Quote:
Originally Posted by JK47
Denver has too much sprawl, its mass transit system isn't fully developed (making congestion a big issue), spends too little on education (38th in the nation overall and 43rd in per pupil spend), is too distant from other major population centers & educational institutions (limiting its ability to act as a recruiting catchment basin).
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Yeah and it would be a huge case of "out of the frying pan and into the fire" for Amazon. There's already huge shortages of labor and housing there without HQ2. There's even, as you mentioned, critical infrastructure shortages. Denver was never built to be millions of people, it was a smallish cow town for most of it's history until the energy industry blew up there in the 70s. Now it's supposed to be a 5 million metro by like 2030 or 2040 or something. The bones aren't there for that kind of growth so you have this giant sprawling mess with meagre infrastructure. Like have you ever seen US 6 through the West side of town? It's literally a 1960s freeway built in a trench that was 4 lanes and is now 6 because they got rid of the shoulders. There's no room to widen it without flattening like another block of housing all the way along it.
So the result of that is that Denver has hellish traffic problems and a light rail that can only do so much because the density just isn't concentrated enough. Amazon would be totally foolish to locate there or Austin for that matter. Like who at Amazon is going to be like "oh, we are having problems in a tech saturated midsized city, let's put HQ2 in the only cities in the country that have a worse crunch than Seattle and none of the urbanity!"