Opportunity knocked, but Houston couldn't even get its foot in the door.

Amazon's heavily hyped search for a second headquarters city is the worst black eye our city has suffered on the corporate relocation front since Continental Airlines executives decamped to Chicago. No excuses: We need to find out why Houston didn't make the cut. And we need visionary leadership to make sure this doesn't happen again.

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Amazon's announcement last fall that it plans to open a second corporate headquarters ignited a spirited competition among American cities. That's no surprise, given the online retail giant's plan to add 50,000 new jobs paying average salaries of more than $100,000 a year. Something's unseemly about a corporation controlled by the richest man in the world pitting cities against each other in a bidding war. But the prize made the contest hard to ignore.

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Houston dutifully joined the fray, hoping to lure Amazon into a stretch of midtown dubbed the Innovation Corridor. We're told our city's bid was competitive, but frankly we don't know whether that's true. Although some details have been disclosed, the full proposal has never been released to the public. Whatever Houston was selling, Amazon wasn't interested in buying.

When the company released its list of 20 cities still in the running, Houston didn't make the cut. Among the metropolises still on the list are some obvious choices like New York and Los Angeles, as well as head-scratchers such as Raleigh, N.C., and Columbus, Ohio. Dallas and Austin are also on the short list. Houston has the dubious distinction as the largest city in the nation that Amazon shrugged aside.

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Now there's no shortage of theories about why Amazon snubbed Houston, but most of them are unconvincing. If you blame it on our traffic jams, why is Los Angeles still in the running? If you think poor mass transit disqualified Houston, when was the last time you rode a commuter train in Austin? If you pin it on underfunded public schools, how do you reconcile that with Washington, D.C.'s notoriously poor school system?

Our city's business and government leaders responded with words seemingly borrowed from the same talking points. Mayor Sylvester Turner and Greater Houston Partnership President Bob Harvey both referred to Amazon's rejection as "a wake up call."

That's an interesting choice of words. And it begs a question. If this is a wake up call, who's been asleep?

ASLEEP: Amazon's search a wake-up call for urban planners

Just as important, who will have the vision necessary to guide the Houston area out of its slumber? Our elected leadership fails our city and our county by focusing on short-term problems instead of the big picture showing where we need to go in the future. Houston was once blessed with a succession of visionary leaders such as Jesse Jones, Roy Hofheinz and Ben Love who would have confronted Amazon's rejection as a provocative call to action.

One factor that clearly didn't help Houston's bid was our dramatically demonstrated lack of preparedness for flooding. Any corporation making a $5 billion expansion couldn't help but question why it should build in a county with the severe infrastructure and resiliency weaknesses exposed by Hurricane Harvey. Tackling those problems requires strong civic and government leaders focused on long-range issues.

OUR FUTURE: Houston after 2040

Instead we have elected officials all too often fixated on momentary predicaments rather than tomorrow's challenges. We have small-minded acts of turf protection. Consider the University of Houston's declaration of war against an incoming "enemy" it should have worked with, when the University of Texas sought to build a data center that could have helped our city lure major employers in the future.

Houston must prepare for the coming era in which the world consumes less and less carbon based fuels. Oil could become to Houston what the automobile became to Detroit, the industry whose decline foreshadows the fall of a great city.

Amazon was a prime opportunity for our city to diversify in the evolving economy of the 21st century. We need to make sure Houston doesn't get shut out the next time opportunity knocks.