9 ms·

The funny thing about data center concerns in Chicagoland, where I'm hearing it, is that data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real

by tptacek 3mo ago

The funny thing about data center concerns in Chicagoland, where I'm hearing it, is that data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate. The data centers in Aurora are surrounded with prairie green space; everything else, including the nicest office buildings, are a sea of eyesore asphalt parking lots. I get there can be real concerns, locally-specific, about energy usage (again: they depend on where you are). But data centers by themselves intrinsically seem like very good neighbors, much better than warehouses and strip malls.

gensym 3mo ago
Strip malls at least offer something to the local residents. I recall from my time in Chicago that some of the best immigrant-family-run restaurants were in strip malls on the northwest side. Warehouses, though, are worse than data centers in that they bring a lot of traffic to the area. (I currently live in Riverside Country, CA which may be the warehouse capital of the country). But if we're being honest, most people see warehouses as a way to get cheap stuff to them, which they like and data centers as a way to make them unemployable, which they don't like so much.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
mixdup 3mo ago
>But data centers by themselves intrinsically seem like very good neighbors, much better than warehouses and strip malls. It totally depends on the developer. Ask someone in Memphis about data centers and they are unlikely to mention energy usage/costs or water usage and will be hyper focused on being a bad neighbor like air pollution and noise For sure DCs can, and probably mostly are built in a way that if there's a good thicket of trees between you and the DC you wouldn't know it's there, but there are plenty of bad actors building things that ruin the area and that's what gets all the press
gilthelander 3mo ago
[flagged]
- warkdarrior 3mo ago
  > You can't plant trees in a rail yard. Why not?
  - tptacek 3mo ago
    The trains have a bad habit of hitting them.
  - ekianjo 3mo ago
    because of... rails
  - perpetuallunch 3mo ago
    Seen what a tree can do to a sidewalk? You can step over or walk around cracked and buckled concrete. Trains don’t appreciate having their rail ballast disturbed.
    - egormakarov 3mo ago
      I think trains are ok with trees. I checked satellite view - there are a lot of rail tracks in Chicago going directly along tree lines. The rail yards indeed look like tracks on concrete with nothing else, but when I look at German ones - there are trees and bushes.
hn_throwaway_99 3mo ago
But data centers basically take land and resources and generate almost nothing for the local community. The jobs are minimal after the data center is built. It's a giant windowless box. I would much rather have a strip mall in my community. Strip malls often have local businesses as tenants (so money made by the business then gets spent in the community), and they provide services the local community can interact with and benefit from. They may not win any architectural awards, but I'll take a strip mall over a giant data center any day.
- gilthelander 3mo ago
  [flagged]
- tptacek 3mo ago
  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.
  - shit_game 3mo ago
    This was a very significant talking point through most of covid, actually. Granted, there is an orders-of-magnitude disparity between office buildings and data centers regarding both their resource consumption and their local financial return through employment. Its no surprise that the attitude towards data centers is much more negative.
    - tptacek 3mo ago
      Not really, no? I'm not saying office buildings are "just as bad" as data centers; I'm saying they're substantially worse. It is much more unpleasant to have an office building next to your home than it is to have one of the CyrusOne Aurora data centers. The data center is --- seriously go look at them --- basically like having a park next door.
locknitpicker 3mo ago
> The funny thing about data center concerns in Chicagoland, where I'm hearing it, is that data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate. This baseless assertion contrasts with any report or reasoning. They are noise generators operating 24/7 that eradicate social activity and purpose to such a degree that makes high-security prisons feel like community centers. Please in your own words state what you feel is the primary advantage of having a data center in your neighborhood. > The data centers in Aurora are surrounded with prairie green space; everything else, including the nicest office buildings, are a sea of eyesore asphalt parking lots. You don't need to build a data center to plant some trees. There are other ways to do that, you know? > But data centers by themselves intrinsically seem like very good neighbors, much better than warehouses and strip malls You got to be joking. Datacenters are massive warehouses whose main output is noise 24/7. Strip malls at least serve a purpose in the community, such as fulfilljng needs of those who go there to shop, and simplify the job if small business owners to setup and maintain a shop.
