[crx087]

I grew up in a small town and have a hard time understanding why it's so contentious to add another major facility in a big city like Dallas or Austin.

It makes almost no impact on things like traffic or social services at a population scale. (In reality, even a HQ1 type facility is just another +0.3% for DFW or +1% for ATX, which is equivalent to hastening net growth by a few months at most.)

[pwinnski]

That's a great observation! I'm making a few assumptions that I think are pretty safe, namely that an HQ2 would not be distributed geographically around the city in many small buildings, and that the single campus would not be built in various areas of the city that are unlikely to meet the requirements.

Because of those assumptions, I'm not thinking of an influx of employees being mixed among the millions of existing residents. I think it's much more likely that the HQ2 would be built in a northern suburb of Dallas, like Frisco. There are roughly 160k people in Frisco right now[0], and it's already dramatically driven up property values, commute times, restaurant wait times, and construction delays.

I might be letting my skepticism of the entire concept of an "HQ2" color my impressions of the economic impact of an HQ2, but a history of sports stadium construction in this country, and the various incentives cities have paid for them combined with the never-quite-what-was-promised results suggests to me whichever city ends up giving away a pile of money for Amazon's HQ2 will likely someday regret it.

[0] http://www.friscotexas.gov/578/Population-Estimates-Projecti...