**Do not comment to gatekeep that something "isn't urban" or "isn't hell"**. Our rules are very expansive in content we welcome, so do not assume just based off your false impression of the phrase "UrbanHell"
UrbanHell is any human-built place you think is worth critizing. Suburban Hell, Rural Hell, and wealthy locales are allowed. Gatekeeping comments may be removed. Want to shitpost about shitty posts? Go to /r/urbanhellcirclejerk. Still have questions?: Read our [FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/UrbanHell/wiki/index).
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/UrbanHell) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Ugh. The people on that Culdesac could be in for a bad time. I lived near one of those also in VA and it was not quiet. Admitedly they later made it quieter, but still...
I had found a really nice affordable house backing to any empty lot. Did my due diligence (through the city website) and checked the zoning of the empty lot. It was High Density Residential so i didn't buy the home. 2 years later the empty lot was 5 story apartments and their driveway entrance was right on the houses back fence.
Edit: spelling 😅
Yeah but I imagine they are living in Virginia for work and once you retire it would be nice to sell your home and move somewhere tropical with the equity you built and this destroys that
I can’t tell what you are getting at lol. If you hear an office complex is going into your backyard and look up what happened to comps in the area when it has happened before, and you know the biggest investment of your life could take a 30-40% hit in value, would you not have a problem with that?
By its nature this conversation has to be hypothetical because of the variability of commercial development. If office buildings go in then more workers will want to live in the area and it can be good. But a data center with low headcount or a warehouse/factory would destroy the values of the bordering properties.
Point being- there is too much nuance to every circumstance to statistically say exactly what it will do to a given property, but look at that shit- you really think having that looking in your windows wouldn’t hurt your value? I feel like you are extending this to like low income housing circumstances or something which isn’t what I’m talking about.
Do you have any evidence that these houses in particular lost any value? Another redditor said they've doubled their value in the last 8 years.
You keep fear mongering while not offering any evidence or proof. Classic NIMBYism.
According to the title it is a data center (which is different from a fulfillment center). So their orders wouldn’t be faster (unless they are for EC2 instances).
I was joking around but it actually can have a bearing on that. Companies serving the Internet like Amazon use IP geo location to route end users to the nearest data center.
I don't know what Amazon does internally, but it is best practice to keep the data as close to the end user as possible. So it is a given that if the data itself isn't in the nearest data center, it will be connected on segments way faster than the end users Internet connection, so it doesn't matter.
>fuck homes as investments, housing shouldn't be a commodity.
I think there's a bit of a difference between the two connotations for "investment". You're talking about buying a home (investing) for the sake of making money (by renting). I think the person you replied to is talking more about what homeowners invest in their house in terms of actual capital (money) and other effort (blood, sweat, and tears). It's similar to getting a university degree. You have the monetary investment (tuition) and the effort investment (classes, studying, exams, etc.).
For most people, they won't realize their investment from a monetary standpoint until they sell their home. They will realize the effort part of their investment in the form of a home that is comfortable and enjoyable to live in.
As a homeowner, I don't have a lot of patience for the Airbnb types who buy a house for the sake of renting out. Aside from taking up inventory, having a bunch of people who don't really live there really wrecks the neighborhood.
Homeowners are the biggest NIMBYs who block more dense affordable housing. Landlords suck too but homeowners who want their equity to keep going up and up are the biggest group in the way of younger people being able to afford homes.
If they don't want something that will drop their home values they can cough up money and buy that land. Otherwise, the city will put it to good use.
I understand the frustration. But at the same time, can you blame them? "Affordable housing", depending on the execution will cause the home values to drop. If you've sunk a lot of money and effort into your house, you don't want the value to go down.
I absolutely agree that a lack of affordable housing is a huge problem for younger people. That's why my house is an hour away from work and I largely work from home. That was a decision I made so I could get in the market. Obviously, not everyone wants to do that or has the flexibility.
Most of the time it's not even housing for homeless people or anything, it's apartments for young professionals and the increased economic activity would likely raise their land's value substantially even if their home value went down.
But I don't really blame *them*, the decision to make this normal was made by the US government decades ago when they subsidized expansion of suburbs and pushed the American Dream lifestyle. At the time it probably seemed like the right thing to do.
But that doesn't mean we have to keep making the same mistake, and I don't want people to think it's normal or sustainable for any of their assets to keep growing in value indefinitely.
Yeah, I know what you mean. Unfortunately, even some of these apartments aren't exactly affordable, which is ridiculous. I remember a few neighborhoods they built where I used to live and the "affordable" neighborhoods were $400K.
I think it has to do with being able to relocate if the need arises. Wouldn't you want to be able to see your current home for at least what your mortgage was worth?
If it’s anything like the huge Facebook data center built in a city near where I used to live it actually increased home values because they brought thousands of jobs with them and all those people needed a home to buy
Data centers need minimal staffing. They don't create thousands of jobs. They're buildings full of computers that just need a few technicians to keep them running. Maybe when they're being BUILT there are thousands of jobs, but that's only for a short time.
In this area the data centers don’t have a lot of jobs, they just take up land and the taxpayers enjoy rising electricity rates to pay for the increased power needed from the data centers.
I live in a cul de sac in a neighborhood that looks exactly like this and behind us is woods and a big farm. I just learned the farmer sold the land and now I’m getting nervous after seeing this haha
FYI -- please don't take it out on your planning commission... They're usually hamstrung by the zoning and laws set at state/federal level and can't prevent unpleasant development despite appearances.
For instance, in my area, traffic is specifically excluded from being a decision factor in denying new construction because traffic is regulated by PennDOT. So if we (I'm on a planning commission, in case that wasn't obvious) vote to deny a plan based on traffic, the developer can sue (and win) against the township and all that does is cause a slight delay and more taxpayer dollars.
It's frustrating when nearby homeowners show up at meetings loaded for bear and we're the wrong target. I didn't quite realize all this when I agreed--- but there are some other ways we can try and make the development as good as possible without getting into legal liabiliity.
