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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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