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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Office buildings take land and resources and generate almost nothing for the local community, and are islands in vast seas of asphalt and traffic attractors to boot. But nobody moralizes office buildings, just data centers, despite the fact that data centers are usually objectively better neighbors.

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This was a very significant talking point through most of covid, actually. Granted, there is an orders-of-magnitude disparity between office buildings and data centers regarding both their resource consumption and their local financial return through employment. Its no surprise that the attitude towards data centers is much more negative.

Not really, no? I'm not saying office buildings are "just as bad" as data centers; I'm saying they're substantially worse. It is much more unpleasant to have an office building next to your home than it is to have one of the CyrusOne Aurora data centers. The data center is --- seriously go look at them --- basically like having a park next door.

Wait are you saying office buildings bring less to the community because so, so, so many more people work in them than in data centers

Do you think a community is your house

The office buildings next to the CyrusOne data centers in the western suburbs are not filled with people from Aurora. They're filled with commuters.

That’s wild, where do all the people from Aurora work? The data centers? Also what does the specific building or set of buildings you hate in one town have to do with the concept of office buildings

I've lost track of what your argument is. Mine is that office buildings are not generally filled with workers from the immediate municipality in which they're situated.

We're talking about office buildings because office buildings and data centers are both large-format commercial real estate developments.

>are you saying office buildings bring less to the community because so, so, so many more people work in them than in data centers

>Mine is that office buildings are not generally filled with workers from the immediate municipality in which they're situated.

Since neither are data centers, which aren’t filled with workers, you could’ve just said “yeah”

“Office buildings bring less to communities than data centers because of all the people that work in them” lmao

> That’s wild, where do all the people from Aurora work?

Last I checked, Aurora had a large blue-collar Latino population, many of whom are successful tradespeople.

These people commute to construction sites elsewhere during the day, and perhaps your own neighborhood, where HN posters snitch to the town if they use a leaf blower within 1500' of their home office.

> These people commute to construction sites elsewhere during the day

While it is a shame that tptacek has to see “commuters“ going both ways it is good to know that the people of Aurora have this beautiful park

https://www.cyrusone.com/data-centers/north-america/aurora-i...

I don't know what you think this link shows, but you can just jump to CHI1 on Google Maps (or, you know, drive there) to see what that area looks like.

It shows another generic large semi-industrial/semi-commercial building with a fancy facade around the lobby/reception area and a big blocky rectangular warehouse-style building behind it, with a little mechanical area outside of it. For a moment I thought I was staring at a satellite photo of parts of south San Jose, Sunnyvale or Newark. I can't even begin to count how many of these I've seen in my life. And counter to your point about aesthetics of an office building, I have seen plenty of office buildings that have nice shaded and tree-covered parking lots that aren't wide expanses of asphalt, with pleasant outdoor areas, and architecture that might not be exquisite, but fits well with the time and place it exists in.

Do they not eat lunch? Or do any local shopping?

The literal foot traffic of office workers was a major reason brought up by cities trying to force companies to RTO post pandemic.

Office buildings employ considerably more people, support nearby restaurants, consume less power and water, produce virtually no infrasound, and are more attractive than data centers. I'd rather have an office building next to my house than a data center, especially if they would not be providing me colocation services at a steep discount.

Office buildings are not more attractive than data centers; that's my whole argument. In format, massing, and design, data centers essentially are office buildings, just with drastically less parking. Asphalt is the biggest eyesore in commercial real estate.

(Data centers consume immaterial amounts of water.)

Drastically less parking, so way less jobs in the local area right?

Like maybe the municipality doesn't care because a lot of jobs are filled by people coming in from an hour away, but surely the inverse of "I am sad because <some job source in my area> closed" is "I am happy because <some job source in my area> opened", right?

I get what you're saying about the buildings themselves. I just think that, in the abstract and all else being equal (it isn't of course!) "big box for 50 jobs" and "big box for 200 jobs", one seems nicer. Maybe I'm overestimating the job differential. And this is all a bit of a false dichotomy anyways

First, no, all these buildings have wildly overprovisioned parking. Most of the lots are empty. I'd encourage people wondering about this to just go drive out to an office complex in a suburb near them and look. Second, no, these jobs are not generally filled by neighbors of the office complexes, or even people from the muni where the office complex is situated.

The big box for 50 jobs is also a nicer building to have near you, at least when we're talking about the data centers you find in the western suburbs of Chicago.

> Most of the lots are empty.

Is this not the same for the data centers? Have data centers solved parking provisioning in a way office parks haven't?

> Second, no, these jobs are not generally filled by neighbors of the office complexes, or even people from the muni where the office complex is situated.

I mean again... are the data center jobs like ... guaranteed to be people in the local area? Isn't the nature of the job provisioning going to be the same with both buildings, roughly? What is special about the data center jobs to not have parking/traffic/etc?

