- Amazon's contest for the home of its second headquarters has helped the company score valuable data on land use and development across the United States.
- A 253-page proposal that New York City prepared at the request of Amazon, which The New York Times published in full on Friday, shows that the city provided extensive data some of it not publicly available on its work force, education systems, optimal sites for development, current and future land use and development projects, and other information .
- The proposals that 238 cities submitted to Amazon are likely to contain similar details.
- "Amazon will put that data to prodigious use in the coming years to expand its empire," said Stacy Mitchell, a director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a think tank based in Washington, DC.
Amazon's highly publicized hunt for the site of its new headquarters, known as HQ2 , was a brilliant strategy.