Which Path of Least Resistance? Participation, Organization, and Opportunity in the US Data Center Siting

• In Event: A Critical Examination of Intersecting Policy, Socioeconomic, Energy, and Environmental Health Concerns About Data Centers

Abstract

Environmental justice scholarship holds that locally unwanted land uses follow the path of least resistance: facilities are sited where communities are least able to oppose them. Data centers, the fastest-growing industrial land use in the United States, are widely assumed to follow the same logic, but the claim has never been tested for them, and "least resistance" bundles three distinct conditions: residents willing to participate, organizations through which they can act, and a political system that gives a challenge an opening. Prior siting studies have measured the first two and assumed the third.We test all three. Using 2,497 operational data centers across 3,109 counties in the contiguous United States, we estimate Spatial Durbin Models with sixteen sociodemographic, infrastructure, and energy controls and state fixed effects, measuring participation through voter turnout and ballot roll-off, organization through the density of advocacy nonprofits and civic associations, and opportunity through the competitiveness of presidential, gubernatorial, and state-legislative elections and the share of legislative seats contested. Participation and organization do not sort siting as predicted: turnout and advocacy-nonprofit density are associated with more facilities, not fewer, and the remaining measures are null or lack any effect beyond the county's neighbors. Political contestedness predicts siting on every measure and for every office. Counties with competitive elections host fewer data centers than their politically settled neighbors, and counties where legislative seats go uncontested host more in total. Data centers follow the path of least resistance, but it runs through political opening rather than political participation or community capacity: facilities are sited where a challenge would have no chance of succeeding, whether or not residents could mount one. Environmental injustice lies in what political institutions allow, not in what communities have.

Authors

• Yookyung Chin, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Dasom Lee, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)
  Presenting Author