Pittsburgh `Obvious' Choice For Amazon HQ2: Author, Editor

PITTSBURGH, PA - John Tamny doesn’t claim to have any inside information. But the author and editor of the RealClearMarkets website believes that Amazon will make Pittsburgh and Detroit the finalist cities for its second headquarters.

Tamny also believes that Pittsburgh will top Detroit for the grand prize.

Amazon has spent nearly three months sifting through the proposals from virtually every major metropolitan area in the country as it decides where to build a new headquarters to complement its existing one in Seattle. A decision is expected in the spring.

The stakes are high. Amazon has pledged to invest as much as $50 billion in its new campus, and eventually hire as many as 50,000 people to work there.

In an online column for Forbes, Tamny writes that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos will eschew larger cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco because people would expect Amazon to locate there. “Bezos has a tendency to surprise,” he noted.

Instead, Tamny believes that Bezos will be tempted to reinvent the image of a city still struggling to shake off its rust belt image. Doing so would give Amazon even more clout in Washington, D.C., than it already has, he wrote.

Detroit and Pittsburgh both have well-developed airports, first-rate educational facilities and a variety of cultural attractions.

But “Pittsburgh also is in the process of developing a strong technology base as the presence of Facebook, Google and Uber attests,” Tamny wrote. “The speculation here is that Jeff Bezos...will revive Pittsburgh.”

Photo: Associated Press.