In Oklahoma, they tried to market a bitcoin farm project as a datacenter. It received a lot of opposition due to the noise levels anticipated.
The graft team tried to get the state government to give tax graft to "datacenters" but didn't define what a DC was - which could mean the graft might go to bitcoin farms as well.
I noticed that the article does not really distinguish between any of these.
Please excuse my English, graft is not my first language.
epistasis · 16h ago
I think noise pollution regulation would be a great way to stop undesired effects that spread from one property to another.
Unfortunately when it comes to land use, we have a tendency to block overall uses rather than blocking the negative effects of those uses. This prevents many solutions from ever being tried.
sorcerer-mar · 16h ago
> Unfortunately when it comes to land use, we have a tendency to block overall uses rather than blocking the negative effects of those uses
Probably because history is full of developers promising to mitigate certain negative consequences and then failing to do so. I'm as YIMBY as anyone, so this history of developers being awful matters a lot to me: it galvanizes the opposition.
epistasis · 16h ago
Do you have examples of this? Where has the negative effect been banned (presumably with suitable penalties) and then ignored?
I'm not that young but I have not seen examples of this.
sorcerer-mar · 16h ago
What do you mean? It happens every day. Lots are upzoned based on VeryNiceIdea and then instead StupidBullshit gets built (so long as StupidBullshit fits into the same zoning scheme as VeryNiceIdea).
epistasis · 16h ago
First, that's not an example of negative effects being banned and then developers getting around it.
Instead you are saying that some people wanted a particular land use on a parcel, bet then a different land use showed up. Lots of VeryNiceIdea have nobody around to execute the idea and actually make it happen. When an abandoned lumberyard next to lots of homes in my area had a proposal for condos, neighbors were livid at the homes, and refused the zoning change. Instead people asked for a music center for senior citizens, but nobody stepped up to raise the money to build something like that.
sorcerer-mar · 16h ago
I guess it depends on your definition of "blocking" or "banned." If StupidBullshit had been proposed, it would've been blocked. Instead, they bait-and-switched with something else.
Yeah that's a frustrating and stupid example.
epistasis · 13h ago
I still have no concrete idea of what you are talking about. You say it happens all the time, but I have not seen it. One person's "StupidBullshit" could be another person's "AmazingIdea" or it could be "StupidBullshit" to 99.999% of people, but without actually knowing what you're referring to it's impossible to know.
For example, there's tons of things that I love that others consider "StupidBullshit": book stores, game shops, live music venues, etc. In my town, a brewery in an industrially zoned area got exceptions to start allow serving beer and food, then a temporary one to allow live music. It's great. Then a shop owner next door shut down the extension that allowed live music because they thought that in the next 10 years there's a chance they might be allowed to build apartments, and that the live music permit should not be allowed because of that potential. 2 years of dragging out the permitting process continued, because a few people thought a beloved music venue was StupidBullshit.
That's the closest example to what you're talking about that I can think of, and it doesn't even involve developers. So I'm very skeptical about the public process of deciding "StupidBullshit," and have not once seen it turn out positively. Like, literally zero times. And I've been following land use in my city very closely for the past decade.
sorcerer-mar · 13h ago
In your city, is every project that gets built pretty much identical to what was proposed during the rezoning process?
epistasis · 12h ago
Yes, of course it is. There's very little rezoning to begin with, and it's extremely constrained. In fact, the opposition to rezoning exaggerates what heights are possible to such an extent that what actually results is quite disappointing in how little new housing shows up.
I'm concluding by your refusal to give examples that perhaps you have none to share. Especially when my repeated questioning meets more questions from you in return. Let me ask plainly: do you have a single concrete example of your complaint about developers?
sorcerer-mar · 11h ago
That’s extremely odd! It’s strange to ask for specific examples because it is quite the norm for actual built developments to differ drastically from their proposed versions.
2001 LIC was rezoned under the premise of creating a central business district, luxury residential high rises took over instead.
Zoning rarely constrains the outcome as specifically as people wish it would while considering rezoning, ergo the default behavior is for the ultimate construction not to match what was proposed during rezoning. I frankly don’t believe you when you say this doesn’t happen where you are. Could you tell me where that is so I can understand how they achieve it?
Unlike many other common private infrastructure projects being spun up, such as large warehouses or factory buildings, data centers don't employ large amounts of people except during the construction.
