Subterranean Chicago

 

Office building entrance near State and Randolph

My ignorance of the Chicago Pedway was inexcusable but real. Despite being born in the city, living most of my young life nearby, and continuing to make several trips per year from nearby Iowa, I had never been in the Pedway until last week. I found out about the Pedway from my son Eli, who joins me in my love for the Windy City, and who found out about them from a video made by University of Illinois-Chicago architecture professor Stewart Hicks:

"The Bewildering Architecture of Indoor Cities" (13:11; discussion of the Pedway begins about 3:15 in)

So, on a bitterly cold December day, Eli and I sought out the Pedway. In the course of the morning, we covered maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of its five miles. The Chicago Pedway is neither as well-marked nor as well-equipped as the Minneapolis Skyway, though it has more commercial spaces than Cedar Rapids' Skywalks. 

The first trick is finding your way in. Entry points aren't well-marked at all. Even when you locate an access point, that's no guarantee of access; the Pedway is not maintained by the city, but by individual property owners, which means availability is not easy to predict. 

Armed with maps downloaded from the Internet, we eventually found a few entrances...

La Salle Street: employees only

...only to find our way blocked.

Lake Street: another no go

This skywalk across Clark Street is an unusual part of the Pedway, most of which is underground. 

Clark Street: another no go

Alas, it too was closed.

Eventually, we found a way in through the basement of Macys department store, formerly Marshall Field's, at 111 North State Street. In this part of the Pedway, there are wayfinding maps...

...and signs:

...and art!

stained glass exhibit near the Macys access

Barbara's Bookstore is in the basement of the Macys building.

Barbara's is a Chicago-based bookseller with mutliple locations

Once through a rudimentary passage across Randolph Street...

...the action really begins. There are quite a few fast-food restaurants in a fancier section across Michigan Avenue. 

Pedway getting bougey

fast food collection near train station

(Note that the space on the left is for rent.)

There was even an Amazon Go store, which surprised me. I didn't realize they were atill around, much less underground!

130 East Randolph Street

The restrooms were a little scary, but sometimes in a storm any port will do.

restrooms, Chicago Pedway

The Pedway also connects to two train lines, the Metra Electric which serves the south side of Chicago, and the South Shore Line which serves commuter stops between Chicago and South Bend, Indiana. Both the waiting areas...

festive waiting area

...and the tracks themselves...

South Shore Line

...were very seasonally festive. Kind of a Polar Express vibe, which I don't get at the larger stations at the west end of downtown. 

If you come in on a train that stops at Millennium Station, finding the Pedway is easy. It's also easy to find from some parking garages as well as Lower Randoph Street, where there are more entrances/exits.

Lower Randolph Street near Michigan Avenue

Urbanists like Jeff Speck criticize skyways, and by extension pedways, for taking foot traffic off the streets. While that's a fair criticism in Minneapolis, I didn't observe that here. At least around Randolph and Michigan, there were many more people at the surface level than in the Pedway.

Overall, the Pedway was a novelty but a bit chaotic for the first-time visitor. Along the way, I spotted a Dollop Coffee, but when I tried to return I could not find it. Here maps apps are no help, because the addresses don't distinguish between surface and underground levels. One Dollop Coffee location (150 North Michigan Avenue) led us to a very corporate building, with security guards who looked like they wanted me to buy coffee there only so they could shove it up my... I settled for a surface level Stan's Donuts at 181 North Michigan, which was very satisfactory.

We couldn't find how to get beyond where we ended. Referring to the map above, we could get to #25 but not to #37 or #50. After surfacing, we made a couple halfhearted attempts to rejoin the Pedway north of Millennium Park, but eventually saved that for another visit. I'd call it a fun prowl, worth doing if you know Chicago well, but hard to navigate and dubiously functional.

