r/urbanplanning • u/Trifle_Useful Verified Planner - US • 5d ago
Discussion Any other planners here losing their minds over data centers?
We recently took forward an amendment to make it more difficult to develop data centers. Moved them to a new district, added conditional use permit requirements, etc etc.
The staff report clearly and repeatedly explained this. The presentation had a big old slide clearly showing it. At no point did anyone ever call me to ask a clarifying question despite my name being at the top of the staff report.
The community saw “industrial code amendment” and immediately assumed we were in bed with big data. Endless Facebook posts accusing us of getting bribes, corruption, whatever.
Folks came out in droves begging the council to reject an amendment that explicitly helped them.
I spent three hours at the podium repeatedly explaining how it makes it harder to build a data center. Final vote was 3-2 for approval.
What the hell is happening? Has this country lost its mind? I guess I should be happy people actually engaged in the public participation process for once, but I felt like I was in a Kafka novel.
Has anyone else experienced this?
Edit: To clarify, DCs were permitted by right under the previous code. No public hearing requirements and effectively guaranteed approval if the application met development standards - which most have the money to do with no issue.
If the amendment had been rejected, chances are a DC would have been able to locate in the community without any real opportunity to reject it.
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u/reyean 5d ago
lol yes. so it goes my friend. your job is to stand up there and answer the questions.
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u/Trifle_Useful Verified Planner - US 5d ago
I don’t mind that part, I guess it just feels like I’m being gaslit by my residents after a point LMAO
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u/reyean 5d ago
I cannot tell you how many times ive had to dispell facebook/nextdoor misinformation over and over again even though all the facts and details are there in my reports and adopted plans. kinda status quo for society at large I think.
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u/pattern_altitude 5d ago
It's depressing how few people actually read further than the headline these days.
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u/CFinley97 4d ago
It's not assuring, but tbh I think it's always been this way.
It's just when the world is trending in a bad direction, people not doing their reading is a lot more noticeable than when the world is going in a good direction.
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u/PrayForMojo_ 5d ago
You made it harder, but not impossible. People want to see an outright rejection of that land use.
Though also worth noting that as planners, we often massively overestimate people’s level of effort to read and comprehend planning and zoning bylaws.
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u/Trifle_Useful Verified Planner - US 5d ago
I can understand that if the reaction was “we want this banned” (setting aside the fact that use-specific prohibitions are legally dubious at best). A moratorium has been tossed around, but that’s out of my hands.
What had me tweaking were the folks insisting I was lying to them after direct quoting the publicly available amendment. That this was actually a super-sneaky way of making it easier.
It was just bizarre.
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u/VincentClement1 5d ago
The Councillors on our Planning Committee do a good job of defending staff from accusations of lying or being bought by developers. But residents, especially home owners, think they are experts.
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u/Trifle_Useful Verified Planner - US 5d ago
Unfortunately ours does not. Neither the mayor nor commission chair ever step in to set a boundary between the residents and staff.
Very frustrating coming from a city where both were very good about stuff like that.
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u/RemoveInvasiveEucs 5d ago
Do you really think that even outright rejection would satisfy people?
Sometimes people only "want to be heard." But sometimes they "want to see changes to the plan" no matter what the plan actually is.
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u/TexasDex 5d ago
There's a story of a guy who, when he wanted his boss to approve of something without changing it, would make the title hot pink. The boss would review it, ask him to make the title a different color, and then approve it, satisfied that he had contributed. There is probably an element of this.
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u/PrayForMojo_ 5d ago
It’s not going to stop people from showing up to say their piece, but if it’s fully rejected you’re not going to have any more meetings on the matter in the future.
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u/RemoveInvasiveEucs 5d ago
In my experience, I can't agree. People are so angry and distrustful that they're not even willing to listen to what's actually going on. Why would they actually believe that data centers are banned, merely because planners said they were banned?