Without much tangible benefits to help uplift a surrounding community in some way, and certainly many tangible drawbacks known to communities at this point, they seem like an easy - the easiest? - NIMBY target in an era where corporate giants have burned a lot of trust.
soupfordummies · 16h ago
They actually have NEGATIVE benefits such as sucking up the resources like electricity and water.
wronglebowski · 17h ago
“Local opposition” and NIMBYism is the primary reason we have a housing shortage, it’s a rampant problem across the US. The few grumpy old folks that show up to local planning meetings shouldn’t hold us back as a nation. Until we can find a way to get over that hump I’m not sure how we'll move forward in many aspects.
rescripting · 17h ago
Except at least housing provides benefits to the local community.
A data centre provides almost no jobs (except during construction), and draws a significant amount of resources (electricity, water, noise pollution).
Why should any community want something that only enriches Amazon taking up vast swaths of land in their backyard?
alright2565 · 16h ago
> significant amount of resources
Most importantly, location!
Location is not fungible, and at least in my local area, data center developers seem to want to place their datacenters in up-and-coming areas, where they would block the development of higher-quality structures.
There's no reason the datacenters can't be built in the middle of nowhere, far from people, especially as they don't provide any jobs to the community.
epistasis · 13h ago
A great solution to this is a land value tax. How do you actually determine if the data center is not the best use for a parcel? If it can compete with other uses of land based on the land value. A land value tax makes the data center, or any other use, pay the community for exactly what it's taking away from the community.
alright2565 · 12h ago
I agree, and I was considering mentioning a LVT in my comment.
I think it would have been pointless though, because LVT doesn't stand a chance: Conservatives would hear "tax" and immediately say "no", and progressives would be unhappy that their elderly mom wouldn't be able to live alone in their 6-bedroom childhood home.
wronglebowski · 16h ago
Housing doesn’t benefit the local community(from most NIMBY perspectives). It makes housing more affordable lowering their property values, creates the need for more infrastructure and creates change in their environment.
The motto seems to be, “Neighborhoods full, I like things the way they are. No more change please.” Doesn’t matter if it’s a data center, housing, or any type of development.
bitmasher9 · 16h ago
It benefits local business by having more customers and benefits local government by having a wider tax base.
Maybe it doesn’t benefit some individuals, but the community improves.
nothercastle · 16h ago
Many times it’s just unplanned uncontrolled growth. It causes issues that aren’t mitigated and generally makes life worse for existing residents. NIMBY is strong because residents know that their politicians are corrupted and incompetent. Politicians will get kick backs and infrastructure will never get extended sufficiently to support.
Theoretically we all benefit from increased density due to reduced infrastructure costs and shared resources, in practice the growth leads to government inefficiency and that offsets any costs savings. Similar to how larger companies cost savings from size is offset by internal inefficiency and friction.
epistasis · 13h ago
I think the history of the 20th century shows that "planned growth" is in many ways far inferior to unplanned growth.
All of our favorite locations were created far before the era of modern planning, when growth was largely uncontrolled.
> in practice the growth leads to government inefficiency and that offsets any costs savings.
Do you have any examples of this? I've never heard of it before and never seen data that could support it. Unless the "government inefficiency" is highly restrictive zoning, which would be an unusual framing but one that I would highly endorse if that's what you mean!
supplied_demand · 16h ago
At the same time, the most densely populated large cities are also among the most expensive.
sorcerer-mar · 16h ago
That's because the community benefits so much from density. People want to live there because the density has created fantastic amenities and jobs, ergo prices go up.
dymk · 16h ago
Depends what you count as an expense and where collected taxes flow. Rural living is artificially cheap by being subsidized by its more “expensive” dense living counterpart.
maratc · 16h ago
Every time I read about a purported "housing shortage" I'm reminded that there are about 140 million housing units in the US[0], with an average of 5.5 rooms per unit[1], or about 700 million rooms, all that for 350 million of population, or about 2 rooms per person.
This doesn't look like "we have a housing shortage". What we do have is a shortage of affordable housing in the megacities, and "it’s a rampant problem" in all the megacities.
