Doral Vying for Amazon's Second Headquarters
Downtown Doral hopes its (Amazon) prime location will convince the world’s largest Internet retailer to choose the city as its second headquarters, per the Miami Herald.
Despite a tri-county proposal from Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties to attract Amazon, the City of Doral is also aiming to lure Amazon all on its own — with a little help from real estate investment and development firm Codina Partners.
Doral’s plan offers Amazon 47 acres of space downtown for the first phase of the company’s expansion. Amazon’s second headquarters, dubbed HQ2, would have more room to grow in Doral with the addition of a 250-acre golf course that Codina acquired in 2016. The firm originally planned to use the property as a single-family home development.
Doral Mayor Juan Carlos Bermudez told the Herald he believes Doral ticks all the boxes for Amazon’s lengthy requirement list. That checklist includes a major metropolitan area with more than 1 million people, a business-friendly climate, low taxes, reasonable cost of living, cultural offerings, proximity to an airport, a diverse population, and a package of economic development incentives, according to the Herald.
The city is even working on Amazon’s request for proximity to mass transit. It already offers three routes of free trolley service connecting to the Palmetto Metrorail Station, and during a recent Doral Council meeting, members planned to endorse a new Rapid Transit Smart Plan aimed at reducing traffic.
Doral is the fastest-growing city in the state — and the 11th fastest nationwide, per statistics from Florida International University. In the face of stiff competition from cities including Orlando, Boston, Denver, Los Angeles, Toronto, and Washington, D.C., Bermudez said he still believes Doral is “a very good fit.”
Should Amazon choose either Doral or the tri-county plan, South Florida would benefit immensely from an economic standpoint. The Herald cites HQ2 as a catalyst for “thousands of high-paying technology jobs in an economy that is now highly dependent on low-wage service jobs.”