- tptacek 3mo ago
  No. You can drive right into the parking lot of a CyrusOne data center in Aurora and listen. You're not going to hear anything. Nobody is disputing that Elon Musk or whoever has built data centers powered by jet turbines or whatever, or that those are good. I'm being specific about what I'm talking about, and you're responding with a platitude.
  - Henchman21 3mo ago
    Buddy I am writing this from that parking lot and I can hear quite a bit. I call bullshit. And suggest a hearing test, for real if you’re a DCO person get it checked on the regular.
    - tptacek 3mo ago
      Respectfully, I've done this recently and I don't believe you, but I'd be happy to place a bet with you and then drive out there and take decibel readings (I can go grab some hardwood at Owl to justify the trip).
Johnny555 3mo ago
>...data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate The biggest reason I wouldn't want a data center next door as opposed to an office building is the noise and pollution from backup generators (that may run more than expected if the datacenter has load shedding agreements with the utility) The sea of parking lots doesn't seem any worse than the huge featureless datacenter building. https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-28/living-in-hell-data-center-neighbors-grapple-with-noise-air-pollution https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-2...
- ComputerGuru 3mo ago
  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.
  - bob1029 3mo ago
    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 municipality probably has something like 10-40% of its average load available in automatic standby generation capacity. These AI data centers shouldn't need backup power at all. The workload does not justify that kind of reliability. If you've got tens or hundreds of these facilities, you don't need every single one of them to serve as a resilient durable hub. You just need a few of those. An inference farm going down and having requests automatically retried elsewhere is not exactly rocket science.
    - ChickeNES 3mo ago
      > These AI data centers shouldn't need backup power at all. Why not batteries?
    - 3mo ago
ashleyn 3mo ago
The reputation of datacenters precludes them due to some high-profile abuses of locals, as well as cities overcommitting brittle and unprepared infrastructure to them. Consumer energy prices in 13+ states hiked because the grid was unable to meet the sudden demand. SpaceX's datacenter in Memphis used gas turbines to rapidly deploy Colossus before the grid could be upgraded, which resulted in an increase in local air emissions that was technically illegal. There are two Meta datacenters that oneshotted their local water supplies during construction and tests, resulting in sediment and bacteria going through consumers' taps. NV Energy cut off an entire town of residential properties because datacenters were more profitable, in a higher-stakes parallel to the ongoing RAM woes in consumer electronics. There's been more than enough well-justified association between "datacenter" and "abuses local resources" that I think nobody should really be surprised at the backlash toward them. The backlash is so furious that it's forming a rare example of a bipartisan, populist consensus on any given political issue.
- tptacek 3mo ago
  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 political valence of data centers is that there are reasons to be optimistic about data centers in blue states, which could move the market towards renewables and grid modernization, making data centers --- which are going to happen one way or the other --- a vector for improving our current energy system. Instead, they're all just going to be pushed to the locales who will do the least to regulate energy usage.
  - DANmode 3mo ago
    > 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?
veunes 3mo ago
A data center can be a much quieter neighbor than a warehouse or shopping center. The catch is that most of its impact is pushed into less visible systems
- inigyou 3mo ago
  It can be, but you missed the important point: these ones aren't.
svara 3mo ago
AI company leadership are telling everyone, and that's paraphrasing only lightly, that there's a chance AI will destroy humanity, and will probably cause mass unemployment, so we need to put datacenters everywhere. So why do people not like datacenters? Go figure.
- user43928 3mo ago
  They are also universally saying that AI's benefits far outweigh the challenges and will produce extraordinary improvements in prosperity, health, and human capability.
  - williamdclt 3mo ago
    > will produce extraordinary improvements in prosperity Who says that? Who is doing _anything_ for AI to result in (even non-extraordinary) improvements in prosperity for the average citizen? I'm hearing a lot about AI reducing need for human labour, but literally nothing about doing anything to transition into a post-labour society. Absolute madness. So far it's all very standard (if scaled up) wealth concentration, and not even a pretense of it trickling down.