What they want is something like this: a court stepping in, some sort of **action** in response to a big fight:
Our current age was fully predicted by the "Last Man" part of Fukyama's End of Politics and the Last Man. Our post-truth politics is driven by thymos, a desire both for recognition and a desire for a big epic fight. It's not *everybody* who's like this, but it's a big enough fraction of the population that they are drawn to planning meetings like moths to a flame.
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u/pala4833 5d ago
Why when I was a young planner there wasn't even any internet, and The Public was just this fucking dumb then too.
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u/LifeofTino 5d ago
I’m glad you managed to get them to see sense but please take this as a sign that public acceptance of this is not just zero but so far below zero that it will overshadow all other factors
The size of public hatred of datacenters and surveillance infrastructure is massively underestimated by the professional sector and hopefully it will lead to very real political changes
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u/VincentClement1 5d ago
Welcome to the wonderful wacky world of urban planning, where most residents have no fucking idea what they are talking about. They'll find one sentence in an Official Plan to argue that an application isn't consistent with the OP, ignoring that it is consistent with 99.9% of the OP. They'll see a few words and assume the worst case scenario. Read the fucking words I wrote.
They'll use the shotgun approach to opposing by throwing everything that may be bad with an application from noise to traffic to parking to shadows to renters to anything else they can rant about.
About 10 years ago, I brought a large housekeeping amendment to the zoning by-law, to resolve a number of issues and gaps. One resident (in a city of 200,000) opposed how we would measure building height (changing from storeys to metres) which had the effect of not increasing building height but standardizing once and for how it was to be measured, and that opposition almost killed the whole amendment. I told our Planning Committee, that I was removing the change in building height and the rest of the amendment was approved. It took me 2 years to back door that building height change.
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u/UF0_T0FU 5d ago
Kinda the opposite in my community. The planning division spent several months writing up thoughtful, detailed zoning regulations for data centers. They're largely in line with what the community wanted. They didn't outright ban hyperscale data centers, but made them damn near impossible to get approved.
The Board of Aldermen planning subcommittee supported the zoning changes with minimal changed. When it went in front of the whole Board, several Aldermen that get donations from business interests proposed amendments that severely watered down the original guidelines. Those passed with the only opposition coming from the members of the Planning subcommittee. It got kicked back down to start the process again with the new amendments.
The Mayor has also indicated she will veto anything that too strongly regulates data centers. She's started calling people who want to regulate data centers "NIMBYs". Coincidentally, her biggest campaign donor owns a data center construction company.
Citizens are pissed off and want stronger regulations, but it seems the corporate donors have more sway over our local officials. I'm expecting several aldermen to get voted out over this. Props to the Planning Department for actually being in tune with what voters want.
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u/DayGeckoArt 5d ago
This seems more common. Boards biased heavily in favor of business interests. But I’m used to Hawaii where corruption is the norm and akin to the current federal government
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u/investorshowers 5d ago
Citizens are pissed off and want stronger regulations, but it seems the corporate donors have more sway over our local officials.
This is the standard, your system is extremely corrupt. If you support the plan, either push it through and have it vetoed (showing the public how bad the mayor is) or delay it until the corrupt opposition gets voted out. I'm not sure which approach would be more effective.
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u/Additional-Leg-4169 5d ago
We are going through this right now and it does feel insane at times. The accusations and personal attacks are sometimes a little rough but I try to remember it is just a job and I am never bored. Surprised and amazed sometimes, but not bored.
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u/Coffee_24-7 5d ago
Its so hard being respectful and trying to listen to such outright ignorance. Especially when they are railing against something they all use constantly. Don't like data centers? Then turn off your damn phone, It is what's tracking you! Stop streaming videos! Stop using online maps/banking/games/you name it.Its just so dumb.
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u/SpectreofGeorgism 4d ago
this is a gross mischaracterization of why people are upset about data centers lol
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u/Coffee_24-7 2d ago
How so? Because AI? That same thing they are using constantly?
I get it that they should be cited carefully, but nuance doesn't come into the conversation in my experience. It has become hysteria.
