Upzoned
Elon Musk's company xAI is building massive data centers in Memphis, promising economic transformation. But at what cost? Abby is joined by Strong Towns Blog Editor and podcast host Asia Mieleszko to dissect the billion-dollar AI infrastructure boom and explore why cities keep falling for "shiny object urbanism."
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
This is Abby, and you are listening to Upzoned.
Hey, everyone, thanks for listening to another episode of Upzoned, the show where we take a big story from the news each week that touches the Strong Towns conversation, and we upzone it. We look at it in depth and dig deeper into what it really means for cities and towns and people who live in them. I wanted to give everybody a heads up before we get into our episode that we are asking listeners of our podcasts to take a survey. If you'd like to give feedback, you can do so at strongtowns.org/survey. So if you listen to Strong Towns podcasts on a regular basis, please tell us what you think, and it will make our podcast even better. That is strongtowns.org/survey. So today I am joined by a new guest to Upzoned. Very exciting. Asia Mieleszko, I think I got that right, is the blog editor for Strong Towns. Welcome, Asia. Tell us a little bit about yourself. This is your first time on, and I understand you're newer to the organization, so I think it would be great to learn a little bit about you and hear a little bit about your background.
Yeah, it's really exciting. I very much enjoy Upzoned. I love the premise of it that you take a piece of news that's sort of trending and dissect it through the Strong Towns lens. So I'm pretty excited to now be a part of that narrative. I joined Strong Towns as a staff writer, and as you just noted, I'm going to be the blog editor, so it's fun. I mean, I think for a lot of us in the organization, we end up wearing many hats, and that's very much true for me, too, and I'm excited for the new hat I'm going to wear. Most recently, I've been also wearing the hat of a podcast host. Feels a little funny talking about a different podcast on a podcast. I feel like it's part of the podcast industrial complex, but I've been hosting a podcast called Stacked Against Us. It's a limited series, so that has been very time-consuming, but also very fun and rewarding, and I really love the conversations that it's beginning to generate. So I think that's enough about me. Outside of this, I'm mostly a musician.
So what do you play?
I'm a trained classical singer, but I also play many instruments, and I find myself in a lot of different musical contexts as of late.
Okay, that's great. Well, you have a very interesting background, and I'll have to go find that podcast that you do. We are part of the podcast industrial complex. I like that. Okay, so we are going to be talking about an article today that was published in The Wall Street Journal by Alexander Saeedy. It is entitled, "Elon Musk Gambles Billions in Memphis to Catch Up on AI." So Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI is rapidly expanding in the Memphis region. He is transforming a former industrial site into a massive AI infrastructure hub near Graceland and across from the Mississippi border. Musk is building two enormous data centers. One is called Colossus, and the other is called Colossus 2, and also building a new power plant in South Haven capable of generating over a gigawatt of electricity to supply them. The Memphis facilities cost tens of billions of dollars and house hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips powering Grok, which is xAI's chatbot. Musk is investing heavily right now to catch up with OpenAI and other rivals in what analysts are calling a multi-trillion-dollar global AI infrastructure race. Financing is coming from $10 billion in new funding, contributions from SpaceX and potential support from Tesla, as well as plans to lease up to $12 billion in chips. Local leaders of Memphis tout this arrival as a major economic boost. xAI has become the second-largest taxpayer in Memphis, for example, but the project has also drawn environmental and community backlash. The data centers consume vast amounts of power and water, rely on natural gas turbines and have generated pollution concerns, and have operated at times without proper permits. Critics are arguing that the deal actually benefits xAI more than residents, while the company pledges investments in wastewater recycling and neighborhood improvements. They're actually donating funds to Memphis schools and other organizations and have hired workers to go around the city and pick up trash. Despite the controversy, Musk's AI ambitions continue to just escalate. He aims to train increasingly powerful versions of Grok at Colossus 2, and has suggested that AI development will eventually require energy on the scale of the sun or even the galaxy. The funny thing is, I don't know if he's exaggerating.
