These U.S. cities have the best chance of being Amazon’s second headquarters

Amazon plans to open a second North American headquarters in addition to its original headquarters in Seattle. The retailer promised 50,000 jobs and $5 billion in capital expenditures for the city that proves it has the best assets and incentives.

The floodgates opened.

It seems as though every mayor in every city in America has declared a bid to be Amazon’s next headquarters. Some have more promise than others.

We created a select list of cities with over a million people that have a chance of getting Amazon’s attention. We compared them on a number of criteria, including tech talent, airport travel time, office prices, housing costs and population. Take a look:

Amazon stressed that incentives like tax breaks would factor into its decision, but those are likely to be unique to each project, so we didn’t look at a city’s past incentives for this analysis.

Of the over 20 cities we looked at, Washington, D.C., is the most expensive for commercial real estate. On average, it costs $595 dollars per square foot to buy office space in its central business district, according to 2016-present sales data from commercial real estate data firm Real Capital Analytics. Columbus, Ohio, is at the other end of the spectrum, at $61 per square foot on average. Of course, all of these pale in comparison to commercial real estate in Amazon’s downtown Seattle home, which costs $604 per square foot for office space.

Areas outside the central business districts are cheaper — and could be closer to the airport, important for deliveries and corporate travel. At just eight minutes from downtown, Columbus, Phoenix and Salt Lake City have the closest airports.

But real estate is only part of the equation. For tech firms, real estate leases and rentals make up just 4 percent of a business’s operating expenses, while payroll alone makes up about 50 percent according to the Census Bureau’s Business Expenses Survey.

The biggest — and priciest — issue is getting and retaining workers.

That might be easiest in Washington, D.C, Atlanta, Raleigh, Austin and Boston, which were the top places in the U.S. — besides the Bay Area, Seattle and New York City, which we didn’t include for obvious reasons — for tech talent, according to real estate research firm CBRE’s 2017 Scoring Tech Talent report.

The report factors in 13 different metrics to gauge a market’s ability to attract and grow tech talent. The result is a rank of 50 North American cities based on which are best for tech employers and workers.

While the city itself will certainly provide workers, Amazon is always looking to recruit from elsewhere. Getting new talent to come to a city requires a mix of good amenities and affordable housing, according to Svenja Gudell, chief economist at real estate data firm Zillow.

Her short list for Amazon’s second headquarters is topped by Austin, Denver and Chicago because they have all the amenities of a big city, but they aren’t geographically constrained and have much cheaper housing than Seattle.

Of course, Amazon might not choose to put its headquarters in the U.S. at all.

According to Gudell, “Given our current immigration policy, especially on the tech side, it might be smart to consider Canada.”

Here’s the same information in the map as a sortable table:

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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