Why Minnesota isn’t going to get Amazon’s headquarters

Minnesota is not going to get Amazon to establish its second headquarters in the state. The only people who think it will seem to be from Minnesota.

Amazon established the criteria for the winning bidder and Minnesota fares poorly, at least according to an analysis by CNBC.

We’re particularly poor at mass transit, although it might be helpful to point out to mass transit opponents around here that a company with 50,000 jobs was looking at communities with mass transit. How do you like it now?

So what cities are the most likely to win the Amazon sweepstakes? Surprise! It’s the ones that usually win these things.

New York, Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco and Boston.

In creating its scorecard, CNBC looked at public transportation ridership, workforce educational attainment, local area job growth, airport passenger traffic, and the number of accredited post-secondary education institutions in each city. The top 20 cities in each category got 20 points, the second-ranked got 19 points etc.

Economists Mark Zandi and Adam Ozimek of Moody’s also created a ranking system to figure out the eventually winner. The top 10 were headed by Austin, Atlanta, and Philadelphia.

You’ll note that in CNBC’s scorecard, Austin finished just behind Minneapolis.