Zoning Doesn’t Limit Its Destruction to Data Centers

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the first zoning laws in the United States. The fierce current opposition to data centers typifies how politicized, socially disruptive, and economically destructive zoning laws and other land-use regulations can be, and why we should all be concerned about them.

In 1926, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Ohio village of Euclid’s zoning ordinance was constitutional as an extension of the state’s police powers. That principle allows the enactment of laws and regulations over public safety, health, and morals.

The Court’s decision in Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. stretched the meaning of public health and safety far beyond any reasonable limits, creating an enormous increase in government power and unleashing state and local governments to micromanage private property, which they routinely continue to do in 2026.

For a hundred years and counting, zoning has raised the cost of housing and contributed greatly to the long-term supply shortage and current affordability crisis. Property owners, community organizers, and local governments are now using that same playbook to prevent the construction of computer data centers.

Protests “disrupted 75 projects worth $130 billion in Q1 2026 alone, matching the entire previous year,” and 14 “statewide legislative measures targeting data centers were introduced in the first three months” of the year, Squared Tech reports.

A poll from the Annenberg Center found 61 percent of Americans oppose the construction of new data centers near them, a rise of 12 percentage points in the past four months.

It is easy to sympathize with people’s concerns about potential bad neighbors. Homeowners pay as much as they can afford to obtain a peaceful and safe place in which to live. Having someone come in and disturb that situation is extremely frustrating and frightening.

Residents have an absolute right to object to government lures such as tax breaks, favorable regulatory treatment, discounts on water costs and energy access, taxpayer money (or bonds) for big infrastructure additions, and other favors that benefit data center projects without fair compensation to the community.

Direct government control over uses of property, however, is a blunt instrument that can do incredible harm, as the housing crisis demonstrates. The specifics of each dispute among property owners can vary widely, yet preemptive regulation necessarily treats every situation identically, creating unfair outcomes.

And when governments do intrude into particular cases, the temptations toward favoritism and corruption are often overwhelming. The imposition of zoning, housing codes, and the like, though presumably well-intentioned, created a fat layer of corruption in the nation’s cities over the course of the past 100 years, fueled by the expansion of states’ police powers into control over the future as opposed to redressing real harms.

Before the Euclid decision established zoning and paved the way for the regulatory state, evaluation of damage claims was the province of the courts, and they dealt with actual damages, not fears of potential harms. A judge and a jury (if you wanted one) would listen to your complaint and the defendant’s response, decide whether the person caused the harm, and if so, determine just recompense.

The tort system thus regulates behavior by example and incentives, as opposed to the blunt-force command-and-control actions of legislatures. Courts deliver justice tailored to the unique contours of each case, and those decisions ripple out into the community and beyond as principles that people know they must follow or be held responsible. Civil court decisions thus foster the best kind of control: self-regulation.

That is possible, however, only because the courts deal with things that have already happened. We are entitled to compensation for demonstrable harm done, not veto power over other people’s property based on fearful predictions.

There is a very good and indeed obvious reason for that limitation: unfounded predictions of harm can prevent highly beneficial enterprises. The town of Quincy, Washington, for example, has enjoyed a terrific economic boom since 30 data centers have been built there, CNN reports. The owners pay an estimated 57 percent of the town’s property taxes, and the projects have “created around 900 jobs for engineers, pipefitters and electricians in the town” and four to six additional jobs in other sectors, the story states.

Other communities have received similar benefits from data centers, as reported by The Wall Street Journal and many other sources.

As to concerns about energy use, “a series of new studies suggests that AI’s energy demands need not raise household electricity bills—in fact, so far, they haven’t,” the City Journal notes. “If anything, data centers have placed modest downward pressure on retail rates.”

As these examples indicate, fear does not justify giving people veto power over activities and construction on land they do not own. Activists and cronies welcome this power because it enables them to use the government to do their bidding. The process “intentionally leaves the question of a property’s best use to the government rather than the owner or, by extension, the market,” the Institute for Justice (IJ) notes.

Zoning now governs “all things large and small—from where you can live and work to what you can grow in your front yard,” the IJ observes. The Euclid decision and others over the decades “signed off on some of the government’s worst impulses, acknowledging that local governments could regulate trivial things, like subjective aesthetics, and deeply intimate choices, like who we live with,” the IJ notes.

The weaponization of local government zoning rules and other regulations to prevent construction of data centers is just the latest battleground in a century-long war of activists, grifters, and government against everybody’s property rights. Scholars and attorneys across the political spectrum are increasingly challenging the system on both the federal and state levels. A court decision knocking down all these laws would be the best anniversary present of all.

S. T. Karnick (https://stkarnick.substack.com/) is a senior fellow at The Heartland Institute and author of the Life, Liberty, Property weekly e-newsletter.

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