As cities nationwide scramble to win the ultimate corporate prize — Amazon's planned second headquarters with as many as 50,000 new employees — Detroit can take hope that at least it'll be in the running.

Metro Detroit checks a lot of boxes that Amazon said it is looking for — a large population and labor force, a major airport hub with international connections, and good universities. Metro Detroit enjoys all those.

Seattle-based Amazon also wants an urban vibe to attract the sort of tech-savvy workforce it employs. And while Chicago, New York and many other cities offer a lot more of that urban vibe right now than Detroit, the Motor City's status as a comeback city with thousands of young millennials moving in should win it some points.

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Author and urban guru Richard Florida said as much in a Twitter posting Friday. Florida listed his top three candidate cities for Amazon's new headquarters as Toronto, Chicago and Washington, D.C., with Detroit as his "sleeper" candidate.

Then, too, Brookings Institution writer Joseph Parilla looked at Amazon's stated criteria and listed Detroit among 20 cities he thought were in the running.

Detroit offers some other advantages — real estate prices that are still relatively cheap by national standards, for one. And Amazon said it wants a city that thinks big and creatively when it comes to building a multimillion-square-foot project such as Amazon's planned second headquarters. Detroit has the excess room to make that happen.

But Detroit faces some obstacles, too. Other metro areas offer a more highly educated workforce than we do — a legacy of decades when Michiganders could get a good-paying job with little more than a high school diploma.

And the wide income and wealth disparities in metropolitan Detroit — from a distressed central city surrounded by many prosperous suburbs — may play against Detroit, just as for years outsiders dismissed Detroit as a "murder capital" or Rust Belt failure.

As my Free Press colleague Nancy Kaffer has already noted, metro Detroit's lack of a good public transportation system will also play against us.

And each advantage that Detroit offers — a major international air hub, access to great universities — can be met or exceeded by other cities.

Certainly Detroit will put together a first-rate presentation. Corporate leaders like Dan Gilbert of Quicken Loans are already working on that. And our political leadership has shown itself willing to deal to win corporate site decisions.

So, bottom line, the odds of Detroit winning Amazon's big prize are neither a slam dunk nor a lost cause. We'll probably be in the running — but so will lots of others.

Contact John Gallagher: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jgallagherfreep.