I know. Even the term Colossus, naming it that is so ominous. I think in that Wall Street Journal article they literally talk about the origins of the name. I'm like, this is not the thing you would want to call it.
Exactly. I definitely feel that reading this article, it feels ominous. The tone is very ominous. I mean, AI, I feel like has become super, super quickly normalized in people's regular use. It's just amazing how much energy they need. I think they said that a server with 16 chips, which is smaller than a piece of checked baggage, needs the same power as five to 10 households, which is amazing. So these facilities are going up very quickly, and we're using a lot of power to support them.
Yeah, the last time on this podcast you spoke about data centers, I believe, was with Edward Erfurt here at Strong Towns, and something he noted was he's been observing that the pitch for these projects is economic development. The language around them is centered around that, and I think that's a good place to start. This article covers a lot of ground, and it's a little hard figuring out where to even start this conversation, but I feel like that's a good one. You were sort of listing in a pros and cons way, because that's how this article frames it. That's not me picking on the author as much as—here, I'll send you an excerpt that kind of caught my eye. It begins—this is a little less than halfway through the piece—"Among the locals, Musk's arrival has kindled hopes of an economic renaissance, but it has also stoked controversy. Musk's data centers will probably bring in only a few hundred jobs to Memphis, while consuming millions of gallons of water a day and more electricity than is needed to power all the city's homes." Then it goes on to say that Musk's pitch to Memphis is that he is building infrastructure that will benefit the city. The company has promised to construct a giant wastewater recycling facility to be used in its cooling system that would help reduce demand on the Memphis aquifer. The company also donated funds to Memphis schools and other organizations and hired workers to go around the city to pick up trash. So there's this prospect of an economic renaissance, to use the author's terms, which is how a lot of giant projects are framed. When a new stadium is coming into town, or a giant entertainment center, sometimes it doesn't even have to be something new. It could be the thing that once powered that place, like there was this promise of coal returning to West Virginia, or certain amusement parks to Louisiana. I think Chuck has made very compelling arguments against this sort of big bet, wishful thinking, and I don't want to simply rehash what he has said better than I ever will. But something that really struck me, and something I see all of the time, is this type of pros and cons list. If you look at the section of the article, here's all the positives and, oh, but here are the negatives. I'm not picking on the author here. This is the way these conversations play out on the ground in City Hall, in business coalitions, in the pamphlets that neighbors literally get placed underneath their door. I find this type of framing and this type of thinking very paralyzing. I would argue that the choices presented don't accurately reflect what choices you have available to you. It necessarily gets reduced to this or that, not to mention—all it takes in a pros and cons list is for the pros side to be one item longer, and I don't think that sets you up for a very productive discussion.
Yeah, that's a really good point, because I feel like the pros and cons are not measured in a very informed way. I think one of the challenges here is that public officials that are assessing these deals may not even fully grasp the scale of this technology and the real impacts of this technology. It's so intertwined into finance and our systems of infrastructure and powering cities, water—there's so much that goes into it that one local leader likely doesn't have all of the information to be able to really clearly assess it. There's also a lot of bias that's baked into different people's perspectives about whether or not this is a good thing or a bad thing for a city. It may not just be good or bad, it could be a lot of different things.
Yeah, I was looking into how some of the funding is being distributed into the communities that are truly on the periphery of these data centers, and some of the schools. I think this type of framing just makes it really hard to have a real conversation about what is missing and what is needed. It puts a lot of leveraging power on the part of whatever giant project it is. I'm not trying to sound like I'm demonizing all giant projects, but it just puts a lot of power again for that pros list to be exactly one item longer, and therefore you can kind of move on to the next step and build your massive gigawatt, 114-acre center, or whatever it is. I saw some image—I don't remember if it was actually Colossus 2—in a separate article where they overlaid some of these existing data centers on cities that we know. One of them literally took up 75% of the island of Manhattan in New York City. It was just such a wild image. If you zoom out, Manhattan is not that big, but just think conceptually, everything that you know Manhattan to be, and for that just to be the singular thing that employs 200 people at most.
