No Amazon, no problem
City may not house firm’s HQ2, but success in tech relies on innovation, expert says
Toronto’s failure to land a new Amazon “headquarters” won’t slow the cityshaping tech boom that could still include a major Amazon component, say observers of the local bid.
“This list of 20 finalists was not really a list (of candidate cities) for HQ2,” or a second Amazon headquarters, Richard Florida, the U of T urbanist who helped craft Toronto’s bid, said in an interview on Tuesday.
“This was a list of places Amazon really thinks they’re going to put something. We should compete to get whatever that is but, in reality, the key to our long-term success is to create the next Amazons in Toronto, not lure the current Amazon.”
On Tuesday, the Seattle-based online retailing juggernaut capped a yearlong competition to host its second headquarters by announcing it will split the hotly sought prize between two cities — Crystal City, Va., a suburb of Washington, D.C., and Queens in New York City.
Each stands to eventually gain up to 25,000 new jobs and billions of dollars of potential investments from Amazon and companies that support it. Nashville will get a 5,000-job operations centre, the company said.
Toronto was the lone Canadian entry on Amazon’s 20-city shortlist. It also stood out for making its bid details public and for not offering the millions, in
some cases billions, of dollars in promised tax breaks and other incentives many U.S. cities and states waved at the explosively growing firm.
Florida said he expected either New York City or Washington, D.C., would win Amazon’s unprecedented contest, but was surprised they split the prize. He was on the board of Toronto Global, the agency that developed the Toronto-area bid, but resigned so he could criticize U.S. mayors and governors for sparking an incentives bidding war with precious public dollars.
“I’ve told (Toronto officials) since Day 1 that Amazon was cloud-sourcing information to make a whole series of corporate location decisions, not just headquarters, and that Toronto is dating Amazon, getting to know Amazon,” the New Jersey-born Florida said. “We did it in the right way, transparently and without incentives, and at the end of the day I’m proud to be a Torontonian.”
Amazon is expected to benefit from government subsidies and investments totalling more than $2.4 billion (U.S.) from New York, Virginia and Tennessee. But observers said the fact that Amazon left incentives from Maryland and New Jersey — up to $8.5 billion and $7 billion respectively — on the table shows that factors including tech talent and air travel connections mattered more.
“We’re going to have a debrief with Amazon later this week,” and pitch the company on expanding its Toronto operations, Toronto Global chair Mark Cohon said.