John Matthews and Heather Curtis
WMAL.com
WASHINGTON — The quest to win Amazon’s “HQ2 sweepstakes” is certainly running rampant in the DC area, as several jurisdictions submitted bids this week to land the online giant’s second coprorate headquarters. But one local economist says the drawbacks may outweigh the benefits if Amazon does choose our area.
Economist Stephen Fuller with George Mason University says if Amazon does choose the District or one of its suburbs, the addition of 50,000 new employees to our region over the next decade and a half would raise rents, increase traffic jams, overwhelm Metro and send more kids to overcrowded schools.
“I don’t think anybody has actually sat back and thought too much about how big this is, and what the consequences are in terms of accomodating [essentially] two Pentagons,” said Fuller.
The D.C. area already ranks number one in the country for time lost in traffic jams, and the new headquarters would make that problem worse.
Fuller says most headquarters that have moved here in the past have brought a few hundred new employees, not tens of thousands. Even Marriott, which is building a new headquarters on Metro’s Red Line, is moving a total of 3,500 workers from its current site near Montgomery Mall – a mere fraction of Amazon’s planned move.
Fuller says it is important for the DC area to diversify its economy to become less reliant on the federal government, but “that is better achieved by having more smaller headquarter functions than one large headquarter functions that could overpower the economy.”
He doesn’t think anyone really considered the difficulty jurisdictions would have accomodating so many new people.
“It’s like that extra helping of chocolate fudge that after you’ve had it, you regret it,” Fuller adds.
Dozens of cities are willing to take the risk of regret, including Toronto, Boston, Austin, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Denver, Houston and many more.
Amazon has not announced when it will announce the winning bid, saying only that an announcement will be made in 2018.
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