CityLab Daily: The HQ2 Competition, One Year Later

Distress signals: City and state governments spend about $50 billion per year to lure companies with incentives—mostly tax breaks—to come to their town and provide jobs. It’s a policy challenge that economist Tim Bartik, the author of a new book, Making Sense of Incentives, has made a career of rethinking.

The cost of attracting big corporate firms at the expense of city tax rolls came into focus with the city-versus-city competition for Amazon’s second headquarters, the results of which were announced one year ago yesterday. In a two-part conversation with Richard Florida, Bartik reflects on incentives in the aftermath of HQ2, and argues that place-based policies like schools, infrastructure, and services are more effective tools for creating jobs, investing in distressed communities, and addressing regional inequality.