Sources provide a behind-the-scenes account of Amazon's HQ2 selection process, say the company made the decision to split HQ2 in two in September
@StevenFulop, Mayor of Jersey City http://www.wsj.com/... Hamza Shaban / @hshaban : Amazon “controls elected officials, acquired the power to tax, and works with government to avoid sunshine laws. It's time to recognize the truth about this company...in its current form, Amazon and democracy are incompatible,” writes @matthewstoller http://www.nydailynews.com/... Anand Giridharadas / @anandwrites : In America in 2018, it is more accepted for the government to pay private companies to “create jobs” than for the government to simply hire people to fix America — its bridges, roads, schools, etc. http://twitter.com/... Aaron Klein / @aaronklein : It's really hard to find a way to complain about 50,000 new high-paying jobs being created, but the anti-math crowd will always find a way to do so. http://twitter.com/... Jeremiah Moss / @jeremoss : “If you thought $1.5 billion was the final sticker price for New York, you'd be wrong. The total is more like $3 billion, considering everything in the package.” http://twitter.com/... Shira Ovide / @shiraovide : I don't get the idea that after a year Amazon decided no single city had the talent pool it wanted. Wouldn't people MOVE from elsewhere for a good job? https://www.wsj.com/... Harvey Miller / @mobileharv : Amazon will invest $5 billion over almost two decades in HQ2, but apparently isn't considering sea level rise in their calculations? https://nyti.ms/... Matt Murray / @murraymatt : The full inside story of Amazon's beauty contest: ‘They literally set in motion a bidding war and these communities literally groveled at the table of the possibility of seeing HQ2 located in their community.’ http://www.wsj.com/... Matthew Rose / @mtthwrose : It turns out Amazon knew for months one city couldn't satisfy its requirements, and yet kept making demands on the long list of supplicants. http://www.wsj.com/... Matt Stoller / @matthewstoller : New York is giving Amazon a tax subsidy of $48,000 per job plus a straight $325 million cash grant. Plus other incentives. http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The HQ2 saga closes its loop today: after reporting last week that Amazon would split HQ2 evenly between two cities to recruit enough talent, the Journal now dates that decision to September and reconstructs how the company ran the contest. The through-line since spring has been Amazon's information advantage — officials visited 10 of 20 finalist cities collecting granular data down to local students' SAT scores, and earlier reporting showed it extracted a wealth of comparable data from all 238 entrants, potentially useful for future warehouses.
First-order effects
- The 238 bidding cities now see the mechanics of a process they competed in blind — including that the decisive split call was made months before the announcement, meaning most late-stage lobbying was theater.
- Jersey City's Mayor Fulop and critics like Matthew Stoller and Anand Giridharadas are using the reveal to press the argument that Amazon's bargaining position over governments is incompatible with democratic accountability.
Second-order effects
- The BuzzFeed roundup of what cities offered — an exclusive airport lounge, employee relocation expenses — turns the incentive race into public record, raising the political cost for the winning cities' officials and arming subsidy opponents.
- Rival large employers watching the auction learn that a structured competition yields deep municipal data cheaply, lowering the barrier to running similar multi-city contests for their own facilities.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, corporate siting shifts from private site selection to open auctions where cities pay with tax breaks and proprietary data — and the losers' contributions become a standing argument for regulating or taxing the practice.
- The backlash Stoller and Giridharadas articulate points toward subsidies-for-jobs becoming a mainstream political fight, with the government-hires-people alternative entering the policy debate.
The trend: Corporate facility siting is becoming a competitive auction in which cities trade incentives and data for jobs, while the resulting subsidy politics hardens into a durable backlash.