Henrico County Virginia has developed a strategy to capture incremental revenues from newer, hyper-scale data centers to seed an affordable housing trust fund.
It’s impossible to escape debates over how to best manage the benefits and challenges these data center projects, with their hunger for space and utilities, bring to communities. At this stage, I don’t believe anyone can really know how today’s decisions will look in retrospect.
That being said, decisions DO have to be made today, and I appreciate that Henrico County has taken the opportunity to try to address one of today’s problems with today’s incremental revenue stream. In addition to adding funding to spark new affordable housing in the area, the trust fund can put the money to work faster and with less uncertainty than federal programs might or might not have done.
It’s early days, but this program is one to watch. Here is the link to the Urban Institute’s write-up.