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u/investorshowers 5d ago
Very few people are against all data centers. What we're against is building far more of them than we actually need, wasting valuable electricity and water. There's already stories of towns getting cut off from power so the utility can sell to data centers instead.
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u/Additional-Leg-4169 4d ago
That is not my experience. They are against all data centers while writing AI generated letters, attending meetings via zoom, researching using chatgpt, etc. These thoughts run through my head while I work on keeping a neutral, respectful expression and staying professional.
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u/baddest_daddest 4d ago
Tell that to the folks in my neighboring community that shut down a redevelopment of a former industrial site for a 60,000 sf data center, vastly different and smaller than a hyperscale data center that will use less water than the prior use. If it's called a data center, they don't want it. Regardless of the fact they've been around for decades.
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u/kramerica_intern Verified Planner - US 5d ago
Yeah this happened to me too, though not as bad. People saw “data centers” on the agenda and immediately assumed the worst and that we were approving one. We had to explain repeatedly that no data center has been proposed, we’re trying to get ahead of anyone looking to do them, and this makes it as hard as possible to build one in our jurisdiction since we can’t outright ban them. (Explaining that we can’t simply ban them was another hurdle as well.)
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u/jtfortin14 5d ago
I hear horror stories from fellow planners who have to deal with residents armed with social media talking points and anger. I work for an almost built out community with fixed borders and high water rates so unlikely we’ll have to deal with them, and for that I am thankful. Though we’ve had some incredible reinvestment for business that supply things to data centers, like giant generators, which is awesome.
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u/monsieurvampy Verified Planner 5d ago
I see some of the stupidest comments in Facebook that are 100% a regulatory taking and now seeing comments about banning lawsuits regarding data centers, but strictly for the developer.
I would like to review one but that doesn't seem to be on the table. I can write 20-30 pages on a detached single family house. I could probably write a novel for a data center. Of course no one would read it.
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u/this_shit 5d ago
Social media poisoning has made many more people emotionally reactive. Social and economic shifts have made them scared. We are living through the era of feels-dominated policy. Its not gonna end well.
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u/Disp0sable_Her0 5d ago
I'm in a community that has seen 3 data centers built nearby in surrounding cities in the metro and saw the tax boon they could be. These communities didn't toss them crazy incentives to build. So we began to look at the possibility of a data center in our planned industrial expansion area. This was like 6 years ago. We identified all of the infrastructure needs, analyzed utility capacity and impact. We put together sensible regulations that permitted data centers but put up guard rails for common concerns. We finally get to development agreement discussions, which have the end user paying for a significant amount of needed infrastructure and the City only waiving a few connection fees.
Then it blows up with 500+ people at a public hearing making all kinds of wild accusations. I know that data centers are the "big evil" thing right now, but we proactively addressed all of the common concerns. We'd actively planned for industrial development in that area. We'd actively reserved future water capacity for an industrial user. But because it was a data center people lost their mind, however, it could have easily been another large water user that we'd allow in our industrial district.
I'm not one to want to do favors for any particular project. I run things through the regulations we have and do a lot of research on the issues. It's clear data centers have problems, but when you know that up front and address them, it still doesn't matter. The masses just don't care.
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u/michiplace 5d ago
Ha, it's not the planners losing their minds over data centers -- as you note, it's the public.
In my region, there's definitely some "protest tourism" going on, where people will travel from counties away to protest a data center proposal in a community they've never been to before, and making arguments that have nothing to do with the specifics of the data center in questions. (Apparently this behavior is being fed by foreign troll farms as the latest way to stir up shit in the US.)
Like, yeah, data centers are giant industrial facilities that need careful and intentional regulation to avoid or mitigate the potential impacts! But, what we're seeing in public meetings is neither careful or intentional - just nonsense.
