Amazon HQ2

[H-Town Man]

34 minutes ago, Ross said:

ExxonMobil is a bad choice for this argument. The headquarters has something like a few hundred employees, while the campus here was built for over 10,000, and they moved all of the Fairfax people here. A slap to Houston would have been the Fairfax jobs going to Dallas. 

 

I don't think so. Just a few hundred employees, but that's where the prestige is and the decisions are made. They moved the lower-level jobs here because they had to, it's where the industry is; they moved the upper-level jobs there because they wanted to.

 

[ToryGattis]

17 minutes ago, H-Town Man said:

 

I don't think so. Just a few hundred employees, but that's where the prestige is and the decisions are made. They moved the lower-level jobs here because they had to, it's where the industry is; they moved the upper-level jobs there because they wanted to.

 

I expect the HQ will move down here at some point with the fancy new consolidated campus.  If not, it's probably because of corporate values that want to keep HQ staff separated from business units so they make more objective budgeting and investment decisions (people are naturally biased towards the people they're around every day).  GE and Boeing - among others - do the same thing.

[ToryGattis]

1 hour ago, htownbro said:

 

I agree.  NYC, LA and Chicago considered while we are the 4th largest city and not even considered?  My guess is DC or NYC will get it so that Amazon will be on both coast

 

I believe it will be DC.  Clearly Bezos wants it since he also included North VA and MD.  And he owns the Washington Post.  The major benefit to Amazon is that DC is absolutely chock full of disillusioned, underpaid tech talent working for the government - easy pickings. Once the idealism wears off, they'd be happy to jump to Amazon.  

[H-Town Man]

1 minute ago, ToryGattis said:

I expect the HQ will move down here at some point with the fancy new consolidated campus.  If not, it's probably because of corporate values that want to keep HQ staff separated from business units so they make more objective budgeting and investment decisions (people are naturally biased towards the people they're around every day).  GE and Boeing - among others - do the same thing.

 

I have heard this explanation of why they went to Dallas before and it seems like an urban legend. Couldn't they have a separate office within the Houston area? Downtown vs. Springwoods? Is the distance from Houston to Dallas really meaningful anymore in the era of teleconferencing? GE and Boeing aren't really comparable. In those cases, the HQ office moved to a big-name city for prestige of location and left the lower positions where office space was cheap.

[ToryGattis]

Just now, H-Town Man said:

 

I have heard this explanation of why they went to Dallas before and it seems like an urban legend. Couldn't they have a separate office within the Houston area? Downtown vs. Springwoods? Is the distance from Houston to Dallas really meaningful anymore in the era of teleconferencing? GE and Boeing aren't really comparable. In those cases, the HQ office moved to a big-name city for prestige of location and left the lower positions where office space was cheap.

The way I've heard it, if they're in the same city then they're mixing at events and on the golf course and meeting at restaurants.  The people in that business unit get undue influence on the HQ staff, which are supposed to be making objective investment and promotion decisions.  Personal relationships undermine that.  Distance makes it much easier.  But you're also partially right about small/thin executive HQs moving to bigger cities with more global nonstop flights and service firms (accounting, consulting, etc.).

[H-Town Man]

12 minutes ago, ToryGattis said:

The way I've heard it, if they're in the same city then they're mixing at events and on the golf course and meeting at restaurants.  The people in that business unit get undue influence on the HQ staff, which are supposed to be making objective investment and promotion decisions.  Personal relationships undermine that.  Distance makes it much easier.  But you're also partially right about small/thin executive HQs moving to bigger cities with more global nonstop flights and service firms (accounting, consulting, etc.).

 

This may be the case but most corporations don't seem to mind having HQ staff and rest of company in the same city. You don't meet lower-level employees at a restaurant or playing golf unless you specifically set an appointment with them. And I've never seen anything to this explanation of Exxon's choice aside from internet rumors. I think they were also considering Conroe for their location at the time.

