I know they eliminated Pittsburgh right out of the gate, but I think it has a bunch of things going for it. It's one of the few places where housing is cheap (but a pretty beautiful downtown) but young tech workers would love to live: tons of stuff to do but lots of knowledge workers with CMU. Biggest obvious issue is no direct flights to Seattle, but if Amazon built a headquarters there it seems like it would be easy to reach critical mass to add more flights
Pittsburgh is probably really close to ideal. I can't really think of much of a downside.
It has a lot of universities, and the programmers are quite good (the ex-CTO of Modcloth? had a video where he pointed out that the Pittsburgh office was quite a bit better than the SV office). Your factory workers will be out toward the airport and your knowledge workers will be downtown. It's a very old city, so it is quite a bit more pedestrian friendly than most. And, because it's old, it has a really good arts scene. And Pittsburgh has a woefully underutilized airport.
The only downsides are weather: 1) Lack of sunlight--Pittsburgh is almost as bad as Seattle in that respect and 2) Winter--Northeast winters SUCK.
Not to mention a starving international airport that would be desperate to help make flights to Seattle happen. I know I'd be on the first one.
And really, Pittsburgh is fantastic. Good schools, good commute even if you live in a suburb, great food and alcohol scene, with an arts scene and history to rival any major city (Carnegie and Warhol for starters).
I visited Pittsburgh recently, and I kind of fell in love with it:
1. Beautiful, unique geography, with a ton of outdoor stuff to do (granted, at least in summer).
2. Gorgeous architecture all around.
3. Great public transportation.
4. Lively nightlife, lots of options.
5. Relatively cheap
Pittsburgh basically has infrastructure for a city twice as big, but has managed to transition from its industrial past better than most rust belt cities.
Relatively cheap will go away as soon as ~30,000 new families come in to work at Amazon. Which is a big reason why I'm not sure I want Amazon to come here.
I think Pittsburgh and Cleveland are two ideal choices, for many of the same reasons. They both have strong tech pipelines at Case and CMU, affordable prime real estate, openness to offering incentives, and are are highly under-rated in terms of livability. Both have shown they can attract tech workers with options (CLE with its hospital system, Pitt with Google and others).They are both disadvantaged by the flight availability metric, but I think this could be induced by demand from Amazon.
Also, they eliminated PGH based on the 1 million population without accounting for the city borders being much smaller than normal cities due to how Allegheny county is structured. The metro area is ~2.5 million and is about the same size as most city borders.