    - user43928 3mo ago
      If you heard nothing about it, it would be because you did not make any effort to look for it. It is central to both OpenAI's and Anthropic's stated mission and either CEO has been discussing this repeatedly. Examples: For OpenAI, we have here an "AI job transition framework": https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/the-ai-jobs-transition-framework_report https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/the-ai-jobs-transition-framework_... Anthropic has "Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence" https://www.anthropic.com/research/labor-market-impacts https://www.anthropic.com/research/labor-market-impacts
    - polski-g 3mo ago
      https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10487271/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10487271/
cucumber3732842 3mo ago
I'd rather have a DC as my neighbor than an office because what are offices full of? People like you who call the next guy's stuff an eyesore.
michaelt 3mo ago
> The funny thing about data center concerns in Chicagoland, where I'm hearing it, is that data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate. Data centres are better neighbours than a steelworks, or a pet food factory, or a fish processing plant, or an oil refinery, or a big distribution centre. By the standards of industrial zones they're low noise, low smell, low traffic, low injury, low pollution, low disaster risk. Low jobs and low tax too unfortunately, but you can't have everything. The thing is, data centres are often built on open fields. So from the perspective of locals it's not data centre vs dark satanic mills, it's data centre vs open countryside.
rayiner 3mo ago
It seems like the biggest issue, related to energy usage, is noise from turbines, right? Doesn’t Illinois have nukes? Does that alleviate the burden?
dqv 3mo ago
> The data centers in Aurora are surrounded with prairie green space I'm skeptical that they're actually surrounded by American prairie. What are the addresses of some of the data centers you're talking about? Edit: I just see traditional American landscaping surrounding the CyrusOne data center in Aurora. I don't really see any native forbs or native grasses and it has a bunch of trees... where's the prairie?
dragonwriter 3mo ago
> The data centers in Aurora are surrounded with prairie green space; everything else, including the nicest office buildings, are a sea of eyesore asphalt parking lots. The concern about datacenters isn’t about visual aesthetics or traffic (the relative absence of workers—which are the traffic and parking lot drivers—for the footprint is actually one of the concerns, though not na environmental one) so this seems to be less of a contradiction than it is implied to be.
Henchman21 3mo ago
Where in Aurora? I’m at the CME DC daily, and I am not aware of any prairie green spaces that aren’t being actively developed. In fact the area between Bilter and Butterfield Rds are so active it’s changing my commute time to the DC — making my 10 minute ride often more than 30. So as someone who visits Aurora data centers daily I’m not seeing it. The point you’re making seems to be of “lesser of two evils” variety, aka DCs are less evil than strip malls. Debatable, but the lesser of two evils is still fucking evil.
- tptacek 3mo ago
  At this point you're basically making an argument against all commercial real estate.
  - Henchman21 3mo ago
    Sure, and I think you won’t have to look too hard to find people who don’t want to live near commercial real estate. That is exactly the point. Why should any of us have to put up with evil? Why do the poor bear that load more than the rich? But also there’s no prairie around there. At all. What year were you last out there?
    - baggy_trough 3mo ago
      What do you mean, evil? Is there something evil about a datacenter, or a strip mall? I struggle to think what that could be.
    - tptacek 3mo ago
      Plot a line from CHI1 to all of the nearest houses and get back to me with the the prices. I did one ray from CHI1 to Molitor Road and the first house I hit was over a half mil. Tell me more about the poor people these data centers inconvenience!
- inahga 3mo ago
  I don't understand his point either. I used to work off of Diehl Road not too far from the CyrusOne DC[1] and it is anything but a prairie. It has greenery, but it's just the usual fake landscaping that all the industrial parks in Aurora, Bolingbrook, Warrenville, etc. do. And there's counterexamples to the desolate office space... the Ace Hardware corporate office[2] I think is remarkably pleasant. [1]: https://maps.app.goo.gl/rFgzVfWNBaGxpBNg7 https://maps.app.goo.gl/rFgzVfWNBaGxpBNg7 [2]: https://maps.app.goo.gl/5EiQy5YUPengwDE18 https://maps.app.goo.gl/5EiQy5YUPengwDE18
hollerith 3mo ago
You wouldn't be worried about constant noise from the chillers?