 

[Houston19514]

1 hour ago, Ross said:

ExxonMobil is a bad choice for this argument. The headquarters has something like a few hundred employees, while the campus here was built for over 10,000, and they moved all of the Fairfax people here. A slap to Houston would have been the Fairfax jobs going to Dallas. 

 

And,  Exxon specifically did not even consider any cities in which they had substantial operations. So Houston was never considered.

[Houston19514]

51 minutes ago, H-Town Man said:

 

I don't think so. Just a few hundred employees, but that's where the prestige is and the decisions are made. They moved the lower-level jobs here because they had to, it's where the industry is; they moved the upper-level jobs there because they wanted to.

 

 

At the time, they wanted the HQ to be in a city where they had no significant operations.  That excluded Houston.  (At the time, that made some sense because they had different divisions headquartered in different places; now, not so much.)

[Houston19514]

9 minutes ago, H-Town Man said:

 

This may be the case but most corporations don't seem to mind having HQ staff and rest of company in the same city. You don't meet lower-level employees at a restaurant or playing golf unless you specifically set an appointment with them. And I've never seen anything to this explanation of Exxon's choice aside from internet rumors. I think they were also considering Conroe for their location at the time.

 

 

Might be true of "most" corporations, but the idea of having HQ separated from multiple divisions of companies is not unique to Exxon.  When Boeing moved its HQ to Chicago, they specifically excluded from considerations all cities where they had substantial operations.

[H-Town Man]

14 minutes ago, Houston19514 said:

 

At the time, they wanted the HQ to be in a city where they had no significant operations.  That excluded Houston.  (At the time, that made some sense because they had different divisions headquartered in different places; now, not so much.)

 

Like I said above, I have heard this as an explanation many times on here but have not seen any substantiation of it. It's not that I don't think it's believable, I would be happy to believe it if I saw a news article or a quote or something.

 

[Houston19514]

31 minutes ago, H-Town Man said:

 

I have heard this explanation of why they went to Dallas before and it seems like an urban legend. Couldn't they have a separate office within the Houston area? Downtown vs. Springwoods? Is the distance from Houston to Dallas really meaningful anymore in the era of teleconferencing? GE and Boeing aren't really comparable. In those cases, the HQ office moved to a big-name city for prestige of location and left the lower positions where office space was cheap.

 

It's not an urban legend.  I specifically recall reading an interview of the guy who handled their HQ search.  He was at Friendswood Development, then itself a division of Exxon headquartered in Houston. He was very disappointed to have to do a headquarters search that excluded his own city.

[H-Town Man]

20 minutes ago, Houston19514 said:

 

It's not an urban legend.  I specifically recall reading an interview of the guy who handled their HQ search.  He was at Friendswood Development, then itself a division of Exxon headquartered in Houston. He was very disappointed to have to do a headquarters search that excluded his own city.

 

The fact that John Walsh, president of Friendswood, was involved in the search validates your memory. If someone had access to this article, it might shed further light:

 

Pearson, Anne and Ralph Bivins. "Exxon moving corporate headquarters to Dallas." Houston Chronicle. Friday October 27, 1989. A1.

[Houston19514]

7 minutes ago, H-Town Man said:

 

The fact that John Walsh, president of Friendswood, was involved in the search validates your memory. If someone had access to this article, it might shed further light:

 

Pearson, Anne and Ralph Bivins. "Exxon moving corporate headquarters to Dallas." Houston Chronicle. Friday October 27, 1989. A1.

 

Here's the quote, which I provided some years back in another thread (the Chron archive link is no longer good):

 

Houston was not considered for Exxon's new corporate headquarters because executives decided it should not be in the same location as one of the company's major operating divisions, said John Walsh, president of Friendswood Development Co., the Exxon subsidiary in Houston that handled the site search.