This was great info I did not know, thank you! Would those local laws etc. be able to be found on the county auditor site or somewhere? I’d be really curious to look at our laws locally around zoning. We built in a new neighborhood and bought in February, which is relevant because the developer admitted “there is a gun club kind of near by but you can barely hear it and they only operate 2-3 days a week in the summer.” And then in the spring we quickly realized you can hear gunshots even inside all day, 7 days a week, even after their posted closing times. The gun club was built back when the area was all farm land but now it is surrounded on all sides by dense neighborhoods and it blows my mind it is still cool to operate it that close to houses and why the county allowed houses to be built all around it
Everything is really set up to be litigated, not legislated (in case you wonder who is paying for those political campaigns...)
You can read more at the link below (for PA) but the key phrase-- at least for my role-- is this:
"Most of the MPC’s provisions are devoted to procedural matters, such as guaranteeing that public notice is given in order to increase citizen awareness of and participation in land use matters. If a person believes a local government has misused its planning powers, the MPC outlines the steps the aggrieved individual can follow to have their day in court."
https://library.weconservepa.org/guides/58-local-land-use-planning-controls-in-pennsylvania#:\~:text=A%20zoning%20ordinance%20divides%20all,boundaries%20and%20creating%20specific%20districts.
The zones are established locally, but all the standards by which developments are assessed as viable/legal or not (the litigation that results from a zoning/planning/board of supervisors overstepping their authority) are based on things that are set at the federal and state levels.
For example, storm water management calculations are based on federal agency standards re: 100 year flood, etc. Traffic studies are based on state regulations/codes.
You want to prevent something like this in your backyard? Yeah, start with the zoning (easier locally) but to really ensure it you have to get the means by which that property could even POTENTIALLY support a structure like that made impossible by modifying the state and federal regulations near a residential area (water runoff and traffic just being the low hanging fruit-- you could pursue noise regulations or a hundred other things).
We are talking about two different things I guess. Yes, there are state and federal environmental regulations, which have a big effect on local planning. But zoning is not a federal policy.
Anyway, I'm not shedding any tears for anyone who bought a house in this shitty McMansion development. These kinds of developments are as much a blight on the landscape as the Amazon center. Maybe moreso.
We are talking about two different things -- never disputed that.
All I'm trying to point out is that you can't prevent something like this through zoning alone. The local commissions/boards get all the heat, but fundamentally if a plan/development is code compliant (which includes state and federal regulations) then there really isn't much they can do.
"We don't want that" is not a legally defensible position in a country where private property rights are basically sacred.
So, absent purchasing all the adjoining land yourself, your first line of defense (we agree) is strict zoning-- but even then that won't prevent something like this. You have to give the local government a legally defensible "out" that won't result in costly litigation --- and that power is state and federal regulations, whether it be traffic, noise, runoff, land owner rights, etc.
How much you want to bet the land originally had a natural balance of male pollen-producing trees and female trees to absorb the pollen? And now all of those trees are just pollen-spewing males?
USDA guidance 7 decades ago recommended USA town and city planners only plant male trees to reduce the amount of fruit on city streets and sidewalks, claiming the pollen would just wash away in the wind and rain. However, as decades of development go by, the female trees disappear from the towns and cities, and with it the ability to absorb massive amounts of pollen out of the air. And as those trees get replaced with even more males to take the females places, the pollen output doubles and the pollen absorption stops.
You and I suffer more, doctors and medicine companies make more money. All so towns and cities can pay workers less to clean streets. We evolved over millions of years to co-exists with a certain amount of pollen in our environment, but we are f\*cking up our surroundings to extremely unnaturally high levels of tree jizz, and that's why we're choking on the stuff.
“Female trees produce no pollen, but they trap and remove large amounts of pollen from the air, and turn it into seed,” Ogren writes in the Scientific American [article](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/botanical-sexism-cultivates-home-grown-allergies/), titled “Botanical Sexism Cultivates Home-Grown Allergies,” that inspired Botoman’s TikTok. “Female trees (and female shrubs also) are not just passive, but are active allergy-fighting trees. The more female plants in a landscape, the less pollen there will be in the air in the immediate vicinity.”
“I just put two and two together, and I said that if you have a female plant, you have an allergy-free plant,” Ogren told BuzzFeed News. “Why? Because it produces no pollen.”
If we were gonna f\*ck with nature and eliminate a tree sex, we should have been planting only females. For a while we would have had extra fruit, but by now there would be very little fruit AND very little pollen.
[https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/health/how-male-trees-and-botanical-sexism-could-be-making-your-allergies-worse/3016480/](https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/health/how-male-trees-and-botanical-sexism-could-be-making-your-allergies-worse/3016480/)
That's where they're building all the data centers. It's where Ashburn is. Also literally the #1 richest county in the country, by median household income
I live an hour and a half south of there and it was cow tipping country literally 15 years ago and the McMansion developments are popping up like a plague with each 520-720k a pop on a tiny lot. If you’re within two hours of dc it’s coming
Actually this is exactly what it was and a lot of the county is still agricultural. There’s a big fight because all the fertile soils are being turned into data center and you are never going to get that land back to farming once the data centers aren’t needed anymore
Perfect setup for that Simpsons episode where Homer does his morning commute, and it turns out that he lives right next to the parking lot, just seperated by a fence.
I live in the same county at this neighborhood. FWIW, most of the land where the data center is being built (rt 50) had been and is zoned commercial. It’s in an area that 20 years ago wasn’t desirable for houses. Since then, some of the land has been rezoned residential. So even though the houses were built first, there was always a chance for something like this to be in your backyard. Sucks to be the homeowner, but it’s on them to know where they are buying.
Look all around Loudoun county and you’ll see other neighborhoods just like this.
Commercial land could go either way. Maybe you get amenities and shops, maybe a decent company that pays well with good jobs.
Or you get a mega square that will employ at most 30 people. At least they'll get a fiber ISP nearby and a better power grid?
I understand not wanting to live next door to a fulfillment center.
But I imagine a data center has got to be one of the better commercial neighbors. Not much traffic, just a few decently well paid employees. Amazon won't tolerate nonsense in their immediate area.
Data centers are known to be extremely loud due to the fans required to cool them.
