“I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers.” Sam Altman, billionaire CEO of Open AI, quoted in The New Yorker.
Tina Goble got out before the flood. Now she’s looking for lifeboats for the neighbors she left behind.
Tina and Sandra, her 27-year-old special-needs daughter, found a new home, but Tina is still sick with worry over the three dozen remaining residents of Valley View Estates. Ignoring overwhelming public opposition, Archbald Borough Council voted last week to approve zoning changes that cleared the way for “Project Gravity,” a massive data center campus that will erase the tiny trailer park.
In a form letter sent in August, the landlord informed tenants that the property was sold and they must vacate their homes by early next year. Council’s vote was an official stamp on the eviction notice, Tina said Friday.
“Now that they passed (the zoning ‘overlays’), where are these people supposed to live?” she asked. “Most of them are just stuck there. Honest to God, I think I’m the only one who left.”
Tina and Sandra moved to Sandra’s boyfriend’s house after the roof of their trailer “literally fell in on my head,” Tina said. “The landlord still charged me for that month’s rent.”
Tina, 50, is disabled from a past work injury and relies on Social Security Disability Insurance benefits to survive. Most Valley View Estates tenants are worse off, she said. Many are disabled, elderly and ill. All are living on next to no income.
“One guy is 75 years old and he has blood cancer,” she said. “He’s on oxygen and all these other things. Where’s he going to plug all that in, a cardboard box? Someone has to stick up for these people. So far, it seems like it’s just me, and I’m nobody.”
Nobody is “nobody.” Tina’s concern and advocacy for her former neighbors is inspiring, infectious and urgently needed. The residents met with a tenant-advocacy attorney, but she said “nothing much” came of it. County officials have promised help, but Tina said Valley View tenants need immediate, proactive assistance to find homes in a tight rental market.
“Believe me,” she said. “I’ve looked everywhere and there’s nothing out there. These people literally have no place to go.”
When the people are gone, there will be no one to care for the colony of about 30 stray cats that call the trailer park home. Many are spayed or neutered. Some have collars. All need rescue.
“I have called animal shelters and rescues and all they say is they don’t have an answer for me right now,” Tina said.
It was a holiday week, so getting in touch with public and private resources who might be of help was a tall order. Let this column serve as a distress call for the soon-to-be homeless people and stray cats of Valley View Estates. If you can help them, now is the time. I’m happy to help bring you together.
While the Archbald Borough Council vote was a hard lesson on the impact of local elections, the politics of the data center gold rush are largely a distraction from the class war being waged in the name of “progress” and under the guise of “shared prosperity.”
The sales pitch is, “Join us in a bright new future of ease, innovation and limitless riches!” The underlying but increasingly obvious message is, “Just lay still until we’re finished.”
To billionaire CEOs like Sam Altman, everybody with less money and power than him is “nobody.” A lot of the world is being covered by data centers daily, from vast farmlands out west to small communities and tiny trailer parks right here in Our Stiff Neck of the Woods. Small towns are being steamrolled to build mammoth concrete mausoleums that are likely to be obsolete by the time they go online. If (when) the “AI Bubble” bursts, today’s data centers will be tomorrow’s culm piles.
The elites who stand to benefit most are no different than the corrupt coal barons and railroad tycoons who ruled the “Gilded Age” and are no less hardwired into every level of business and government. Forget Republicans and Democrats. When mountains of money are at stake, there are no parties, just profits.
The cavalry isn’t coming. We Are Oldham County, a grassroots nonprofit, accepted this grim fact and mobilized against a data center project in rural Kentucky.
Amid unrelenting public resistance and accusations of government collusion, Western Hospitality Partners (WHP) scrapped its plans to build a $6 billion data center campus on the site of a former drive-in theater. WHP is the developer behind “Project Gravity” in Archbald. Opponents who vowed to fight on should take heart in a statement issued by We Are Oldham County after WHP pulled out of Kentucky.
“While we are happy to hear the news, we are still saddened at how the process played out. Private citizens were forced to invest what should have been unnecessary time, funds, and emotional toil to hold our elected officials accountable. It is unfortunate that our citizens were forced to protect themselves from our own government.”
Tina Goble got out before the flood. The neighbors she left behind are in dire need of lifeboats.
CHRIS KELLY, the Times-Tribune columnist, is inhospitable to data center developers steamrolling small towns. Contact the writer: ckelly@scrantontimes.com; @cjkink on X; Chris Kelly, The Times-Tribune on Facebook; and @chriskellyink on Blue Sky Social.