Exxon officials believed the presence of the corporate headquarters could erode the autonomy and independence of the division headquarters if it were located right next door,Walsh said. "They made the decision early on they did not want to locate near one of their operating groups," he said.

http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/ar...id=1989_659330

[ToryGattis]

1 hour ago, H-Town Man said:

 

This may be the case but most corporations don't seem to mind having HQ staff and rest of company in the same city. You don't meet lower-level employees at a restaurant or playing golf unless you specifically set an appointment with them. And I've never seen anything to this explanation of Exxon's choice aside from internet rumors. I think they were also considering Conroe for their location at the time.

 

It's not much of an issue is a company is in a single major line of business, like most are.  Very few companies are so large as to have multiple large business units operating independently.

[102IAHexpress]

I agree about the innovation district/hub. I remember UT wanting to create one here in Houston, but UH objecting. Maybe the Governor can bring both sides together and reach a compromise. UT can support UH's College of Medicine in exchange UH can support UT's innovation hub. A win win for the city. 

[102IAHexpress]

There's a Washington Post article discussing the top cities that were good matches for Amazon based on their criteria yet still left out of the top 20. The top three that were left out were Minneapolis, Baltimore and Houston. Their analysis ranked Houston's public transit/transportation and education favorably, but labor participation in tech not so favorable. 

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/01/19/the-big-losers-in-amazons-hq2-hunt/?hpid=hp_hp-more-top-stories_wb-hq2-840am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.79e983a21fb6

[ToryGattis]

My blog post on the topic.

Why Amazon's HQ2 rejection is good for Houston (plus a winner prediction)

[HOUTEX]

Quote

We're saving a lot of resources we don't have to spend on a losing battle, or even risk the "winner's curse" for whoever does win the bidding war.  We'll just keep growing with lots of small under-the-radar wins like we always do.  I'm not saying we don't have work to do as a city to attract more tech talent and companies (something Houston Exponential is directly addressing), but let's not blow this up to be more than it is.  Houston is doing fine - more than fine - and most cities would kill to be growing and thriving like we are.  Amazon was an unnecessary distraction. - let them cause havoc (talent poaching, driving up home prices, increasing traffic, draining tax incentives) somewhere else.

 

With respect, it's that mentality that will keep this city from ever being more than an also-ran in corporate relocations not involving heavy industry. The fact that  20 cities made the cut and Houston didn't in the face of the fact that there are more STEM workers here than anywhere else in the country is a damning statement. Granted, those workers by and large aren't going to be sought after by tech companies, but it does prove up the robustness employment base and regional education system to accommodate the 50,000 jobs that Amazon would have created. 

 

 

Blaming Harvey may not be all that incorrect - although it's likely more accurate to say that climate change and risk were factors. 

 

The fact we didn't make the short list is ultimately a judgement on the desirability of Houston, and a confirmation that nothing has changed in the eyes of the nationwide firms who value quality of life. The city has made great strides to reduce it's concentration on energy labor and to boost quality of life, maybe this will provide adequate impetus to kick start a tech sector and invest in public facilities that don't just convey massive numbers of cars from the burbs to downtown. Or, we could just shrug our shoulders and say "aw shucks, didn't want it anyway."

 

[Fortune]

Houston, the City of Houston, the Greater Houston Partnership, Houston First, Houstons leaders should all be embarrassed that Houston didn't even make it to the top 20. I really hope that this lights a fire, because Houston really needs to get its s**t together. There are to many backwards thinkers running Houston. There is no reason the UT campus should not have moved forward in Houston, there is no reason our mass transit should not be further along than it is. We need a more diversified economy!

[Ross]

7 hours ago, H-Town Man said:

 

I don't think so. Just a few hundred employees, but that's where the prestige is and the decisions are made. They moved the lower-level jobs here because they had to, it's where the industry is; they moved the upper-level jobs there because they wanted to.

 

The move to Dallas was in 1989 or 1990, and was a deliberate choice to locate away from operational sites. I've seen articles somewhere that Atlanta was considered. I suspect one reason for Texas was the lack of a state income tax.

