LOUISVILLE — All of the Amazon HQ2 applications are in and the retail company isn’t expected to make an announcement until 2018, but the speculation about which city the business will choose isn’t over.
This time, it’s Sperling's Best Places, a data company that makes city rankings, that thinks they have an answer. Unfortunately, Louisville isn’t theirs.
Best Places evaluated 18 “of the most reputable lists and rankings of potential Amazon HQ2 locations,” according to a blog post, to come up with the 64 most likely cities for Amazon to build its second headquarters.
Louisville didn’t even place.
Instead, Atlanta stole the top spot thanks to six first-place rankings. Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. followed, making up the top five slots. Indianapolis made the list, but ranked toward the middle at 34.
The list did not include every city or region that applied. Amazon received 238 proposals from across North America for its HQ2.
Louisville did meet Amazon’s basic requirements for a second headquarters. The city contains over 1 million people, is within 45 minutes of an international airport and has the space for 8 million square feet of buildings.
But even champions of Louisville’s Amazon bid admitted that there were challenges to getting the company to settle here. Perhaps the biggest roadblock for the city is its lack of skilled workers. Amazon needs a technical employee base and Southern Indiana’s educational attainment, at least, is low compared to the rest of the country.
Still, Louisville submitted its Amazon application in October with cautious fanfare.
“You have to go for it,” said Alison Brotzge-Elder at the time, the communications and public relations director for Greater Louisville Inc. “Yes, it’s a big ask. It’s a huge, huge ask. However, we have to put ourselves out there because that’s the only way we’re going to move our region and our economy forward.”
Louisville was supposed to include several possible sites for the headquarters in its application and one of those was the River Ridge Commerce Center in Jeffersonville.