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Originally Posted by the urban politician
I guess I'm kinda annoyed by the whole HQ2 thing, and at the fact that so many people are putting so much hope into what is such a statistically unlikely, all or nothing affair.
I guess I just don't get it. There is no second place here. This is winner take all, like the Olympics. So even Chicago though could win, it's still not even remotely close to guaranteed, and probably not even a very high likelihood. And even if Chicago comes very close and Bezos chooses another city over it by a thin margin, we get nada. Zilch.
But instead of debating Chicago's chances, answer me this--how do some of you even get excited about this? How do you make plans like "if Chicago gets HQ2, we're gonna do such and such and see x, y, and z happening" with all that contained excitement, only to be set up for MASSIVE disappointment when it doesn't happen? Hell, I don't even get excited about a single highrise project until I'm confident it will get built.
Sorry, but I'm out of touch with so many of my fellow Forumers on the HQ2 thing. Not sure how you can salivate over something that has the potential to be such a huge disappointment.
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I don't think people are putting so much hope into it. It's a wish that people hope comes true, but most people maybe outside of the public side of the mayor, are realistic in some way about it.
I would say that you aren't any different than most people - out of touch is a good way to put it, but maybe not in the sense that you are talking about. Issue is that most people don't really understand this industry in reality and what it takes to staff up, get resources, what types of people and talent are needed, and where they are. There's a ton of articles out there that show this - anybody who's ever managed, had to hire, etc for a tech company or tech department of a company can see this. A lot of them just really don't know what they're talking about. A lot of the articles also talk as if fully tech workers are the only thing that need to be hired. That's non sense - with 50,000 employees, you are going to be having a lot of different areas covered in your hiring from software developers to marketing to managers to business analysts to purely financial people etc. Amongst everything, you are going to need management and while hiring someone with tech experience is a definite plus, depending on the structure and level of management, it may not be necessary.
The above reason is why I think Chicago has a good chance to land in the top 5 or 6 of this. My money is on the following in the top 5:
NYC, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago. I think that Atlanta has a decent outside shot due to the increase of the city and it being a little more urban than somewhere like Dallas, which I predict will lose major points on their lack of walkable areas, public transit, and urbanity. Miami may have an outside shot like Atlanta too, but I think their lower higher-education level will shoot them in the foot. Pittsburgh could be a shoe-in too. It will basically come down to urban areas with walkable parts, public transit that have a very varied economy and are able to attract people to move there. No matter what you think, Chicago does continue to attract people. The issue there in the numbers you see is that there's almost as many people leaving as coming in. Believe me, if the number of people coming in halved, you'd see some pretty big population loss. This isn't happening - the city continues to attract people and the types of people who are coming play more into Amazon's hands, considering that Chicago now has the highest educational attainment of any city in the top 5 largest - and even just 3 or 4 years ago it wasn't #1.
I don't know if you read those or are just like "How can Chicago compete with the big guns!?" - but I think that's pretty much misguided and almost plays hand in hand with what we were just talking about with the media. Not to say that Chicago is the top or top 3 when it comes to this stuff, but it's a lot stronger than most people realize.
I also disagree about if you come in 2nd you "lose." Sure, you lose out on a potential good economic prize - but coming in the top 5 or 10 for something as big as this - especially if you are top 5 - will make people take your city much more seriously in this industry and business in general. I guarantee you if Chicago didn't win but Amazon released their top 5 or whatever and Chicago was in it, you'd see a lot more interest from companies looking to open offices in Chicago. I will put a lot of money on that.