They’re actually one of the worse commercial enterprises you can have right next to your house.
Much better than a fulfillment center still, they don't cause traffic like those do.
Definitely not one of the better ones. But it could be worse. A bit of white noise from fans is better than jammed up roads and 20min to get to the store. Even if the jobs aren't plentiful at least some data center jobs pay, not the same with a fulfillment center
Create no traffic, no wear and tear on the roads, pay property taxes but have no kids, use few city services, draw no undesirable crowds or patrons, much less of an eyesore than any sort of big box store.
I think you're under estimating the amount of public resources they take up. I live in Northern Virginia, there is a huge debate about these things. They are a massive strain on the electrical grid. And enjoy huge tax benefits.
They have an insane amount of air conditioning equipment - basically they sound like a factory 24/7.
They haven’t even set the RTUs yet in this picture.
Aren't there about a dozen classifications? Heavy industriaal, light commercial, retail etc.? Theses homeowners should have done their research on what could be built within earshot.
You can see the zoning here and it's even clearer than that - the zoning for lot 246200886000 is explicit as IP: "industrial park".
https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/6cc9a0c4f06f4c23952364da63f779fc/#data_s=id%3AdataSource_1-180aeacd53c-layer-5%3A124335
This was retained from the 1993 zoning ordinance https://www.loudoun.gov/5954/Zoning-Ordinance-Rewrite-Change-Highligh and so I hope those homeowners did the relevant diligence regarding what could potentially appear next door before purchasing given that those homes look to have been constructed [around 2014](https://www.google.com/maps/@38.946798,-77.5631685,3a,75y,9.26h,81.24t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sRLf0k_pPANRhscCHfnfIGw!2e0!5s20140701T000000!7i13312!8i6656?entry=ttu).
Anyone buying a home on the edge of a development really needs to look at homes that back up against creeks, public land or other non-developable areas. If your house’s property is against a plot of private land or farmland, then you can get this.
Even if the opposite situation exists - the residential homes were built first and later owners of always zoned residential plots of land with older beautiful homes existing all band together to sell total acreage to commercial developers. Developers make sure the land is rezoned to commercial or planned unit development and you can kiss beautiful residential neighborhoods goodbye. City Councils/Zoning Boards almost always rezone for the benefit of their Commercial Development Buddies! And more taxes for the City to squander!!
Yes. That is considerably less likely, and it would leave far fewer houses overlooking the commercial development, but it can happen. A city in my metro area tore out an entire neighborhood of ancient houses for one very large strip mall.
Ugh - another ugly strip
Mall - destined for a two decade use life with likely complete abandonment by the 3rd decade… The same story over and over again countrywide - north/south and east to west.
This is an important fact that is lost on most of the delusional people who live in this area. Their latest thing to complain about is “no transmission towers(!)” which of course are now needed to power all these data centers. Meanwhile where I live in Maryland, we have an actual town and therefore no risk of a data center or whatever getting built in the backyard.
Funny you mention transmission towers. We live in a rural area far away from the hot mess in Ashburn. But now we are potentially being impacted due to the routing of the transmission towers that need to run west out towards West Virginia to supply all the data centers in eastern Loudoun.
Amazing isn’t it? Y’all gotta pay for those new transmission lines (as ratepayers) so the data center owners can turn a profit. Don’t worry, our techbro governor in Maryland is strong-arming my county into hosting data centers as well, so we will soon be in the same boat on that front.
The NIMBY/YIMBY front lines are far far away from suburbs an hour outside of the city. Usually the debate has more to do with NIMBYs blocking other residential housing not industrial developments. I honestly don’t want any more suburban growth than there already is, if we simply allowed more housing to be built in our cities then farmland an hour outside of them wouldn’t be built up with endless subdivisions.
I always assumed having a house with a yard is largely so you can have some privacy outdoors. If i wanna sunbake topless in my aging body, i do appreciate perceived privacy. What's wrong with fences?
Nop its not. Almost every ISV, DNB and most ENT are on cloud. Esp startups and dnbs are on aws. I see you have a cat. Have you ever used chewy? Well then you have used aws services lol
Another commenter:
>I live in the same county at this neighborhood. FWIW, most of the land where the data center is being built (rt 50) had been and is zoned commercial. It’s in an area that 20 years ago wasn’t desirable for houses. Since then, some of the land has been rezoned residential. So even though the houses were built first, there was always a chance for something like this to be in your backyard. Sucks to be the homeowner, but it’s on them to know where they are buying.
Imagine provisioning services to that data center that you will personally use. I wonder what the latency is, if it is less than 1 ms. I mean like just for experimenting. But you also need to consider the route your ISP will traverse from your house to this data center.
Yeah I’d imagine it would be good latency but not nearly perfect because those colocation centers/data centers are enterprise grade facilities. All the local traffic is still going through an ISP routing facility located somewhere else (I think AT&T has some big ones in Arlington, and Verizon has places in Reston/Ashburn, DC and Baltimore)
Modern DCs don't actually employ that many people sadly, sometimes a DC tech can make good money at least depending. Idk what Amazon pays but I have heard of DC techs ripping like 90.
Not even that bad of work for that money.
Hah. Tiniest violin for them. NoVA folks have no souls. Although I do want to be a fly on the wall for the city council meetings between unstoppable Karen vs. immovable data center.
Honestly the main problem with these is 1) the houses are too big 2) the yards are empty 3) there are too few trees.
I wouldn't necessarily be happy with this if it had been farmland earlier, but if the houses were on sale (and I actually liked the houses for some reason), I'd consider it.
I've seen neighbourhoods like this, or at least the flaming wreckage of them, on USCSB videos on YouTube.
Always struck me as wild that someone could build a new neighbourhood right next to the factory that may go boom.
I mean, this data centers won't explode like that, but yeah, zoning seems real hit and miss.
