Image (of the Washington Post article) from DC Mayor Muriel Bowser's promotional video pitching DC as a site for Amazon's HQ2.

News that Amazon is interested in locating a second headquarters in some city has sparked a fascinating set of comparisons and urban planning analyses of cities across the nation. It's also become an opportunity to see how national writers view the Washington area, including many who live here.

Downtown DC, or even anywhere in the District west of the Anacostia, indeed seems like an unlikely place for a new Amazon headquarters. Most notably, there just isn't a whole lot of empty space, especially not with transit, ready infrastructure, and zoning for a large office complex, Office space is expensive and has to compete with the high demand for new housing.

East of the Anacostia River, though, might be more of a possibility, as it still has a few large, mostly-empty areas planned for new development like Poplar Point and Saint Elizabeths (if Amazon goes there, expect a lot of Alexa queries for “why isn't there an apostrophe in Saint Elizabeths?”)

There's more to Washington than DC

Also, the District is not the entire Washington region. It's not even the entire walkable urban part of the region. It's been interesting to see how many national analyses comparing Washington to other areas forget about areas like Arlington, Alexandria, Silver Spring, or Prince George's County.

One of the most obvious potential Amazon sites is Crystal City, a very large, very dense, walkable neighborhood of primarily office buildings, right near metro and an airport, which is (unfortunately) largely vacant thanks to federal officeholders leaving.

Image from a video by the Crystal City BID.

Crystal City has been working hard to remake it's image and attract new, private office tenants, but there is still an enormous amount of space for a potential Amazon campus. And, it's almost all controlled by one property owner, formerly Vornado, now JBG Smith.

Prince George's County has many areas right at Metro stations which could make an excellent new tech campus with, with the added benefit of helping to alleviate the regions significant east-west divide. So would a site in eastern Montgomery County, like White Oak, though that does not have a Metro station.

Washington shines in walkability outside DC

Whether Denver, or Philadelphia, or another metro area with a highly-educated workforce is a better site is certainly worth debating. But many of the analyses simply did not consider sites outside their cities' cores.

It's important to make this point, not so much because I am pushing so hard for Amazon in our region, but because the existence of walkable urban places with transit outside the center city is actually a major defining quality of our region.

A 2016 report from Christopher Leinberger and Michael Rodriguez from the GWU School of Business and Smart Growth America ranked the Washington area #2 in walkable urban places, largely because of the many “WalkUPs” in the region but outside DC.

Image from Foot Traffic Ahead: 2016.

Why our suburban jurisdictions are (and aren't) walkable

This is thanks in large part to foresighted planning decisions by Arlington and Montgomery county in particular. Arlington moved the planned Orange Line from a highway median to under Wilson Boulevard specifically to create places for new transit-oriented villages. Montgomery County also planned extensively around several stations to create new urban centers.

Fairfax County missed this chance, and had to build a new (Silver) line to bring transit to its office centers and create walkable urban places. Nodes like the Mosaic District, which is just one huge boulevard too many away from Dunn Loring Metro, suffer for it, but to its credit Fairfax really trying hard to make Tysons walkable.

Relative walk sheds (red outline) of Landover and Takoma. Image from PlanItMetro.

Prince George's County did a particularly poor job of locating its metro lines in areas right for urban growth, or planning urban growth where possible around Metro stations. Now, it is hamstrung by metro stations hemmed in by rivers and low-density single family neighborhoods.

But it, too, is trying. More than most other US cities, elected officials at least pay lip service to walkable urbanism. That means any analysis comparing Washington to other cities needs to look just a bit farther than “blocks from the White House.”