So the city dropped the plan.

Amazon also insisted on nondisclosure agreements from the 238 cities bidding for HQ2. Scandalously, American cities and states now spend some $90 billion a year in cash and tax incentives to attract companies, money that could go for infrastructure, schools and police, and that usually doesn’t pay off, as Derek Thompson pointed out this week in The Atlantic. Amazon’s nondisclosure clause set up a process that allowed it, in effect, to crowdsource vast swaths of information about cities while preventing their citizens from knowing what their elected officials were doing to entice the $860 billion company.

This is certainly not how New Yorkers like to operate.

If New York hadn’t landed Amazon, it would not have been a surprise if Dallas had. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, apparently has a home in Texas, too. Scott Galloway, the business analyst and Amazon expert, tweeted a funny-but-true image showing the proximity between Mr. Bezos’ homes and the company’s current and prospective headquarters.

Silly as it sounds, where bosses live turns out to be as good a predictor as any of where tech companies will settle.

For years, suburbia has offered these companies acres of disposable, cheap, anonymous office parks: mostly one- or two-story concrete structures surrounded by loads of surface parking. These sites minimized costs, maximized security and allowed companies to scale up, contract or split into different units quickly — at the same time they promoted sprawl and traffic jams and transformed once-quaint bedroom communities south of San Francisco into phenomenally expensive places to live.

Not that young tech workers, more and more of them immigrants, wanted to live in suburbia, anyway. Increasingly they demanded the diversity and benefits of city life. And so did successful innovation companies, following the lead of workers.

Another way to put it is that companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon became attracted to cities like New York, Los Angeles, Seattle and Washington because these cities had already made transformative public investments in assets like culture, parks, universities and transit.