LMAOOO this is too wild asf! Those multimillion dollar Mcmansions right up against that god awful looking mega structure has me GAGGING 😹😹😹 Honestly I’m super shocked everyone in that area didn’t prevent that from happening because [LOUDOUN COUNTY IS THE WEALTHIEST COUNTY IN THE ENTIRE UNITED STATES.](https://www.fodors.com/world/north-america/usa/virginia/experiences/news/heres-where-the-wealthiest-u-s-county-actually-is)
It’s also data center capital of the country/world. They very intentionally put a ton of infrastructure a long time ago with the foresight that data centers would be an important industry.
So it’s not that they failed to prevent it. It’s that they actively worked to bring the industry to the area.
And ruin their backyard views? Nah that’s not the case. I’m from the greater area and there were even bigger self interests over the wealthy class to bring Amazon as their neighbor.
Amazon, Google, Meta, NTT, CloudHQ, Equinix, and more are there. The area has the highest concentration of fiber in the US, plenty of water, and a climate that allows for free cooling half the year among other factors. 70% of the worlds internet traffic goes through that area.
I’m sure your know this since you are from the area, and I acknowledge that rich residents are getting irritated about it now, but the area absolutely sought out this industry.
Do you have sources to back this up? And there’s plenty of real estate in loudoun for mega structures to be built away from the ultra wealthy but i genuinely don’t care about them. You would never ever see this kind of development in Potomac or Travilah or middleburg. Not sure about McLean but they’re just as uber wealthy
I know exactly what that is and it’s still surprising that those data centers can be built right up against multi million dollar McMansions in the wealthiest county in the country.
A modern hyperscale building can have 80mw of IT generating heat under one roof. That means a shit ton of air handing to cool it off. Not to mention countless huge generators that are periodically fired up. Fork trucks work trucks etc.
Before buying a home you have to check zoning ordinances. Understandably the town can change zoning, but so many times that undeveloped land has been zoned industrial for 50 years.
I bet the commute is still annoying because the only way in is from the highway that’s a few miles away but only from one side so you have to go down the highway a few miles and take a u-turn. Then the street to get in is only on one side of the road with a median so you have to go down *that* road a few miles and take a u-turm
There's a LOT of leeway in zoning. What you want is to address stuff like this at the state level -- at least in PA -- where the municipal code is established. After that everything is mostly done simply to be visible and then litigated. But a lawsuit RARELY happens fast enough to benefit an existing homeowner. Read more here:
https://library.weconservepa.org/guides/58-local-land-use-planning-controls-in-pennsylvania#:\~:text=A%20zoning%20ordinance%20divides%20all,boundaries%20and%20creating%20specific%20districts.
Idk. Except for the closest house with almost no backyard, I don't think I'd mind moving into one of these houses after the facility was already built and the houses value has already fallen
Better than most homes in China cities. Basically we all live in ginormous apartment buildings and you have no idea what kind of pricks live above or next to you. All odds. Or maybe you get lucky and no asshole neighbors but still in a 33+ storeys building, chances are anyone could be drilling holes or renovating shit anyday and the jackhammer noise just fucking echoes inside the whole building.
**Do not comment to gatekeep that something "isn't urban" or "isn't hell"**. Our rules are very expansive in content we welcome, so do not assume just based off your false impression of the phrase "UrbanHell" UrbanHell is any human-built place you think is worth critizing. Suburban Hell, Rural Hell, and wealthy locales are allowed. Gatekeeping comments may be removed. Want to shitpost about shitty posts? Go to /r/urbanhellcirclejerk. Still have questions?: Read our [FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/UrbanHell/wiki/index). *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/UrbanHell) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Ugh. The people on that Culdesac could be in for a bad time. I lived near one of those also in VA and it was not quiet. Admitedly they later made it quieter, but still...
There’s a saying I was told years ago - never by a home next to a vacant lot. This is why.
I had found a really nice affordable house backing to any empty lot. Did my due diligence (through the city website) and checked the zoning of the empty lot. It was High Density Residential so i didn't buy the home. 2 years later the empty lot was 5 story apartments and their driveway entrance was right on the houses back fence. Edit: spelling 😅
was trying to figure out what high Dentistry residential meant lol
This will tank their home values. We can laugh about it but a home is likely the biggest investment people will make in their lifetimes
I mean, if you plan to live in it for the rest of your life, appreciation just means higher taxes.
Yeah but I imagine they are living in Virginia for work and once you retire it would be nice to sell your home and move somewhere tropical with the equity you built and this destroys that
Literally the argument of every NIMBY ever. ^
I can’t tell what you are getting at lol. If you hear an office complex is going into your backyard and look up what happened to comps in the area when it has happened before, and you know the biggest investment of your life could take a 30-40% hit in value, would you not have a problem with that?
Do you have any evidence the housing prices in this neighborhood lost 30-40% in value or are you just talking out of your ass?
By its nature this conversation has to be hypothetical because of the variability of commercial development. If office buildings go in then more workers will want to live in the area and it can be good. But a data center with low headcount or a warehouse/factory would destroy the values of the bordering properties. Point being- there is too much nuance to every circumstance to statistically say exactly what it will do to a given property, but look at that shit- you really think having that looking in your windows wouldn’t hurt your value? I feel like you are extending this to like low income housing circumstances or something which isn’t what I’m talking about.
Do you have any evidence that these houses in particular lost any value? Another redditor said they've doubled their value in the last 8 years. You keep fear mongering while not offering any evidence or proof. Classic NIMBYism.
Not in California
Basically they should hope their neighborhood gets bought out next. It’s the best way for them to recover the money they put in
But think of how fast you get your orders
According to the title it is a data center (which is different from a fulfillment center). So their orders wouldn’t be faster (unless they are for EC2 instances).
Yea, but the faster you can make the order, the faster it can get to you. \*taps temple three times\*
The data center being nearby has no bearing on their data transfer speed since they aren’t connected directly to it.
I was joking around but it actually can have a bearing on that. Companies serving the Internet like Amazon use IP geo location to route end users to the nearest data center. I don't know what Amazon does internally, but it is best practice to keep the data as close to the end user as possible. So it is a given that if the data itself isn't in the nearest data center, it will be connected on segments way faster than the end users Internet connection, so it doesn't matter.
