After 14 months, two rounds and 238 bids, Amazon finally decided to split its second headquarters between the two most obvious locations imaginable: New York City and Washington, D.C.

The process of identifying the companys HQ2 location pitted cities against each other, incentivizing them to offer the largest tax breaks and the most slickly produced marketing campaigns to capture Amazons attention. Chicago offered to give highly paid tech workers their state income taxes back to them. Fresno was fine with letting Amazon decide how to distribute its tax revenue . Calgary, Canada, put up banners near the companys headquarters in Seattle reading, Hey Amazon, were not saying we would fight a bear for you but we totally would. In a bizarre inversion of municipal corruption, the city of Tucson sent a 21-foot cactus to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos who announced he was returning it for ethical reasons.

All of these efforts were aimed at landing the big prize: $5 billion in investment and 50,000 new jobs. After the announcement that Long Island City, in the Queens borough, would host half of the new HQ2, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted , New York City is about to get tens of thousands of new, good paying jobs and Amazon is about to meet the most talented workforce in the world. Allison Silberberg, the mayor of Alexandria, Virginia, which will host the other half of HQ2 along with Arlington, said her citys bid was successful due to the collective strengths of our communities our workforce, education, infrastructure and our unparalleled quality of life all of which will be strengthened by this new investment from Amazon.

Others were less enthusiastic. New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson said he was excluded from the negotiations with the company and that he was very concerned about the details of the subsidy agreement. New York Assemblyman Ron Kim (D) introduced legislation to block the deal and spend the funds forgiving student debt instead. Even before the bids were announced, activists in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Chicago and Atlanta demanded city lawmakers release their bids to the public or rescind them altogether.

The year-plus bidding process was a cynical ploy at worst and a huge waste of time at best. After shortlisting proposals from Miss Congeniality candidates Indianapolis and Raleigh, North Carolina, Amazon ultimately chose two large, established American cities that offered millions of educated workers, existing tech clusters and proximity to financial and political capital. Bezos even owns homes in both cities already.

By using this process, Amazon was able to get cities to offer up bigger and better incentives than they otherwise would have, said Greg Squires, a George Washington University researcher who studies urban development. Jay Carney, Amazons senior vice president of worldwide corporate affairs, made this explicit Tuesday, stating that the talent pool i.e., not the tax incentives was the primary reason Amazon chose Arlington and Long Island City.

But the implications of Amazons announcement go far beyond one company or two cities. The ugliness of the last 14 months highlights a growing challenge for cities and politicians who run them. According to a March 2018 report by the Brookings Institution, state and local governments dole out up to $90 billion worth of subsidies to individual businesses each year. As cities compete to give away more tax revenue and larger incentives to companies, they may lose track of the line between investing in their communities and exploiting them.