Yeah, they are massive and sprawling facilities that, not unlike suburbs, require a lot of infrastructure, and it would be worth doing a value per acre assessment of what level of fiscal value you're getting out of that land use pattern and if it's really worth it. I'm curious how you would recommend framing these discussions in a way that could lead to a more productive dialogue.
Two things. One, there's a piece I came across on Substack recently. Actually, technically, I came across it first on LinkedIn. I've been spending more time on LinkedIn, which is the lamest thing I've ever said in my entire life.
Welcome to adulthood.
I'm old now. I'm spending time on LinkedIn. But it did take me to Substack, and it was a piece called "Shiny Object Urbanism," and it talks about this once-in-a-lifetime, larger-than-life waterfront project called Panther Island, I believe, in Fort Worth, Texas. It's been in the works for decades. In addition to recreational opportunities, parts of its plan involve the construction of mixed-use buildings in the downtown vicinity, which the author notes makes a lot of sense. But if the goal was to densify the vicinity of downtown and capturing that land value, there are other opportunities to do so, much lower-hanging fruit that we have left rotting. I'll actually read from it, because I feel like I really love how this person put it, and we can add this in the show notes, because I thought it was an interesting piece. Here's from the piece directly: "What I find strange is not the project's goal. Adding mixed-use development near downtown makes sense, but just south of the river sits parcel after parcel of undeveloped parking lots. Entire blocks are devoted to surface parking. Next to the convention center is nearly 10 whole blocks of surface parking broken only by one half-block of single-story commercial buildings. This strip of parking is so long that if you removed the buildings in the middle, it could serve as a landing strip for a private jet in the middle of downtown. At around 30 acres, the parking lots make up only a fraction of Panther Island's footprint, but they are infinitely easier to develop in a downtown with infrastructure and transit access outside of the floodplain, yet it has looked like this for decades, long before the 2004 proposal for Panther Island. I'm not saying it's an easy issue to solve. If it were, there wouldn't be dozens of other downtowns dealing with the same thing, but it's certainly more practical than rerouting a river." Going back to Memphis specifically, there's one quote from The Wall Street Journal here I'll share, and it's from this 65-year-old retired firefighter who lives in the neighborhood next to Colossus, and he says, "Memphis is desperate, and this is not the first time they have been so desperate for companies. They come in and promise them the world." I don't know exactly what companies or projects this firefighter was thinking of. Obviously, I recall the Memphis Pyramid, the Bass Pro Shops Pyramid, which, by the way, I want to visit so badly. I'm totally obsessed with it. But I think it's also a clear example of an investment that went wrong at literally every turn since its inception in the 1950s. It's been hemorrhaging money for almost the entire time it's been around. To be clear, I don't think that's just the fault of the structure. If you look—I mean, there were some decisions that were made that were curious, and I think the whole NBA debacle is exemplary of that. But if you look at the vicinity, this is the most valuable land. It's right on the river, it's basically in downtown. It is completely surrounded by roads. It's completely surrounded by asphalt. It's just highways and wide, high-speed roads. There was a photo—this is very early Strong Towns lore—there was a photo that a member, a Strong Towns member, sent to Chuck after Chuck wrote about the pyramid, and it was a view from the top of the pyramid. It's a moat of asphalt. So there are—it makes you kind of think we're putting in so much money into this pyramid. It's supposed to be the symbol of the city. I don't want to argue against or for that. Again, I want to visit it, so I'm glad it's still around. But at the same time, it feels like this was telling you at every single—every year, something was going wrong with this thing even before it got built. So then once it got built, it was just not making money. It kept failing. It was failure after failure after failure, and then nothing around it really changed in that time too. We weren't investing in the area around it to even help it perform better if that was the goal, and clearly it was.
