What About the Cities Amazon Forgot?

The news that Amazon decided to split its new headquarters between New York City and Washington, D.C.—two big East Coast metros already equipped with roaring economic engines—came as little surprise to urbanists who’d been keeping a close eye on the year-long HQ2 pageant. Instead of dropping their “prosperity bomb” on a struggling town that would have been utterly transformed by an influx of high-salaried workers, the tech behemoth picked a pair of superstar coastal cities already laden with them. For any number of business reasons, that decision made a lot of sense.

As CityLab’s Richard Florida wrote in his take on a Brookings Institution report that came out earlier this week, this was a textbook demonstration of “winner-take-all urbanism.” That report details the alarming dimensions of the growing gulf between America’s boomtowns and its “left-behind places”: Just 2 percent of the country’s biggest, showiest metros have enjoyed the bulk of employment gains since 2008. The rest are largely languishing—unable to recover after repeated blows of de-industrialization and globalization.