Right now, especially in the Midwest, the number one economic development driver is shifting away from tax incentives and moving more and more to available talent. The game in the economic development world is a competition for the best and brightest young minds. And for that, public perception outside of a city matters a very great deal. Companies are very much aware of this trend as well. They will not spend hundreds of millions on a place that will be leaking talent, as it would impinge on their hiring ability. For a site like Amazon, every municipality is going to offer the max tax incentives allowed by state statute. That is not even a point of discussion, it will just be assumed. At the end of the day, the value of the tax incentives will only be a portion of the other financial incentives (training dollars, building expenses, infrastructure work to prepare for the site). Don't get me wrong, for smaller projects there can be a vast difference, and the more incentives the better. However, for major companies, incentives won't make or break a project and everyone is putting their best foot forward.
So in the case of an Amazon HQ, incentives are important, but they will be fairly commensurate from community to community. If I had to guess, I'd say the two top factors for amazon are talent and logistics. When you give free two-day shipping to millions of customers through their prime programming, logistics is key. Both the internal logistics within the facility, but also transportation of goods and people. Traffic, access from available sites to highways and airports, potentially even rail, all matter. Then you need a place that people will want to live and work. Since this is a second headquarters, a place where Amazon execs will want to go as well. Amazon is also a tech company where perception directly effects their sales and talent attraction efforts. So certain cultural and societal perceptions must be maintained.
They need to hire 50,000 people. That is roughly 3.5% of the entire workforce pool in the StL metro area. That is all but a few of the current unemployed. Believe me, nobody wants to hire all of the unemployed, as when you get down to 2-3%, they are unemployed for a reason. People will have to move there, or commute from the surrounding area. These new people will be needed to work for both Amazon, and for the companies that Amazon steals workers from. More and more, people are refusing to move or commute, no matter how good the job, to place they don't like. If St. Louis doesn't change its image, it is going to find itself struggling more and more to attract talent, and as a consequence large site location projects.
That doesn't mean its impossible for St. Louis. They are centrally located, have a good airport, large population and plenty of things to do. If they have the right site that can support such a project, that can mean as much on the micro-level of the site itself as the macro level of city-wide data, depending on the needs of the project. Because every project has vastly different needs. I have worked as a site selection consultant (never on anything near Amazon level), and currently work in a local ED office (again, not on the level to compete for Amazon). From my experience, I can tell you that the decision matrices generally have much the same variables, but the relative weights are vastly different. And the trend is definitely moving away from financial incentives to factors that effect daily operations (access to supplies/customers, access to airport/rail/highways/ports, cost and availability of labor, quality of higher education in important fields and likelihood of that talent staying, etc). Almost all of my efforts as a LEDO right now, are spent on talent attraction, retention and development.
I totally agree about working together. The more you can work together, the better it is for your self interest. A region pooling its resources has a better shot than a smaller municipality. A project that lands in your region is good for the region and even state, even if it doesn't land in your community. Regions where communities compete against each other, end up hurting themselves by hurting their neighbor.
TLDR - I actually work in the field and from my observation, community perception as it relates to talent attraction, is growing more and more important, and will be critical to Amazon.