It's amazing the persistence that gets put into projects like that, that are just massive projects that are developed over this long period of time and continue to have issues. I think it's, at some point the city has put too much investment and hope into something that people just cannot quit. I can think of a couple of examples of that in my own town or city. But yeah, I think all of this and this discussion on data centers and AI as well, it really is this question of prosperity and whether or not this approach could be considered just a fragile economic approach, because growth doesn't necessarily equal wealth. A massive one-time private investment doesn't guarantee long-term financial strength for a city, and data centers in particular generate minimal local jobs and limited local spending, meaning that the economic benefit doesn't really circulate within the community, and that is kind of a big part of the pitch for a lot of other mega projects. I think this is different, because they're almost—it seems that they're more so making the pitch that AI and the power to support AI is almost in and of itself its own public good of joining the race, this global race for this technology. For Memphis, they risk becoming financially dependent on this one big mega project owned by, I guess, kind of a volatile company led by a single billionaire. If xAI falters, or Musk moves on, or something happens to him, the city could be left with a lot of infrastructure and no sustainable local economy to support it. So it's kind of this infrastructure debt trap. Even though xAI is paying for some infrastructure, the public is going to be bearing these long-term maintenance costs for all the substations and the water systems and the roads that I'm sure will be created. So it's this imbalance that has—I mean, it's an imbalance that you see played out in a lot of mega projects, that is kind of played out again and again across the United States. It's expensive to maintain, maybe cheaper to build, although this isn't really cheap to build. But we're all kind of thinking of the now and just getting it done. It seems like this is very much an example of a project where there's just massive persistence to get it done, and they're not really thinking about the long term.
Yeah, definitely the speed is a huge part of the story. Not just Musk trying to rush this through, but the Memphis Chamber of Commerce and the mayor and all of the sort of business coalitions that are supporting this are really trying to accelerate every aspect of this. There was an article that referred to them offering concierge service so that this can get done as fast as possible. I think it's a little heartbreaking to see that for something of this sort in a place like Memphis, which really struggles with—I mean, there are just neighborhoods in Memphis that are just struggling. There's a lot of poverty. There are people who want opportunity and feel like the city has not been adequately providing that. This isn't providing—when you think of something like Foxconn, a sort of the hallmark of catfish big deals gone awry. At least Foxconn promised several tens of thousands of jobs, 13,000, whatever it was. This is promising barely 300. So it's not about the jobs. It's kind of counting on this being a really high taxpayer, but otherwise, just being kind of a dead-weight taxpayer. You mentioned earlier the numbers that the city is seeing already—xAI being the second-biggest taxpayer, probably after FedEx. I think FedEx is the big one there.
Which makes them a major stakeholder from a political perspective.
Yeah, it's just sort of fascinating, because there are so few people who are ultimately going to be employed there. There's a second question as to whether those employed there would actually be local. I'm not really sure what the job opportunities are, but nevertheless, you're not really employing more than a Main Street. A pretty mediocre Main Street employs probably 200 people. It's hard to believe, but that's kind of what you might be looking at. This takes up the footprint of—this is so much larger. It involves so much less people, and yet, as you've noted, it's going to be a bigger stakeholder in the local politics of the city, just because of the footprint and because it's just this large taxpayer that dwarfs all the people living and working in Memphis and their contributions to the city. So that's definitely an unfair dynamic, I would say.
It's a very unfair dynamic, but it's one that you see play out in a lot of local economies, where you have these big players that generate a lot of tax revenue, and once that tax revenue hits the budget, it's really hard to make a case to not continue to support that and try to sustain it. Cities become reliant on that money, and cities, of course, like that firefighter said, are desperate to add revenue to their books.
So there's this framing. I noted this earlier that Musk and obviously the local stakeholders who are interested in pushing these projects through are trying to figure out, "Okay, well, how can we leverage some of the taxes from this to go to these underserved communities in the vicinity? How can we help this fund public schools and whatnot?" I just think it's so unfortunate that, as you note, it's so fragile that we're putting that power into big companies. "Oh, we can only invest in these places if we get a lot of money from somebody from outside." It's a dynamic, again, it just gives someone a lot of power, a lot of power.