Sorry, are you suggesting that the solution to housing shortage is to move into an existing building with strangers?
maratc · 16h ago
If I'm reading myself right, I'm suggesting that there's no need to "the solution to housing shortage," since -- with more than 2 rooms per person on average -- it's not a problem to begin with. The problem frequently called "the housing shortage" is a problem of "housing affordability in the megacities," and we should call it by its real name.
epistasis · 13h ago
How are those rooms distributed? It's not like they are individually moving parts.
People buy a house big enough to hold their kids, then they age and the kids move out, and there's lots of fully owned homes with empty rooms, but no places for the now-adult children to live, until a prior generation dies.
> "the housing shortage" is a problem of "housing affordability in the megacities," and we should call it by its real name.
Housing affordability problems are driven by a single thing: shortage of housing. Refusing to call the shortage a shortage and instead only referring to the symptom, inaffordability, rather than the cause, shortage is willful deception to prevent action on the cause.
This is not a problem just in megacities, it's spreading everywhere else in the country as the problem gets worse and worse. It showed up first in the most in-demand cities but as remote work increased let people spread out more, it affected more and more locations. Meanwhile, people living in the highly economically productive areas with the greatest housing shortages say there's no need to allow more housing to be built because remote work solves the problem. They speak out of both sides of their mouth though, as a few short years ago they denied that shortage caused the affordability problem, but when there's something that can be used to lessen the shortage (remote work, banning AirBNB), they grab on eagerly to the the shortage explanation for housing affordability.
The story of the housing shortage in the US is people desperately, by any means they possibly can, avoid addressing the shortage and being realistic about it.
maratc · 13h ago
> willful deception to prevent action on the cause.
I don't care either way. I don't live in the US. Action or non-action, I'm unaffected by that. There's no reason for me to "willfully deceit" anyone, as I don't stand to either gain or lose with any outcome. There's also no reason for you to frame this as a personal attack.
I've checked Zillow though.
There's a plenty of $1 homes, mostly dilapidated and non-functional even though the land could be worth $1 if one can afford demolition and rebuilding. But at the range of $10,000 to $15,000 there's a lot of pretty normally looking homes. Even if one doesn't have that amount as a down payment, I assume plenty of banks would be willing to give a mortgage for that sum with 25 years of $150/mo payments.
The problem is nobody wants to live where these houses are, because it's not SF, while in SF there are a lot of options under $2M, but not many people have that amount of money.
"Housing shortage" doesn't exist. The only shortage that exists is the shortage of $10,000 homes in SF.
jmclnx · 17h ago
It is not just "grumpy old folks", almost everyone who own property, no matter the age fights development.
Seems the only people that do not actively fight development are the working poor. That is because either they work multiple jobs or have travel issues.
reliabilityguy · 16h ago
Statistically speaking, the homeowners in the US are not young.
runako · 16h ago
Statistically speaking, Americans are not young.
aegypti · 16h ago
The “YIMBY” movement is completely dominated by 20-40yo middle class professionals in my experience.
nothercastle · 16h ago
Who own nothing and are renting everything. They also think they don’t pay property taxes hence they vote for every tax increase
aegypti · 16h ago
YIMBY is a supply side movement laser focused on regulatory barriers, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a tax measure mentioned in relation to it.
Plenty of tax breaks though.
epistasis · 13h ago
YIMBYs are on the forefront of attacking Proposition 13 in California, and YIMBYs are also driving a resurgence of Georgism to use land value taxes to address fundamental inequity.
YIMBYs also regularly support work on non-regulatory barriers, such as the rent increase caps in California (ABA1482), and have even supported social housing bills in California.
There are two types of discussions about YIMBYs: 1) that by far-leftists that see the battle as ideological and about regulation/deregulation and trickle-down housing vs. revolution, and 2) the actual YIMBY activism on the ground which is all about more housing and making housing less of a financial and emotional burden for renters.
daveguy · 16h ago
Surely most people can recognize the difference between NIMBY of a noisy wasteful cover for Bitcoin mining operation compared to the NIMBY of not wanting "the poors" nearby or the ability to retain high rent charges on hoarded housing. Housing shortage NIMBY and "don't put an industrial facility in my backyard" are really very different things.
this15testing · 16h ago
most ycombinator folks can't seem to distinguish things outside the software realm. Maybe if all these super ultra mega smart engineers and developers could focus on utilizing existing hardware more efficient we wouldn't need to constantly build these energy sinks.
pif · 16h ago
Where you see a housing shortage, I see too many people in too little an area.