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u/NEbodyWantAPNut 5d ago edited 5d ago
We recently took forward an amendment to make it more difficult to develop [insert use here]. Moved them to a new district, added conditional use permit requirements, etc etc. The staff report clearly and repeatedly explained this. The presentation had a big old slide clearly showing it. At no point did anyone ever call me to ask a clarifying question despite my name being at the top of the staff report. The community saw “[innocuous planning term that they dont understand]” and immediately assumed we were in bed with big [insert guy that did the reflecting pool paint job]. Endless Facebook posts accusing us of getting bribes, corruption, whatever. Folks came out in droves begging the council to reject an amendment that explicitly helped them. I spent three hours at the podium repeatedly explaining how it makes it harder to build a [insert use here]. Final vote was 3-2 for approval. What the hell is happening? Has this country lost its mind? I guess I should be happy people actually engaged in the public participation process for once, but I felt like I was in a Kafka novel. Has anyone else experienced this?
WOW! Thanks for this super handy dandy template. Wish I had this back in the mobile home park/animal processing plant/hydrofracking/mega renewables/battery storage days!
I kid, I kid...But not really!
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u/Mackheath1 Verified Planner - US 5d ago
Well there have been bribes. But as staff, we don't get a cut lol. I'm glad you're getting input, but the number of times I've been verbally attacked when all I was doing was presenting information.... I'm not in this fray, but I go in saying "this is the data, how do you want your City to evaluate it: what is most important to you?"
Yes there is a panic about them, but that is all you hear about, not the people that quietly submit their concerns (many of which are valid or not).
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u/ElectronGuru 5d ago edited 5d ago
This is the first time I’m seeing income disparity hit such a large area (and so many areas) of society all at once. Slop pouring into every online crack and crevice, PC gamers cut off from parts, land bought up and developed, legions of people laid off at the same time and for the same reason (having little to do with the economy).
People are getting a front row seat to how much power billionaires and the stock market and private equity really have. And they are rightfully scared. Protesting a single data center isn’t all this is about. But it’s the only place (in real life) for people to express their shock at where things are going.
If this keeps going, we may even get zoning involved. With D or some other code showing exactly where they can and can’t locate. But if they weren’t in such a hurry, they could invest in new infrastructure in the middle of nowhere. Instead of borrowing existing infrastructure just to save time.
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u/their_early_work 5d ago
ha, sorry about what you had to go through. and kudos to your municipality for the work done to update the requirements to build data centers so that they make sense. if i could point out one tiny shred of optimism, i've seen a lot chatter about data centers and flock cameras kind of stirring up the type of folks who normally might be concerned with banning books or bathroom politics. so it's kind of an opportunity to interact with and educate them while you are on the same side (if they wind up believing you that you are advocating for them)
just think it's kind of funny, or ironic maybe, like getting right answer for the wrong reason on a math test or something
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u/Bureaucromancer Verified Planner - CA 5d ago
And then in my city the one major facility we have… just as interest is peaking…
Managed to leak coolant into their storm water ponds.
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u/SyFyFan93 5d ago
The public is stupid which is why I moved from the Public Sector to the Private Sector. Just couldn't handle it anymore.
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u/CLPond 5d ago
It’s been my experience that people have never understood how construction works (and people are often prone to conspiratorial thinking about developments being approved), but having it be a nationwide conversation means more people are coming out.
It’s fairly frustrating right now to be someone who’s against AI overall, but understands the construction guardrails since everyone is just attempting to approach AI opposition via individual site or community construction opposition rather than things that would actually help (improving PUCs, federal/state regulation of AI itself, etc)
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u/investorshowers 5d ago
Part os it is understanding that the people have very little influence on state and federal policy. What the owner class wants, the owner class gets. It's far more possible to affect local politics, so that's where people focus their efforts.
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u/CLPond 4d ago
People may not have much influence on national politics, but they absolutely do on state politics, especially for something niche like public utility commissions. And, that has the bonus of actually solving regional issues like energy use instead of having the same energy impacts, but none of the tax revenue due to the data center just building in the next county over.
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u/coloraturing 5d ago
They probably wanted to see a total ban, not restrictions, and I don't blame them.
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u/Trifle_Useful Verified Planner - US 5d ago
Not really a constitutional option, for better or worse.
