Data center projects blocked or delayed amid local opposition

Instead you are saying that some people wanted a particular land use on a parcel, bet then a different land use showed up. Lots of VeryNiceIdea have nobody around to execute the idea and actually make it happen. When an abandoned lumberyard next to lots of homes in my area had a proposal for condos, neighbors were livid at the homes, and refused the zoning change. Instead people asked for a music center for senior citizens, but nobody stepped up to raise the money to build something like that.

All of our favorite locations were created far before the era of modern planning, when growth was largely uncontrolled.

> in practice the growth leads to government inefficiency and that offsets any costs savings.

Do you have any examples of this? I've never heard of it before and never seen data that could support it. Unless the "government inefficiency" is highly restrictive zoning, which would be an unusual framing but one that I would highly endorse if that's what you mean!

YIMBYs also regularly support work on non-regulatory barriers, such as the rent increase caps in California (ABA1482), and have even supported social housing bills in California.

There's also lots of talk of transfer taxes amongst YIMBYs, see for example: https://cayimby.org/blog/if-you-tax-the-things-you-want-less...

There are two types of discussions about YIMBYs: 1) that by far-leftists that see the battle as ideological and about regulation/deregulation and trickle-down housing vs. revolution, and 2) the actual YIMBY activism on the ground which is all about more housing and making housing less of a financial and emotional burden for renters.

I don't care either way. I don't live in the US. Action or non-action, I'm unaffected by that. There's no reason for me to "willfully deceit" anyone, as I don't stand to either gain or lose with any outcome. There's also no reason for you to frame this as a personal attack.

I've checked Zillow though.

There's a plenty of $1 homes, mostly dilapidated and non-functional even though the land could be worth $1 if one can afford demolition and rebuilding. But at the range of $10,000 to $15,000 there's a lot of pretty normally looking homes. Even if one doesn't have that amount as a down payment, I assume plenty of banks would be willing to give a mortgage for that sum with 25 years of $150/mo payments.

The problem is nobody wants to live where these houses are, because it's not SF, while in SF there are a lot of options under $2M, but not many people have that amount of money.

"Housing shortage" doesn't exist. The only shortage that exists is the shortage of $10,000 homes in SF.

It seems like you're suggesting that Politico didn't mention that the area already had pollution problems prior to xAI, but that's literally the very first sentence of the article:

> Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company is belching smog-forming pollution into an area of South Memphis that already leads the state in emergency department visits for asthma.

It's restated in the 5th sentence:

> The plant is in an area whose air is already considered unhealthy due to smog.

The power plant down the street is mentioned in the 6th sentence:

> The turbines spew nitrogen oxides, also known as NOx, at an estimated rate of 1,200 to 2,000 tons a year — far more than the gas-fired power plant across the street or the oil refinery down the road.

So I have to deduce that your actual complaint is that the article didn't say something to the effect of, "xAI is adding a bunch of emissions, but don't worry because the people there were already well-abused by other nearby emission sources?"

> what I strongly disagree with in the politico article is that the datacenter is framed as a major polluter when the whole area is heavy industry,

The xAI data center is a major polluter. In fact it's a major polluter even in an area full of major polluters! It produces more NOx than the gigantic power plant that powers the region.