Minus museums, this could be said of plenty of other cities that are in places with less wacky politics. Museums don't mean a thing. Low cost of living as a requirement means a relative low cost of living compared to the West Coast.
I'd prefer to see Denver as the location over Dallas. The State of Texas needs a swift kick in the ass regarding their state politics, specifically the war on women, and their continued absurd policies regarding weed. The last thing they need more of is to be rewarded for unsustainable tax policies.
Dallas is a liberal stronghold in Texas, and in absolute numbers turns out more for Democrats than any other city in the state, including Austin (percentage-wise Austin wins by +5%, I believe). Unlike Austin, which is gerrymandered in the state legislature, every single state/county/city official in Dallas is a Democrat.
Dallas is also a gay rights stronghold, representing the only county and city in Texas, again including Austin, with non-discrimination clauses in employment and housing for LGBTQ+ individuals.
Furthermore— Texas is considering bi-partisan legislation to legalize weed. Dallas has already decriminalized it, and the State, while backwards in other regards, hasn’t indicated it will force Dallas to back down on that measure. Dallas also has stricter gun laws than the state of Texas.
Texas has a long way to go, but I think if you would step in Dallas you would learn to leave your preconceived notions of it at the door.
I believe an HQ2 would speed up Texas’ change.
You can have your LGBTQ anti-discrimination and TX still remain red, BTW. They're not mutually exclusive.
I don't really see the argument that businesses choosing location based on taxes is fine but choosing based on employee life satisfaction is a crisis.
We need to fix the culture divide in this country. Let's work from places where we agree rather than searching for disagreement. Lots of states are near the tipping point if we could only speak to each other honestly.
It is absolutely not bullshit. I would flat out refuse to relocate to a red state. In the high tech industry, I'm not alone. Setting up shop in a deep red state is not a good way to attract world class talent from across the globe.
> Gay marriage, for example, is federally protected.
Small comfort when you are gay and wish to find a safe place to hang out for a drink and hook up... Small comfort when you are an ethnic minority waiting for a bus....
> We need to fix the culture divide in this country
In my opinion this is not gonna happen any time soon. The divide is almost to the bone. It is a fundamental divide that can't be solved with mere empathy or compromise. There is no empathy to be had and no common point for compromise.
You can only tolerate an environment where absolutely everybody agrees with you?
You know where this goes, right? Let's pack all the liberals into 1/5 districts and give the rest to 60/40 conservative majorities. Great job everyone, at least nobody (rich) compromised their values.
Certainly not when there's so many people like you with bizarre black and white visions of the world.
If you're an employer, a great way to pre-emptively shoot yourself in the foot is to make yourself unattractive to employees and shrink your hiring pool in such a tight labor market.
What's the end game for "I refuse to deal with those people"? Permanent 60 R senators?
If you wouldn't live there, who should?
This is a bunch of malarkey. For a person who's supposedly not homophobic, he's appointed a lot of homophobic judges, has a homophobic Attorney General, is gutting a lot of executive orders and regulations on homophobia in the workplace, etc. And this is before we get into anything transgender. https://www.advocate.com/politics/2017/11/09/trumps-14-most-...
This. Gay marriage is a good litmus test if you're a minority of any kind trying not to get discriminated against or shot.
Careful making suppositions about politics based on a winner's party. Often it matters about the opponent strengths (or lack of). This is the same party-assumption failure people make about national elections.
Also, the government race is not a good indicator. Lupe Valdez has made mistake after mistake in her campaign — I’m liberal, and even I wasn’t enthusiastic about voting for her. She’s doing so bad that she’s polling less than the percentage of registered Democrats there are in the state.
For change, look at the Beto polls — he’s not favored to win, but he’ll come within 5 points. That’s huge considering Cruz previously won by +21. Furthermore, in the 2016 election Texas was only +9 Trump — that’s less than conventional swing states such as Ohio.
Hillary did better in Texas than any Democrat since Reagan. Also, Texas last had a Blue governor in 1994. Texas hasn’t always been red — only for the past two decades — and it won’t stay red forever.
California last had a Republican governor in 2011, but people will look at you funny if you try to cite that as evidence that California wasn't dyed-in-the-wool Blue at the time.
To discount any state as unchanging is doing a disservice to all US Citizens: public opinion changes, demographics change, politics change, and people change.
Which state did the only President to pass a civil rights bill since the civil war come from? And he passed 3 of them! 3-0 vs the field.
In terms of margins she did better than any Democrat since Bill. Bill had a 3 point and 5 point loss respectively thanks to Ross Perot.
A couple months ago I was there, and around my wife's parents' house, almost every yard had a Beto sign.
So I can verify that this is true, at least for some parts of Dallas.
Not really any different than Seattle, except Seattle has enough sway over the rest of Washington to keep it from going hard right.
