Each day that passes is another day closer to learning where Amazon will plant its second headquarters — a 50,000 job, $5 billion mega-project for which 20 North American metro areas are competing.
If the e-commerce and technology giant picks the Dallas-Fort Worth area, the decision making won't stop there.
The North Texas proposal for HQ2 — compiled by the Dallas Regional Chamber of Commerce — has not been released for the public to see how many sites were pitched to Seattle-based Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN). But cities and developers with projects across North Texas pitched more than three dozen sites to the chamber.
In addition to Dallas, Fort Worth, Frisco, Allen, Plano, Irving, Richardson, Denton, Carrollton and Westlake are among roughly a dozen North Texas cities believed to be represented in the DFW packet sent to Amazon.
For the Dallas Business Journal’s list of the Top 10 sites primed for Amazon HQ2, click here.
Sites in downtown Dallas seemed to be the frontrunners when Amazon visited in February, sources familiar with the search said.
If HQ2 heads downtown, Amazon could anchor the proposed bullet train station, go into one or more of the city's existing skyscrapers, be part of Victory Park or Trinity Groves, or anchor a redevelopment planned for the area surrounding Fair Park, among other choices.
Stuart Fitts, co-founder and managing partner of Trinity Groves on the west side of downtown Dallas, is one of the majority of developers and public officials familiar with the project. Fitts thinks HQ2 will land in Dallas, in part because the city is the population center of the region.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Fitts thinks the restaurant incubator-anchored development he started with famed restauranteur and entrepreneur Phil Romano matches up well with Amazon’s needs.
"If North Texas is chosen for Amazon HQ2, I expect it to be the urban core, including sites in Trinity Groves, Victory (Park) or the Reunion (District),” Fitts said.
“Amazon has said they want easy access to DFW International Airport and Love Field, the greater DFW area, public transit and employee housing,” Fitts added. “The urban core offers Amazon exactly what they are looking for."
If Amazon comes to North Texas, “it will be Dallas” as opposed to the suburbs, Tom Leppert, a businessman and former Dallas mayor, told the Dallas Business Journal in a recent interview.
“I know when they were here, they expressed a desire to be in the core,” Leppert added.
But Leppert said he doesn’t know which site in Dallas the company might favor.
Real estate developer and investor Ross Perot Jr. said he thinks Dallas-Fort Worth has a solid chance to win Amazon’s second headquarters. He put the Northern Virginia-Washington D.C. area, along with Atlanta and Dallas-Fort Worth, at the top of his list for Amazon’s HQ2 pick.
Perot and his Hillwood real estate development company are pitching sites for Amazon's HQ2 in Dallas' Victory Park and in Alliance, a giant development north of Fort Worth.
“I think Dallas has got as good a chance as anywhere in the country,” he said. “When you go through all of the numbers, all the reasons that companies move here and people move here, we are very, very attractive.”
To read this story in its original form on DallasBusinessJournal.com, click here.