Megacities are a problem everywhere. We have not yet found a scalable way to improve the economy without resorting to unnatural concentrations of people. Still, hope must be kept high, and the battle must go on.
sorcerer-mar · 16h ago
> Where you see a housing shortage, I see too many people in too little an area.
Huh? There are housing shortages in plenty of low-density places.
epistasis · 17h ago
This is very similar to the economic destruction wrought by those who block housing in the most highly productive geographic regions of the country.
By taking what would be a positive sum situation and changing it into zero sum, productive capital growth is shifted into rentier capital growth. It shifts wealth from those who use use capital to make us all wealthier to those who hoard capital and reap the work of others.
littlestymaar · 16h ago
> This is very similar to the economic destruction wrought by those who block housing in the most highly productive geographic regions of the country.
It's not. You are just repeating Cloud providers' talking point.
Housing is a basic need, and I such many people including myself wouldn't mind overruling the locals' preferences in order to make sure everyone can have access to housing at a decent price.
Data centers aren't and there are already too many of them. As a matter of fact the majority of them exist because companies worth hundreds of billions of dollar use cloud-based walled garden to milk consumers in ways they couldn't if the software was local.
epistasis · 16h ago
> Data centers aren't and there are already too many of them.
And here you're just repeating the same arguments that NIMBYs use to block housing. And saying "you're using the same arguments as X, X is bad, therefore your argument is bad" is nat actually a sound argument in itself, I point it out because it's ironic when you accuse me of repeating Cloud provider's talking points!
Where the NIMBY argument actually falls down in that the assessment of "too many." How is that determined? Why is your answer right and the person who wants a datacenter wrong?
And don't you see that your determination of "too much" is exactly what converts productive capital allocation into rentier capital allocation? What happens if you are right and the cloud provider is wrong? The cloud providers spends a bunch of money building a datacenter that doesn't get used, and loses lots of money, and pays property taxes to the local government. If you are wrong, then existing data centers are able to jack up their prices a ton, and will, and make a lot more money not because they are providing a better service, but because there's an artificial shortage. It rewards speculation, and incentivizes speculation on land uses.
littlestymaar · 12h ago
> If you are wrong, then existing data centers are able to jack up their prices a ton, and will, and make a lot more money not because they are providing a better service, but because there's an artificial shortage.
Your econ 101-based argument is seducing and all, but it's not like there is a competitive market in here, we're talking about a handful of players with a dominant position over a segment of the market. They are already jacking prices up because they thrive over an artificial walled garden.
roenxi · 17h ago
If China's chip industry takes off maybe they will pick up the slack? Otherwise it isn't obvious to me where the data centres will get built. Europe probably doesn't want them for environmental concerns, Africa probably isn't a good option. South America, maybe? Greater Asia seems like an obvious choice.
monkaiju · 17h ago
They could, for the most part at least, just not get built. So much of the current and new capacity is destined for nonsense like AI, would be better to simply not expand that.
bitmasher9 · 16h ago
Why would someone want a data center near them? They provide fewer jobs than other projects of similar size, they consume huge amounts of local resources, and most are paired with significant tax breaks.
jeffbee · 16h ago
Really? What are some similar sized projects? An alfalfa farm in the desert, for example, employs almost nobody, pays nothing in taxes (may even be a net consumer of taxes due to subsidies) and consumes 100x-1000x the water. These are the direct tradeoffs for new Nevada data centers.
bitmasher9 · 16h ago
Farming alfalfa in the desert has to be one of worst business ideas I’ve read.
jeffbee · 16h ago
And yet ... Nevada has > 120000 hectares under irrigated cultivation for hay.
troyvit · 8h ago
That is truly stupid, but is putting a data center there any less stupid?
jeffbee · 6h ago
It is a bit less stupid, yes, because of the abundance of energy. The same reason it makes sense to make batteries and cars and stuff in Nevada.
runako · 16h ago
Largely unaddressed by this article is whether these projects are being "canceled" as in there will be less capacity overall or being completed elsewhere (as is indicated about at least one of the "canceled" projects).
Commercial RE projects are often moved and/or delayed, how is this any different?
DetroitThrow · 16h ago
>Commercial RE projects are often moved and/or delayed, how is this any different?
In terms of how these projects will get built, I assume they're quite similar - the bigger difference is that we're talking about tech companies and startups who may lose an early market advantage or run out of runway if their project is delayed two years.
