Amazon recently announced that New York and Washington D.C. would split their “HQ2.” While it is disappointing that Nashville didn’t land HQ2, Amazon did announce that they will be building an “East Coast Hub Of Operations” in Music City. While some may see this as a 2nd place medal, this will have a major impact on the future of this city for decades to come.
I previously wrote an article on why I thought Nashville was the perfect city for Amazon HQ2. Nashville simply can not handle the amount of jobs that would bring. In retrospect, it was foolish to think that Nashville would be a serious contender; nevertheless, it was a fun idea to think about. Currently there are 70,000 jobs in downtown Nashville; Amazon would bring 50,000 more jobs. Nashville isn’t big enough to handle this kind of impact yet. The traffic is already terrible, and there is no quick fix to solve that. Not to mention that the housing market is one of the fastest growing the nation already.
The good news is that Amazon did announce the East Cost Hub Of Operations would bring 5,000 jobs paying an average of $150k. That’s a nice average salary for a lot of Nashville’s residents. That’s $750,000,000 a year added to Nashville’s economy. For a city who’s GDP is around $60 Billion , that’s a nice shot in the arm. These 5,000 jobs will supposedly create another job and a half indirectly equaling 12,500 total. The impact of this will be seen and felt as traffic gets worse and buildings rise up.
Something that really sticks out about this project is that this will automatically make Amazon one of the ten biggest employers in Nashville. While Nashville feels big, the city’s biggest employer is Vanderbilt with 26,000 employees. After you take out government jobs, you then have HCA and Nissan at 10,000 jobs, and Saint Thomas at 7,000. This will slot Amazon as the 7th largest employer ahead of Community Health Systems. The number of jobs Amazon is bringing is not small for a city the size of Nashville.
Nashville has been notorious for giving insane corporate handouts, but they got a bargain here. $102 million in incentives is what they offered Amazon. Some quick math based on the $750,000,000 a year this will bring to the economy, and it is easy to see that the tax revenue from these salaries will be made up in no time. It’s unfortunate that cities keep doing this corporate handout practice, but it was easily worth it in this case. Sometimes, you have to play the game or stand on the sidelines.
Of course, this isn’t all good news for Nashville. With rapidly rising housing costs already putting people on the streets, this will only make things worse. Not to mention the terrible traffic problems throughout the city and no real solution on the horizon. Ideas like “the commuter challenge” won’t solve this issue, and the public transportation in Nashville is abysmal. Commutes that used to take 20 minutes just a few years ago now take over an hour. There’s a lot of great ideas out there, but there’s yet to be real action on this issue. Nashville will need smart people to solve these problems and Amazon should play a big part in that.
Overall, Middle Tennessee should be excited about this economic growth. Not landing HQ2 may be one of the best things to happen to Nashville. This isn’t a consolation prize, it’s very much a big win for Nashville.
Smokey covers the Tennessee Volunteers for the SoBros Network. He loves a good backpacking trip, but hates taking a shit in the woods. Follow on Twitter: @SoBroSmokey
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