I Wish This Parking Was... (II)

"T3": 200 block of Johnson Av NW (Google Earth screenshot)

Work continues apace on Cedar Rapids' casino, due to open at the end of this month. In time, when it is a fabulous success and we are all rolling in prosperity, you can tell me how dumb I was back in 2025 for my negative outlook.

There are three reasons to oppose casinos. The first two relate to the morality of gambling and the class distribution of gambling losses (which fall much more on the poor). There are also doubts, given the rise of Internet gambling, whether brick and mortar gambling still has a future. I'll take all those as read, but my specific complaint about this casino has to do with its use of land. We are taking several blocks close to the center of the city, which should be used for more intense development, and using it for what is ultra-suburban development.

Casino, under construction, F Avenue view

Andres Duany, one of the earliest new urbanists, described traditional development patterns as a transect that gradually tapered from the most intensive development at the urban core ("T6") to agricultural ("T2") and natural ("T1") areas at the edge of town. (See the discussion at Steuteville 2017, as well as Andres Duany, Jeff Speck and Mike Lydon. The Smart Growth Manual [McGraw Hill, 2010], 1.4) 

This ordering is "useful" (Steuteville's word), because it preserves space in urbanist design for nature and agriculture, enables people not to be completely dependent on cars, provides a unified concept of development, and allows that development to proceed in harmony with surrounding areas. 

Future casino parking. I-380 in background

Development according to the transect is more inclusive by centering economic opportunity on the urban core. Kevin Klinkenberg (2015) wrote about why urbanism matters most in urban cores: If we truly care about the less fortunate in society, we would want them in places of maximum opportunity for access to jobs at low cost--not scattered about in suburbia. Less need to drive, and more green space at the edge of town, is also better for the natural environment on which we all depend. And making intense use of the most valuable land is better for city finances.

Casino construction, from 1st Street NW

Cedar Rapids, like most towns, was built according to the transect long before Duany coined the term. Downtown looks like "T6" and the core neighborhoods look like "T3." The problem is that, in the decades since the town was built, the area around town that was once "T4" and "T5" was gutted and remains a doughnut of emptiness. Instead of small but intense development that could provide customers and clients for downtown businesses as well as property tax revenue for the city, we have what we have, making for a car-dependent city and lots of complaints about parking.

Future casino parking

City officials are enthused about the advent of the casino--scheduled to open 12/31/2026--because they know the political value of a flashy project that gets a lot of attention and promises fun for all. But I wish the casino campus, parking lots and all, would look more like the stretch of Johnson Avenue pictured above, which I called in 2022 one of my favorite streets in the city.  The nine blocks of this project could be a neighborhood with workers and shoppers for downtown as well as neighborhood businesses, and students for nearby schools if we ever decide to build schools near the center of town again (another sore subject, for another day). The tax value of an individual property would be small, but collectively they would likely provide more city revenue than the casino will.

If one of the residents meets with misfortune, the neighborhood will survive, and the house will survive under new ownership. If the casino fails, I think we're looking at a big box with a long term vacancy.

If we must have a casino, put it out on Route 100.

One last look, from the trail along the Cedar River

SEE ALSO

"I Wish This Parking Was...," 27 November 2020

"Cedar Rapids' Big Bets," 17 January 2025

Black Friday Parking 2025: Northeast CR

 

It felt like it! (And on the Celsius scale, it actually was.)

Consumer confidence may be down at COVID levels, and Black Friday ads are increasingly oriented to websites, but it's still Black Friday. If you give a boy a parking lot, he's going to want to take a picture of it. At least it was warmer than last year, though at first not by much. Eventually the sun came out and it was all right.

Along the way, I saw this marquee.

Question, 224 Collins Road NE

The riddle was not funny, which weirdly reassured me I was not becoming hypothermic.

Answer, 224 Collins Road NE

Strong Towns started Black Friday Parking in 2013; my first year was 2015, covering roughly the same territory as this year. For the record, I also wore the same Garfield School sweatshirt. The Parking Reform Network has taken over the promotion, but the point remains the same: to document excess surface parking, even on what is arguably the busiest shopping day of the year (Lefebvre 2025).

