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tptacektoday at 5:57 AM1 replyview on HN

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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rtpgtoday at 6:12 AM

> 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)

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