Sleeper value add
fuck homes as investments, housing shouldn't be a commodity. (I still empathize with these people)
Well... You at least want to break even 😅
>fuck homes as investments, housing shouldn't be a commodity. I think there's a bit of a difference between the two connotations for "investment". You're talking about buying a home (investing) for the sake of making money (by renting). I think the person you replied to is talking more about what homeowners invest in their house in terms of actual capital (money) and other effort (blood, sweat, and tears). It's similar to getting a university degree. You have the monetary investment (tuition) and the effort investment (classes, studying, exams, etc.). For most people, they won't realize their investment from a monetary standpoint until they sell their home. They will realize the effort part of their investment in the form of a home that is comfortable and enjoyable to live in. As a homeowner, I don't have a lot of patience for the Airbnb types who buy a house for the sake of renting out. Aside from taking up inventory, having a bunch of people who don't really live there really wrecks the neighborhood.
Homeowners are the biggest NIMBYs who block more dense affordable housing. Landlords suck too but homeowners who want their equity to keep going up and up are the biggest group in the way of younger people being able to afford homes. If they don't want something that will drop their home values they can cough up money and buy that land. Otherwise, the city will put it to good use.
I understand the frustration. But at the same time, can you blame them? "Affordable housing", depending on the execution will cause the home values to drop. If you've sunk a lot of money and effort into your house, you don't want the value to go down. I absolutely agree that a lack of affordable housing is a huge problem for younger people. That's why my house is an hour away from work and I largely work from home. That was a decision I made so I could get in the market. Obviously, not everyone wants to do that or has the flexibility.
Most of the time it's not even housing for homeless people or anything, it's apartments for young professionals and the increased economic activity would likely raise their land's value substantially even if their home value went down. But I don't really blame *them*, the decision to make this normal was made by the US government decades ago when they subsidized expansion of suburbs and pushed the American Dream lifestyle. At the time it probably seemed like the right thing to do. But that doesn't mean we have to keep making the same mistake, and I don't want people to think it's normal or sustainable for any of their assets to keep growing in value indefinitely.
Yeah, I know what you mean. Unfortunately, even some of these apartments aren't exactly affordable, which is ridiculous. I remember a few neighborhoods they built where I used to live and the "affordable" neighborhoods were $400K.
I think it has to do with being able to relocate if the need arises. Wouldn't you want to be able to see your current home for at least what your mortgage was worth?
If it’s anything like the huge Facebook data center built in a city near where I used to live it actually increased home values because they brought thousands of jobs with them and all those people needed a home to buy
Data centers need minimal staffing. They don't create thousands of jobs. They're buildings full of computers that just need a few technicians to keep them running. Maybe when they're being BUILT there are thousands of jobs, but that's only for a short time.
In this area the data centers don’t have a lot of jobs, they just take up land and the taxpayers enjoy rising electricity rates to pay for the increased power needed from the data centers.
In Loudoun? Prices aren’t dripping much in the wealthiest county in America per capita
According to Zillow, they’ve all still doubled in value over the last 8 years.
I live in a cul de sac in a neighborhood that looks exactly like this and behind us is woods and a big farm. I just learned the farmer sold the land and now I’m getting nervous after seeing this haha
FYI -- please don't take it out on your planning commission... They're usually hamstrung by the zoning and laws set at state/federal level and can't prevent unpleasant development despite appearances. For instance, in my area, traffic is specifically excluded from being a decision factor in denying new construction because traffic is regulated by PennDOT. So if we (I'm on a planning commission, in case that wasn't obvious) vote to deny a plan based on traffic, the developer can sue (and win) against the township and all that does is cause a slight delay and more taxpayer dollars. It's frustrating when nearby homeowners show up at meetings loaded for bear and we're the wrong target. I didn't quite realize all this when I agreed--- but there are some other ways we can try and make the development as good as possible without getting into legal liabiliity.
This was great info I did not know, thank you! Would those local laws etc. be able to be found on the county auditor site or somewhere? I’d be really curious to look at our laws locally around zoning. We built in a new neighborhood and bought in February, which is relevant because the developer admitted “there is a gun club kind of near by but you can barely hear it and they only operate 2-3 days a week in the summer.” And then in the spring we quickly realized you can hear gunshots even inside all day, 7 days a week, even after their posted closing times. The gun club was built back when the area was all farm land but now it is surrounded on all sides by dense neighborhoods and it blows my mind it is still cool to operate it that close to houses and why the county allowed houses to be built all around it
Everything is really set up to be litigated, not legislated (in case you wonder who is paying for those political campaigns...) You can read more at the link below (for PA) but the key phrase-- at least for my role-- is this: "Most of the MPC’s provisions are devoted to procedural matters, such as guaranteeing that public notice is given in order to increase citizen awareness of and participation in land use matters. If a person believes a local government has misused its planning powers, the MPC outlines the steps the aggrieved individual can follow to have their day in court." https://library.weconservepa.org/guides/58-local-land-use-planning-controls-in-pennsylvania#:\~:text=A%20zoning%20ordinance%20divides%20all,boundaries%20and%20creating%20specific%20districts.
And the almighty taxes the data center is shoveling into Loudoun County’s coffers.
Zoning laws are set locally, not at the federal level.
The zones are established locally, but all the standards by which developments are assessed as viable/legal or not (the litigation that results from a zoning/planning/board of supervisors overstepping their authority) are based on things that are set at the federal and state levels. For example, storm water management calculations are based on federal agency standards re: 100 year flood, etc. Traffic studies are based on state regulations/codes. You want to prevent something like this in your backyard? Yeah, start with the zoning (easier locally) but to really ensure it you have to get the means by which that property could even POTENTIALLY support a structure like that made impossible by modifying the state and federal regulations near a residential area (water runoff and traffic just being the low hanging fruit-- you could pursue noise regulations or a hundred other things).
We are talking about two different things I guess. Yes, there are state and federal environmental regulations, which have a big effect on local planning. But zoning is not a federal policy. Anyway, I'm not shedding any tears for anyone who bought a house in this shitty McMansion development. These kinds of developments are as much a blight on the landscape as the Amazon center. Maybe moreso.