I started a little past 9:00 at the bus stop on Twixt Town Road, close by the Collins Road Square shopping plaza. It was maybe one-third full.

 Collins Road Square, looking towards Petco

 Collins Road Square, looking towards Michael's

Across Collins Road is Lindale Mall, which dates from the early 1960s, but the Collins Road side has gotten quite the facelift. Its many parking lots were half-full, maybe more.

Lindale Mall, parking lot facing Collins Road

Hobby Lobby had the fullest parking lot I saw, easily 60 and maybe 75 percent full...

180 Collins Road, looking towards Hobby Lobby

...but even that plaza had plenty of empty spaces.

180 Collins Road, other side of the plaza

There were no cars parked in the huge lot on the other side of Collins Road. It has been vacant since the Hy-Vee grocery store. I don't know for a fact that Hy-Vee is retaining ownership of the building and just leaving it vacant, but I wouldn't put it past them; they tried that at their Mound View store, which also remains vacant anyhow.

empty parking lot at vacant building, 279 Collins Road
(utility pole cleverly used to block sun)

Across Northland Avenue from the former grocery store, however, Northland Square plaza's parking lot was well used, being at least 60 percent full. 

Northland Square from the east

But even today, there were plenty of parking spots going unused.

Northland Square, middle of the plaza

I cut across the Collins Aerospace parking lot--mostly empty, with a skeleton crew working today--and ended up at the Blairs Ferry Road Target. It had a lot of shoppers, and its parking lot was at least two-thirds full...

Target parking lot, east edge

...but a great big parking lot is hard to fill.

Target parking lot, west edge

I've said most years that I don't think these particular parking lots are driven by mandates in the zoning code (though those do exist). It's just how we develop commercial strips. Collins Road may be the ghastliest such strip in our city--though the Westdale area gets some votes, too--but it's just one example of development we shouldn't be doing. The parking lots themselves are just part of the damage, but they do more damage in town than they do on the suburban edge. I'll have more to say about that in a future post.

In a Strong Towns post entitled "What Comes Next After Abolishing Parking Mandates?" Tony Jordan of the Parking Reform Network argues that repealing such mandates is the first step on road to truly walkable cities:

To build the type of cities we want, to take advantage of zoning reforms that re-legalize compact, walkable, and transit-rich neighborhoods, we have to continue to pursue comprehensive parking reforms that go beyond repealing minimums and actively combat car dependency. Fortunately, these additional reforms and strategies are also simple, impactful, and fiscally advantageous. Cities should price their curbs to manage demand and spend the revenue on infrastructure and programs that improve safe, convenient, and equitable access to our communities for people traveling by any mode, not just in their cars. (Jordan 2022, italics mine)

Thinking positively about Marjorie Taylor Greene

 

I don't know quite what to make of the whirl of events surrounding Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), third term member of the U.S. House until recently known for a series of inflammatory statements that made her one of President Trump's most vocal supporters in Congress--and, however weirdly, one of the most effective at rallying the base and getting under the skin of Democrats: "Once greeted with derision by Washingtonians as a shrill and zany show pony, she is now seen more as a savvy operator who understands the conservative base like few others" (Draper 2025).  

I also don't know what to think about the Epstein files, information related to the superpedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who died in 2019. Releasing the files won't get anyone fed or access to health care, nor will they help us mitigate climate change. Nevertheless, the Trump administration has been turning themselves into pretzels to keep them under wraps, so I can only conclude there must be something in there that Trump needs us not to know.

Yet, while Attorney General Pam Bondi, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Sassmonger in Chief Karoline Leavitt have done what they can to protect the President from Epstein revelations, Greene was one of four Republican House representatives to sign a discharge petition directing the files be released by the Justice Department. All four personally resisted Trump's calls to unsign the petition, which passed both houses and then was signed by Trump. Shortly thereafter, Greene (alone among the four hardheads) announced she would resign her congressional seat after the first of the year.

