Seattle has new challenges, now that Amazon has chosen to direct most of its upcoming growth to New York and Virginia.
The first is to ensure that Seattle continues to be a place where startups and growing companies want to locate and build their future.
This requires more care and feeding of its attributes, including livability, a diversity of housing options, an educated workforce and a vibrant cultural scene. It also demands a new definition of Seattle, beyond the constricted geography and political climate of Seattle proper, encompassing a broader metro area.
Greater Seattle has ample capacity for growth, a talented and dispersed workforce, and a $77 billion rapid-transit system in progress. Note that Amazon's new sub-headquarters won't be in Manhattan or Washington, D.C. They'll be in nearby communities linked by mass transit.
Amazon announced Tuesday that it's investing $5 billion and creating 50,000 jobs _ to start _ divided between Long Island City, New York, and Crystal City, Virginia. For perspective, Apple now employs 25,000 in the San Francisco Bay Area and Google employs 20,000 at its Mountain View, California, headquarters.
The second challenge for Seattle is to reset its relationship with Amazon and cement its ties to the place that nourished Jeff Bezos' startup and enabled its phenomenal growth and success. This means more than the groveling letters and kaffeeklatsches that followed Amazon's initial HQ2 decision.
Seattle prevailed because for now it remains Amazon's primary headquarters and center of gravity. The current generation of company leadership is established here, but the next may not be, especially now that satellite headquarters enable experimentation with multi-headed organizational structures.
The decision should be viewed as a win not just for any particular region but for the United States. It's a triumph that the country has hundreds of locales ready to support the equivalent of two new Apple headquarters, including sites in two of its oldest and largest metro areas.
Amazon wasn't going to grow forever in one place. But Seattle may have hastened its pursuit of alternate headquarters sites, and jeopardized its long-term claim on HQ1, by blaming it for the city's failure to manage growth, affordability and traffic challenges facing every major city nowadays. Officials must stop blaming private-sector job creators and make the region function better.
Rather than planning and supporting economic growth that creates generations of jobs and opportunity, City Hall used Amazon's success as an ideological wedge. Amazon might have deflected this sooner with heavy-handed lobbying and by manipulating public opinion. But companies creating good, clean, well-paying jobs shouldn't have to play that game.
Amazon will continue hiring in Seattle, but Tuesday's HQ2 decision coincided with the end of the boom. The state is already seeing a slowdown in commercial construction, which gave government more to spend during the Amazon surge.
"We do expect quite a bit less growth than we had previously," said Bret Bertolin, the state's senior economist.
In the online shopping sector that includes Amazon, employment grew from 21,000 to 56,000 jobs over the last five years. The state expects another 12,000 will be added by 2023. Each of those jobs generates at least 1.6 other jobs, according to the state's conservative economic model.
Seattle and the state of Washington will miss the tens of thousands of jobs Amazon is creating elsewhere. But they should be grateful for the prosperity Amazon already created and the strong chance _ if they rise to the challenge _ of producing more leading companies.