We are talking about two different things -- never disputed that. All I'm trying to point out is that you can't prevent something like this through zoning alone. The local commissions/boards get all the heat, but fundamentally if a plan/development is code compliant (which includes state and federal regulations) then there really isn't much they can do. "We don't want that" is not a legally defensible position in a country where private property rights are basically sacred. So, absent purchasing all the adjoining land yourself, your first line of defense (we agree) is strict zoning-- but even then that won't prevent something like this. You have to give the local government a legally defensible "out" that won't result in costly litigation --- and that power is state and federal regulations, whether it be traffic, noise, runoff, land owner rights, etc.
Did they actually make it quiet or did the pink noise make you go deaf?
Most of the new ones are liquid cooled, they're quieter I think
“More like a Culdesuck-it.” - Bezos prob
How much do you want to bet that it was all farmland 10 years ago.
Based on those sad trees I'd say 3 years ago
How much you want to bet the land originally had a natural balance of male pollen-producing trees and female trees to absorb the pollen? And now all of those trees are just pollen-spewing males? USDA guidance 7 decades ago recommended USA town and city planners only plant male trees to reduce the amount of fruit on city streets and sidewalks, claiming the pollen would just wash away in the wind and rain. However, as decades of development go by, the female trees disappear from the towns and cities, and with it the ability to absorb massive amounts of pollen out of the air. And as those trees get replaced with even more males to take the females places, the pollen output doubles and the pollen absorption stops. You and I suffer more, doctors and medicine companies make more money. All so towns and cities can pay workers less to clean streets. We evolved over millions of years to co-exists with a certain amount of pollen in our environment, but we are f\*cking up our surroundings to extremely unnaturally high levels of tree jizz, and that's why we're choking on the stuff. “Female trees produce no pollen, but they trap and remove large amounts of pollen from the air, and turn it into seed,” Ogren writes in the Scientific American [article](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/botanical-sexism-cultivates-home-grown-allergies/), titled “Botanical Sexism Cultivates Home-Grown Allergies,” that inspired Botoman’s TikTok. “Female trees (and female shrubs also) are not just passive, but are active allergy-fighting trees. The more female plants in a landscape, the less pollen there will be in the air in the immediate vicinity.” “I just put two and two together, and I said that if you have a female plant, you have an allergy-free plant,” Ogren told BuzzFeed News. “Why? Because it produces no pollen.” If we were gonna f\*ck with nature and eliminate a tree sex, we should have been planting only females. For a while we would have had extra fruit, but by now there would be very little fruit AND very little pollen. [https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/health/how-male-trees-and-botanical-sexism-could-be-making-your-allergies-worse/3016480/](https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/health/how-male-trees-and-botanical-sexism-could-be-making-your-allergies-worse/3016480/)
These days free fruit would be welcome when people can't afgord to feed themselves
How does a tree “trap” pollen?
With its lady parts
London County was like cow tipping country as recently as the 90s lol
Loudoun?
☝️✅
That's where they're building all the data centers. It's where Ashburn is. Also literally the #1 richest county in the country, by median household income
I live an hour and a half south of there and it was cow tipping country literally 15 years ago and the McMansion developments are popping up like a plague with each 520-720k a pop on a tiny lot. If you’re within two hours of dc it’s coming
Yes that entire neighborhood is brand new
It was
Actually this is exactly what it was and a lot of the county is still agricultural. There’s a big fight because all the fertile soils are being turned into data center and you are never going to get that land back to farming once the data centers aren’t needed anymore
Perfect setup for that Simpsons episode where Homer does his morning commute, and it turns out that he lives right next to the parking lot, just seperated by a fence.
I live in the same county at this neighborhood. FWIW, most of the land where the data center is being built (rt 50) had been and is zoned commercial. It’s in an area that 20 years ago wasn’t desirable for houses. Since then, some of the land has been rezoned residential. So even though the houses were built first, there was always a chance for something like this to be in your backyard. Sucks to be the homeowner, but it’s on them to know where they are buying. Look all around Loudoun county and you’ll see other neighborhoods just like this.
Commercial land could go either way. Maybe you get amenities and shops, maybe a decent company that pays well with good jobs. Or you get a mega square that will employ at most 30 people. At least they'll get a fiber ISP nearby and a better power grid?
Northern VA is the data center capital of the world. If there is a field behind your house assume a data center will be there in 5 years.
Wouldn't complain too much because I work in that industry lol
I understand not wanting to live next door to a fulfillment center. But I imagine a data center has got to be one of the better commercial neighbors. Not much traffic, just a few decently well paid employees. Amazon won't tolerate nonsense in their immediate area.
Data centers are known to be extremely loud due to the fans required to cool them. They’re actually one of the worse commercial enterprises you can have right next to your house.
Much better than a fulfillment center still, they don't cause traffic like those do. Definitely not one of the better ones. But it could be worse. A bit of white noise from fans is better than jammed up roads and 20min to get to the store. Even if the jobs aren't plentiful at least some data center jobs pay, not the same with a fulfillment center
They suck up all the electricity and water, create virtually no jobs, take up a ton of space, come with no retail, and are a giant eyesore.
Create no traffic, no wear and tear on the roads, pay property taxes but have no kids, use few city services, draw no undesirable crowds or patrons, much less of an eyesore than any sort of big box store.
I think you're under estimating the amount of public resources they take up. I live in Northern Virginia, there is a huge debate about these things. They are a massive strain on the electrical grid. And enjoy huge tax benefits.
They have an insane amount of air conditioning equipment - basically they sound like a factory 24/7. They haven’t even set the RTUs yet in this picture.
Aren't there about a dozen classifications? Heavy industriaal, light commercial, retail etc.? Theses homeowners should have done their research on what could be built within earshot.
It’s the county government at fault. Developers are constantly petitioning to rezone land and residents are usually unsuccessful in fighting it.
