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Originally Posted by urbanpln
After working for the City's Department of Planning and Development for many years, I can tell you that these groups really don't matter to companies looking to relocate or open up an office here. In this situation, where the top sites are located in the central area, they have little power to do any real damage. These types of resistance happen everywhere, so calm down. A good example of this type of competition was the 2016 Olympic bid. There where all types of groups jockeying for their piece of the pie. Yet despite all of their shenanigans the City made it to the final round. I believe we lost because the IOC are a bunch of bullshit gangsters who get off on pitting cities against one another to find the most lucrative deal for themselves. That's why I agree with TUP, although I don't always agree with his perspective on development and social issues. However, I think he's spot on about the whole Amazon competition.
As much as I like this Chicago, I believe we will not land Amazon HQ2. I just watched Professor Scott Galloway's assessment of the whole Amazon scam. He is a professor at NYU Stern School of Business. He believes the winner will be either metro Washington D.C. or NYC, because of basically two important factors.
(1) The access to top notch talent. He said in the eyes of Amazon the best talent is a 24 year old EE grad from MIT. He goes on to explain that top talent isn't concern about cost of living, and that cost of living only matters when you are in your 30's and begin accumulating things, (i.e. homes, kids, and dogs). He said that Amazon doesn't really care about middle managers (older workers), and they know younger talent will pile into five bedroom apartments in Brooklyn (Gowanus) and D.C. (Adams Morgan).
(2) His second and strongest prediction is that what matters most is where does a 53 year old billionaire (Bezos) want to spend most of his time. He said that Mr. Bezos already have homes in D.C. and NYC.
I hoping he's wrong, but this guy has a winning record in making predictions about business, especially in the Tech world. I hope he's wrong, but his logic makes since to me. Check out his quick analysis on Youtube ("Amazon HQ2:The Winner Is....")
If Chicago does not land Amazon, I hope it causes the politicians and citizens in this region to wake up. Chicago is too much of a jewel to not be managed right.
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I watched his video. He gets some things right, and gets some things wrong IMO. Where Bezos will want to spend most of his time does not matter in my opinion as much as he thinks it does. He has a handful of residences all over the place and he's a smart guy, and a smart business man. He will pick the place that gets him what he wants and will allow him to grow whatever business he wants to grow in the way he needs to at whatever targets. Where he resides or wants to resides is secondary. He might love Miami and might love spending time there, but Miami might not be the best place for the actual business versus another place he might not like as much as far as personal life goes. He is not stupid enough to choose a place solely on that. If he does do this, then he's a stupider business person than we ever imagined.
As far as NYC goes, I understand that they will get younger workers to pile into apartments, but the issue with this is that eventually that type of mindset changes by the late 20s. You can get someone fresh out of college/a few years out of college to do this but just a handful of years later, it changes. I know that he states that they only care about younger talent, but that's really not true. Any corporation, tech or not, relies on a diverse work force to get successful - that includes age diversity. There's a lot of hot shot 22-24 year olds coming out of college, and while some are pretty damn good, the average person is not as good as they think. They're arrogant about their own abilities - I know because I was there once upon a time. The reality is that they don't know shit on average and rely heavily on people who are a little older (not 50 year old people, but people usually in their late 20s to late 30s and into their 40s sometimes). If you are dealing with enterprise level software development, there's a lot of intangibles that you just cannot teach. It comes with experience and more than just the technical stuff. When you're dealing with tens of millions of customers, you have to know how to manage things - it doesn't matter how talented of a programmer you are at that point. You have to know how to manage and also know what the right decisions are as well as the right path to decision making. I don't really expect anybody to know this who's never worked in that environment - including this professor. I manage a part of a piece of "software" which is used by tens of millions of people and is very important to each person's lives too. The actual delivery of this to tens of millions of people and the management of any serious issues is never, ever done by someone in their early 20s. They may be in on it, but they are never making any actual decisions. It's like that for a reason. I have some very talented people on my teams who are just a few years out of school, but they usually do not have the right insight into things like this - they will probably in a small handful of years, but not yet.
I wouldn't be shocked if they picked NYC but I would be half surprised. Ultimately the top cities that it'll come down to are NYC, DC, Philadephia, Boston, Chicago and probably Atlanta. Los Angeles, Dallas, and Toronto are maybes. I guarantee you those will be the top 6 to 9. Eventually it will come down to large metro areas that have a diverse economy which has a proven record of attracting top talent across the board whether it's experienced people or just out of college - and places with at least decent public transit and urbanity. Right now, the places I listed are exactly what they're looking for. Which one? It's hard to say - there's probably a lot of factors that are private to them. Air travel for example might come into play and that particular part might favor somewhere like Chicago or Dallas, but then there could be another criteria that does not.