The city collects $0 if there's no building no matter what the incentive was. It would be as if AMZ went somewhere else to build. People see "handout" and think AMZ was written a check, but that's not how the incentives work. "handout" is a very misleading term.
> The city collects $0 if there's no building no matter what the incentive was.
In reality that's not what happened. Amazon has had a very large unsubsidized office in Manhattan which predates their "HQ2" proposal and has quietly grown even larger in the years since I interviewed there. That they have significantly expanded their corporate offices in Hudson Yards without subsidy suggests that the tax breaks were unnecessary to begin with. Amazon was always going to staff up in NYC regardless of whether they got the tax break or not.
In general, subsidies of that sort for companies operating out of desirable locations like SF and NYC are unnecessary because the employer needs access to the highly educated talent pool in those cities far more than the city needs any individual employer.