Lumen orbit, the DC-in-space startup, might run out of runway if they space construction suppliers delay their project by two years for example.
This is in comparison to office buildings or automotive, where big delays can be a lot of trouble but not the end of the company.
827a · 17h ago
How will this impact AI 2027's legacy?
jeffbee · 17h ago
The parade of misleading and exaggerated hit pieces in the news must be seen as part of the integrated plan to destroy American science, information, and research.
burningion · 17h ago
or... maybe there's something to people being skeptical of datacenters?
> In just 11 months since the company arrived in Memphis, xAI has become one of Shelby County’s largest emitters of smog-producing nitrogen oxides, according to calculations by environmental groups whose data has been reviewed by POLITICO’s E&E News. The plant is in an area whose air is already considered unhealthy due to smog.
Had this set the precedent of working with the community, and _not_ breaking the law, I think we'd be in a better place all around.
Similarly, Amazon tried to take the excess nuclear power, without paying back into the electrical grid infrastructure, and got denied in 2024:
Yeah, that politico article conveniently leaves out that the TVA - the local electricity provider - runs a methane-powered gas power plant literally 200 meters down the road (which replaced a much dirtier coal-burning power station at the same location), but somehow could not be bothered actually hooking their neighbours up to the grid.
sorcerer-mar · 16h ago
I presume they couldn't be bothered hooking their "neighbors" [0] up because the demand was too great, no...?
[0] "Neighbors" here means a datacenter primarily processing data for wealthy people outside of the community and their mega-companies, where the revenue from that processing primarily goes... also to wealthy people outside of the community and their mega-companies...
Datacenters are not things that just randomly appear. There are planning processes, and city stakeholders are involved - which would include the TVA. The fact that they built the thing is a good indication that the stakeholders agreed this project should go forward - and that would involve an agreement on power provisioning.
But what I strongly disagree with in the politico article is that the datacenter is framed as a major polluter when the whole area is heavy industry, including a steel works and - a methane-burning power plant. To put the blame now on the xAI site smells a lot like an anti-Musk hit piece.
Doesn't mean I like the guy. I just like my journalism honest.
sorcerer-mar · 10h ago
I don't really understand the point you're making.
It seems like you're suggesting that Politico didn't mention that the area already had pollution problems prior to xAI, but that's literally the very first sentence of the article:
> Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company is belching smog-forming pollution into an area of South Memphis that already leads the state in emergency department visits for asthma.
It's restated in the 5th sentence:
> The plant is in an area whose air is already considered unhealthy due to smog.
The power plant down the street is mentioned in the 6th sentence:
> The turbines spew nitrogen oxides, also known as NOx, at an estimated rate of 1,200 to 2,000 tons a year — far more than the gas-fired power plant across the street or the oil refinery down the road.
So I have to deduce that your actual complaint is that the article didn't say something to the effect of, "xAI is adding a bunch of emissions, but don't worry because the people there were already well-abused by other nearby emission sources?"
> what I strongly disagree with in the politico article is that the datacenter is framed as a major polluter when the whole area is heavy industry,
The xAI data center is a major polluter. In fact it's a major polluter even in an area full of major polluters! It produces more NOx than the gigantic power plant that powers the region.
paulryanrogers · 17h ago
This seems like a pretty objective view of all sides. What makes you think it's a hit piece?
Must R&D be prioritized over quality of life, environment, and be subsidized by local tax breaks/grants?
glitchc · 16h ago
> Must R&D be prioritized over quality of life, environment, and be subsidized by local tax breaks/grants?
Yes, yes and maybe, if it needs to be accelerated.
No part of our modern life would exist without scientific and engineering advancement. Centuries of inventions and discoveries have built on top of each other to give us the very essential (housing, plumbing, food production) that are vast improvements on the original as well as the very boutique (space travel, self-driving cars, AI), the benefits from which are not fully realized yet. Pressing pause on science is guaranteed to cause misery. The last time Europe did that it lead to the Dark and Middle ages, leading to centuries of suffering.