Which, honestly, it should be - I get the /notion/ of a lot of US electoral history in trying to allow diversity and representation, but it's people who get to vote, not acreage. Punishing people for living in a city by making their vote worth proportionally less is wrong, and ironically, by acreage/population density is a rough analog of what many were trying to escape "more votes with more land holdings".
Given that the Puget Sound region has 65% of the states population...
At this point the Democrats can't win for losing. If you field broadly likeable A teamers like Beto and Davis and still lose to comical villains like Cruz and Abbott, it's laughable to think the tide is really turning in our lifetime. Something big has to change, and I'm not sure what it is.
Saying stuff like this just makes you sound like a partisan hack. I'm not a "both sides are equal" guy, and I have my preferences, but you should work on trying to see other's points of view a little better than what you apparently have been.
(lived in Texas, now live in Seattle)
I searched about this and found: https://www.aclutx.org/en/know-you-rights/abortion-in-texas
It does seem they have some fairly detailed restrictions.
Even if you're just coming at it from a place of power politics.. you think MORE packing of liberals into fewer and fewer areas is going to swing it for us? If tech companies were serious about liberal politics, they'd be opening big offices in TX and OH. Could solidify the blue wall for a generation with a few 10k people.
Part of that is ensuring they keep things as center to slightly right as possible and toss some money at social causes to keep their rep.
If the democrats actually won consistently they might start to shift left. These companies do not want a strengthened left wing in the US.
Yes, they do.
> Part of that is ensuring they keep things as center to slightly right as possible
Liberal politics are center-right.
> If the democrats actually won consistently they might start to shift left.
They might, at which point tech companies (and other big firms) would be less likely to support them.
I believe I've seen these trend analyzed in other states as well (low and middle income earners have the most to gain by moving to lower cost of living states, so it's a common pattern).
https://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/article13647809... https://lao.ca.gov/laoecontax/article/detail/265 http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-california-migration-2...
Perhaps you should clarify that this is true of legal in-migration. Wanna take any guesses as to how wealthy and educated the folks crossing over the border on a continual basis are?
Illegal immigration to Texas btw is much higher than to California: https://www.sacbee.com/site-services/databases/article174373...
Citation, or are you guessing? Which state has the most people migrating to it? To determine whether they are educated, the reason for the migration can help.
The fact that you've heard of it is entirely unrelated to the number of people it employs and in what capacity it employs them.
“Ever heard of X?” is an idiom that means something like “here’s an obvious example you should already know about.” It doesn’t imply that knowing about it proves something. It’s a perfectly fine argument that just says, “TI exists and attracts educated employees.”
It's a bit hurtful whenever the Midwest is left out like it's not part of the country.
My understanding is that Texas doesn't have a lot of that or at least its minimized.
The reason "business environment" can't be duplicated or reversed because it's like a legal equivalent of tech debt code rot where also a large group of ops employees (politically influential bureaucrats) earn their life's income on the busy work the system creates.
For instance, property taxes in Williamson County (Austin suburb, extremely conservative, are at 3.08% for new construction homes. Compare that to any other state.
California has the highest state income tax, near top sales tax rates and if you are a recent home buyer some of the highest absolute property taxes (thanks to the price dynamic described above). Plus you get screwed on federal SALT caps, mortgage interest deduction and maybe AMT.
I'll gladly take your 3% if there were more options for interesting places to work and it was not 110 degrees in the summer.
By this ranking, the tax burden in Texas is 33rd out of 50 states so it's not a low tax state, but it is definitely on the lower tax end of the spectrum. https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-highest-lowest-tax-bur...
Both NYC and DC have far better public transit and airports than Dallas. The only thing Dallas has beat over these two places is cost of living, where in both it's not too difficult to find affordable housing outside the city (something that isn't as much the case in other tech hubs).
The business environment aspect tends to matter more to smaller companies, or those building things like factories, than it does for Amazon, as they already have the resources to push through complicated government processes, and will receive substantial tax breaks to make up for the rest.
1. DC area may have three potential cities, but Texas is the only other region that has two cities being considered
2. DFW airport is one of the US’s busiest airports, and American Airlines is headquartered there, so you can get a direct flight to anywhere in the country in 3 hours tops. Amazon already has multiple warehouses here and also ships freight through DFW and other airports in the area.
3. Public transit (Dallas has the largest light rail network south of DC), continued investment, world class museums, and honestly a pretty hip city with a lot of activity in the center, not unlike Seattle. Also lots of millennials moving there for its low cost of living and ample jobs.
4. You can’t beat Texas’ business environment — Bezos even praised it when he spoke at a business conference at SMU earlier this summer.
5. Establishing two offices will give Amazon influence in two places, and covering Seattle (West Coast), DC/NoVa (East Coast), Texas (South) gives them nationwide influence.