What are the major effects of an urban vs suburban campus? I would expect a suburban campus would make people more likely to move out there, so it would help with city housing prices, but I don't know anything about how urban planning works.
"What are the major effects of an urban vs suburban campus?"
An urban campus will promote urban housing which is dramatically more energy efficient than single family homes.
Further, commuting from a condo building to an office tower (or whatever) is very likely to not involve a car and to involve significantly more walking - so you have positive environmental and public health externalities there.
... and then there are networking effects as the new condo building needs a new neighborhood cafe which needs a new bus station and bulb-outs for bike lanes ...
Fast forward 20 years and you have a new train line.
I'm of the firm belief that suburbs are a blight in general. Wasteful, inefficient, characterless... they are the real reason cities "lose their soul". So I agree with you that Amazon did the right thing by choosing to go with an urban campus.
In the bay area it seems that the bunch of suburban campuses just leads to high property values in the end but you also have terrible commutes and even worse traffic.
Out where? East of Redmond is MOUNTAINS. West of Seattle is WATER. So shove it way more north and south? And increase traffic 10 fold while waiting 30 years for the highways to catch up?
That mountains are still 20+ miles east of Redmond. There's still plenty of building opportunities if you look around Redmond Ridge, Duvall, Carnation, Fall City and Monroe.
It doesn’t affect traffic that hugely if people are fine with living out in the vicinity of the suburban and exurban campuses. Which for a number of decades including when Microsoft was being established, they were. There was a net outflux from many cities in the US. Most people wanted to live out to way out.