Science is one of those few things that benefits everyone, from the very rich to the very poor. It's how we ensure that life does not remain a zero-sum game, it's how we grow the pie so that everyone can have more. Science is not free: It comes at a cost, but that cost is repaid many times over.
paulryanrogers · 15h ago
Is it pressing pause on science to say data centers must be built with care and consideration?
glitchc · 15h ago
I addressed the general point since the question was around whether R&D should be prioritized. Whether data centers are required for R&D (or not) is up for debate. Clearly, science to date has not been impeded by the absence of such data centres. Would their existence accelerate science? I suspect a correlation exists but not a strong one.
jeffbee · 16h ago
_This_ article is objective. The opposition this article is discussing has been whipped into existence by the past year or so of exaggerated hit pieces.
The graft team tried to get the state government to give tax graft to "datacenters" but didn't define what a DC was - which could mean the graft might go to bitcoin farms as well.
I noticed that the article does not really distinguish between any of these.
Please excuse my English, graft is not my first language.
Unfortunately when it comes to land use, we have a tendency to block overall uses rather than blocking the negative effects of those uses. This prevents many solutions from ever being tried.
Probably because history is full of developers promising to mitigate certain negative consequences and then failing to do so. I'm as YIMBY as anyone, so this history of developers being awful matters a lot to me: it galvanizes the opposition.
I'm not that young but I have not seen examples of this.
Instead you are saying that some people wanted a particular land use on a parcel, bet then a different land use showed up. Lots of VeryNiceIdea have nobody around to execute the idea and actually make it happen. When an abandoned lumberyard next to lots of homes in my area had a proposal for condos, neighbors were livid at the homes, and refused the zoning change. Instead people asked for a music center for senior citizens, but nobody stepped up to raise the money to build something like that.
Yeah that's a frustrating and stupid example.
For example, there's tons of things that I love that others consider "StupidBullshit": book stores, game shops, live music venues, etc. In my town, a brewery in an industrially zoned area got exceptions to start allow serving beer and food, then a temporary one to allow live music. It's great. Then a shop owner next door shut down the extension that allowed live music because they thought that in the next 10 years there's a chance they might be allowed to build apartments, and that the live music permit should not be allowed because of that potential. 2 years of dragging out the permitting process continued, because a few people thought a beloved music venue was StupidBullshit.
That's the closest example to what you're talking about that I can think of, and it doesn't even involve developers. So I'm very skeptical about the public process of deciding "StupidBullshit," and have not once seen it turn out positively. Like, literally zero times. And I've been following land use in my city very closely for the past decade.
I'm concluding by your refusal to give examples that perhaps you have none to share. Especially when my repeated questioning meets more questions from you in return. Let me ask plainly: do you have a single concrete example of your complaint about developers?
Anyway, here’s a notable one: https://www.mas.org/news/op-ed-lets-not-repeat-the-unintende...
2001 LIC was rezoned under the premise of creating a central business district, luxury residential high rises took over instead.
Zoning rarely constrains the outcome as specifically as people wish it would while considering rezoning, ergo the default behavior is for the ultimate construction not to match what was proposed during rezoning. I frankly don’t believe you when you say this doesn’t happen where you are. Could you tell me where that is so I can understand how they achieve it?
Here’s a review of this pattern: https://media.villagepreservation.org/wp-content/uploads/202...
Without much tangible benefits to help uplift a surrounding community in some way, and certainly many tangible drawbacks known to communities at this point, they seem like an easy - the easiest? - NIMBY target in an era where corporate giants have burned a lot of trust.
A data centre provides almost no jobs (except during construction), and draws a significant amount of resources (electricity, water, noise pollution).
Why should any community want something that only enriches Amazon taking up vast swaths of land in their backyard?
Most importantly, location!
Location is not fungible, and at least in my local area, data center developers seem to want to place their datacenters in up-and-coming areas, where they would block the development of higher-quality structures.
There's no reason the datacenters can't be built in the middle of nowhere, far from people, especially as they don't provide any jobs to the community.
I think it would have been pointless though, because LVT doesn't stand a chance: Conservatives would hear "tax" and immediately say "no", and progressives would be unhappy that their elderly mom wouldn't be able to live alone in their 6-bedroom childhood home.
The motto seems to be, “Neighborhoods full, I like things the way they are. No more change please.” Doesn’t matter if it’s a data center, housing, or any type of development.
Maybe it doesn’t benefit some individuals, but the community improves.
All of our favorite locations were created far before the era of modern planning, when growth was largely uncontrolled.
> in practice the growth leads to government inefficiency and that offsets any costs savings.