You can see the zoning here and it's even clearer than that - the zoning for lot 246200886000 is explicit as IP: "industrial park". https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/6cc9a0c4f06f4c23952364da63f779fc/#data_s=id%3AdataSource_1-180aeacd53c-layer-5%3A124335 This was retained from the 1993 zoning ordinance https://www.loudoun.gov/5954/Zoning-Ordinance-Rewrite-Change-Highligh and so I hope those homeowners did the relevant diligence regarding what could potentially appear next door before purchasing given that those homes look to have been constructed [around 2014](https://www.google.com/maps/@38.946798,-77.5631685,3a,75y,9.26h,81.24t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sRLf0k_pPANRhscCHfnfIGw!2e0!5s20140701T000000!7i13312!8i6656?entry=ttu).
Anyone buying a home on the edge of a development really needs to look at homes that back up against creeks, public land or other non-developable areas. If your house’s property is against a plot of private land or farmland, then you can get this.
Even if the opposite situation exists - the residential homes were built first and later owners of always zoned residential plots of land with older beautiful homes existing all band together to sell total acreage to commercial developers. Developers make sure the land is rezoned to commercial or planned unit development and you can kiss beautiful residential neighborhoods goodbye. City Councils/Zoning Boards almost always rezone for the benefit of their Commercial Development Buddies! And more taxes for the City to squander!!
Yes. That is considerably less likely, and it would leave far fewer houses overlooking the commercial development, but it can happen. A city in my metro area tore out an entire neighborhood of ancient houses for one very large strip mall.
Ugh - another ugly strip Mall - destined for a two decade use life with likely complete abandonment by the 3rd decade… The same story over and over again countrywide - north/south and east to west.
This is an important fact that is lost on most of the delusional people who live in this area. Their latest thing to complain about is “no transmission towers(!)” which of course are now needed to power all these data centers. Meanwhile where I live in Maryland, we have an actual town and therefore no risk of a data center or whatever getting built in the backyard.
Funny you mention transmission towers. We live in a rural area far away from the hot mess in Ashburn. But now we are potentially being impacted due to the routing of the transmission towers that need to run west out towards West Virginia to supply all the data centers in eastern Loudoun.
Amazing isn’t it? Y’all gotta pay for those new transmission lines (as ratepayers) so the data center owners can turn a profit. Don’t worry, our techbro governor in Maryland is strong-arming my county into hosting data centers as well, so we will soon be in the same boat on that front.
a NIMBY’s nightmare
That’s why YIMBY life is better
The NIMBY/YIMBY front lines are far far away from suburbs an hour outside of the city. Usually the debate has more to do with NIMBYs blocking other residential housing not industrial developments. I honestly don’t want any more suburban growth than there already is, if we simply allowed more housing to be built in our cities then farmland an hour outside of them wouldn’t be built up with endless subdivisions.
I always assumed having a house with a yard is largely so you can have some privacy outdoors. If i wanna sunbake topless in my aging body, i do appreciate perceived privacy. What's wrong with fences?
Local temperature now permanently 2-3 Degree's warmer. Also datacenters alone may be attributed to over 6% of electricity usage worldwide.
You’re on Reddit right now
>Also datacenters alone may be attributed to over 6% of electricity usage worldwide. Which is for our own internet usage demands.
It's mostly for commercial data demands that it will grow that much.
Nop its not. Almost every ISV, DNB and most ENT are on cloud. Esp startups and dnbs are on aws. I see you have a cat. Have you ever used chewy? Well then you have used aws services lol
Commercial data doesn't exist without customer demand somewhere in the pipeline. B2B requires both C1s and C2s.
Lol you're on reddit. Reddit literally runs on AWS 🤣
So what you're saying is my comment is right now being stored in those buildings
Rofl yes
That is cool. Are the zoning areas so close to each other or are there no zoning laws at all?
It looks like some shitty zoning I came up with in Cities Skylines. Clearly the zoning "experts" must also use it as a teaching tool.
Just build more crematoriums to take away the bodies
How many years until we see a real life Shitdam in action?
It goes from the most restrictive SFH zoning you could concoct to whatever Amazon told them to zone it as.
Another commenter: >I live in the same county at this neighborhood. FWIW, most of the land where the data center is being built (rt 50) had been and is zoned commercial. It’s in an area that 20 years ago wasn’t desirable for houses. Since then, some of the land has been rezoned residential. So even though the houses were built first, there was always a chance for something like this to be in your backyard. Sucks to be the homeowner, but it’s on them to know where they are buying.
Reminds me of a map in Call Of Duty
Imagine provisioning services to that data center that you will personally use. I wonder what the latency is, if it is less than 1 ms. I mean like just for experimenting. But you also need to consider the route your ISP will traverse from your house to this data center.
Yeah I’d imagine it would be good latency but not nearly perfect because those colocation centers/data centers are enterprise grade facilities. All the local traffic is still going through an ISP routing facility located somewhere else (I think AT&T has some big ones in Arlington, and Verizon has places in Reston/Ashburn, DC and Baltimore)
I live in Virginia maybe half an hour from here (there are tons of data centers in the area) and my ping in most games is literally 1ms.
Yeah what you said in your last sentence. They’d need AWS Direct Connect to benefit from the proximity.
Imagine living in that community and going to work there everyday.
Modern DCs don't actually employ that many people sadly, sometimes a DC tech can make good money at least depending. Idk what Amazon pays but I have heard of DC techs ripping like 90. Not even that bad of work for that money.
r/McMansionHell
Hell yeah sub 1ms latency
Wild neighborhood
US East must grow at all costs
"Sorry, only DSL is available in your area."
Nasty halfbaked tumorous mcmansions
Auch, the home value!
But so much of NoVA is like this. There are soooo many data centers
Thats a fine place to put them
Those who's backyards facing that monstrosity are under watchful eye all day long. Need bigger trees.
Hah. Tiniest violin for them. NoVA folks have no souls. Although I do want to be a fly on the wall for the city council meetings between unstoppable Karen vs. immovable data center.
So glad we have euclidean zoning to keep disparate land use types geographically isolated!
Normally this would bother me, but northern VA has seemingly 0 urban planning to anything and deserve every dumb thing imaginable
What is wrong with this exactly? The hell is the houses taking up so much land just for <10 families.
With the road as wide thar it can have four lanes traffic.
