The chances of online marketing behemoth Amazon choosing Salt Lake City, or any other location in Utah, for its much coveted second headquarters - (hashtag)HQ2 - are slim.
And, no matter what they might say, the people who run the state’s political establishment are just fine with that. For reasons they might not admit.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, we are too close to the company’s original headquarters in Seattle to further its goal of world domination. The tax breaks and rebates and other enticements we could offer would not come anywhere near the multi-billion dollar sweeteners dangled before the company elsewhere. We don’t have enough educated workers on tap.
We do have a lot of beautiful public lands for recreation between 72-hour workweeks and, thanks to our ranks of returned Mormon missionaries, lots of people who speak Spanish and other languages. But that is not likely to sway Jeff Bezos enough that he would choose to base his drone fleet in Draper.
So the 50,000 high-paying jobs and $5 billion in construction will likely pass us by. And it is probably just as well.
We don’t have 50,000 workers qualified, mostly in computer engineering, marketing and other professions, for those jobs. So we’d have to import a great many of them. And where the hell would they live?
The whole valley is already suffering from a severe housing shortage, which is a primary cause of the homelessness crisis that is the center of so much attention. An invasion of white-collar workers would just drive up rents and real estate prices and make it that much more difficult for average people, much less the poor, to have a decent roof over their heads.
Yes, the resulting economic activity would, to some degree, raise all boats. But, as previously discussed in this space, the high-tech HQ Streets of San Francisco have a lot of homeless folks sleeping on the street in front of Twitter’s main office. Even the tech-employed have to double and triple up to get a decent loft to live in.
The strain on the local system of highways, streets and public transit would also be huge. Our already overcrowded schools would be so packed that you wouldn’t be able to turn around in the hallways. And a further degradation in the area’s air quality, even if the Amazon beatniks brought along their affinity for such things as public transit and electric cars, would likely be a real problem.
But the real reason why Gov. Gary Herbert, House Speaker Greg Hughes and their cadre of Republican real estate developers may not really want to land Amazon is because of what else it might bring with them.
Yes, you guessed it.
Liberals.
An influx of $100,000-a-year tech heads, those who fit well into the Amazon culture, would be an influx of, largely, Seattle-style progressives, Democrats and the religiously unaffiliated and inactive, aka the “Nones.”
Consider that last year’s election results from King County, where lies Seattle and the first Amazon HQ, went nearly 70 percent for Hillary Clinton. Amazon-area voters went about as overwhelmingly for Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee and Democratic Attorney General Bob Ferguson.
The Seattle metro area is also among the leaders in the trend for Americans -- especially in the continental ears of New England and the Pacific Northwest -- to be giving up ties to any formal, organized religion. According to the Pew survey of such things, some 37 percent of adults in the Seattle metro are atheist, agnostic or, in the words of the survey, “nothing in particular.”
The political demographics of Utah are already slowly shifting, especially in Salt Lake County, as millennials and other Information Age natives have come here, drawn by the University of Utah, the health care giants at the U. and Intermountain Healthcare, other high-tech employers and, of course, the ski resorts.
It is getting more and more difficult to gerrymander this shifting population out of its due share of Utah political power. As a whole, Utah is likely to remain a reliably red state for at least another generation, thanks in part to the Legislature’s skilled Big Data gerrymandering of congressional and legislative districts.
But Utah will get slowly but surely more purple, and even many of the Republicans who continue to get elected will have to tack to the center to maintain their positions. It will happen slowly. Unless Amazon were to provide it with One-Day Delivery.
George Pyle, The Tribune’s editorial page editor, is writing this on a computer system we bought from Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post. The jury is out on whether that’s a good thing. gpyle@sltrib.com