Residents of Dowagiac, Michigan, just filed a lawsuit against a data center that allegedly generates a high-pitched whining sound — and has done so 24/7 for the past two years.
The data center, which is owned by Alliance Cloud Services LLC, a subsidiary of Hyperscale Data, used to be an industrial building that sat behind a row of pine trees across the street from the most affected residents, according to ABC-affiliateWXYZ. The site started development in 2018 and was eventually turned into a cryptocurrency mining center in 2021. But in 2024, something changed drastically when the building started emitting noise pollution around the clock. Residents say it sounds like a vacuum cleaner in their living room, and the company has offered to buy up homes from unhappy residents.
There’s the thing: what’s a woodpecker’s property rights on his dead tree? I mean, you can offer him any amount of money and he isn’t likely to just give up the nest he carved in it and move on to try to find another. Ask a colony of bats what they want to move to a new roost?
Same for people’s homes, there’s a price they could get for them if they tried to sell on the open market because they want to leave, but there’s a very different and often much higher price that would be required to compensate them for the downsides of moving.
When a corporation wants to entice a new hire to move to a new city, they will buy the home at high-end market value, pay the real-estate commissions on both sale of the old home and purchase of the new home, pay for professional movers, and bulk up all of these benefits to cover increased income taxes where applicable. And that’s for a new hire who wants to move.