What is the actual procedure through which this happens? You buy the land and then are granted permission on a discretionary basis? It seems to me that if you were a small business this becomes much harder to participate in because you need to acquire and hold the unproductive asset.
This would mean that land use tends towards that which large firms (which can sustain the costs easily by self-financing) find useful.
A comment on HN a few years ago in a thread about car washes brought this to light a little bit for me, the proliferation of subscription car washes everywhere in the US (self storage too) seems like it can't possibly make sense financially, but when you think about developers that also want to speculate on the land, car washes and self storage are about as easy as it gets to develop and maintain some cashflow, then you can sell or redevelop later. Now I am expecting a spinoff to Mister Inference and Quick Flops as these sprawling networks of carwashes turn into data centers in 2030
SMaller business would find land already zoned for what they want. That makes it much less of a fight. These large companies find the land they want, then fight governments to allow the code and zoning changes to allow them to do what they want. It's a backwards process, but they think it's fine because they can afford it, and don't stop to realize that if they stopped letting execs make the decisions of where it goes, then a facility professional can find better land that they could get up and operational much faster.
I've seen it a decent number of times in my life. The exec gets their hart set on a specific building or parcel, but literally no one else in the entire project cares because they know it doesn't matter. Then the site desired won't work, and half the time the project fails.
I was at one company years ago, the execs were bound and determined the company was going to move the HQ from one building to another a handful of miles away. They saw the floors we were to rent, were completely set on that, and then proceeded to act like the deal was done. They had the credentialing department put in a change of address to MEDICARE before we had even signed the lease! We were 6 weeks from the move day when FINALLY there was a blow up in a meeting where people told the CEO and COO they were delusional and that we had to cancel the plan because we STILL DID NOT HAVE A SIGNED LEASE. There had been major negotiating hurdles between facilities and the building owner, but the C suite acted like none of it was happening for months. They spent 6 figures prepping for a move that in the end never happened. Building owner went bankrupt, we didn't move and instead just rented another suite in our own building.
Yes it's called zoning, it's why we have a housing shortage in the USA. It makes building new things nearly impossible. It's also why none of the homes in Los Angeles that burnt down in massive fires a few years ago are being rebuilt, and likely won't be rebuilt for decades (if at all).
Pretty much. The discretionary nature of permitting, and other add-ons like CEQA, pose an enormous, and worse, unpredictable, burden on attempting to start a business in many places.
It'd be one thing if the requirements were merely onerous, but the discretionary nature adds corruption greatly favoring incumbents, the deep pocketed, and those willing to disregard the rules (start-ups with low capital requirements).
Never mind the timeline of these processes. Permitting can take 18-24 months, as can items like basic utility upgrades (adding 480V service, for instance, to an existing building can be an 18 month ~quarter million dollar endeavor.)
My first reaction is that 244 acres for a data center sounds absolutely obscene. But I have to admit that I'm coming from a place of ignorance.
How big "should" a data center be? How big are some other data centers? How big is us-east-1, for an example of a large one? I'm finding this to be rather difficult information to google.
Wealthy white exclave succeeds in using environmental justice language to keep cheap coal-fired power to themselves. Very American outcome.
Although I obviously don't care about Microsoft's outcome here, this was clearly a great site at the intersection of two transmission lines and with essentially infinite water resources.
Notably, this location is not far from where the Foxconn facility was going to be installed (the "eighth wonder of the world", 10k+ jobs, yada yada). After that debacle, I can imagine local residents are deeply skeptical of new big development projects.
I wonder if USA would have futuristic Datacenter Towns much like coal mining towns - they might have their own lore, vibe and aesthetic about them.
Certain new emerging towns would get the moniker of "DC towns". New economies might flourish - perhaps not jobs from DC but certainly the tax money should help.
This could happen if the NIMBY movement weren't so extreme.
I'd say they should come build them in Canada instead since our energy is cheaper, but anti-industrial development policy and NIMBYism is even more embedded than America, which is probably why no one is bothering.
At what point was this datacenter going to benefit the residents beyond a trifling number of jobs in exchange for draining local resources for pennies on the dollar Microsoft should have paid? If the tech companies can't make these things into genuine win/win scenarios, then don't let them build anything, they're currently as useless to local communities as stadiums except you don't even get to watch games in them.
Absolutely 100% force them to make a genuine case for them and to sign contracts demanding they live up to their obligations. Otherwise, it's more evidence why billionaires need to write and sign some reality checks on their dragon piles.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 42.8 ms ] thread(also thanks for the useful message telling me to "contact the website owner... while blocking me from the website where the contact info should be)
This would mean that land use tends towards that which large firms (which can sustain the costs easily by self-financing) find useful.
I've seen it a decent number of times in my life. The exec gets their hart set on a specific building or parcel, but literally no one else in the entire project cares because they know it doesn't matter. Then the site desired won't work, and half the time the project fails.
I was at one company years ago, the execs were bound and determined the company was going to move the HQ from one building to another a handful of miles away. They saw the floors we were to rent, were completely set on that, and then proceeded to act like the deal was done. They had the credentialing department put in a change of address to MEDICARE before we had even signed the lease! We were 6 weeks from the move day when FINALLY there was a blow up in a meeting where people told the CEO and COO they were delusional and that we had to cancel the plan because we STILL DID NOT HAVE A SIGNED LEASE. There had been major negotiating hurdles between facilities and the building owner, but the C suite acted like none of it was happening for months. They spent 6 figures prepping for a move that in the end never happened. Building owner went bankrupt, we didn't move and instead just rented another suite in our own building.
It'd be one thing if the requirements were merely onerous, but the discretionary nature adds corruption greatly favoring incumbents, the deep pocketed, and those willing to disregard the rules (start-ups with low capital requirements).
Never mind the timeline of these processes. Permitting can take 18-24 months, as can items like basic utility upgrades (adding 480V service, for instance, to an existing building can be an 18 month ~quarter million dollar endeavor.)
How big "should" a data center be? How big are some other data centers? How big is us-east-1, for an example of a large one? I'm finding this to be rather difficult information to google.
Although I obviously don't care about Microsoft's outcome here, this was clearly a great site at the intersection of two transmission lines and with essentially infinite water resources.
The data center would have been built in this scene. https://www.google.com/maps/@42.8440852,-87.8474228,2445m/da...
Certain new emerging towns would get the moniker of "DC towns". New economies might flourish - perhaps not jobs from DC but certainly the tax money should help.
This could happen if the NIMBY movement weren't so extreme.
Absolutely 100% force them to make a genuine case for them and to sign contracts demanding they live up to their obligations. Otherwise, it's more evidence why billionaires need to write and sign some reality checks on their dragon piles.