In Praise of the Windowless Box: Data Centers and What Cities Forgot
A city just voted to ban its quietest neighbor. Why?
In 2026, Monterey Park, California, became the first city in America to permanently ban new data centers. The council chamber was packed for months — and then residents settled it at the ballot box, with roughly 86 percent voting to stop a building that would never enroll a child in local schools, never clog the roads at rush hour, never call 911, and never ask the city to build a playground, library, or recreation program for it.
It was a quiet, windowless neighbor, and it was treated like an invasion.
Meanwhile, the ordinary projects that actually burden residents escape moral panic. Apartments bring real traffic, real students, real policing needs, and real road wear. Retail development brings cars, deliveries, trash, and endless fights over parking. Nobody loves those impacts, but they are familiar. They fit the old categories. The data center did not. So the city turned its fury on the building that asked almost nothing of the people already living there.
That is not just a story about one proposed building. It reveals how cities judge private development.
Every Building Gets a Grade
Years of attending city council meetings have taught me that cities develop an opinion about every type of building. Housing worries them because it “demands services.” Warehouses disappoint them because they “do not employ enough people.” Enough by what standard? There is no market standard for how many people a warehouse should employ. There is only an elite class that has decided headcount is the scorecard.
Then comes big-box retail, which offends the refined civic palate. Costco is too vulgar, Walmart too large, the parking lot too plain, the shoppers too ordinary. The same people who claim to love “community” cannot bear the places where actual families buy paper towels, tires, and affordable rotisserie chickens. Retail is tolerated anyway — but for the money. Sales tax makes it respectable. The transaction is admired not because people want the goods, but because the city organization gets a cut.
Notice what is really being graded. Not the value a property creates for its owner. Not the voluntary trades it makes possible. Not the burden it places on neighbors. The city is grading land uses by what they do to the city’s own budget.
That is why cities can maintain the appearance of financial stability while they grow, only to panic when the music stops. They spend more every year, expand their missions, layer promise upon promise, and quietly depend on new growth to cover old commitments. The result is a demographic Ponzi scheme with a master plan and public comment periods.
Then the data center arrives. It has an invisible product, few workers, a large footprint, heavy power use, and a low service burden. It fits no column — not housing, not jobs, not shopping, not sentimental “sense of place.” So the people holding the report card reach for the ban.
And the officials with the report card are not the only ones who reach for it. In Monterey Park the voters banned the box themselves, and overwhelmingly — a collective mood, formalized. Most of them, I suspect, were not considering the city’s budget at all; they were uneasy about a windowless building doing something they could not understand. A different impulse from the council’s ledger, and yet, as we’ll see, the same mistake. Whether their vote makes it legitimate is a question I’ll come back to.
The left-wing snobs and the crony dealmakers fail the same test.
The snobs want to ban the data center because it offends “community character” — usually the taste of people who already got theirs, sometimes dressed up as a worry that the development is not “sustainable.” Either way, they elevate a fuzzy concept over the property owner’s right to build and treat the neighborhood’s preferences as a veto over a lawful use. And the snobs are not always a crowd of homeowners; sometimes they sit on the dais. Tucson’s city council voted unanimously in 2025 to reject the Amazon-linked Project Blue — turning away tens of millions in projected tax revenue and thousands of jobs — on the ground that the industry was not “sustainable” and that the city needed protecting from it.
The crony dealmakers commit the same error with the opposite sign. They do not defend the owner’s right to build; they ask what the city can extract — an abatement, a ribbon cutting, a negotiated tribute. Prince William County, Virginia approved what would have been the world’s largest data-center campus in a single 27-hour hearing — an outgoing board majority overriding its own planners’ recommendation to reject it — because the tax revenue was too tempting to refuse. Less than two years later, courts voided the approval, and the project collapsed for good in 2026. The same building is treated first as a prize and then as a menace, but never once as a right.
This is why the political right is often a poor advocate for development. It shows up only when there is a deal to be had. The left opposes building in the name of impact; the right supports it in the name of opportunism. So builders and developers have no principled defender.
The corruption was never the data center. It was the abatement.
What Cities Are For
A city should not be in the business of bribing growth into existence through tax incentives or banning it out of existence through legislation. Its job is simpler and harder: protect the rights of residents whether the population or business activity rises or falls. Courts, police, and the roads the city already owns are basic obligations. Manage them honestly, finance them transparently, keep the mission bounded — and if each new use pays its own way, growth is not a fiscal emergency and decline is not an existential crisis. The boom-bust panic is not a feature of population. It is a feature of an addiction to growth.