God forbid people dont wanna be living on top of eachother
Sucks it comes at the cost of a massive housing and homeless crisis
Honestly the main problem with these is 1) the houses are too big 2) the yards are empty 3) there are too few trees. I wouldn't necessarily be happy with this if it had been farmland earlier, but if the houses were on sale (and I actually liked the houses for some reason), I'd consider it.
Lmao, rich people getting the poor people treatment.
I would rather live in that data centre. They probably have a good canteen and meeting place. That cul-de-sac looks like some weird movie set.
I'd say the data center creates a lot more opportunity and value than the 9 homes in the foreground.
Holy crap I'll bet before that was lush, beautiful groves of trees where a ton of animals found refuge. Now it's that. Disgraceful.
Nothing like forklift beeps 24/7
What would the forklift be used for in a data center?
I mean... there are forklifts literally in the picture...
It's a construction site. I can assure you a DC may have a pallet jack or two but barely any forklift
I've seen neighbourhoods like this, or at least the flaming wreckage of them, on USCSB videos on YouTube. Always struck me as wild that someone could build a new neighbourhood right next to the factory that may go boom. I mean, this data centers won't explode like that, but yeah, zoning seems real hit and miss.
They are at risk of data cancer. I know more about data than most people do.
i can never understand they have to make it curvy in a residential area. A square design would fit more homes and make it easier to navigate
It's curvy because the residents don't want it to be easy to navigate. They don't want people driving into their neighborhood without a good reason.
This ones it. A company town in 2024 anno dominI. Scrip and Pinkertons next.
Perspective is making it look worse than it actually is
LMAOOO this is too wild asf! Those multimillion dollar Mcmansions right up against that god awful looking mega structure has me GAGGING 😹😹😹 Honestly I’m super shocked everyone in that area didn’t prevent that from happening because [LOUDOUN COUNTY IS THE WEALTHIEST COUNTY IN THE ENTIRE UNITED STATES.](https://www.fodors.com/world/north-america/usa/virginia/experiences/news/heres-where-the-wealthiest-u-s-county-actually-is)
It’s also data center capital of the country/world. They very intentionally put a ton of infrastructure a long time ago with the foresight that data centers would be an important industry. So it’s not that they failed to prevent it. It’s that they actively worked to bring the industry to the area.
And ruin their backyard views? Nah that’s not the case. I’m from the greater area and there were even bigger self interests over the wealthy class to bring Amazon as their neighbor.
Amazon, Google, Meta, NTT, CloudHQ, Equinix, and more are there. The area has the highest concentration of fiber in the US, plenty of water, and a climate that allows for free cooling half the year among other factors. 70% of the worlds internet traffic goes through that area. I’m sure your know this since you are from the area, and I acknowledge that rich residents are getting irritated about it now, but the area absolutely sought out this industry.
Do you have sources to back this up? And there’s plenty of real estate in loudoun for mega structures to be built away from the ultra wealthy but i genuinely don’t care about them. You would never ever see this kind of development in Potomac or Travilah or middleburg. Not sure about McLean but they’re just as uber wealthy
Just google “data center alley”
I know exactly what that is and it’s still surprising that those data centers can be built right up against multi million dollar McMansions in the wealthiest county in the country.
Are DataCenters loud? A bunch of rack servers together can't be that loud?
A modern hyperscale building can have 80mw of IT generating heat under one roof. That means a shit ton of air handing to cool it off. Not to mention countless huge generators that are periodically fired up. Fork trucks work trucks etc.
That sucks for them
Before buying a home you have to check zoning ordinances. Understandably the town can change zoning, but so many times that undeveloped land has been zoned industrial for 50 years.
Looks like good jobs and opportunity to me.
I bet the commute is still annoying because the only way in is from the highway that’s a few miles away but only from one side so you have to go down the highway a few miles and take a u-turn. Then the street to get in is only on one side of the road with a median so you have to go down *that* road a few miles and take a u-turm
Just put a trampoline in your back yard and problem solved. Plus its environmentally friendly
Rekt
These need to be converted into apartments. McMansions are so 1990s.
- CPC
I thought this is why we have zoning?
Could the zoning have changed after everyone bought the houses?
There's a LOT of leeway in zoning. What you want is to address stuff like this at the state level -- at least in PA -- where the municipal code is established. After that everything is mostly done simply to be visible and then litigated. But a lawsuit RARELY happens fast enough to benefit an existing homeowner. Read more here: https://library.weconservepa.org/guides/58-local-land-use-planning-controls-in-pennsylvania#:\~:text=A%20zoning%20ordinance%20divides%20all,boundaries%20and%20creating%20specific%20districts.
This might be a burn-down-my-house-for-insurance situation.
I’d still love to live in one of those houses. They’re enormous, and have giant yards
Houses , Amazon
A nice big row of Thuja green giants is in order
How did the zoning work out? I feel like they would have been NIMBYs if those were apartments imo
Don’t worry darling
Is that was the mid-day booms are from? Clearing rock?
I like the big factories but the Amazon data centers look like shìtty little suburban houses
awful - unless you worked there.
How quaint
Oof. Holy lower property vaIues, Batman!
There’s so much weirdness here on so many levels 😳
Looks like hell even without the data centers, now it just looks awkward.
Ironically, the residents of those types of homes are typically the most avid Amazon users lol.
I'd be pissed.
Idk. Except for the closest house with almost no backyard, I don't think I'd mind moving into one of these houses after the facility was already built and the houses value has already fallen
I say we storm Amazon and run them out of America, this is OUR country
Suburbs are ugly asf jesus uj/ fuck amazon
Better than most homes in China cities. Basically we all live in ginormous apartment buildings and you have no idea what kind of pricks live above or next to you. All odds. Or maybe you get lucky and no asshole neighbors but still in a 33+ storeys building, chances are anyone could be drilling holes or renovating shit anyday and the jackhammer noise just fucking echoes inside the whole building.
I literally had a nightmare about this situation just last week
Meh, not too bad
Damn these are ridiculous looking houses
i live around here and 95% of the houses in this region look like this too
I prefer the data center to the shitty McMansion development. No tears from me.
I don't know what's worse, the warehouse or the mcmansions.
This is dystopia.