The View From Atlanta: Is A-town Really the Inevitable Site of Amazon's HQ2?

A company that specializes in comparing communities, making lists of best and worst, has surveyed the various bets on Amazon's new headquarters and predicted a Georgia choice.Seattle-based Amazon recently narrowed its list of potential cities for its second headquarters from several hundred down to 20 -- Atlanta and 19 other metro areas in the United States and Canada. In Texas, Dallas and Austin made the cut.The prize will be a massive project that include 50,000 well-paid tech and corporate workers.Government officials vying for the headquarters have been frenetically trying to out-do each other with taxpayer-funded largesse for Amazon, which last fiscal year had revenues of about $136 billion."Trust us -- it's going to be Atlanta," wrote Sperling's BestPlaces, after evaluating 18 other rankings of potential locations for Amazon's much-desired second headquarters."We created one huge super-study which tallied how each location performed and from that, we generated a score for each place," Sperling wrote.  Continue reading...