It gives them a lot of power over the basic public services that should be sustainable, but rather is being outsourced to kind of the whims of larger companies, and not to mention the rebate programs that are offered to xAI for utility infrastructure, which are effectively acting as corporate subsidies, because it shifts those costs onto the citizens of Memphis. That's in addition to just the costs associated with energy bills that might go up or water. So the strain on public utilities is also a similar issue where it's putting a lot of power into the hands of these companies, and it is pretty concerning. But also, I think the reason this article feels so ominous is that it feels like it's happening too fast for anyone to really fully understand, like you said, the pros and cons and to be able to mesh those together to have a productive understanding. It's all happening so quickly that unless you have a lot of people who understand a lot of different complex systems, it's very difficult to assess what the options should be and how cities should negotiate for themselves to protect their citizens.
So I'm going to jump around a little bit, but to me, in my broken brain, this is immediately connected. So I've been working on this podcast series for Strong Towns called Stacked Against Us, and I'm marshaling listeners through how single-family homes become an asset class and securitization and the rise of corporate ownership. At some point I realized I have to take this story to South Bend, South Bend, Indiana, because South Bend offers a remarkable story of how you can think about economic development differently, and how a city can just restructure its imagination around economic development. One of the people I connected with in South Bend is Mike Keen. Mike Keen is great. I mean, I had super insightful conversations with everyone. One of the things that stuck with me with Mike Keen is that I asked him, "All right, if South Bend never went down this route of incremental development, if he never showed up on the scene, if the dozens of others who were starting to do this work never kind of mobilized, what would have happened to South Bend? Would it have just continued to rust?" He often tells the story that South Bend, Indiana is arguably one of the first rust belt cities to have begun rusting. It was this—it was the former site of the American dream. This was 65, 70 years ago. This was a bustling city. Then what is it? Studebaker leaves in the early 60s, and then the city begins declining. It's losing population. It's losing more industry. It's just a steady downward spiral. It falls off a cliff after 2008 with the foreclosure crisis, and by 2011 it was one of these surveys in either Newsweek or Time magazine that referred to South Bend as a dying city. This is an extremely dark fate prescribed to a city that a few decades prior, within living memory for some of its residents, was in its heyday, in its golden age. So I asked Mike Keen, "Okay, if it weren't for this whole incremental development renaissance there, would it just have continued to rust? Would it just still be a dying city?" And he's like, "Probably yes, but what you would have likely seen is continued investment in downtown, because there's at least some recognition that downtown is the economic engine of the city." So you see this all across the country. You do see new buildings pop up in downtown. You see new things pop up there. You see that the orchestra gets a new hall in downtown, even if the rest of the city is struggling and continuously losing population and whatnot. So you do see this. What you likely would not have seen is what you get to appreciate now in South Bend, is that where people actually live, where they actually converge and all of that, those places would have continued to really die. Those homes would have—there were so many abandoned homes—then those would have continued to be teared down, just left. Population would have still been decreasing. Likely things would have looked bad, but the downtown would still get investment. I guess all this to say—hold on, now I have to find my original point—is that I think that's one of the threads of incremental development that I found very compelling. Downtowns are important. I think Urban Three does a great job of showing how much downtown powers the rest of our cities and why it's important to really be cautious of our investments in downtowns. Is this really the place where we want to build more parking, or do we want to kind of capture the land value here and make it productive, since it is such a powerhouse for everything around it? But downtown is just downtown. It's not the majority of the city.
Yeah, one place, exactly.
Yeah, and so, I mean, obviously this data center isn't planned for downtown. The Bass Pro Shops Pyramid is more so in that area. But just thinking of these concentrated investments here and there, instead of everywhere, where people can kind of take control over where they are so that you're not just seeing this completely lopsided investment process. So even if they are funding underserved neighborhoods nearby, I mean, there's a question of longevity for whatever funding models with taxes and all that. This isn't set in stone. Is this sustainable? I don't know. That points to larger questions, high-level questions about, are we in a bubble? This is extremely fragile. This is a very, very fragile way of thinking. To me, the South Bend story—they were trying to get away from that fragility. They're like, "We were fragile when Studebaker left. That was massive. That exposed everything, and we kind of didn't address it. Then 2008 happened, and it was just getting worse and worse, and we were called a dying city, and we had to really tackle what that meant." It didn't just mean investment in the downtown, which has gotten a lot of investment, and it probably looks great, but it's also everywhere else, and these little investments that you don't think of as big projects. You just go there and you don't even think, "Oh my gosh, when the—what was it?—the 1,000 Homes in 1,000 Days program was completed in 2015, this entire block was demolished, and now there's homes there," but they just look like they've always been there. It's these little investments that you can—not that you can't appreciate if you live there, you can totally appreciate them. But from the outside, it's like, "Oh, this isn't the shiny object urbanism."