6 hours ago, ToryGattis said:

I expect the HQ will move down here at some point with the fancy new consolidated campus.  If not, it's probably because of corporate values that want to keep HQ staff separated from business units so they make more objective budgeting and investment decisions (people are naturally biased towards the people they're around every day).  GE and Boeing - among others - do the same thing.

That's the explanation given by then CEO Rex Tillerson here http://fuelfix.com/blog/2014/10/23/exxon-mobil-ceo-not-moving-headquarters-to-houston/

 

 

There will be other opportunities to attract new companies. Hopefully without giving up any great amounts of subsidies.

[kbates2]

There are plenty of reasons the UT campus should not have moved forward.  Don’t jump topics.

[102IAHexpress]

10 hours ago, Fortune said:

Houston, the City of Houston, the Greater Houston Partnership, Houston First, Houstons leaders should all be embarrassed that Houston didn't even make it to the top 20. I really hope that this lights a fire, because Houston really needs to get its s**t together. There are to many backwards thinkers running Houston. There is no reason the UT campus should not have moved forward in Houston, there is no reason our mass transit should not be further along than it is. We need a more diversified economy!

 

How exactly can Houston's leaders diversify the economy? Are you suggesting some sort of state owned/controlled industry? Hysteria aside, Houston will be just fine. Fortunately Houston's leaders are pretty rational. If you want to see a case study on how local leaders can cause a mass exodus of citizens from a region, just look at the failed polices of Chicago's mayors and alderman. 

 

My two cents:

 

Long term pluses for Houston:

Johnson Space Center. NASA really put Houston on the map. Unfortunately the previous administration ended man space exploration. However the current administration is reversing that policy. That can only be good for Houston.

Bush Airport. Not really reported much but yesterday/today IAH launched a new route to Sydney. It's currently the second longest route from the US. Cities would kill for the amount of international routes Houston has. 

Energy: Again, favorable policies on energy will only help Houston.

Health Care: Baby boomers are getting older every day. 

Port of Houston:

Etc,...I could keep going but you get the picture.

 

Long term challenges:

Image problem: Houston is an ugly spread out city. It just is. Houston's 600 sq miles is half of the state of rhode island. It's pretty much the worst laid out city in the world for mass public transportation. But if the image of mass transpiration is really that import then maybe Houston can spend a few billion on a vanity project. Like that maglev to Shanghai's airport that operates at a deficit, transports very few people and provides no viable market solution for travelers, yet is very "cool".

 

Universities: Rice is top notch, but is way too small and pumps out way too few graduates. I was surprised at how many people had never heard of Rice up here in Chicago. I know that Rice prefers to be the Princeton of the south instead of the Harvard of the south, but on a few key majors/disciplines they need to greatly expand for the betterment of the region. 

 

 

[ToryGattis]

Why You Shouldn’t Wish for Amazon’s HQ2 in Your Town

[HoustonIsHome]

I think Dallas and Austin are consistently regarded as more attractive than Houston for 3 reasons: 

 

1. Complacency.

To me Houston is the most complete city in Texas. We know it but we often assume respect but never demand it. Our attitude is often " we will definitely get the bid because Dallas had nothing on us and let's not even talk about Austin." Where we often fail is that we don't show how good we are we just lay there and hope for the best. Which brings me to #2. 

 

2. Marketing.

Dallas and Austin know they lack the resources that Houston has, but they never let that bring them down. While Houston is bragging about how they are better than DFW and Austin, DFW and Austin are putting out lists of reasons why they are great fits. We do not market ourselves enough. Out shining fellow cities is not marketing. It's just bragging.

 

3. Perception.

Putting the first two together it seems we have a perception problem and we are to blame. Dallas and Atlanta grow because they see a value in a new job no matter what that might be. 