Do you have any examples of this? I've never heard of it before and never seen data that could support it. Unless the "government inefficiency" is highly restrictive zoning, which would be an unusual framing but one that I would highly endorse if that's what you mean!
This doesn't look like "we have a housing shortage". What we do have is a shortage of affordable housing in the megacities, and "it’s a rampant problem" in all the megacities.
[0] https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/time-series/demo/popest...
[1] https://www.census.gov/acs/www/about/why-we-ask-each-questio...
People buy a house big enough to hold their kids, then they age and the kids move out, and there's lots of fully owned homes with empty rooms, but no places for the now-adult children to live, until a prior generation dies.
> "the housing shortage" is a problem of "housing affordability in the megacities," and we should call it by its real name.
Housing affordability problems are driven by a single thing: shortage of housing. Refusing to call the shortage a shortage and instead only referring to the symptom, inaffordability, rather than the cause, shortage is willful deception to prevent action on the cause.
This is not a problem just in megacities, it's spreading everywhere else in the country as the problem gets worse and worse. It showed up first in the most in-demand cities but as remote work increased let people spread out more, it affected more and more locations. Meanwhile, people living in the highly economically productive areas with the greatest housing shortages say there's no need to allow more housing to be built because remote work solves the problem. They speak out of both sides of their mouth though, as a few short years ago they denied that shortage caused the affordability problem, but when there's something that can be used to lessen the shortage (remote work, banning AirBNB), they grab on eagerly to the the shortage explanation for housing affordability.
The story of the housing shortage in the US is people desperately, by any means they possibly can, avoid addressing the shortage and being realistic about it.
I don't care either way. I don't live in the US. Action or non-action, I'm unaffected by that. There's no reason for me to "willfully deceit" anyone, as I don't stand to either gain or lose with any outcome. There's also no reason for you to frame this as a personal attack.
I've checked Zillow though.
There's a plenty of $1 homes, mostly dilapidated and non-functional even though the land could be worth $1 if one can afford demolition and rebuilding. But at the range of $10,000 to $15,000 there's a lot of pretty normally looking homes. Even if one doesn't have that amount as a down payment, I assume plenty of banks would be willing to give a mortgage for that sum with 25 years of $150/mo payments.
The problem is nobody wants to live where these houses are, because it's not SF, while in SF there are a lot of options under $2M, but not many people have that amount of money.
"Housing shortage" doesn't exist. The only shortage that exists is the shortage of $10,000 homes in SF.
Seems the only people that do not actively fight development are the working poor. That is because either they work multiple jobs or have travel issues.
Plenty of tax breaks though.
YIMBYs also regularly support work on non-regulatory barriers, such as the rent increase caps in California (ABA1482), and have even supported social housing bills in California.
There's also lots of talk of transfer taxes amongst YIMBYs, see for example: https://cayimby.org/blog/if-you-tax-the-things-you-want-less...
There are two types of discussions about YIMBYs: 1) that by far-leftists that see the battle as ideological and about regulation/deregulation and trickle-down housing vs. revolution, and 2) the actual YIMBY activism on the ground which is all about more housing and making housing less of a financial and emotional burden for renters.
Megacities are a problem everywhere. We have not yet found a scalable way to improve the economy without resorting to unnatural concentrations of people. Still, hope must be kept high, and the battle must go on.
Huh? There are housing shortages in plenty of low-density places.
By taking what would be a positive sum situation and changing it into zero sum, productive capital growth is shifted into rentier capital growth. It shifts wealth from those who use use capital to make us all wealthier to those who hoard capital and reap the work of others.
It's not. You are just repeating Cloud providers' talking point.
Housing is a basic need, and I such many people including myself wouldn't mind overruling the locals' preferences in order to make sure everyone can have access to housing at a decent price.
Data centers aren't and there are already too many of them. As a matter of fact the majority of them exist because companies worth hundreds of billions of dollar use cloud-based walled garden to milk consumers in ways they couldn't if the software was local.
And here you're just repeating the same arguments that NIMBYs use to block housing. And saying "you're using the same arguments as X, X is bad, therefore your argument is bad" is nat actually a sound argument in itself, I point it out because it's ironic when you accuse me of repeating Cloud provider's talking points!
Where the NIMBY argument actually falls down in that the assessment of "too many." How is that determined? Why is your answer right and the person who wants a datacenter wrong?
