In September, Amazon announced it would be searching for a second home: a new headquarters, replete with 50,000 high-paying jobs and an expected $5 billion invested in construction. But instead of doing the searching themselves, Amazon requested proposals from cities and regions interested in the offer.
They got back 238 bids from across North America by the deadline, October 19. Not only did these cities throw their hats in the ring, they competed in offering tax incentives, streamlined regulatory processes, and more. One town even offered to create the city of Amazon in some de-annexed land.
We want to know what every single city offered Amazon as incentive for the second headquarters. Only one of the 238 proposals will win, but the precedent set by each bid matters for future corporate subsidies.
Amazon hasn’t announced where the bids came from, but The Seattle Times tracked which places publicly announced they were in the running, and we used the newspaper’s database to request as many bids as we could.
- Small Red - No Responsive Documents
- Large Red - Rejected
- Small Yellow - Awaiting Acknowledgement
- Orange - Fix Required
- Small Green - Partially Completed
- Large Green - Completed
Some places were excited to share their proposals, like Billerica, Massachusetts.
Others have already turned us down. Chicago won’t play.
But we’ve only requested bids from around 100 places - that leaves more than a 100 bids we don’t know about. That’s why we need your help! If you know of a place that submitted a proposal to Amazon that we missed, let us know via email, Twitter, Facebook, or via the form below. And if you want to keep tabs on what comes back, join our HQ2 mailing list.
Places people have already submitted:
Image via Defense.gov