[A}ccording to interviews with friends and associates... she had become politically isolated, feeling betrayed by Mr. Trump, disgusted with her own party and friendless among the Democratic opposition. When Mr. Trump announced on Truth Social last week that he had had enough of Ms. Greene’s apostasies, labeling her “Marjorie Traitor Greene” and threatening to run a primary opponent in her district, Ms. Greene felt blindsided. Terrified by the ensuing wave of death threats aimed at her and her family from apparent supporters of Mr. Trump, she could no longer see any upside to duking it out in the political arena. (Draper 2025)

I am not imagining that Greene has had a road to Damascus experience, and that she will now be advocating for abortion rights and citizenship for immigrants, or that she will join a holy order like Duke Frederick at the end of As You Like It. If she is a candidate again, or if she attempts conservative media stardom (Drenon 2025), I expect she'll be the same old MTG. (Call it the Megyn Kelly rule?) I don't feel at all sorry for her; she is reaping the whirlwind that she herself sowed. I am, however, impressed that she found her moral core, a line across which she would not take her partisan hackery.

In our city, we're not going to agree on everything, and on some things we will find ourselves to be strongly opposed. But I for one can respect, and deal with, people who find some core values that are more important to them than partisanship or financial advantage.

10th anniversary post: I Still Believe in the City

Vivian Gornick (b. 1935)

Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 173 pp.

He strikes a match and holds it to his cigarette.

 "I'm not the right person for this life," I say.

"Who is?" he says, exhaling in my direction. (36) 

Ten years ago this month, I reflected on the defeat of a local referendum to raise the library tax, and read Vivian Gornick's celebration of life in New York City, while the world around me was showing gun violence, terror attacks, and anti-Muslim sentiment. This month, Cedar Rapids voted down bonds that would have funded public school capital projects ("Cedar Rapids Schools Thank" 2025), and a white nationalist cadre is fueling the Trump administration's tear-gas attacks on American cities and their terror campaign against immigrants (cf. Schulze 2025, Carrasquillo 2025). Seemed about time I revisited Vivian Gornick.

Ready to read, at Brewhemia in New Bohemia

On second reading, her segmented essay proved to contain so much more than I'd caught the first time through. She indeed celebrates the life around her in her long-time hometown, but out of need more than pleasure. Like Thomas Merton, her days have included both dark nights and promising dawns. Parker Palmer (2011: 36-38) would describe hers as a "heart broken open," with love born from pain. 

As I reread The Odd Woman and the City, I found myself underlining and circling, marking passages with abandon. It's worth noting that I almost never do this. Some people do. U.S. President John Adams engaged in a running dialogue with whatever he was reading, at least once scrawling "Fool! Fool!!" at some work that displeased him. I wasn't arguing with her, though, just trying to keep up with the numerous dimensions in her reflections, as she jumped around in time, and roped in exemplars from street people to other writers. There is so much I wanted to show you in this book that I didn't discuss in 2015. It would probably be easier on you, me, and Gornick, though, if you just read it.

"The City" is, after all, only part of the title. "The Odd Woman" is Gornick herself, which she announces early (p. 4), but without telling us why or how. In time she tells us that, growing up in the Bronx, she and her friends were already walkers, and what she saw as she walked up and down the streets of Manhattan showed her what she anticipated would be her life (p. 11, p. 51). But it was not to be, despite advanced degrees, relationships, and jobs. She simply could not--would not?--fit in anywhere. Her longtime friend Leonard tells her:

"Fifty years ago you entered a closet marked 'marriage.' In the closet was a double set of clothes, so stiff they could stand up by themselves. A woman stepped into a dress called 'wife' and the man stepped into a suit called 'husband.' And that was it. They disappeared inside the clothes. Today, we don't pass. We're standing here naked. That's all." (36)

Freedom from traditional roles had become freedom from any role, intolerable because "no one wanted freedom" (p. 121), an insight she attributes to Henry James. She identifies with Mary Barfoot, the main character in George Gissing's novel The Odd Woman; Rose, the mother in the musical Gypsy; and John Dylan, an actor whose stroke left him with a speech impediment that he used to disturbing effect in a public reading of a work by Samuel Beckett.