Yeah, absolutely. I think that is the looming question around data centers, and what's going on right now is, are these facilities here to stay? Are they going to be here for the next 20, 50, 100 years? Will they stay in a manner that generates the tax revenue that is needed to support the sprawling infrastructure of these places? Will the utility issues and the imbalances of who's paying for what be figured out? Again, this stuff is happening so quickly that I think communities are having to scramble to try to figure out how to do this right in a way that doesn't harm people. But I think I don't want to say that data centers and AI just shouldn't happen, because it's not incremental. Like you said, this isn't a case against any large project, but I think the fact that—I mean, it's just like post-1950s America, when we just had a lot of dumb money, and we're moving really fast. This is the new version of that, where we have a lot, a lot, a lot of dumb money and a lot of quickness in the implementation of these facilities. Will these things be figured out? Or will it be a situation where we look back in 50 years and say, "Wow, we created a lot of problems for ourselves because these issues were not thought through systematically before implementing them." There's things that were unfair and hurt people. I think the way that these issues are managed, because I don't think you're going to stop the AI construction—it's happening. There's too much money behind it—but I think that the manner in which cities and communities figure out who's paying for what and how to mitigate harm will determine whether or not a data center is a nuisance or a good for a community.
Unfortunately, as you pointed out, we can't stop this. It's already in motion. It already exists in many places. When Edfurt—excuse me, I just combined his first and last name.
Yeah, you did. You should just start calling him that.
When Edward was on the podcast, he mentioned that he's in the proximity of one of these projects. This is very much a conversation happening in his community. It's, you're seeing this everywhere, not too far from me. So I'm in Philadelphia, and in Chester, which is actually one of the oldest cities in the state of Pennsylvania. Oh, man, Chester has been subject to so many things, and this is another one of them. This is just another conversation. This is a place that—if you try to think of the biggest polluters, they were all placed in the oldest city in Pennsylvania. So you have some of the oldest brick homes you can see in the country, feet away from the tallest smokestacks. Then you have another big stadium project, a giant interchange. It's always—it's been the site of these massive, massive projects that each one of them promises some sort of massive economic return that clearly has not happened since the city has declared bankruptcy. It's one of the few that has—it entered a receivership, or perhaps, sorry, I may have that backwards. It entered a receivership. I don't know if it ultimately declared bankruptcy, but it was just in such a poor fiscal position for so long, despite being hammered with all these big projects that are bringing jobs and all of this. It has casinos, it has giant arenas. It has this. None of that came to fruition, and now it's going to be the site of perhaps another data center. So in so many of these communities—I mean, Memphis is a clear example, especially the neighborhood in Memphis where this is located—it's kind of a brownfield development. But because these things are so huge, it starts butting up against neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods are some of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. Those neighborhoods continue to be subject to a lot of these big projects because they are near some of these sites. I mean, historically, they have not seen these investments pan out in ways that actually improve their living situations, improve the problems that they're actually seeing on the ground. It kind of makes me think of—it sometimes feels silly to me to think about these big, big problems and then think of, "Oh, small steps." But I really feel like a city like Memphis should take something from South Bend's playbook, and go through the Strong Towns four-step process: observe a struggle, ask what's the next smallest thing, and then do it. That struggle, do it, and then repeat. It feels like maybe silly advice, but I actually think it's so much more powerful, even when xAI ends up being Memphis's biggest taxpayer. They can really count on them. They're raking in millions or billions, whatever the number is, and there's a fraction of that that's being invested into the neighborhoods in its periphery. There's, first of all, all this missed opportunity. Why wasn't anything done in the last 20, in the last 30 years? It's the sort of same conversation that I reflected on in that Substack article, "Shiny Object Urbanism." There's low-hanging fruit. Is this actually going to—is the city actually going to reimagine how it can act, how it can affect change?
