Amazon, like most TAMI companies (notable exceptions include Salesforce), does not generally prefer heart-of-downtown trophy high-rises. Most of the giant office leases they've signed this year have been in downtown-adjacent locations: Seaport Square in Boston, Manhattan West in NYC, on Granville South in Vancouver.
The core of the SLU campus is a mid-rise area that was, ten years ago, mostly low-rise light industrial and parking lots. Only very recently has Amazon built >20 story buildings. The Seaport area of Boston and Manhattan West were similar areas -- yes, even that stretch of 10th Ave in NYC was mostly garages and storage yards. (The Manhattan West building that houses Amazon is the one with the angled walls in the photo just above.)
Amazon also has leased a large chunk of 525 Market in the middle of downtown SF, but SF is a uniquely constrained market and large-enough spaces in the tech-heavier SoMA area are nonexistent.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Atlanta3000
I figured out why Amazon is not interested in the Schuylkill site.... the fact is the whole site needs to be built over damn railroad tracks. Do you know how long that would take and how much it would cost? I'll give you a hint - Hudson Yards has been under construction since 2005 an is expected to cost $20 Billion.
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Schuylkill Yards is currently surface parking lots and an old newspaper facility at street level,
west of 30th Street Station. It is not the area over the tracks north of the station. The first phase began construction last fall, with the renovation of "One Drexel Plaza," an existing office building (built for the Bulletin), as
laboratory space. It's the blocks right above "alamy stock photo" in your above image; in
this image, the railyards that you've pictured are off to the right.
It's also not the only already under-construction large-scale project in University City; a few blocks west is
uCity Square.
Those sites (also the proposed downtown adjacent sites in Chicago, like the Old Post Office) are vacant and have zoning and infrastructure ready, unlike... the Gulch site, which needs a 40-foot high, $500M platform to be built over railroad tracks. That's why CIM is asking for such a giant tax increment subsidy -- because
they need it to proceed, quite unlike other sites.
Remember that the RFP explicitly says: "Amazon will prioritize certified or shovel-ready greenfield sites and infill opportunities with appropriate infrastructure and ability to meet the Project’s timeline and development demands... sites with the requisite access, utility infrastructure, and zoning are critical." A site that doesn't even have roads, and doesn't even yet have the funding to pay for building the roads, doesn't sound "shovel ready" to me.
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