As cities around the country continue to put together packages that will entice tech-giant Amazon to relocate its second headquarters, many observers have begun to see Atlanta as the early favorite to emerge from the scrum as the big winner.
European based betting site Paddy Power, (the Brits will bet on just about anything) currently have Atlanta as the city with the best odds to score Amazon HQ2 at 3/1, followed by Austin, Boston, and Toronto all at 7/1. Those odds mirror the musings of many experts, who have listed Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, New York, and Washington D.C. as the top American options.
The Amazon move promises to be transformative for whichever city winds up with the winning bid as the company plans to invest upwards of $5 billion on a new campus and employ 50,000 plus high paid tech workers. The states with cities still in the running, Georgia included, have been working feverishly to put together incentive packages attractive enough to lure one of the world’s most profitable corporations.
Incentives aren’t all Amazon is looking for though – a highly educated workforce, access to transportation, and a young, diverse population have all been listed as key attributes for a host city, and luckily for Atlanta it grades out well in nearly all of those categories. With the world’s busiest airport in addition to being a transportation hub with a direct link to the Port of Savannah, Atlanta is among the best options for the mammoth logistics operation that Amazon would run at its second headquarters. College-educated millennials continue to pour in from throughout the country, even beyond the local schools producing prodigious talent in Emory, Georgia Tech, and UGA. A bustling economy has seen the state named as the best in which to do business for five straight years as Governor Nathan Deal and his crack economic development team have already attracted a large handful of businesses to move to the state.
Scoring Amazon would be the crown jewel in Deal’s legacy, which is already seen as one of the most pro-business tenures in state history. Some critics, though, are already warning that Georgians need to be careful what they wish for.
Democratic candidate for Governor Stacey Abrams told recode.net that “In the tech space, Georgia’s opportunity is to make sure that we’re growing the type of workers to sustain a tech economy. If you are incentivizing a company to come by destabilizing the educational system, you are not going to have people who stay for very long.”
“When we [in Georgia] say ‘tax incentives,’ what we usually means are tax abatements, which means the company that comes is not paying property taxes,” she added. “That means you’re not investing in schools, you’re not investing in infrastructure, you’re not investing in safety. That comes at a cost, because you’re usually bringing new people to the community who use all these services.”
That line of thinking runs against that of the Republicans who have controlled the state over the past decade, who have made economic development via attractive incentive packages a priority and let a strong economy trickle down into an improving education system and transportation infrastructure. With wild successes such as the arrival of the film industry turning Georgia into one of the top places to shoot movies and tv shows in the world, it’s hard to argue with those results.