Gornick's oddness, and her "inability to make peace with" herself (p. 19), is survivable only in the city. Walking becomes a sort of therapy once "nothing turned out as expected" (p. 14), but it is even more than that. It is her connection to people: Leonard, with whom she converses so intently that time becomes unreal (p. 17); the active residents of Manhattan's West Side, which she prefers to the "calmer, cleaner, more spacious" East Side (p. 94); and even the men in line at a soup kitchen, who remind her of journalist's line about "ruined faces worthy of Michelangelo" (p. 152). "It's the voices I can't do without" (p. 173), like the three she samples in rapid succession on pp. 37-38, but she is also comforted by all the nearby presences as she goes to bed at night (p. 21).

Frank O'Hara (1926-1966)

Along the way we meet her mother, ex-lovers, other friends, and any number of writers on these themes, including the poet Charles Reznikoff (p. 38), the novelist Isabel Bolton (p. 79; see also Bloom 2016), and Frank O'Hara, who wrote: I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people don't totally regret life (p. 42). Once you allow for the possibility of oddness, it's everywhere.

Gornick is still with us at 90; she turned 80 the year The Odd Woman and the City was published. In old age, she seems satisfied she's figured out what her problem is. But it continues to be the people of her city who make the "odd" life satisfying. She concludes:

I am home, having dinner at my table, looking out at the city. My mind flashes on all who crossed my path today. I hear their voices, I see their gestures, I start filling in lives for them. Soon they are company, great company. I think to myself, I'd rather be here with you tonight than with anyone else I know. Well, almost anyone else I know. I look up at the great clock on my wall, the one that gives the date as well as the hour. It's time to call Leonard. (175)

SEE ALSO: 

Sam Adams, "Why a 26-Year-Old John Prine Song is Suddenly Everywhere," Slate, 7 November 2025

Parker J. Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit (Jossey-Bass, 2011)

Book review: Life After Cars

 

Goodyear, Sarah; Gordon, Doug; and Naparstek, Aaron. Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile. Penguin Random House, 2025, xix + 282 pp.

Like every American younger than 80 years of age, I have lived all my life with cars. When I was a mere tot, my mom used to take my sister and me for rides around town after lunch. Later, a car became my preferred way of getting to school, and once I got my drivers' license, a ready and able way to get anywhere I wanted to go.

In a country where most adults drive to get almost everywhere, our towns have been designed around making driving convenient and parking readily accessible. It's how our world has looked since before we were born, and we've heard its attributes celebrated in advertising and entertainment media. Only with effort can the substantial social costs of all these cars and all this driving become apparent, and it takes even more effort to imagine a different way of designing places.

Life After Cars is a handy survey of all those social costs of driving. I have long been a fan of The War on Cars, a slightly edgy but erudite podcast out of New York City that began in 2018 as a three-way collaboration between journalist-activists Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, and Aaron Naperstek. I don't remember how I found out about it, but it can't have been too long after the podcast began. Somewhere on the road to 160 episodes, Naparstek, who also founded the website Streetsblog, withdrew from the podcast, though he is listed as a co-author of the book.

The title of the book is overstated, of course, even though it is not as contentious as the (ironically intended) title of the podcast. Motor vehicles are here to stay, and they know that. What the authors actually seek is "[a] world where those who truly need to use cars and trucks--workers delivering heavy loads, residents of rural areas, some people with mobility disabilities--can do so without competing for space and resources with people whose use of personal motor vehicles is unnecessary, wasteful, and inefficient," and walking, public transit, and cycling are accepted as part of the mobility mix (pp. 225-226).

