{"id":18695,"date":"2026-03-05T13:37:39","date_gmt":"2026-03-05T13:37:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/?p=18695"},"modified":"2026-03-05T13:37:54","modified_gmt":"2026-03-05T13:37:54","slug":"whose-neighborhood-is-this","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/05\/whose-neighborhood-is-this\/","title":{"rendered":"Whose Neighborhood Is This?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
Donald Perryman<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By Rev. Donald L. Perryman, Ph.D.<\/em>
\nThe Truth Contributor<\/em><\/p>\n

Planning is not neutral. It either serves those with power, or it redistributes it.\u00a0 <\/em>\u2013 <\/em>Norman Krumholz<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The “cloud” is no longer a Silicon Valley thing. It is an everybody-everywhere thing.<\/p>\n

We scroll, FaceTime, and Facebook Live; stream Sunday services, post our small businesses and hobbies on Instagram, and use AI tools that promise to change how we live and work \u2014 but we never see the massive server warehouses powering it all. And even fewer of us are asked whether we want one in our backyard.<\/p>\n

It is time to stop waiting to be asked.<\/p>\n

In the first half of 2025, data center investment accounted for a staggering 92 percent of U.S. GDP growth, says Harvard economist Jason Furman. That’s not normal. McKinsey projects $6.7 trillion in new global capacity by 2030. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta are spending hundreds of billions to build what is the largest infrastructure expansion in America since the Interstate Highway System.<\/p>\n

The question is who benefits \u2014 and who bears the burden.<\/p>\n

A Familiar Development Pattern<\/strong><\/p>\n

Massive infrastructure projects are rarely neutral. Highways cut through Black business districts and thriving residential neighborhoods. Industrial facilities clustered where political clout was weakest. By the time residents found out, the decisions were already a done deal.<\/p>\n

Data centers are following the same pattern. Non-disclosure agreements (NDA) between corporations and local officials limit what residents are told before zoning votes are even cast. As Ohio State Senator Paula Hicks-Hudson put it: “It is an unequal balance of who has the right information to make the right decision.” The public meeting happens after the terms are already set.<\/p>\n

Hicks-Hudson said something else rare for someone in public office: “I know just enough not to know enough to be really clear about whether they’re good or bad.”<\/p>\n

If our own elected officials are still asking basic questions about water, electricity, noise, and long-term impact, communities should not be expected to accept these projects on faith either.<\/p>\n

You will hear others selling this, say that skepticism is overstated \u2014 that modern data centers use minimal water, that rising electricity costs are the fault of utilities, not server farms, and that while permanent jobs are few, “payments in lieu of taxes” (PILOTs) can fund schools and cover what the state stopped paying for without raising anyone’s taxes.<\/p>\n

The truth is that townships, municipalities and counties are indeed broke. Schools are underfunded. So, when a company dangles dollars without a tax increase, it is an offer hard to refuse.<\/p>\n

But be sure to read the contract, though, because the devil is in the details.<\/p>\n

Some deals lock in tax abatements of 80 to 90 percent for decades. A community might receive millions in payments while giving up billions in tax revenue it would otherwise have collected. Then the state exempts the same facility from sales taxes on construction, equipment and utilities on top of that.<\/p>\n

The reality is that corporations keep most of what they owe. The community gets a fraction and calls it a win, even though no one showed them the full ledger. That is not generosity when one side sees the numbers and the other doesn’t.<\/p>\n

The Electric Bill Test<\/strong><\/p>\n

To judge whether this data center boom benefits communities, merely check the electric bill.<\/p>\n

Black households and low-to-moderate income families already spend 15 to 20 percent of their income on home energy before a single new data center connects to the grid \u2014 compared to roughly three percent for higher-income households.<\/p>\n

Utilities nationwide requested more than $29 billion in rate increases in the first half of 2025 alone. Residential electricity prices rose more than 11 percent this year and are expected to continue rising, driven primarily by transmission upgrades and new generation capacity required to support round-the-clock AI infrastructure.<\/p>\n

Senator Hicks-Hudson raised the water question, too. “They use so many thousands of gallons a day,” she said. “That’s a problem for out in the county because of their access to water \u2014 or lack thereof.” She is right. U.S. data centers consumed 17 billion gallons of water directly in 2023. A single facility in Iowa used one billion gallons in 2024 alone. In Bessemer, Alabama, one data center requires 2 million gallons per day \u2014 one-third of the local utility’s entire supply.<\/p>\n

Representation and Long-Term Power<\/strong><\/p>\n

While the electric bill is the most visible cost, there is another, deeper and compounding burden that does not appear on any statement. It is about who will build and govern the digital backbone of the future.<\/p>\n

Black workers remain underrepresented in the data center and AI workforce \u2014 yet the algorithms processed inside these facilities shape decisions about credit, hiring, healthcare, housing, and criminal justice. Study after study confirms that diversity in technology design reduces discriminatory outcomes. If Black communities remain absent from ownership, workforce pipelines, and governance, that imbalance will be encoded into the technology itself.<\/p>\n

Senator Hicks-Hudson also asked another inconvenient question: “Why do they (data centers) have to be built out and not up? We have old factories in our communities just sitting there. Could they be repurposed? No one has been able to answer that question for me.”<\/p>\n

It is the right question. Ohio’s cities are full of vacant industrial land. If a data center can rise on a cornfield, it can rise on a brownfield \u2014 and bring workforce pipelines with it. The senator is still waiting for an answer. So are we.<\/p>\n

What Must Be Demanded<\/strong><\/p>\n

Before any zoning change or incentive package is approved, communities should demand full public disclosure of water and electricity projections at least 90 days before a vote; transparent accounting of tax abatements and PILOT agreements; binding Community Benefits Agreements with enforceable local hiring provisions; rate protections ensuring residential customers don’t subsidize discounted corporate power; and serious evaluation of urban siting options that puts the money where the damage is.<\/p>\n

This is not an argument to reject innovation. It is an argument for the right to decide.<\/p>\n

Who decides. On whose terms. Who pays the bill? And who is left to absorb the consequences?<\/p>\n

Whose neighborhood is this?<\/p>\n

Contact Rev. Donald Perryman, PhD, at <\/em>drdlperryman@centerofhopebaptist.org<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Rev. Donald L. Perryman, Ph.D. The Truth Contributor Planning is not neutral. It either serves those with power, or it redistributes it.\u00a0 \u2013 Norman Krumholz   The “cloud” is no longer a Silicon Valley thing. It is an everybody-everywhere thing. We scroll, FaceTime, and Facebook Live; stream Sunday services, post our small businesses and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55,252],"tags":[],"wf_post_folders":[337],"class_list":["post-18695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial-opinion","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18695"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18695\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18696,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18695\/revisions\/18696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18695"},{"taxonomy":"wf_post_folders","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wf_post_folders?post=18695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}