This is also the answer to anyone who calls the Monterey Park ban simple democracy at work — the community deciding what it wants. There is something to that: a community’s character is a real thing, and the wish to shape it is not disreputable. But a right is precisely the thing a majority may not vote away. The owner whose land was placed off-limits was almost certainly not among the thousands who voted to forbid his project, and he bears a cost none of them will. “The community decided what it wanted” turns out to mean the many decided what the few may do with their own land. That is not self-government. It is the oldest problem in politics wearing a city planner’s hat.
This is not the claim that new residents are costless. More people require more policing; more cars wear roads faster. The point is that those costs scale and self-fund when each resident and each use pays its way. What makes a newcomer a fiscal question mark is not the cost of protecting his rights. It is the unbounded city mission layered on top.
Under such a standard, the data center is easy to understand. It is one of the lowest-burden neighbors a city will ever be offered. It pays its own way and asks little back. Nobody across town should be stuck subsidizing it — and nobody across town should be allowed to ban it because it fails an aesthetic test.
A grocer never holds a hearing on whether it can “handle” more customers. Every customer is a voluntary exchange, so more of them is simply good. Cities fear more residents because they have inverted that relationship: the resident is treated less as the principal being served than as a claim on a common pool. Fix the relationship, and residents become as unthreatening to a city as shoppers are to a grocer.
More Than a Windowless Box
So far I have defended the box on the modest ground that it asks little of anyone. But that undersells it — because the objection to it was never really about municipal burdens, and neither is its value. A data center is the physical machinery of the AI age — a combine harvester for the mind. Cheap energy once gave the average person the equivalent of dozens of servants doing physical work; this is the equipment that begins to do the same for mental work: a tutor for the child a school failed, an adviser for someone who could never afford one, a researcher for a person no institution credentialed. Notice who that threatens. It is the same class that sneered at Costco for making abundance vulgar and common, now recoiling from the building that would make intelligence itself common. Water, noise, and power use were the stated objections — but they do not explain the fury.
Many people fear what they cannot picture, so they fill the windowless building with imagined dangers: vast quantities of water, diesel fumes, forever chemicals, and AI itself.
The largest fear of all was electricity. The proposed Monterey Park facility reportedly would have drawn roughly twice as much power as the city itself. But a giant new customer does not, by itself, raise everyone’s rates. Often it does the opposite. A data center is a steady, around-the-clock buyer, and a large steady buyer spreads the grid’s fixed costs across more kilowatt-hours. That is why the states absorbing the most new demand have generally seen rates rise slower, not faster, than the states that turned it away.
Where rates have spiked, the culprit has been a shortage of reliable supply — plants retired faster than new ones were permitted — not the new customer as such. And a growing share of new facilities now build their own generation, leaning on no one’s grid at all. Where added capacity really is needed, that is a pricing question: the utility should charge for it, or the customer should finance it, so the load carries its own cost instead of landing on everyone else’s bill. That is a reason to write a contract, not to outlaw a lawful building.
Some concerns are real. Noise and backup-diesel emissions are real, preventable pollution; water matters where it is scarce and subsidized. Regulate them at the margin with setbacks, objective emissions standards, and market-priced water. That is the opposite of banning the category. A city that outlaws the box has not protected its character. It has voted to keep capability scarce — and a people that withdraws its own tools out of fear of a thing it will not trouble to understand is not being cautious. It is disarming itself. And it does so at the very moment its rivals abroad — China chief among them — are racing to build the machinery it is voting to keep out.
The honest fiscal upside is not a larger city payroll. Quincy, Washington, is the useful example because its property-tax levy rate fell by roughly 70 percent after data centers arrived — the burden on residents went down, not up. In Loudoun County, Virginia, data centers now generate nearly half of county property-tax revenues. Yet those revenues have also proved volatile when server equipment is not refreshed on schedule. That is a warning against fiscal dependence, not an argument for bans. A surplus is proper only when it shows up as lower burdens on residents — retired debt, lower rates, fewer claims on taxpayers. If it becomes new payroll and a larger mission, residents were right to be suspicious, just not about the data center.
A city should be as indifferent to whether its population grows as a court is to how many contracts get signed. Its job is to protect rights, not to hit or hold a number. Growth is something residents and businesses do, not something the city government engineers or defends against.
Cities should not merely tolerate data centers — and they certainly should not bribe or ban them. Under the proper standard, the windowless box stops looking like a threat and reveals itself for what it is: one of the most productive and least demanding neighbors a community will ever be offered, and, behind its blank walls, part of the machinery by which a free people builds a better future. That is not a thing to fear, or to grade, or grudgingly to permit. It is a thing to welcome — and, yes, to praise.
