Great Museums Seem to Matter for the Locations on the Shortlist for Amazon’s HQ2
Is it just by chance that almost all of the 20 cities and counties on the shortlist for Amazon’s second headquarters can boast access to great art museums?
You can’t help noticing the correlation. Of the 238 cities and counties that applied for consideration, plenty have the population (over a million), the pleasant environs and the basic infrastructure Amazon seeks. But if they don’t also have an exceptional art museum — and preferably more than one — those cities didn’t make the cut.
Amazon (whose founder and chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, owns The Washington Post) says it expects to hire as many as 50,000 full-time employees over the next 10 to 15 years for its second headquarters, with an average annual total compensation exceeding $100,000. (Average pay at Amazon’s warehouses is a different story.)
How do art museums come into it?
Unemployment has been low for a while now. Demand for workers is high, supply tight. People qualified to expect high salaries tend to have the leisure time and surplus cash to pursue cultural aspirations. Companies trying to persuade them to move to where they are — and often to drag families with them — need to be conscious of those aspirations.
That’s why, in the competition to secure the best and brightest, Amazon and other big companies care deeply about cultural offerings in the places they’re located.
This isn’t just my hypothesis. It’s right there in Amazon’s stated criteria. Yes, the company wants its second headquarters to be in a place where there is excellent higher education, low crime rates and cooperative local government. But it also wants, in the company’s own words, “locations with the potential to attract and retain strong technical talent”; places where its “employees will enjoy living, recreational opportunities, educational opportunities, and an overall high quality of life.”
Art museums — which these days are much more than just places to look at art — play an outsize role in satisfying all these factors. Their prestige and prominence make them prime tourist destinations. Their health and quality are also tied up with civic pride, with what makes a city desirable to live in.