It's great to be the capital of am industry but even better to have that an be attractive in other areas. When I graduated from school in San Antonio and I told my neighbors I was moving to Houston everyone kept saying why Houston and that Austin would be much better for young people. When asked why all they could say is that it just is. Even Texas leaders when there is talk about corporate relocations they immediately think Dallas. Why? Because that's where companies relocate.

 

4. Weak proposals.

We know we are great but we need to start doing a better job at going after things more forcefully by showcasing our strengths. If we do not believe that we are a good fit and Texas leaders don't see us as a good fit what makes you think companies would see it as a good fit to move here? We are just as liberal as Austin but we are not Austin and should not be compared to Austin. We are just as business friendly as Dallas but we are not Dallas. We are Houston and should show off Houston and it's amenities instead of bringing down or neighbors.

The two choices floated around were week in my opinion. And I didn't really hear much incentives that were ear pulling. The KBR site is an awesome piece of real estate but weed poorly packaged with transit and residential. I know you are all going to talk about all the nearby new builds but how it was packaged was lackluster. 

The other site in the Northeast was even worse in terms of promotion. Again the other cities put out a site and they say if you come we will do this and that and you will enjoy his this related to that and we will make it so that you will live how this interact with that. For us we say look how awesome this plot is. Or "look how ready this site is" 

 

Anyway, on a more positive note. My city is resilient. We will diversity. We will continue to attract lots of new jobs. We just need to realize that the big ones get away mainly because we have a more lukewarm approach to attracting them. 

 

[IronTiger]

1 hour ago, ToryGattis said:

Why You Shouldn’t Wish for Amazon’s HQ2 in Your Town

It does make me think why Amazon was even looking for large A-class cities to begin with (Houston, Philadelphia, NYC, Chicago, etc.), which already have big problems with housing prices, homelessness, and traffic. That's why I think they should be looking for B-class cities that have good connections with A-class cities but aren't connected, like Pittsburgh, places in Ohio, etc. (I would consider Detroit and Austin to be B-class but not good candidates but different reasons).

[bobruss]

14 hours ago, Fortune said:

Houston, the City of Houston, the Greater Houston Partnership, Houston First, Houstons leaders should all be embarrassed that Houston didn't even make it to the top 20. I really hope that this lights a fire, because Houston really needs to get its s**t together. There are to many backwards thinkers running Houston. There is no reason the UT campus should not have moved forward in Houston, there is no reason our mass transit should not be further along than it is. We need a more diversified economy!

When the congressman from our district squashes future projects which would compliment our existing rail lines its pretty hard to work around it.

Especially when he is one of the players on the transportation committee and has written into the transportation bills that Houston will not receive any money for rail along Richmond or Post Oak, due to a very small handful of his constituents. Half of the properties along Richmond who had tenants that were negative about the rail aren't even there anymore and quite a few of the properties have been bulldozed and major mid rise apartments have been built in their place. Which would seem to provide riders for said line.

It would also be the final piece that would connect pretty much every major cultural, university, medical, sports, business districts and residential areas in the city.

When you have two dodards Delay and Culbertson in charge of transportation plans consecutively that are against mass transit it kind of puts you in a hole.

No telling how large a mass transit system we might have now if they hadn't got in the way. There is a solution coming up this November and you need to do your homework and find the alternative to John Quack Culbertson.

[SkylineView]

It may be semantics, but IMO, the core issue for non-inclusion was the site.  We shouldn't have presented a "please help us make our city better" location (east side)... we should have presented a "this is what Houston is all about and it's AWESOME" location.  Generation Park would have been ok, though it's damn far to town, and it's green-field.  There are lots of great big empty lots in this country, and we didn't need to show Amazon an empty lot, we needed to show them something that would have fit into the fabric, culture, and excitement of our town.

 

Trying to think of sites that I would have presented (and ignoring who owns them), I offer three options. 

