The University of Toronto School of Cities recently looked at the changing economic geography of Fortune 500 companies across the US from 1975 to 2017. Here is a diagram of the results taken from CityLab:

New York sits at the top with 70 corporate headquarters as of 2017. But the San Francisco Bay Area is now the second largest center with 35 headquarters – a testament to tech.

The study does, however, omit service firms, as these weren’t tracked in Fortune’s list back in 1975.

Also noteworthy is the specialization that has taken place across specific cities and regions. Here is another excerpt from CityLab:

America’s headquarters geography reflects the substantial variation and specialization of the U.S. economy. New York leads in finance and business services, consumer services, and goods and materials. But Houston leads in energy, San Jose in tech, and Chicago in retail and wholesale. Chicago also ranks second in consumer services, and goods and materials, and Dallas takes third in energy. Other cities like Nashville and Minneapolis take third in consumer services, and goods and materials, respectively.

The full article can be found, here.

During the recent election here in Toronto, mayoral candidate Jennifer Keesmaat raised the idea of this city region, maybe, becoming its own province. It wasn’t the first time this idea has been floated, but it once again didn’t stick.

Earlier this week, Richard Florida spoke at the Urban Land Institute’s Toronto symposium and he brought up a similar issue: Toronto is a ‘city state’ and needs to start acting like it. Here is an excerpt from a recent Star article about his talk:

He also noted that in terms of total economic output, the GTA [Greater Toronto Area] — he included the Golden Horseshoe — is responsible for about “$700 billion” (U.S) in economic output.

“Which means our … region is equivalent to that of Sweden. So we are a city state, a mega region.”

He later added: “we are a powerful global city with lots of assets to build on,” he said.

But he went on to say that despite all of these successes there’s a “sense that something is amiss, something is wrong.”

I have long supported the notion that city regions need to see and think of themselves as one united and contiguous economic landscape. In our case, it is not about, for instance, Hamilton vs. Toronto. This is about our entire region vs. New York or Singapore (a city-state) or the Pearl River Delta megalopolis.

The headlines coming out of Amazon’s recent announcement are clear: In Superstar Cities, the Rich Get Richer, and They Get Amazon. This is winner-take-all urbanism where you need to be a “superstar” in order to compete. 

So I was wrong. Amazon didn’t pick Toronto for HQ2. It instead picked Crystal City, Virginia (Washington) and Long Island City, NY (New York City). More on that, here, in the NY Times. Confession: My prognostication was at least partially about trying to create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In any event, it’s interesting to consider the locations that they did pick – as well as the fact that they ended up picking multiple cities. This was not part of their RFP. Though, many have convincingly argued that this process was over before it even began. HQ2 was always going to end up on the east coast, near one of Bezos’ homes.

Nevertheless, urbanists such as Aaron Renn took the announcement as a direct repudiation of the American heartland. He believed that Amazon would be far more cost conscious in their decision making and ultimately elect for a lower cost locale in the middle of the country. Instead, the coastal hegemony won out. 

Joe Cortright of City Observatory correctly predicted that Amazon would, for a few reasons, parlay their HQ2 search into multiple smaller locations (HQ2, HQ3, and so on). One of the reasons for this is that it gives the company more leverage when it comes negotiating subsidies on a go-forward basis. If NYC doesn’t want our next round of hires, we’ll take them to Washington.

Looking at the locations, one of the first things I noticed is that both are just outside of their respective “downtowns” (across a body of water), as well as adjacent or on the way to an international airport. Crystal City is across the street from DCA and Long Island City is a 15 minute drive from LGA. Both are situated on top of higher order transit. Makes sense to me.

Now, who wants HQ4?