High-tech degrees, price of an avocado: The data New York gave to Amazon

An avocado at Whole Foods costs $1.25. Columbia University handed out 724 graduate degrees in computer science over the past three years. And 10 potential land parcels in Long Island City are zoned M1-4, for light manufacturing.

New York provided all of these data points, and thousands more, to Amazon as part of its successful bid to woo the tech giant to town. On Monday, New York City posted online the 253-page proposal it submitted, along with New York State, to Amazon in March. The city quickly took the file down, saying it should have checked with its partners before posting it, because the document included proprietary information. But The New York Times downloaded the document before it was taken off the public website.

The proposal shows the types of data, some rarely available publicly, that the company amassed from cities across the country as part of its search for a second headquarters. 

When Joseph Parilla, a fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, first scrolled through New York’s submission, one word kept flying out his mouth: “Wow.” Parilla, who researches economic development, was amazed at the detail and hard-to-find data the city had provided. 

The unique information in the submissions was the details on available real estate sites and incentive programmes, said Richard Florida, a professor at the University of Toronto. New York’s second response included dozens of pages of detailed information on outcomes from the city’s educational institutions that, the document says, is not all publicly available. Amazon asked for detailed information on the availability of machine-learning specialists, user-experience designers and hardware engineers — three jobs critical to its growth. The proposal says that New York University awarded 64 undergraduate and 63 graduate degrees in integrated digital media, which includes design, in the past three years. Amazon also learned that Columbia University has outreach programs for STEM programs for K-12 schools in the Bronx and Upper Manhattan that reached 3,682 students last year, and that Columbia planned to expand the offering.

The data, while not flashy, is core to the ability to understand where the best pool of potential employees live and could be developed, which drove the search for the new headquarters. 

©2018 The New York Times News Service