by tptacek 3mo ago

gensym 3mo ago

Strip malls at least offer something to the local residents. I recall from my time in Chicago that some of the best immigrant-family-run restaurants were in strip malls on the northwest side. Warehouses, though, are worse than data centers in that they bring a lot of traffic to the area. (I currently live in Riverside Country, CA which may be the warehouse capital of the country). But if we're being honest, most people see warehouses as a way to get cheap stuff to them, which they like and data centers as a way to make them unemployable, which they don't like so much.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

mixdup 3mo ago

>But data centers by themselves intrinsically seem like very good neighbors, much better than warehouses and strip malls. It totally depends on the developer. Ask someone in Memphis about data centers and they are unlikely to mention energy usage/costs or water usage and will be hyper focused on being a bad neighbor like air pollution and noise For sure DCs can, and probably mostly are built in a way that if there's a good thicket of trees between you and the DC you wouldn't know it's there, but there are plenty of bad actors building things that ruin the area and that's what gets all the press

gilthelander 3mo ago

[flagged]

warkdarrior 3mo ago
> You can't plant trees in a rail yard. Why not?
- tptacek 3mo ago
  The trains have a bad habit of hitting them.
- ekianjo 3mo ago
  because of... rails
- perpetuallunch 3mo ago
  Seen what a tree can do to a sidewalk? You can step over or walk around cracked and buckled concrete. Trains don’t appreciate having their rail ballast disturbed.
  - egormakarov 3mo ago
    I think trains are ok with trees. I checked satellite view - there are a lot of rail tracks in Chicago going directly along tree lines. The rail yards indeed look like tracks on concrete with nothing else, but when I look at German ones - there are trees and bushes.

hn_throwaway_99 3mo ago

But data centers basically take land and resources and generate almost nothing for the local community. The jobs are minimal after the data center is built. It's a giant windowless box. I would much rather have a strip mall in my community. Strip malls often have local businesses as tenants (so money made by the business then gets spent in the community), and they provide services the local community can interact with and benefit from. They may not win any architectural awards, but I'll take a strip mall over a giant data center any day.

gilthelander 3mo ago
[flagged]
tptacek 3mo ago
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.
- shit_game 3mo ago
  This was a very significant talking point through most of covid, actually. Granted, there is an orders-of-magnitude disparity between office buildings and data centers regarding both their resource consumption and their local financial return through employment. Its no surprise that the attitude towards data centers is much more negative.
  - tptacek 3mo ago
    Not really, no? I'm not saying office buildings are "just as bad" as data centers; I'm saying they're substantially worse. It is much more unpleasant to have an office building next to your home than it is to have one of the CyrusOne Aurora data centers. The data center is --- seriously go look at them --- basically like having a park next door.

locknitpicker 3mo ago

> The funny thing about data center concerns in Chicagoland, where I'm hearing it, is that data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate. This baseless assertion contrasts with any report or reasoning. They are noise generators operating 24/7 that eradicate social activity and purpose to such a degree that makes high-security prisons feel like community centers. Please in your own words state what you feel is the primary advantage of having a data center in your neighborhood. > The data centers in Aurora are surrounded with prairie green space; everything else, including the nicest office buildings, are a sea of eyesore asphalt parking lots. You don't need to build a data center to plant some trees. There are other ways to do that, you know? > But data centers by themselves intrinsically seem like very good neighbors, much better than warehouses and strip malls You got to be joking. Datacenters are massive warehouses whose main output is noise 24/7. Strip malls at least serve a purpose in the community, such as fulfilljng needs of those who go there to shop, and simplify the job if small business owners to setup and maintain a shop.

tptacek 3mo ago
No. You can drive right into the parking lot of a CyrusOne data center in Aurora and listen. You're not going to hear anything. Nobody is disputing that Elon Musk or whoever has built data centers powered by jet turbines or whatever, or that those are good. I'm being specific about what I'm talking about, and you're responding with a platitude.
- Henchman21 3mo ago
  Buddy I am writing this from that parking lot and I can hear quite a bit. I call bullshit. And suggest a hearing test, for real if you’re a DCO person get it checked on the regular.
  - tptacek 3mo ago
    Respectfully, I've done this recently and I don't believe you, but I'd be happy to place a bet with you and then drive out there and take decibel readings (I can go grab some hardwood at Owl to justify the trip).

