Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo • Hacker News Board

Re: Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo

#201

Post by rtpg » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 5:55 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #190

MrDrMcCoy wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Office buildings employ considerably more people, support nearby restaurants, consume less power and water, produce virtually no infrasound, and are more attractive than data centers. I'd rather have an office building next to my house than a data center, especially if they would not be providing me colocation services at a steep discount.

Office buildings are not more attractive than data centers; that's my whole argument. In format, massing, and design, data centers essentially are office buildings, just with drastically less parking. Asphalt is the biggest eyesore in commercial real estate. (Data centers consume immaterial amounts of water.)

Drastically less parking, so way less jobs in the local area right?

Like maybe the municipality doesn't care because a lot of jobs are filled by people coming in from an hour away, but surely the inverse of "I am sad because closed" is "I am happy because opened", right?

I get what you're saying about the buildings themselves. I just think that, in the abstract and all else being equal (it isn't of course!) "big box for 50 jobs" and "big box for 200 jobs", one seems nicer. Maybe I'm overestimating the job differential. And this is all a bit of a false dichotomy anyways

Re: Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo

#202

Post by tptacek » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 5:55 AM UTC

rtpg wrote: post #195

tptacek wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Office buildings take land and resources and generate almost nothing for the local community, and are islands in vast seas of asphalt and traffic attractors to boot. But nobody moralizes office buildings, just data centers, despite the fact that data centers are usually objectively better neighbors.

> nobody moralizes office buildings I do not believe this to be true! I have the impression you keep up with zoning discourse etc in your area based on your posting history... you surely have heard of people complaining about things like traffic concerns and general "ugliness" complaints around building out office parks, right? Data centers might be making the nat'l news at the moment, but it feels hard to consider a…

I'm a housing activist (we're fourth and inches from getting Oak Park to be the first municipality in Illinois to outlaw single-family exclusive zoning) and from grim experience I can tell you that my neighbors would far rather have an office building go up than an apartment building. It has specifically come up.

Re: Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo

#203

Post by tptacek » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 5:57 AM UTC

rtpg wrote: post #201

tptacek wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Office buildings are not more attractive than data centers; that's my whole argument. In format, massing, and design, data centers essentially are office buildings, just with drastically less parking. Asphalt is the biggest eyesore in commercial real estate. (Data centers consume immaterial amounts of water.)

Drastically less parking, so way less jobs in the local area right? Like maybe the municipality doesn't care because a lot of jobs are filled by people coming in from an hour away, but surely the inverse of "I am sad because closed" is "I am happy because opened", right? I get what you're saying about the buildings themselves. I just think that, in the abstract and all else being equal (it isn't of course!) "big box…

First, no, all these buildings have wildly overprovisioned parking. Most of the lots are empty. I'd encourage people wondering about this to just go drive out to an office complex in a suburb near them and look. Second, no, these jobs are not generally filled by neighbors of the office complexes, or even people from the muni where the office complex is situated.

The big box for 50 jobs is also a nicer building to have near you, at least when we're talking about the data centers you find in the western suburbs of Chicago.

Re: Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo

#204

Post by ChickeNES » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 5:58 AM UTC

bob1029 wrote: post #194

ComputerGuru wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have the same concerns but note that backup generators aren’t just run when needed but also have a weekly/monthly quota of hours they need to run for both testing and keeping them in shape.

Approximately 80% of the homes in my neighborhood have standby generators that all need to exercise weekly. You think it would be a nightmare but you almost don't even notice when Wednesday rolls around unless you are standing outside at just the right time. Sewage lift stations and cell towers have generators that need to exercise as well and I've never once heard a complaint about this situation. Your local municip…

> These AI data centers shouldn't need backup power at all.

Why not batteries?

Re: Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo

#205

Post by haunter » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 6:02 AM UTC

Same city:

>The 60,000-seat stadium is projected to cost $2.1 billion, including $1.26 billion of public money—the largest stadium subsidy in U.S. history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Stadium_(2027)

Re: Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo

#206

Post by JumpCrisscross » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 6:02 AM UTC

locknitpicker wrote: post #156

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opposition to data centers is like 90% hatred of Silicon Valley and its obstinate elites. One they amplified by trying to build these things sneakily.

> Opposition to data centers is like 90% hatred of Silicon Valley and its obstinate elites. One they amplified by trying to build these things sneakily. This is utter nonsense, and reeks of a desperate and deep denial. I mean, you might as well rationalize your denial by claiming they don't like you because they don't like you. Have you tried actually listening to what critics have to say? Nimby doesn't just pop up o…

> Have you tried actually listening to what critics have to say? Nimby

I wouldn’t dismiss the critics as NIMBY. They are closer to fuck it, nowhere.