That's an excellent question, because are people who are making this huge investment going to then turn around and take this large amount of money and do something small with it? I can't imagine that would be the case. Maybe they would, but I think it's more likely that they'll take the money and spend it on more shiny things.
I mean, it's going to be routed through the city. This is ultimately taxpayer money. Exactly. This doesn't reflect on the city's willingness to reimagine how it can actually invest that money, how it can actually use it in the neighborhoods where there are these struggles. This thing isn't providing many jobs. So if the struggle is people find it difficult to get well-paying jobs, to afford their homes, etc., this isn't really a way to reconfigure that. Those struggles—this isn't a way to respond to those struggles. This isn't actually taking those struggles in mind. It's just saying, "Oh, we're going to invest in these chronically disinvested neighborhoods."
The way in which they invest is incredibly important. I'd love to see a plan. I'd love to see an idea of what they—a concept of a plan, something for how they would actually utilize this money. But again, there's this big question of what happens when the hype phase is—is this long-term guaranteed revenue, or will this technology change in a way that cities did not anticipate? No one exactly knows the answer to that, but I think that that is a big question for people who are in leadership positions faced with this decision to incentivize data centers in their communities.
I'd be curious if there's a local conversation in Memphis. I should have checked this before hopping on this podcast, but I'd be curious to hear what conversations they're having on the ground as they're actually contending with this arriving in their neighborhood. There's something else. When I was connecting with people from South Bend, I talked to Tim Corcoran, who's the Director of Planning, and something that he told me—he was telling me basically the story of how they revised their zoning code, and something that motivated that project was basically adopting an outcomes-first-based thinking. Yes, that's it. Outcomes-first-based thinking, as I think exactly the expression he used, and I found it very compelling. They're asking, "What is it that we want in the end, and how do we get there? What is the smallest thing we can do, what's the lowest-hanging fruit we can tackle to get to that place where we want to be?" We want to be in a place where people can afford homes, where we can actually build on the vacant lots that we now have as a result of this program, 1,000 Homes in 1,000 Days. We want to be in a place where small businesses can operate, where there's a local economy that can sort of support itself. We want to be in a place where we're not just hemorrhaging money as a city and losing population. So when it came to the zoning code, it was, "Okay, we're going to go line by line and see what we can do to make this more and more possible." I felt like this was, to me, it was a really compelling idea to think of truly, what do you want in the end? I think Memphis has to ask itself that question. I think every city does. My city certainly should be asking this question, and really on that granular level. "Oh, we want people to be able to shape the neighborhoods they're in." Actually, maybe that's even too vague. "We want people to be able to afford the homes they live in. We want rents to—" I don't know, I really don't want to speak on behalf of what cities should be asking themselves, but I really feel like in this—someone like Tim is just better versed at this, and he and the rest of his crew in South Bend went through the zoning code and just looked at opportunities. "Okay, we want this. We have to tackle this code. How can we make what we want more possible within this code?" Noting that simply revising the zoning code isn't going to solve everything. This isn't a silver bullet, but we have this document. We know that this is a cause of stress because it's a cause of headaches for us. So if it's a cause of headaches for us, it is probably so much worse for anyone trying to literally do the most modest upgrades on their homes, small businesses just trying to shape a little bit of their place, or developers trying to literally build a single-family or duplex home on a vacant lot. There were things in that code that were making that so onerous, and that was a starting point. Then they started doing more and more, and this is maybe a little bit of a tangent, but something that I really loved about this process is that it basically revealed to them that the zoning code should be a living document. It shouldn't just be this once-in-a-generation overhaul, and then, boom, we fixed it. That's exactly the type of technocratic mindset that Jane Jacobs went after. It's not, "Oh, we figured it out. It's perfect. Lock it in. Let's go. This is gonna last forever, guys." No, it's, this is a living document. Already, since they revised the whole thing, they've made changes, and they're anticipating more changes, and it's just gonna be this thing that has to move along with the city and the people in it.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Someone who's—I'm working on a zoning code right now, and it's just amazing, as uses change, how outdated things can become. So having any kind of zoning code that's just fully locked in place would be a real loss for cities. To bring it back to data centers, I think that this new use that is suddenly becoming so prevalent—cities—it's an example of why it's really important for codes to keep up with emerging technologies, emerging land uses, because our world is ever-shifting and quite quickly these days. So maybe we can leave it there. But before we finish today, do you want to do the Downzone? Talk about anything that you have been reading, watching, listening to, anything that has been on your mind these days.