Johnny555 3mo ago

>...data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate The biggest reason I wouldn't want a data center next door as opposed to an office building is the noise and pollution from backup generators (that may run more than expected if the datacenter has load shedding agreements with the utility) The sea of parking lots doesn't seem any worse than the huge featureless datacenter building. https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-28/living-in-hell-data-center-neighbors-grapple-with-noise-air-pollution https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-2...

ComputerGuru 3mo ago
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.
- bob1029 3mo ago
  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 municipality probably has something like 10-40% of its average load available in automatic standby generation capacity. These AI data centers shouldn't need backup power at all. The workload does not justify that kind of reliability. If you've got tens or hundreds of these facilities, you don't need every single one of them to serve as a resilient durable hub. You just need a few of those. An inference farm going down and having requests automatically retried elsewhere is not exactly rocket science.
  - ChickeNES 3mo ago
    > These AI data centers shouldn't need backup power at all. Why not batteries?
  - 3mo ago

ashleyn 3mo ago

The reputation of datacenters precludes them due to some high-profile abuses of locals, as well as cities overcommitting brittle and unprepared infrastructure to them. Consumer energy prices in 13+ states hiked because the grid was unable to meet the sudden demand. SpaceX's datacenter in Memphis used gas turbines to rapidly deploy Colossus before the grid could be upgraded, which resulted in an increase in local air emissions that was technically illegal. There are two Meta datacenters that oneshotted their local water supplies during construction and tests, resulting in sediment and bacteria going through consumers' taps. NV Energy cut off an entire town of residential properties because datacenters were more profitable, in a higher-stakes parallel to the ongoing RAM woes in consumer electronics. There's been more than enough well-justified association between "datacenter" and "abuses local resources" that I think nobody should really be surprised at the backlash toward them. The backlash is so furious that it's forming a rare example of a bipartisan, populist consensus on any given political issue.

tptacek 3mo ago
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 political valence of data centers is that there are reasons to be optimistic about data centers in blue states, which could move the market towards renewables and grid modernization, making data centers --- which are going to happen one way or the other --- a vector for improving our current energy system. Instead, they're all just going to be pushed to the locales who will do the least to regulate energy usage.
- DANmode 3mo ago
  > 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?

veunes 3mo ago

A data center can be a much quieter neighbor than a warehouse or shopping center. The catch is that most of its impact is pushed into less visible systems

inigyou 3mo ago
It can be, but you missed the important point: these ones aren't.

svara 3mo ago

AI company leadership are telling everyone, and that's paraphrasing only lightly, that there's a chance AI will destroy humanity, and will probably cause mass unemployment, so we need to put datacenters everywhere. So why do people not like datacenters? Go figure.

user43928 3mo ago
They are also universally saying that AI's benefits far outweigh the challenges and will produce extraordinary improvements in prosperity, health, and human capability.
- williamdclt 3mo ago
  > will produce extraordinary improvements in prosperity Who says that? Who is doing _anything_ for AI to result in (even non-extraordinary) improvements in prosperity for the average citizen? I'm hearing a lot about AI reducing need for human labour, but literally nothing about doing anything to transition into a post-labour society. Absolute madness. So far it's all very standard (if scaled up) wealth concentration, and not even a pretense of it trickling down.
  - user43928 3mo ago
    If you heard nothing about it, it would be because you did not make any effort to look for it. It is central to both OpenAI's and Anthropic's stated mission and either CEO has been discussing this repeatedly. Examples: For OpenAI, we have here an "AI job transition framework": https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/the-ai-jobs-transition-framework_report https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/the-ai-jobs-transition-framework_... Anthropic has "Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence" https://www.anthropic.com/research/labor-market-impacts https://www.anthropic.com/research/labor-market-impacts
  - polski-g 3mo ago
    https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10487271/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10487271/

cucumber3732842 3mo ago

I'd rather have a DC as my neighbor than an office because what are offices full of? People like you who call the next guy's stuff an eyesore.

