I remember the call. The city manager told me to buckle up. A re-zoning for a smelly new potato-salad factory was coming my way. On a street with nothing but houses.
My life as a city planner flashed before me like the grainy black and white final scene of Frankenstein — angry village mobs storming my office with torches and pitchforks to burn it down with me in it.
He wished me godspeed.
Lately, I’ve harkened back to those days watching data center debates rage like Eddie Vedder mosh pits in city council chambers. They’re all lulus.
Just not that sort of lulu.
LULU’s, planner-speak for locally unwanted land uses, were first coined by political scientist/city planner Frank Popper in the early 1980s to classify regionally/nationally needed developments objectionable to many people near them.
A defining feature of LULU’s are negative externalities — imposed social costs on unintended third parties.
Highways, landfills, prisons, wastewater treatment plants, airports, homeless shelters, factories, etc., cause noise, air pollution, odor, visual blight, reduced health outcomes and reduced property values.
Unwanted, they tend to gravitate towards disadvantaged areas with cheaper land and lower political influence.
Today, hyperscale data centers are the quintessential modern version of LULUs. They have national infrastructure needs like highways or transmission lines powering private enterprises. They also spew negative externalities and gravitate to areas of least resistance.
But they’re more complicated than that.
They run e-commerce websites and logistics for beloved online retailers that whacked our beloved malls (who whacked our beloved downtowns).
They store files and provide cloud-based services for coveted remote work that gut office buildings and whack downtowns again draining a city’s top revenue source: property taxes.
Yet baby boomers are three times likelier to support data centers than 20-year-olds.
Paradoxically, we really hate them but keep needing them.
About half of America “strongly opposes” data centers AND used a chatbot this summer. Classic LULU externalities — high energy bills, gobbled-up land and water, fear of human worker replacement — are to blame. In Kansas, you could throw a dart and hit a community organizing bans or moratoriums like the citizen-led versions in Ottawa and Emporia.