The social costs of motor vehicles are mostly explored across five chapters in Part II, "How Cars Ruin Everything." Cars make force children to choose between their personal safety and exploring their world (ch. 3); cause a host of environmental, noise, and other public health problems (ch. 4); kill more and more people each year (ch. 5); create social isolation and all the problems attendant to it, not to mention making enemies of our fellow drivers (ch. 6); and create extra burdens for people who are poor, physically handicapped, or otherwise socially marginalized (ch. 7). A lot of these phenomena are explored in more detail elsewhere--they cite a lot of recently published books, many of whose authors they've had on their podcast--but rarely are they presented in one place in such a convenient way.

Are these social costs of driving "worth it?" Have we as a society, somewhere along the line, collective decided that some collateral damage was acceptable given the benefits car provide us? The authors argue otherwise in Part I, "How We Got Here." They spend a lot of Chapter 1 in the pre-World War II era, when cars had to fight for space on streets with pedestrians, streetcars, and so forth. They credit cars' ultimate victories, on the streets and in the halls of government, to powerful and ruthless business interests. Today, with fewer and fewer people around who remember a non-autocentric world, it's easy to see cyclists and other advocates of transportation alternatives as threats, because whatever our ideals, we have to get to work in the world cars have made.

The authors try to end on a hopeful note in Part III, "How We Get Free," although they frequently revert back to Part II world, as in their critique of city-supplied free parking (pp. 162-172). They hail academic studies of the effects of cars, and while noting the difficulties officials have faced even where (Ghent, Paris, e.g.) some space has been reclaimed, argue that politicians can look past the loud objectors to a quieter supportive majority; citizens can make themselves heard; and people in some cases can be proactive, as with tactical urbanism (pp, 205-214). 

They have faith, backed up by some experience, that once we are able to provide space for alternatives to cars, people will enjoy and defend it. The trick is overcoming the fears of chaos that are easy to gin up. 

It's a beautiful world, this one. A quieter, greener world that is more sustainable both environmentally and economically. It's also a happier world, where people are more likely to let their children roam free, to know and trust their neighbors, or to have spontaneous interactions with friends they bump into on a sidewalk. This is what life after cars could look like. (226)

I'm not sure I share their optimism, but they do lay out the choice urgently before us. The fantasy world of SUV commercials, in which we zip confidently through empty city streets or about the scenic wilderness, is just that--a fantasy. The reality, however, of traffic-choked suburban stroads was constructed to serve those fantasies as well as the economic needs of auto manufacturers. Reclaiming our streets will be strenuous, even if everyone reads this book, just because of how our towns have built those streets for the last 80 years. 

Promotional sticker is appropriate for guitar case placement

Life After Cars webpage (Penguin Random House)

The War on Cars webpage (Patreon)

"Week Without Driving Diary (II)," Holy Mountain, 29 September 2025

Data Centers

Source: IntelDig.com (used without permission)

The Linn County Planning and Zoning Commission had a long discussion about proposed large-scale data centers at their Monday meeting, led by Planning and Development director Charlie Nichols. They are anticipating a formal ordinance at their November 17 meeting.

Increasing use of computerized data, particularly with the rise of artificial intelligence operations, has resulted in the burgeoning construction of "hyperscale" data centers nationwide. Linn County, Iowa, is getting into the game, with two planned for unincorporated areas, to be operated by Google and QTS. These were approved "by right," because the historically small scale of data centers led them to be considered a normal industrial use. 

Linn County is discussing an ordinance related to future data centers (Nieland 2025), and has requested bids on a study of water impact, which will be paid for by Google. Meanwhile, local officials are bragging on the size of the investments Google and QTS are making in their data centers. But does that signify in any way to the average metro resident?

