How to stop a data center in your backyard

https://lataco.com/stop-sgv-data-center-building

31•cdrnsf•1h ago

Comments

nslsm•1h ago

Remember when this was the anti-nimby site.

oceansky•54m ago

Unlike solar and wind power, some people don't want AI data centers in any neighborhood.

tt24•53m ago

> website named “hacker”news

> begs the government to outlaw data centers

Hilarious. I think the users of this platform have started to develop a taste for boots :/

rexpop•48m ago

Everyone's just arguing about the seasonings.

pesus•47m ago

By this logic, anyone "begging the government" to prevent anything harmful is bootlicking.

Personally, I think bootlicking more accurately describes wanting to allow the billionaires in control of the country unlimited ability to build data centers to help destroy the fabric of society and spy, stalk, disappear and murder people with impunity.

bluefirebrand•44m ago

Do VC boots taste better than government boots or something?

oaxacaoaxaca•43m ago

Datacenters have evolved into this gigantic nuisance that are sucking up a town's water and electricity, emitting a ton of pollution, causing people's utility bills to skyrocket, and all sorts of other problems. I don't think people who are against this issue are "bootlickers". More like people who have at least a shred of empathy.

thepryz•20m ago

I’m curious if you looked into the industry to see how much water and power modern data centers actually use or whether you’re just blindly accepting the popular narrative?

I’ve seen a lot of verifiably false claims being thrown around data centers.

sroussey•11m ago

What pollution?

Last I was using data centers directly there was no water use, though I know now that many use water for cooling and don’t bother with a closed system because water is cheaper than the power. (Exception being Elon and gas turbines for data centers of his but that’s something you get away with doing to Texans).

I don’t get why utility bills go up when the DC should pay for the upgrades it needs for power itself.

I don’t get why people would be against them. For that matter, I don’t understand why people would be for them.

I spent many many hours in my local DC in downtown LA and you would never know it was there except the office building windows were not open to see inside.

jmye•31m ago

“Hacking is letting Zuck or Musk or Nadella build shit in your backyard actually” is a fucking lame argument to make, and it’s only worse because of the misuse of the tween-on-Reddit “bootlicking” meme.

georgemcbay•50m ago

NIMBY-ism/anti-NIMBY-ism isn't all or nothing.

I support an increase in housing development and cautious modifications to zoning regulations because I believe these changes will improve housing affordability for humans.

I support more development into renewable energy sources because I believe these changes will improve the environment that humans must live in.

I do not support a massive increase in data center development, resulting in situations like xAI poisoning parts of Memphis and Southaven with methane turbines.

tptacek•37m ago

"Cautious" modifications to zoning is a NIMBY argument, just for what it's worth.

switchbak•35m ago

That's such an oversimplified thing to say. And how much work are those quotes doing?

tptacek•32m ago

I don't agree, and none.

georgemcbay•23m ago

Zoning is currently too restrictive in the US. I believe it should be less so.

"Cautious" as I mean it exists in the space between where we are now and just throwing zoning regulations out entirely and YOLOing it.

I support significant changes, but I don't support just eliminating all regulations with no replacements and expecting "the market" to do the right thing. IMO we'd be trading one problem with another likely much more destructive one.

The NIMBY argument is generally that the current zoning system is fine (and then hiding behind it to support their NIMBY-ism).

Karrot_Kream•13m ago

This kind of data center opposition is part of the NIMBY playbook though. A core part of NIMBY positions is that the built environment should be purely discretionary; every change to the neighborhood should have sufficient community approval to go forward. The idea being that current residents should have veto rights over what is built in their community. Highly restrictive zoning just happens to be the method by which this land use philosophy is exercised.

Regular zoning in most of the US already covers data centers. They're highly likely only being placed in medium or heavy industrial zones. Opposing a data center despite zoning allowance is being a NIMBY. It's saying that community members should have veto rights over what gets built in their community, despite zoning and code which restricts what can be built.

ianm218•12m ago

Why not throw almost all zoning regulations out besides some designations for what areas can be used for industrial uses?

The status quo of zoning basically just stops people from living and working where they want to.

seattle_spring•36m ago

I don't want this garbage in anyone's "backyard", mine or not.

cucumber3732842•28m ago

I want it in my back yard. Commercial and industrial interests make great neighbors.

jmye•33m ago

Equating this shit with a NIMBY argument is unequivocally dishonest.

I don’t want any more shitty AI data centers anywhere. Sorry that that negatively impacts your totally awesome start-up.

dorksquad•43m ago

most people have no idea where their apps come from. they think it all happens on their phone. this is why we can't have nice things.

achierius•39m ago

We aren't building dozens of new datacenters to host more webapps.

jmye•30m ago

I think we’ll all probably survive without yet another shitty, vibe-coded app. I’m sure your idea was a banger, though.

ofjcihen•42m ago

Considering what’s happening to the residents in places like West Virginia they had better figure out how to make these things more palatable to locals than “it will create 10 $50k a year jobs and some one time windfalls for a construction company”.