1. The Rice-owned property on Main where the old Sears is going to close (in town, transit, colleges, area is dynamic and building, plenty of apartments and a good scene)

2. The Energy-Corridor at I-10 and HW 6 where plans show a campus similar to what this would become (bus transit, good highway connections, access to suburban homes and great schools, planned dense developement, Top Golf)

3. Around the future Bellaire transit station (transit, access to Uptown, 'relatively' convenient to areas out west)

 

These sites are true Houston, fit into an existing fabric (rather than trying to make something from scratch), and cater to the demographic of the Amazon workforce.

We shouldn't have put the success or failure of a neighborhood on the company, we should have invited them to participate in the ongoing success of an area.  

[IronTiger]

17 minutes ago, bobruss said:

When the congressman from our district squashes future projects which would compliment our existing rail lines its pretty hard to work around it.

Especially when he is one of the players on the transportation committee and has written into the transportation bills that Houston will not receive any money for rail along Richmond or Post Oak, due to a very small handful of his constituents. Half of the properties along Richmond who had tenants that were negative about the rail aren't even there anymore and quite a few of the properties have been bulldozed and major mid rise apartments have been built in their place. Which would seem to provide riders for said line.

It would also be the final piece that would connect pretty much every major cultural, university, medical, sports, business districts and residential areas in the city.

When you have two dodards Delay and Culbertson in charge of transportation plans consecutively that are against mass transit it kind of puts you in a hole.

No telling how large a mass transit system we might have now if they hadn't got in the way. There is a solution coming up this November and you need to do your homework and find the alternative to John Quack Culbertson.

 

Not this again. I'm not going to break down everything but...

- A lot of the Inner Loop has densified in the last 10 years without rail

- Traditional METRORail wouldn't have worked at all outside the Inner Loop, Dallas-style commuter hybrid rail would struggle to gain ridership due to the slow speed, and either way the street-running rail system would be dog slow

- Even as it is, the Red Line is highly successful but it takes nearly an hour to go from Northline to Fannin (52 minutes according to METRO's schedule) whereas the equivalent drive is about 20 minutes in non-peak freeway times

 

[bobruss]

There are people who have no other way of getting around than mass transit and for them every little bit helps. 

You don't have to ride it. Others will and will take cars off the streets. Its about options and great cities have them. We don't.

Your right traditional rail wasn't meant for commuter lines, but how do you create commuter lines that take everyone to all of the different 

centers of commerce. Galleria, Med center, downtown, energy corridor, greens point, and the  woodlands. Houston is almost too disjointed for commuter lines but by first building a rail system that connects all centers of commerce to each other allows for more of the commuter lines to help.

You could build a commuter line to Sugarland and  Rosenburg that carries much of the med center that could connect to the red line.

Same for Katy freeway or 290 that could connect to the bus hub at old katy. and so on. 

Your own statement about the density is just the reason it will be more useful and help take cars off the streets. 

I don't know anything about you but a lot of the young people that I talk to don't necessarily care about cars and would prefer to take the rail when convenient. Thats one of the selling points for all of the new development along the rail.

You have to be more open to the future. If you wait until then its too late to build the infrastructure.

I don't understand your why this again.  Its a fundamental issue that people like Amazon, Apple and the high tech industry are looking for.

[H-Town Man]

4 hours ago, ToryGattis said:

Why You Shouldn’t Wish for Amazon’s HQ2 in Your Town

 

I think the main think for these cities is guaranteeing themselves a future in the 21st century. Pittsburgh was relevant in the 20th century because of industry, but industry is gone. They need something new to be relevant. Newark is doling out more than anyone because they are a hellhole. They need to put themselves on the map again.

 

The intoxicating thing about HQ2 is that it's a magic bullet - you can instantly go from irrelevant to relevant. It's like hitting a grand slam when you're down 3-0. If you have 50,000 Amazon jobs, no one can say you're not a relevant city for tech. And more jobs will follow these.

 

Houston also needs to worry about its future post-oil, but the first thing we need to worry about now is flooding. Nothing else we do really matters if that fear is hanging over us. We might just need to exit these beauty pageants for awhile and get back to fundamentals.