Government
The Extreme Amazon Bidder Just Got Real
Chula Vista is offering free land; Fresno is ceding community control; and New Jersey is offering $7 billion in incentives. Here’s what else we know about the 30 publicly available Amazon HQ2 bids.
Last month, before any of the bids for Amazon’s HQ2 were submitted, CityLab profiled the Hypothetical Extreme Amazon bidder. We explained some of the more outrageous economic incentives that cities could offer to woo the corporation’s second headquarters to town. Now 238 cities’ bids are in, and at least 30 have been revealed in full, between MuckRock’s requests for access and the Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat’s research. From just those few bids, we now know: the Real Amazon Bidders have met and exceeded the expectations of the Hypothetical.
They have offered their own employees’ income taxes, free land, and even a partial surrender of community control in pursuit of Amazon.