Amazon in Houston

Bringing Bezos’ e-commerce giant to his boyhood home justifies economic incentives.

Legend has it that a smart little boy playing around with a primitive computer back in the 1970s figured out something none of his teachers at River Oaks Elementary School knew how to do. Long before other kids started poking quarters into Pac-Man machines, the resourceful fourth-grader hooked his school’s terminal up to a mainframe downtown. Then he invited his friends to join him and stay after school playing video games.

When the budding computer nerd came back home to Houston to help his alma mater celebrate its 75th anniversary in 2004, Jeff Bezos was on his way to becoming one of the richest men in the world.

Now the business he founded, Amazon, is looking for a place to establish its second U.S. headquarters. The company plans to spend more than $5 billion building what Bezos calls “a full equal” to its sprawling base in Seattle. We’re a little biased, but we can’t imagine a better place than Houston.

Amazon’s announcement has already triggered a battle pitting big cities across America against each other. The company clearly wants to ignite a bidding war between local governments eager to lure the new corporate headquarters with lavish tax breaks and other lucrative concessions.

We’ve always been deeply skeptical about government officials showering corporations with tax enticements that amount to little more than corporate welfare. But what we have here is not some questionable deal to sweeten the pot for a retailer moving into a shopping strip. Amazon’s new headquarters is a special case, a major new employer whose potential benefit to our city fully justifies offering generous economic development incentives.

Amazon’s 50,000 proposed new jobs would make it the city’s largest employer. Just as important, most of those jobs would pay well, averaging more than $100,000 a year. Houston would become home not just to another Fortune 500 corporate headquarters, but also to the nation’s largest online retailer. Anyone who lived through the economic bust of the 1980s knows the critical importance of diversifying the city’s employment base beyond the oil and gas industry; Amazon would instantly establish Houston as an international hub in the explosively expanding world of e-commerce.

The company issued an outline of “key preferences and decision drivers” that reads like a laundry list of everything Houston brags about. Amazon says it wants a “stable and business friendly environment and tax structure,” a diverse population, excellent institutions of higher education, a highly educated labor pool and an international airport with daily direct flights to Seattle, New York, San Francisco and Washington DC. On the list of Amazon’s requirements, Houston checks every box. If it wants verification, just ask ExxonMobil. The oil giant recently opened a similar state-ofthe-art campus north of Houston. It’s employees have one significant benefit: no state income tax.

Bezos has already invested heavily in Texas. Amazon just bought Whole Foods Market, which is based in Austin. His Blue Origin suborbital launch facility is located in Van Horn, a couple of hours drive east of El Paso. The company plans to build its largest wind project, Amazon Wind Farm Texas, in Scurry County, about midway between Lubbock and Abilene. And it’s already announced plans for two fulfillment centers in our area.

“Houston’s open for business,” Mayor Sylvester Turner has said repeatedly in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. Nothing would shout that message to the world louder than Amazon establishing its second U.S. headquarters here. We look forward to welcoming that kid who tinkered with a computer at River Oaks Elementary School back to his boyhood home.