I saw the pics of the data center you're talking about, with nice trees. I get what you're saying, it looks nice!

But it's not like if I made a nice park buffer around my office park that you would be like "oh they're the same" now right?

Is your argument "if you have a data center and an office park of the same size, the data center will generate less traffic and be less of an eyesore"? Then that means less jobs right? Why is the "cost to municipality per job" lower with the data center? Or maybe your argument is simply based on value to the specific municipality, and that the jobs are not worth much to your eyes in any case/in fact are negative, and so it's about (glibly) damage reduction?

(in other words: if you're going to a council meeting to fight a data center being built, you probably should be going to the council meeting to fight the office building being built...?)

(Serious question, I want to understand the dynamics here better)

No, it's not the same! At least not at the data centers I've seen. Go look at the Aurora CH1 CyrusOne DC and then beam yourself down 88 a bit to the nearest office building and compare. Data centers have parking, but not a lot of it. CHI1 is ringed by a single two-sided line of spots. Every big box retailer is surrounded by an ocean of asphalt larger than CHI1 itself.

Feels like you’re cherry picking to make a point, so here’s some cherry picking on the other side https://www.fierce-network.com/data-center/top-10-ugliest-da...

So much dead ugly space, and let’s not look at them at night with enough external lighting to see from space (almost)

It amuses me that you have consistently refused to draw the connection to this 'ocean' of asphalt and the purpose of the building it was designed for and are basically being obtuse.

But you know what is a better neighbour than a data centre or an office or a strip mall? A nice public park and local shops that support the community without you having to drive your car a distance that in any other country would be easily walkable.

Why would anybody want a monolithic megastructure sat next to their house that offers nothing good to the community itself? There is no upside for the locals. No improvement to quality of life.

You know what's even better than a nice public park?

A hospital and a university. And if they don't generate taxes, they should fund a welfare program too.

That is what the discussion sounds like to me.

We turned from discussing whether data centers cause concrete issues to the point where authorities should intervene, to some sort of wish list for how data centers that are constructed far away from residents should provide great public benefits.

You'd take a featureless, opaque warehouse over a structure with windows and architecture that was intended to stand out? The asphalt doesn't have to be an eyesore if planned well, either. Copious vegetation woven throughout, painted teal or with murals instead of black, a policy of "after the following hours, locals are allowed to play roller-hockey and tennis here.", host regular farmer's markets, etc.

I'd love to see a Google Maps picture of a large, attractive parking lot.

Hasn't been done != can't be done.

The data center might be more attractive but the office building provides more jobs and resources to the local community. You skipped that point in your reply. Even if most of the people working in the office building aren't from the area, those people are getting food and other services from local businesses. All that money goes to the local community and supports local businesses.

This is not true. Office buildings are non issue and also imply more shops, restaurants, cafes and generally walkable environment.

> nobody moralizes office buildings

I do not believe this to be true! I have the impression you keep up with zoning discourse etc in your area based on your posting history... you surely have heard of people complaining about things like traffic concerns and general "ugliness" complaints around building out office parks, right?

Data centers might be making the nat'l news at the moment, but it feels hard to consider any subcategory of project development that doesn't have a bunch of whiners associated to it.

I'm a housing activist (we're fourth and inches from getting Oak Park to be the first municipality in Illinois to outlaw single-family exclusive zoning) and from grim experience I can tell you that my neighbors would far rather have an office building go up than an apartment building. It has specifically come up.

Office buildings presumably are filled with bodies who get paid, who will spend some amount of money in the local economy.

I'm not sure data centers could make the same argument.

The agents will leave the data center and buy stuff from the local economy, didn’t you hear that?

I have lunch around the datacenters when I go to them.

The main point I think is density - for their size datacenters typically don't hire many people.

People have been talking about these issues for decades:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Life_of_Small_Urban...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Marohn

https://www.youtube.com/@NotJustBikes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Delahanty

> Office buildings take land and resources and generate almost nothing for the local community

This reads like the prelude to Month Python's "what have the Romans ever done for us" skit.

I recommend you catch up on the post-covid "return to office" conversation, particularly the arguments from municipalities and local governments. Even though I'm a diehard WFH guy, you clearly missed all the arguments on how forcing people to commute to the office benefits the economic activity in urban neighborhoods.

Now, if your employer opted to build offices in the middle of nowhere... That's another issue.

Nobody? I do, and I've seen plenty others.

> Office buildings take land and resources and generate almost nothing for the local community, and are islands in vast seas of asphalt and traffic attractors to boot.

Manhattan (or any downtown business district) has lots of office towers with little asphalt, and many (small) businesses that make their living from office workers. Perhaps you are biased towards car-centric design thinking?

Toronto (for one) has condo towers next to (or not far from) business towers so many folks can walk, cycle, or take transit as their commute. And this is not a new concept:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb

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