The Geography of Corporate Headquarters

When Amazon announced this week that it would locate HQ2 in both New York City and Arlington, Virginia, major media outlets published articles complaining that big tech was reinforcing the growing gap between coastal superstar cities and left-behind cities in the middle of the country. Sure, the company announced a smaller facility in Nashville, but that hasn’t muted the outcry of criticism, fueled by nearly $3 billion in taxpayer-funded incentives—one of the biggest incentive hauls in modern memory.

This is all as predicted: A chorus of urbanists including myself have said that the Amazon HQ2 was never about a single HQ2, but rather about crowdsourcing data on sites, talent pools, and local incentives, for future sites. For these and other reasons, since the announcement nearly every media story about Amazon has been negative, as the Washington Post’s Jonathan O’Connell tweeted. Local politicians and activists groups are already speaking out about how Amazon is taking its “winners” to the proverbial cleaners. A growing chorus of pundits and commentators are also calling on Amazon and other corporations to shift their operations away from coastal superstar cities and spur more development in the heartland.