Oh, gosh, so much. Well, earlier today, amongst us Strong Towns workers, Lauren asked us, "What's the most recent thing we have read?" So a couple of books that I've been reading, and this is purely coincidence—these are all books that I found outside, and the fact that they all happen to touch on the same topic, their titles kind of suggest that, but the titles were also a little corny, so I wasn't sure what to expect. So I've been reading a lot of books that kind of talk about the connection between science and music and kind of exploring why—how do we organize sound in our brains and also in nature? There's a term that Bernie Krause, the author of—oh gosh, what is it?—The Great Animal Orchestra, I believe, is the book. Fantastic book. I don't want to go off too much, because I think his story is very, very cool. He was a session musician and an audio engineer, and at some point he was put on this kind of BS project to go listen to corn grow in Iowa. He actually took it seriously, and it launched this entirely new phase of his career and fascination with sound. He started going to the Amazon and all these different places that are just completely full of wildlife, and really learning to listen. So I've been fascinated by books that talk about listening and how we organize sound in our heads, as well as how sound is organized in nature, and what it helps to sort of communicate to all sorts of organisms. So I don't know if any of that's relatable, but that's kind of been a fascinating, totally non-urban, non-Strong Towns-related path that I've been on.
That's awesome. Well, I guess I actually hadn't thought about what I would share today, but actually, I'm in the middle—I don't even know if I want to share this because it might not work out, but I hope it does. I'm about to hopefully go under contract to buy an historic duplex, and it's really pretty. I'll send it to you. Yeah, I will. It's really cute, and it's just beautiful, and I hope it works out, and I will know probably by the end of the day today, but it's looking good. It was built in the early 1900s and is in a very historic neighborhood in Kansas City, and is a historic structure. I think it's locally designated. I don't know if it's nationally designated, but—
Yeah, it's all really strict rules if you want to change the windows or something.
Yes. So if I would want to change the windows or the facade, yeah, it falls under the Secretary of the Interior's Guidelines, and I would need to go to the Landmarks Commission, so that's a thing, but I'm not too worried about that. But yeah, I can't just paint things whatever I want to paint them if I buy this, but it's beautiful. I'll send you a picture. I really, really hope that it happens. I'll be sad if it doesn't, but if it doesn't, then it's not meant to be. So we'll see.
That's a good way to think about things. That's kind of my mindset.
You can't control these things. I mean, it's just—it's out of my control. All you can do is offer on it, but it's looking positive, so I'm hoping it's a yes by the end of the day, and then I can start panicking after that. No, I'm just kidding.
That's like, once you pass that threshold, then you're just gonna have a whole other set of worries.
Exactly. It's like, "Wow, okay, let's go." Yeah, it's amazing how quickly—I don't know if you've ever bought a home or anything like that, but it's amazing how quickly everything becomes so real, very quickly. You get approved, and then you're like, "Oh, I like this one. I'd like to make an offer." Then all of a sudden the ball is rolling, and it's like, "Oh, closing date is in three weeks or four weeks." You know, it's just, "Okay, I'm moving." So I've done it before. I've moved a few times, but I'm excited about this one, and hopefully it works out, so we'll see. Yeah, fingers crossed. Well, hey, thank you so much, Asia, for meeting with me today. It's been a pleasure, and please don't be a stranger. You can join me anytime on Upzoned.
Thank you so much.
All right, thanks, guys. Bye.
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