And don't you see that your determination of "too much" is exactly what converts productive capital allocation into rentier capital allocation? What happens if you are right and the cloud provider is wrong? The cloud providers spends a bunch of money building a datacenter that doesn't get used, and loses lots of money, and pays property taxes to the local government. If you are wrong, then existing data centers are able to jack up their prices a ton, and will, and make a lot more money not because they are providing a better service, but because there's an artificial shortage. It rewards speculation, and incentivizes speculation on land uses.
Your econ 101-based argument is seducing and all, but it's not like there is a competitive market in here, we're talking about a handful of players with a dominant position over a segment of the market. They are already jacking prices up because they thrive over an artificial walled garden.
Commercial RE projects are often moved and/or delayed, how is this any different?
In terms of how these projects will get built, I assume they're quite similar - the bigger difference is that we're talking about tech companies and startups who may lose an early market advantage or run out of runway if their project is delayed two years.
Lumen orbit, the DC-in-space startup, might run out of runway if they space construction suppliers delay their project by two years for example.
This is in comparison to office buildings or automotive, where big delays can be a lot of trouble but not the end of the company.
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/musks-xai-opera...
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...
> In just 11 months since the company arrived in Memphis, xAI has become one of Shelby County’s largest emitters of smog-producing nitrogen oxides, according to calculations by environmental groups whose data has been reviewed by POLITICO’s E&E News. The plant is in an area whose air is already considered unhealthy due to smog.
Had this set the precedent of working with the community, and _not_ breaking the law, I think we'd be in a better place all around.
Similarly, Amazon tried to take the excess nuclear power, without paying back into the electrical grid infrastructure, and got denied in 2024:
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/ferc-interconnection-isa-ta...
and again in April of 2025:
https://www.ans.org/news/2025-04-16/article-6937/ferc-denies...
[0] "Neighbors" here means a datacenter primarily processing data for wealthy people outside of the community and their mega-companies, where the revenue from that processing primarily goes... also to wealthy people outside of the community and their mega-companies...
Edit: Ah yes, that is exactly the case [https://memphischamber.com/blog/press-release/xai-phase-one-...]. While xAI is fronting the cash, the entire upgrade will ultimately be paid for by taxpayers in the form of monthly rebates.
But what I strongly disagree with in the politico article is that the datacenter is framed as a major polluter when the whole area is heavy industry, including a steel works and - a methane-burning power plant. To put the blame now on the xAI site smells a lot like an anti-Musk hit piece.
Doesn't mean I like the guy. I just like my journalism honest.
It seems like you're suggesting that Politico didn't mention that the area already had pollution problems prior to xAI, but that's literally the very first sentence of the article:
> Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company is belching smog-forming pollution into an area of South Memphis that already leads the state in emergency department visits for asthma.
It's restated in the 5th sentence:
> The plant is in an area whose air is already considered unhealthy due to smog.
The power plant down the street is mentioned in the 6th sentence:
> The turbines spew nitrogen oxides, also known as NOx, at an estimated rate of 1,200 to 2,000 tons a year — far more than the gas-fired power plant across the street or the oil refinery down the road.
So I have to deduce that your actual complaint is that the article didn't say something to the effect of, "xAI is adding a bunch of emissions, but don't worry because the people there were already well-abused by other nearby emission sources?"
> what I strongly disagree with in the politico article is that the datacenter is framed as a major polluter when the whole area is heavy industry,
The xAI data center is a major polluter. In fact it's a major polluter even in an area full of major polluters! It produces more NOx than the gigantic power plant that powers the region.
Must R&D be prioritized over quality of life, environment, and be subsidized by local tax breaks/grants?
Yes, yes and maybe, if it needs to be accelerated.
No part of our modern life would exist without scientific and engineering advancement. Centuries of inventions and discoveries have built on top of each other to give us the very essential (housing, plumbing, food production) that are vast improvements on the original as well as the very boutique (space travel, self-driving cars, AI), the benefits from which are not fully realized yet. Pressing pause on science is guaranteed to cause misery. The last time Europe did that it lead to the Dark and Middle ages, leading to centuries of suffering.
Science is one of those few things that benefits everyone, from the very rich to the very poor. It's how we ensure that life does not remain a zero-sum game, it's how we grow the pie so that everyone can have more. Science is not free: It comes at a cost, but that cost is repaid many times over.