The point isn't that he can't afford houses anywhere (obviously he can), it's that the places he already owns houses in are places he enjoys spending his time in. So he'd want to locate additional offices in those places. He's probably not all that interested in spending time in, e.g., Dallas.
It seems like I'm the resident Dallas apologist on these Amazon pieces, but Bezos is no stranger to Dallas. He has spoken fondly of Dallas many a time, just had the honor of speaking at SMU's Business Conference and offered personal anecdotes of why he likes Dallas, and, as Dallas Morning News has reported by tracking his flight records, been to Dallas many a time this year alone.
Sure, maybe he doesn't own property in Dallas, but it also seems like it's more of a place he'd like to spend time in over Austin, or Atlanta, or Pittsburgh, or a whole bunch of other cities.
The fact that Amazon was in late stage talks with Dallas also makes me think Dallas will be one of the cities to get "other major Amazon facilities as well" as this WSJ article mentions.
Not to be "that guy", but I really do wonder whether there even were any serious "late stage" talks with any of these other cities?
NYC is so obviously superior to every other location that you have to wonder whether there was any serious chance of anyone else actually getting the HQ2 at all? I mean, sure, DC can play both the government card, and the "Bezos loves us" card. But everyone else has no credible argument to put forth that would entice Amazon to abandon the opportunity that is NYC.
(In the end, even DC didn't have a good enough argument. After all, they still kept half the jobs in NYC.)
It's not about taxes though. That's what so many people don't understand.
If you had a global behemoth of a company, and you were already based on the West Coast, then your links to Asia would be just about as good as they could be without relocating out of the US.
But what if you wanted to go for a whole "sun never sets on the British Empire" thing? Then you would need better links from the Europe-Africa side of the world to your HQ. Assuming you don't want to relocate out of the US, that means the Eastern seaboard. That's just geography. Which place on the eastern seaboard has the best multi-modal transport links to the rest of the US and Europe-Africa? NYC. For logistics, by air, land, and sea, you can't beat NYC. They've just invested way too much into that stuff for anyone else to beat them at it. (Probably did so over time using those high taxes you talked about.)
Add in the fact that NYC has access to an enormous community of technology experts, and the fact that it has plentiful high powered jobs in other industries, and the choice really is a no-brainer.
Dallas, is just not there yet, to be perfectly frank. The only city in Texas that is even working towards being a rival to NYC is Houston. And while they've made admirable progress, with ports, metro trains, and airports, they've still got quite a ways to go. (For instance, they're metro is building out nicely, but it still doesn't connect to either of their airports yet. Nor does it connect to their port.)
Other cities can compete with the coastal elites, but we have to sober up as to what we need to do in order to actually be competitive. Lowering taxes might be part of it, but it's not going to make any of the knowledge behemoths leave the coastal elite cities.
Would you leave your home for another home in a neighborhood with worse schools and worse transport just because it was cheaper?
I don’t think Dallas is better than NYC in well, any regard except cost of living (which isn’t a huge draw in and of itself for the already wealthy), and I love Dallas.
I do think Dallas has so much potential though, and I think if you would look a little you would see the overwhelming number of similarities between Dallas and Seattle, both politically, economically, socially, and even traffic/transport-wise.
I just hoped, maybe naively, Amazon would want to move somewhere where it could harness that potential and help shape the city rather than merely rely on a city’s already established resources.
Dallas will continue growing without Amazon, just as Seattle would have, but I can’t say I’m not disappointed for my hometown.
