City’s Amazon bid a winner for all
The ultimate reality show — Survivor: Amazon — got under way in earnest yesterday.
The bids are in, the smart money bet for the firm’s second major campus (estimated cost $5 billion) and with it some 50,000 jobs will be somewhere on the East Coast. And happily Boston makes just about every expert’s short list of contenders.
Sure, New York had to light up its Empire State Building and a bunch of other skyscrapers in “Amazon Orange” to make its point. How very New Yorky, no? A little too flashy, and surely not enough to make up for its incredibly high costs and high taxes. And if that isn’t a deterrent, we have three little words for Amazon execs to consider — Mayor Bill de Blasio.
New Jersey is prepared to hand out $7 billion worth of tax breaks and subsidies and other goodies, but then its proposed site is in Newark. Well, OK then.
Atlanta and Pittsburgh seem to have quite a following among real estate handicappers, along with Austin, Texas; Chicago and Denver — that’s if you discard the East Coast shoo-in theory.
Now there are multiple possibilities in Massachusetts. Worcester is offering a $500 million package of incentives. However, just so Amazon execs are forewarned, the head of the local chamber of commerce there is former Lt. Gov. Tim Murray — nickname “Crash” and the rest you really don’t want to know. (Just a little tribal Boston humor there.)
On Wednesday night Boston Mayor Marty Walsh revealed that the city’s prime site — of several included in the proposal — is the 161-acre Suffolk Downs race track in East Boston. It is, in a word, first-rate. It’s got a good deal of the infrastructure needed to serve a campus of the size Amazon is planning, complete with two stops on the Blue Line. And that means ready access to Logan Airport — with its nonstop flights to Seattle.
But it’s the incomparable human and intellectual infrastructure that Boston and its surrounding communities offer that ought to win over Amazon execs. Sure there’s Harvard and MIT but also UMass and Boston College and Boston University and Emerson and Suffolk, and heck you can’t turn a corner without bumping into another school.
This is a place where the best and the brightest come to grow even brighter and then — if they possibly can — stay on, bringing their energy and their quest for innovation to the place they call home. Those are the people Amazon is looking for.
It’s the same reason that General Electric and Vertex landed here.
In fact, the city’s Amazon bid includes a letter from Vertex CEO Jeffrey Leiden.
“To me, Boston is in the most exciting point I’ve ever been here for. That ecosystem is really hard to put together,” Leiden said. “That’s the kind of place companies like Amazon and other innovators want to be. It’s about the people and the talent.”
That the capital city has a Democratic mayor and the state has a Republican governor who work together seamlessly also should be an advantage in wooing this mega-project. And both are in agreement about not getting into a bidding war over subsidies and tax breaks — certainly not at this stage of the competition.
They’ve charted an entirely appropriate course. Amazon would be wise to consider it.