I was a grown woman before I learned I’d been an apartment kid.
Hoover spent years fighting over school zones and buses, and the apartment complexes were always in the middle of it. It was all over the news. But I heard it first from friends. Good people, people I like, worried about the kids who might end up in their schools. “The apartment kids.” I don’t have kids, so I wasn’t in that fight. But I sat there thinking, that was me.
We lived in apartments for a good part of my childhood. My parents did what parents do and chased the best school district they could afford. Once we moved just for a better school, my mom didn’t like it, and we moved again. I never knew we were the thing other parents worried about. I just knew I was the new kid a lot.
We moved something like 19 times before I was nine. Five states before third grade. When people ask if my parents were in the military, I say no. The military is a lot nicer than that.
I started out in Northeast Tennessee with an Appalachian accent. Not Southern. People think Southern is cute. Appalachian is Brad Pitt in Inglourious Basterds. Southern California killed it. Nothing teaches a kid their way of speaking is wrong like moving.
Then my dad lost his job, and the choices got smaller.
I get it. Parents want the best for their kids. But that conversation stuck with me because of what it showed: most of us don’t think about the impact of a decision until it lands on us or our family. When it lands on somebody else’s kid, it’s just a zoning question.
That’s what’s happening with data centers right now.
What’s the big deal?
I had this conversation recently with someone outside of tech. Fair question. We all use AI. We all use the cloud. The computers have to live somewhere.
Here’s the big deal. These buildings eat power, water, and quiet.
A proposed data center campus in Bessemer, AL, near where I live, could use up to 1,200 megawatts, more than 90 times what the city’s residents use in a year. The developers want at least 2 million gallons of water a day, maybe much more, from the same river fork that supplies a utility already losing half its treated water before it reaches our taps. Oh yeah, the cooling fans run around the clock.
If you want to know what that sounds like, ask the people in Granbury, Texas.
Granbury
For years, residents of Mitchell Bend, an unincorporated neighborhood near Granbury, have complained about noise and health problems they tie to a nearby bitcoin mine. People there report hearing loss, tinnitus, and serious health problems.
Here’s the part that matters: they couldn’t pass a law to stop it. Hood County can’t pass a noise ordinance, because in Texas only cities have that power. The constable can write a ticket with a $500 fine. That’s it.
No city, no ordinance, no protection. Their “no” didn’t count.
Bessemer
Bessemer has a city government, but it didn’t matter much. Officials in the majority Black city agreed to sweeping secrecy terms while developers pushed a massive data center residents fear will strain water, power, and public health. Residents have been almost universally opposed. The water utility has said it can’t meet the demand without significant upgrades.
The site is more than 1,600 acres of previously undeveloped forest. Meanwhile, in Birmingham, another developer is buying an old bank operations center in an existing office park by the Humane Society. The choice to build on land that’s already developed exists. It just doesn’t always get made.
Whose no counts
I’ll be honest about my own part in this. I used to live in Jefferson County, and the sewer bills were ridiculous, still carrying the weight of bond deals from years before. A job took me away for a while. When I came back, I said nope and moved to Shelby County. That was a choice, and I got to make it. A lot of people don’t. The people who can choose, do, and the bill stays with the people who can’t.
“Not in my backyard” gets a bad name, and sometimes it deserves one. But notice who it works for: People with a city council that answers to them. People with ordinances, lawyers, time, and money. They say no, and the project moves on to the next place.
It keeps moving until it finds people whose no is easiest to ignore. Unincorporated land. A town whose leaders signed an NDA. Neighborhoods that were already living next to the last thing nobody wanted.
It’s the apartment kids all over again. Nobody decides on purpose that those kids don’t matter. It just never comes up, because it isn’t happening to them.
I use AI every day. I work in tech. I’m not arguing we stop building. I’m arguing that if we all benefit from these things, we all owe an honest answer about where they go and who pays for it. That starts with doing the thing I didn’t do until I heard my friends talk about kids like me.
Thinking about it before it’s you.