At this point it’s getting hard to figure out how these are supposed to benefit the people who’s tax money is subsidizing it.

amluto•38m ago

Or… allow it, but tax it appropriately, don’t give any subsidies, and actually require that the operators deal with the negative externalities (noise, including subsonic noise, effects on utility pricing, etc).

It really ought to be possible to structure the utility contracts such that a new data center lowers every one else’s rates instead of raising them. And it really ought to be possible to design a tax system such that the data center actually pays its way on an ongoing basis.

ofjcihen•34m ago

You would think and I’m definitely with you on your method.

slg•20m ago

I agree it "ought to be", but from a practical perspective, this often just isn't worth it at a local level. Actually determining the right cost for the externalities would take a decent amount of work and odds are whatever the "fair" value is will be enough to kill the project anyway. The developer will likely jump to some other jurisdiction that isn't able to muster up enough political will to demand a fair deal. An outright ban might sound harsh, but there are benefits to their simplicity because many of these race to the bottom deals aren't worth engaging with at any level. Let some other community gamble with the winner's curse.

twoodfin•38m ago

I’m just spitballing here, but how about a commercial property tax?

ofjcihen•35m ago

Unfortunately that doesn’t guarantee that any of that is actually used to offset any of the negatives these things bring with them.

arjie•33m ago

There's a datacenter around the corner from where I live in San Francisco. More than a decade ago[0], I worked at a company that had hundreds of machines there. Recently I was looking to colocate a server and found that Hosting.com on 3rd street sold off datacenter operations and the buyer shut them down at that location. Sad. Hurricane Electric is still running in Fremont and it's only an hour away, but I would have preferred to have just walked next door. Ah well, such is life. I imagine the building is much more valuable as an empty tenant since it's a block away from the VCs at South Park.

I do wish, selfishly, that it was still a datacenter though. It would be sick to be able to walk down the street to my servers. I'm still procrastinating on readying my GPU servers because of the one hour of travel.

0: back when individuals didn't have petabytes or 1 TiB RAM machines or 1 GiB CPU cache machines

cucumber3732842•32m ago

The real travesty here is the double standard. Can you imagine if these residents wanted to develop their properties for business use. The government would not exercise their discretion to waive various reviews for lowly peasants. But a data center comes along and suddenly all the doors are opening.

tptacek•30m ago

I live in a muni where virtually all development is done under variance, so I'm not sure what you mean here; "peasants" get stuff all the time, in fact, my guess is most of what gets decided on is "peasants" getting stuff.

(For obvious reasons we're not going to get data centers, because like every dense metro area we're the most expensive conceivable place to put them --- I'm ambivalent about the data center argument, they're going to go somewhere, might as well put them where they're welcome.)

ianm218•15m ago

In most cases the government should get out of the way for any development of private property. If they need to pay for increased usage of utilities but 90% of restrictions on private development are insane on the US Coasts.

ButlerianJihad•14m ago

You would be surprised! Here's a fun pastime: pull up your Google Maps and scan through any McMansion district or SFH subdivision. Count how many independent businesses pop up in residential zones and at residential addresses! Count how many people are outright running businesses from their homes, some that even require foot traffic (like a boutique, a nail/hail salon, a notary public, a firearms shop in their garage!)

I've found "family farms" that will sell you raw milk and some freshly-butchered mutton. There is a local news story, ongoing here, about a gentleman and his family that just wants to give out free bottles of water to passers-by but his HOA is being a big old meanie-head. It turns out that this family is running a full-on business from their garage, and the water bottles are a marketing strategy to drum up customers.

Is it any surprise, that in a nation built by wealthy landowners who derived profit from their home estates, that "home ownership seen as an investment" is not so much a money pit but a lot of free space to open up your office and your workspace and start extracting some value out of it, zoning regulations, commercial insurance, and business licensing be damned?

tptacek•27m ago

Getting a data center halted in Monterey Park doesn't seem like that much of a flex; is there some subtle reason why this wasn't a super weird place to try to site a dense data center in the first place? Most of these things seem to go in exurbs.

_--__--__•26m ago

I lived in Reston Virginia for 5 years, the claims about NoVa noise pollution in this article are bizarrely conflating the noise levels of active construction sites with the regular operations of a data center (which are imperceptible compared to the noise of living near any highway or airport in America).

bluepeter•23m ago

Holy moly this is upsetting to see on HN. If even here we're cheering on data center bans, AI is on track to become the next Concorde, or nuclear in the US. AI is the most amazing tech innovation that I've seen in my career since I started programming Perl back in 1994... Gosh, I'm gonna be gloomy for the next day.

PearlRiver•19m ago

Do you want to live next to one? Or do you think that honor should go to poor people?

Now that I think about it were do all these tech bros live...

goldcountry•15m ago

If you had a data center in your backyard you'd change your mind on this one suuuuuper fast.

slg•6m ago

>AI is on track to become the next Concorde

A technologically impressive innovation that is ultimately doomed by being too loud and so expensive that it mostly benefits the rich before the costs just become too high for even that to be practical? That's the positive analogy?

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