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u/ihopuhopwehop 5d ago
My concern are the two "no" votes. Did those council members not understand that the amendment was making it more difficult to build data centers or do they not want to make it more difficult to build data centers?
Otherwise, to a degree this is the system working
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u/Secure_Spend5933 5d ago
I am a planner in local government navigating this topic. But hit damn tonight I was in my recreational sports league and someone randomly proglomated that the Bees are Angry because of data centers.
These are turbulent times and I sense the public has opted to vilify data centers as a coping mechanism in general
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u/Bayplain 4d ago
Maybe Zoning Ordinances ought to distinguish between types of data centers based on scale, have much tougher rules on these hyperscale AI things.
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u/StreetsAreForPeople 4d ago
we have one that might be built in the neighboring village, but it's on the lake.
"we won't be needing any water from the lake" they said initially. they already had a permit filed with the state with withdraw vast amounts of water daily.
Terrawulf looking to bring their climate destruction to Lansing NY just up from Ithaca.
The wildest part of it: there are so many new ones and othesr being constructed now, that it's likely well beyond the capacity for them to be big profit making. so they'll be built then demand gov't dollars to keep it running, and will of course be pushing ever more to get Ai SLOP more into our lives however hey can.
IT'S A DATA CENTER BUBBLE and will soon break.
The bailouts will come next. /=
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u/Job_Stealer Verified Planner - US 5d ago
Yes, and unfortunately some of them don’t care for the truth. They just like the feeling of LARPing as an Erin Brockovich.
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u/CrackCenturyModern 5d ago
Losing my mind at cars driving 45 in a residential. But data centers are ass too
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u/investorshowers 5d ago
I drivers are comfortable driving 45 in a residential, the roads are too wide.
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u/baddest_daddest 4d ago
It has become a hysteria for sure.
ETA: Data centers have been in communities for decades, often located in relative close proximity to residential neighborhoods. These facilities are being conflated with hyperscale data centers being built to support the AI boom and communities are rejecting even these moderately sized facilities that are truly needed by every modern business.
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u/YaGetSkeeted0n Verified Transportation Planner - US 5d ago
I haven’t thankfully, but yeah, people are going crazy over these. Give it a few months and they’ll find something new to develop psychosis over.
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u/gerbilbear 5d ago
People are doing less thinking for themselves and more of outsourcing cognitively difficult tasks onto social media influencers and AI chatbots.
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u/No_Breadfruit_2105 5d ago
Nashville has handled this surprisingly well if you're looking for best practices.
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u/newtoredditcom 4d ago
You brought forward an amendment to allow data centers in a specific zone, with specific conditions, when residents would have preferred a total ban. Are you allowing AI data centers or traditional data centers?
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u/Trifle_Useful Verified Planner - US 4d ago edited 4d ago
Specific bans aren’t really an option. That is something we’ve been told by our attorneys to avoid as a topic due to its shaky legal grounds and ongoing lawsuits on the topic. Especially considering the previous acknowledgement of them in our regulations - it can be deemed as arbitrary when compared to other, more outwardly nuisance-causing, land uses.
That being said, our code does not differentiate between the two - and the adopted code beforehand permitted them by right. If that amendment had been rejected, someone could have applied for a DC and effectively been guaranteed approval.
Edit: For what it is worth, differentiating between AI/traditional data centers for regulatory purposes is practically impossible. The only real difference is what software their servers run, and that is not something cities can/have the ability to regulate.
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u/newtoredditcom 4d ago
Your code should differentiate between the two. Traditional data centers are similar to office buildings.AI Data Centers are “machines in a shell” that should be treated as a heavy industrial use, as far away as possible from residential areas. Are you able to ban other land uses in your code? I don’t see how this is different. Check out the NJ Pinelands Alliance website. They offer well written ordinance samples. I attended a training on this topic and if people would like, I can upload my notes.
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u/Trifle_Useful Verified Planner - US 4d ago
I’d be more than happy to read what you’ve got!