Some opposition is just anti-AI or misinformed about e.g. water use. But most of them have legitimate complaints about, on one hand, noise and power prices and, on the other hand, the shocking lack of contribution to local employment or taxes from these structures minting—very visibly, they’re not subtle on social media—billionaires at an unprecedented pace.

> because someone failed to do PR

They should have engaged with the whole community and made the commitments needed to ensure they weren’t jacking up residential power prices and e.g. committing to funding the municipal budget in ways locals would champion.

Re: Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo

#207

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 6:03 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #202

rtpg wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nobody moralizes office buildings I do not believe this to be true! I have the impression you keep up with zoning discourse etc in your area based on your posting history... you surely have heard of people complaining about things like traffic concerns and general "ugliness" complaints around building out office parks, right? Data centers might be making the nat'l news at the moment, but it feels hard to consider a…

I'm a housing activist (we're fourth and inches from getting Oak Park to be the first municipality in Illinois to outlaw single-family exclusive zoning) and from grim experience I can tell you that my neighbors would far rather have an office building go up than an apartment building. It has specifically come up.

[deleted]

Re: Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo

#208

Post by GolfPopper » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 6:04 AM UTC

godwinson__4-8 wrote: post #141

Barrin92 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You think the standard of life you enjoy today is because of the triumph of local parochialism? My standard of life involves democracy and self-determination. Americans are 'pathetic' about that because it turns out at the end of the day liberty is a bit more durable of an idea than buying yet another pile of junk. If you think you can just throw fortune cookie economic slogans at people to convince them they want t…

[flagged]

>Is he forcing people to login to Instagram or Facebook?

Yes. The "no one is putting a gun to users' heads" argument is irrelevant when it comes a trillion-dollar company invested in behavioral modeling deliberately driving engagement.

"Social media apps are 'deliberately' addictive to users" (2018)

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44640959

"Addicted by Design: The Hidden Psychology Behind Social Media’s Hold on Us" (2025)

https://information-warfare.com/addicted-by-design-the-hidde...

Re: Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo

#209

Post by namdnay » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 6:05 AM UTC

DANmode wrote: post #197

tptacek wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The infrastructure thing I get! The water thing is, I think, baloney, but depending on where you are there's energy generation concerns. Seems totally reasonable to me for local political bodies to demand that new data center projects account for what they'll do to the local power grid, and, obviously, running jet turbine gas generators is not a reasonable answer to those concerns. What frustrates me about the new po…

> The water thing is, I think, baloney It’s legal/permitted in most cases, but it’s certainly a problem, what these specific data centers are dispensing into the water table in certain places. What exactly are you saying is baloney?

The water sediment thing had nothing to do with the building being a data center I think? Any form of construction would interfere with people drinking well water next to it

Re: Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo

#210

Post by otherme123 » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 6:05 AM UTC

kube-system wrote: post #55

conductr wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aesthetics are important. Everyone enjoys looking at a golf course, even non-golfers. Nobody wants to look at a datacenter. My general thought is, what’s the argument for placing them in populated areas to begin with? Why dedicate land use for it in Nashville? Wouldn’t putting it 40 miles outside town work just as well? Why don’t we create development zones specifically for these things? In Dallas we have a similar t…

> what’s the argument for placing them in populated areas to begin with? Colos advertise their proximity to populated areas. It is desirable for physical access, latency, and connectivity.

That makes no sense: are they going to use this datacenter exclusively for Nashville people use? We regularly access data from datacenters thousands of kilometers away, and the latency is acceptable. Not even pro-gamers would notice the latency increase if the datacenter moved 10 kilometers further in any direction, which is virtually empty in Nashville.

I live in Spain, and my latency to my VPS at Germany, 3,000 kilometers away, is 40 milliseconds. Good enough. A traceroute shows that I have to pass through Madrid (400 km away), with a ping of 5 ms. Do anyone believe that moving datacenters within neighborhoods to shave additional 5 or 10 km is noticeably good for the latency, when 100 km mean extra 1 ms on average? Apparently the Nashville neighbors don't give a shit about -0.1 ms latency.

We have a couple of small datacenters nearby. Luckily they are somewhat isolated from where people live, because the things are noisy at all times, and each year they add more capacity, more refrigeration towers and more noise (all efficiency gained at the CPU/GPU level is used to increase density, not to lower consumption or cooling needs). Nobody would want to live less than 200 meters away from them.