So quickly has the data center phenomenon taken hold that there aren't really good data on their impacts. Several Minnesota groups have raised questions about the effect data centers in that state are having on water supplies and rates (Meyer 2025). Rosemount, Minnesota, on the edge of the Twin Cities metro area, is seeing construction of a hyperscale data center, and Streets.MN lists six other projects at various stages. Dr. Carrie Ferguson of the nonprofit Freshwater told Streets.MN: "We don't understand the total water footprint at all. There is opacity and nondisclosure all along the way." Cathy Johnson, chair of a citizen group in Farmington, south of Rosemount, called Coalition for Responsible Data Center Development, told of the difficulty in getting information from the developer of the data center in that town: "The coalition learned that water demands for the proposed data center campus would require 2.93 million gallons per day, according to the agreement the city signed with Tract in December 2024; normally the city's total daily consumption is 2.3 million gallons a day. (All quotes from Meyer 2025; italics and bolding are mine.)

Other communities are finding their electric bills shooting upward: Watchdog groups like AEP Ohio attributed hikes of $27 per month to the average Columbus family to the energy demands of area data centers (Whoriskey 2025). Abe Silverman, who studies energy markets at Johns Hopkins University, told The Washington Post: "We are seeing every region of the country experience really significant data center load growth. It's putting enormous upward pressure on prices, both for transmission and for generation." Power demands of data centers will rise sharply in the next few years, according to the U.S. Department of Energy cited by Nichols.

This year, incoming Washington governor Bob Ferguson created a task force to study the environmental and economic impacts of data centers, after 87 centers were built in the state, often by companies who were awarded massive tax advantages (Ramadan and Brownstone 2025). The task force, which has yet to make its report, was created after a series of articles published by the Seattle Times and ProPublica suggested the tax breaks were buying less job creation and more energy use than had been sold to state officials (cf. Ramadan and Brownstone 2024).

Photographer Steven Voss (2025) took pictures of data centers in Northern Virginia, which he calls "the world's internet hub" processing maybe 70 percent of global data. Almost half of the state's 600 data centers are located in two unincorporated communities, Ashburn and Sterling, close by Dulles International Airport. He depicts the centers' enormous land use, light pollution, and noise. (Nichols of Linn County points out that part of Virginia is "much more built out" than the corners of Linn County where hyperscale data centers are going. Google, for one, has proposed building a data center near Palo.)

Linn County Planning and Development director Charlie Nichols
addresses Planning and Zoning Commission October 20
(screen capture from county-provided video)

The experience with data centers illustrate our vulnerability to market forces: when a new, powerful player(s) enters the market for, say, water or electricity, ordinary users with ordinary market power get priced out as higher demand jacks up the equilibrium ("market") price for that good. Other effects are negative externalities, including the environmental impacts of higher resource use. If hyperscale data centers increase their electricity consumption by 22 percent--what's projected for 2025, cf. Robinson 2025)--that's not going to be easy for either households or the natural world to absorb.

As you can see, I'm ambivalent about the sudden rise of data centers, and by the sudden rise in use of artificial intelligence that causes it. Investment in data centers seems a poor substitute for sustainable economic development, even as the big-win-fixated governments shower them with tax breaks. The risks are spread among all of us, while the benefits are concentrated at the top. As Mary G. (2025), who shepherds the coffeeneuring movement over at Chasing Mailboxes, said after an AI incursion that she's "learned that tech companies fervently believe that AI is going to make them rich and that our data will feed their money-making machine. It's one of the many reasons I remain mixed about using Facebook, while some of me has still found that it can be a helpful tool for some things." 

I wish I could be more hopeful that we can have data without scorching the Earth. I'm encouraged by local protests like those folks in Minnesota, and in Indianapolis, and elsewhere, but I'm not naive about the ability of large corporations to snow revenue-starved localities.

SEE ALSO: "Cedar Rapids' Big Bets," 17 January 2025

"Large Language Muddle," n + 1 51 [Have we considered why we're building all these data centers?]

Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Kuhaneetha Bai Kalaicelvan, "Data Centre Investments Bad Deals," Challenging Development, 28 October 2025 [Malaysian economist summarizes the case against them]