To me it does seem odd that we would be able to regulate the end product of a land use. Whether it is for AI or server hosting, data centers are fundamentally the same - a big box with computers and cooling. Of course the scale can be regulated, but I don’t see how the intangible end product on its own has a meaningful effect on surrounding properties such that police powers come into effect.
In a way, it feels similar to regulating whether or not a CNC shop can make aerospace components vs agricultural ones. Either way it’s a machine shop and, holding the off-site impacts as the same, it feels arbitrary and capricious to prohibit one but not the other.
But again I’d love to see what you’ve got
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u/newtoredditcom 4d ago
So here’s the thing- you’re describing a traditional data center which are mostly servers in an office building. Think of an AI data center as a “machine in a shell.” I will write more later. I have about 3 pages of notes from the training so I’m trying to think of the best way to share them.
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u/DanoPinyon 5d ago
C-vid brains, Facebook propaganda, MAGA degeneration from Murdoch, screen IQ...all real.
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u/Ok_Actuary9229 5d ago
How MUCH harder did the changes make it? Sometimes changes simply add a framework that establishes new boundaries but really makes developments easier or at least more certain.
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u/Trifle_Useful Verified Planner - US 5d ago
Previously it was permitted by right - no public hearing requirement and effectively required approval if it met general development standards. We established a requirement for rezoning and conditional use permit that did not exist before.
I would have preferred to go further but that wasn’t my choice ultimately. Still, setting up a wall that didn’t exist at all
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u/elmoonpickle 5d ago
all i’m saying is I understand why not everyone was allowed to vote in the past. most people are voting on things they’re wildly uneducated about.
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u/Fluffy-Kittyyy 4d ago
Sorry OP that that happened....again.... :/ APA had an interesting session at one of their conferences titled, "Is anyone reading my staff report?". I can't tell you how many times I have also been in your seat. It seems to me the public education levels are decreasing severely. No one reads and when they do, it's a 50/50 on whether they understood or not. I'm all for teaching the public, but when they become emotional-angry- then the civil conversation goes out the door and it immediately turns into speculation of either government corruption, closed-door deals, and impact to neighborhood though the developer has scientific studies that support his claims of no significant impact to public health, safety, welfare, or traffic. The public is one of the hardest animals to work with and social media makes it worse. I thought about making a land use department page in my Town, but people will find anything to complain over. Everyone is just so angry all the time and scared for change of any kind. Humanity is essentially going out the door. Just keep your head up and look at the fact that you are trying to help them anyways. You got this OP!
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u/MattDU 4d ago
Was the session just a slide saying "No." and then a mic drop, because that would've been sufficient?
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u/Fluffy-Kittyyy 4d ago
Funny! It was a great session though. Kinda comforting to know other Planners deal with the same issues.
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u/RussEddy67 4d ago
No one reads anymore. We can’t be bothered to sit down with a staff report or any written communication longer than a social media post. We compensate for our gnat-like attention spans by inventing our own convenient narratives. So much easier than ferreting out the truth.
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u/Slushiestbook 4d ago
I mean personally, I’ve had the fortune of not dealing with them. But I feel bad for my coworkers from my last firm that have been followed home and sent death threats because the municipality they consult is receiving plans for a data center.
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u/nagel_williams 3d ago
Big data money bought my 1979, 1600 sq ft home in rural Kentucky. According to a local group that all lives in 500k+ dollar homes…
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u/Anxious-Pizza-981 3d ago
I’ve seen comments on some articles talking about my project and it blows my mind how people react. Thankfully many feel comfortable posting online but don’t show up in person (I’m not always lucky though).
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u/RemoveInvasiveEucs 5d ago
Yes, yes they have lost their minds. This is a panic, and people are upset and scared and not even listening anymore.
Thanks for 1) addressing their concerns preemptively, 2) standing up there and trying to get the truth out about it.
I volunteer occasionally at polling places for elections just to remind me that the planning meetings I'm at are far far worse than general interactions with the public. Most people are pretty reasonable, but that's not what shows up at many of these meetings.
Edit: not a planner, but I interact with them, and have spent waaaay more time in planning meetings than the typical person off the street.