michaelt 3mo ago

> The funny thing about data center concerns in Chicagoland, where I'm hearing it, is that data centers are better neighbors than almost any other commercial real estate. Data centres are better neighbours than a steelworks, or a pet food factory, or a fish processing plant, or an oil refinery, or a big distribution centre. By the standards of industrial zones they're low noise, low smell, low traffic, low injury, low pollution, low disaster risk. Low jobs and low tax too unfortunately, but you can't have everything. The thing is, data centres are often built on open fields. So from the perspective of locals it's not data centre vs dark satanic mills, it's data centre vs open countryside.

rayiner 3mo ago

It seems like the biggest issue, related to energy usage, is noise from turbines, right? Doesn’t Illinois have nukes? Does that alleviate the burden?

dqv 3mo ago

> The data centers in Aurora are surrounded with prairie green space I'm skeptical that they're actually surrounded by American prairie. What are the addresses of some of the data centers you're talking about? Edit: I just see traditional American landscaping surrounding the CyrusOne data center in Aurora. I don't really see any native forbs or native grasses and it has a bunch of trees... where's the prairie?

dragonwriter 3mo ago

> The data centers in Aurora are surrounded with prairie green space; everything else, including the nicest office buildings, are a sea of eyesore asphalt parking lots. The concern about datacenters isn’t about visual aesthetics or traffic (the relative absence of workers—which are the traffic and parking lot drivers—for the footprint is actually one of the concerns, though not na environmental one) so this seems to be less of a contradiction than it is implied to be.

Henchman21 3mo ago

Where in Aurora? I’m at the CME DC daily, and I am not aware of any prairie green spaces that aren’t being actively developed. In fact the area between Bilter and Butterfield Rds are so active it’s changing my commute time to the DC — making my 10 minute ride often more than 30. So as someone who visits Aurora data centers daily I’m not seeing it. The point you’re making seems to be of “lesser of two evils” variety, aka DCs are less evil than strip malls. Debatable, but the lesser of two evils is still fucking evil.

tptacek 3mo ago
At this point you're basically making an argument against all commercial real estate.
- Henchman21 3mo ago
  Sure, and I think you won’t have to look too hard to find people who don’t want to live near commercial real estate. That is exactly the point. Why should any of us have to put up with evil? Why do the poor bear that load more than the rich? But also there’s no prairie around there. At all. What year were you last out there?
  - baggy_trough 3mo ago
    What do you mean, evil? Is there something evil about a datacenter, or a strip mall? I struggle to think what that could be.
  - tptacek 3mo ago
    Plot a line from CHI1 to all of the nearest houses and get back to me with the the prices. I did one ray from CHI1 to Molitor Road and the first house I hit was over a half mil. Tell me more about the poor people these data centers inconvenience!
inahga 3mo ago
I don't understand his point either. I used to work off of Diehl Road not too far from the CyrusOne DC[1] and it is anything but a prairie. It has greenery, but it's just the usual fake landscaping that all the industrial parks in Aurora, Bolingbrook, Warrenville, etc. do. And there's counterexamples to the desolate office space... the Ace Hardware corporate office[2] I think is remarkably pleasant. [1]: https://maps.app.goo.gl/rFgzVfWNBaGxpBNg7 https://maps.app.goo.gl/rFgzVfWNBaGxpBNg7 [2]: https://maps.app.goo.gl/5EiQy5YUPengwDE18 https://maps.app.goo.gl/5EiQy5YUPengwDE18

hollerith 3mo ago

You wouldn't be worried about constant noise from the chillers?