How Toronto’s losing bid for Amazon’s ‘HQ2’ headquarters still delivered benefits

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During an Amazon headquarters contest that was likened to a Hunger Games for cities, the Toronto region made it to the middle pack of a 20-city shortlist, a new book reveals.

Toronto didn’t win the unorthodox 2017-2018 “HQ2” competition to host Seattle-based Amazon’s second headquarters chronicled — with previously secret details — in a chapter of U.S. journalist Brad Stone’s “Amazon Unbound.”

But people behind the local bid tell the Star that the experience, while “weird” in the words of one, continues to pay economic development dividends today.

The tech giant’s September 2017 invitation for incentive-laden bids to land more than $5 billion (U.S.) in construction and up to 50,000 well-paying jobs triggered a frenzy among North American cities, yielding a total of 238 bids.

Calgary’s giant banner in Seattle — along with a newspaper ad declaring “Not that we’d fight a bear for you ... but we totally would” — failed to push it into the top 20 contenders with Toronto.

In 2018, after Amazon staff visited shortlisted cities, a site review committee put them in categories — “not viable”, “hotly debated” and “top tier,” Stone reveals.

Toronto was “hotly debated,” along with Atlanta, Boston, Los Angeles, Nashville, and Washington, D.C. “The HQ2 (site review) group cited high costs and high taxes as negatives for Boston and Toronto,” Stone writes.

In the top tier were Chicago, Dallas, New York, Northern Virginia, Philadelphia and Raleigh, N.C. Rejected by the committee, based on factors including size, infrastructure and talent pool, were Austin, Columbus, Denver, Indianapolis, Miami, Montgomery County in Maryland, Newark and Pittsburgh.