped. A very attractive opportunity for Amazon.....

Exactly. The Washington Post in DC is a tiny investment compared to the Whole Foods acquisition in Austin.

Also, Bezos personally bought the Washington Post. Not Amazon. However, Amazon now has a very real $13.7B division in Austin.

I do agree that Amazon has already chosen a city, and their RFP is simply a way of finding the max incentives that a city will offer -- to make the chosen city match it. There is no way of really knowing what city that is, but I think if Vegas actually gave odds on it, the favorite would be Austin.

The real estate Whole Foods purchased for a corporate campus was two blocks IIRC across from their HQ on Lamar. That was when they were flying high in ~2014. They still own that real estate as far as I know. But it's not zoned for high-rises, and I doubt the City of Austin would grant a zoning variance for high-rise construction on the West side of Lamar - even for Amazon.

DC is too expensive. Not a whole lot of space left. I agree with the New York times that Denver is Amazon's pick since it's the ONLY city that fits every criteria they gave. However if they do choose Austin there is plenty of places to choose from. Whole Foods properties, Austin American Statesman, Domain Area, This new Riverside project Catalyst etc. If only the darn non-visionary voters of Austin had voted YES on light-rail once in the last 20yrs we'd have this cat in the bag.