The Building Next Door

By the numbers, 2026 has already been the roughest year on record for data center developers trying to get a project approved. Data Center Watch found that at least 75 projects worth more than $130 billion were delayed or canclled in the first quarter alone, matching the pace of opposition seen across all of 2025. Active local opposition groups more than doubled in the same window, from 396 at the end of last year to 833 by the end of March, spread across 49 states. A separate industry survey conducted for Bloom Energy found that while power availability still tops the list of site-selection factors, community scrutiny is now one of the fastest-growing barriers developers report facing.

It's tempting to read that as a story about communities turning against data centers as a category. Look closely at the specific fights making headlines, though, and a narrower, more specific pattern emerges.

It's rarely the data center itself. It's the rezoning.

In Coweta County, Georgia, residents are contesting an 829-acre hyperscale campus built on land that a divided county commission rezoned from rural conservation to industrial. In Wake County, North Carolina, a developer withdrew its annexation and rezoning applications for a 190-acre, six-building campus after sustained community pushback over water use, air quality, and infrastructure costs. In Hoffman Estates, Illinois, a proposed data center on land zoned for traditional neighborhood and mixed-use development was withdrawn after weeks of organized opposition, triggered the moment residents saw public notice signs go up for the rezoning hearing.

What's notable about that last case is what happened next to it, not the fight itself. Hoffman Estates has two other data centers already under construction elsewhere in the village. Neither has drawn anything close to the same resistance, because both sit on land already zoned for manufacturing. A Barrington Hills resident summed up the distinction better than any survey could: the objection was never to data centers as a use, it was to building one on land that was never meant for it.

That distinction shows up again and again in the reporting on this year's fights. Researchers tracking the opposition wave have documented rezoning appeals built around projected property value declines, procedural challenges to environmental review, and water rights disputes, almost all of it anchored to the moment a parcel's designated use changed to accommodate a project that didn't fit its existing footprint. In some of the more heated cases, opposition mobilized before a project was even formally filed, on the rumor of a rezoning alone.

A facility that fits doesn't need the fight.

None of this is an argument that data centers are broadly unwelcome. It's an argument that a specific kind of siting decision, converting rural, residential-adjacent, or otherwise undeveloped land into a large-scale industrial use, is what tends to manufacture the conditions for opposition: a rezoning hearing to organize around, a visible before-and-after in the landscape, a clear "this wasn't here before" grievance that's easy to rally a community behind.

A facility sited within land already zoned for commercial or industrial use sidesteps that trigger almost entirely. There's no rezoning hearing to protest, because none is required. There's no dramatic before-and-after, because the building fits into a landscape that already includes commercial and industrial uses. It doesn't ask a community to accept a new category of land use, it asks a community to accept another building in a part of town where buildings like it already exist. That's a fundamentally smaller ask, and it shows up as a fundamentally smaller target.

A smaller target is not the same as no target.

It would be dishonest to stop there. Smaller and less visually disruptive doesn't mean immune. Noise, traffic, and grid capacity concerns don't disappear because a facility sits on already-zoned land, and a community's interest in knowing what's moving into an existing industrial park is legitimate regardless of the zoning status. What changes isn't whether engagement matters, it's the size and shape of the risk a developer is managing. A project that doesn't require a rezoning fight to get built still benefits from a community that understands what it is and what it needs, it just isn't starting from the deficit of having asked for permission to change what the land is for in the first place.

That distinction, between a facility a community has to be convinced to accept and one that simply fits, is also where the next question in this series picks up: not just where these buildings sit, but what's already connected to them, and why that matters just as much to the tenants inside.

If you are interested in learning more about where Radius DC is building or would like to chat with a member of our team, please visit www.radius-dc.com

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