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Dallas dodges list of Amazon HQ2 ‘biggest losers'

The Dallas-Fort Worth area may or may not ultimately win Amazon.com Inc.'s second headquarters, but at least North Texas has escaped a list of "biggest losers" for the highly coveted project.
Credit: David Ryder/Getty Images
An Amazon logo is seen inside the Amazon corporate headquarters on June 16, 2017 in Seattle, Washington. Amazon announced that it will buy Whole Foods Market, Inc. for over $13 billion.

The Dallas-Fort Worth area may or may not ultimately win Amazon.com Inc.’s second headquarters, but at least North Texas has escaped a list of “biggest losers” for the highly coveted project.

Toronto, Los Angeles and Miami were tagged with that distinction in an Op-Ed published Wednesday in The Daily Caller, a conservative news and opinion website based in Washington, D.C.

Twenty metro areas have made it to the second phase of the selection process for Seattle-based Amazon’s (Nasdaq: AMZN) second headquarters, dubbed HQ2.

The Daily Caller knocked Toronto for its lack of incentives and, well, just generally being in Canada.

The publication dinged Los Angeles for high taxes, onerous regulations and a housing crisis.

Miami made the biggest-loser list because it lacks a major research university focused on tech, and because it might be headed underwater.

“There’s little chance (Amazon CEO) Jeff Bezos, firmly in the climate change camp, is going to commit to low-lying Miami,” Keith Naughton, a public affairs consultant, writes in the Op-Ed.

In a related story, a new website and petition have been formed, called “Obviously Not D.C.,” that argue against planting HQ2 in Washington.

“In a city with a housing and homelessness crisis, where tens of thousands of longtime black residents have been pushed out over the last decade, our city leaders are clamoring to bring in up to 50,000 new, likely affluent residents, without any conversation about the impact on longtime residents,” the website says.

The Daily Caller also calls New York City and Chicago longshots for HQ2. Both are cities that “might be in the running, but shouldn’t,” the Op-Ed says.

New York is bashed for being expensive, congested and a political minefield for Amazon.

“Unlike pro-business cities like Atlanta and Dallas, or mid-tier cities where Amazon can dominate politics (Columbus, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh), Amazon is practically guaranteed to be stuck in a political morass and will find (New York City) much more expensive than it thinks,” the Op-Ed says.

Chicago, meanwhile, has the worst public finances in the United States and corrupt politics to boot, it says.

Earlier this year, Amazon announced 20 metro areas, including Dallas-Fort Worth, as finalists for the $5 billion campus, which is expected to bring 50,000 high-paying jobs over the next 10 to 15 years.

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