As online marketplace mega giant Amazon continues its search for a location for its brand new second headquarters, five Bay Area cities have joined together to make one big bid for their attention.
The San Francisco Business Times reports that Concord, Richmond, Fremont, San Francisco, and Oakland are involved in the bid, which aims to place the possible headquarters — dubbed HQ2 — on Concord's shuttered naval station. It proves to be a bit of an ideal spot for Amazon, as their request for pitches lays out some fairly specific criteria that must be met to qualify for consideration. For starters, apparently the site needs to have the potential for growth, with a minimum starting size of 1 million square feet that could potentially turn into 8 million square feet by 2027's end. On top of that, the SF Business Times also said that site "must be no more than 45 minutes from an airport, have at least two major highways nearby, access to mass transit and be within 30 miles from a population center."
With the "Tidal Area" of the naval base clocking in at about 7,630 acres, Concord easily meets the first requirement. And at about a 40 minute drive (on a good day) to Oakland International Airport, it more or less nails the second criteria.
Guy Bjerke, the director of community reuse planning in Concord, told SF Business Times, "We can give (Amazon) exactly what they want, something they can design from scratch because we’re in this process right now. But we’re being good regional partners in the pursuit of this. So we’re partnering with San Francisco, Oakland, Richmond and Fremont, which all have good sites, so that we could potentially get Amazon to maybe distribute themselves along a BART line and put some of their office workers in different spots."
Competing with Concord is Vallejo, as the North Bay Business Journal said last week that the Solano County city was developing its own pitch, possibly suggesting that Mare Island (which is about 25 minutes from Concord's potential site) could serve as a location for HQ2. Naturally, Concord and Vallejo are just two of many other cities vying for the contract. In the running are also Washington, D.C., Denver, Chicago, St. Louis, and Atlanta.
Previously: Oakland, San Jose Both Want To Be In The Running For New Amazon HQ