'Poverty, Crime and Squalor': The President Says That Is What Towns Get for Refusing a Data Center. The Records Say It Is What Some Towns Got for Approving One.

Updated: September 5, 2026. The president's remarks were made on September 4 and reported the same day. Every number below was checked against the source listed at the bottom of this page on September 5. Where a figure comes from an advocacy organization rather than a government record, we say whose number it is in the sentence itself. Where we do arithmetic on published figures, we show it.

How to cite this page: SueDataCenters.org, "'Poverty, Crime and Squalor': The President's Data Center Claim, Checked Against the Records," updated September 5, 2026, https://suedatacenters.org/guides/trump-poverty-crime-squalor-data-centers-what-the-records-show.

Three things this page does not do. It does not claim data centers cause crime in the criminal sense; no study we could find supports that in either direction, and we say so in the section that addresses it. It does not claim data centers lower home values as a rule; the two studies that exist say otherwise on average, and we print them. And it does not claim that every community loses. Loudoun County, Virginia, is the clearest counterexample in the country and it appears below. What this page does is put the president's four promises, lower taxes, more wealth, higher home values and the avoidance of squalor, next to the documented experience of the places that took the deal.

Speaking in the Oval Office after an unrelated signing on Friday, September 4, 2026, President Trump said, as reported by The Hill's Julia Shapero:

"If you want to get rich as a state or as a town, if you want to pay lower taxes, if you want to create tremendous wealth, if you want your house to be more valuable and everything else, you're going to want a data center. If you want to go through poverty, crime and squalor, I would say don't approve data centers. You know, you have your choice. So I'm all for people approving them or not."

It was the second time in a week. On Monday, August 31, he wrote on Truth Social, as reported by The Hill's Max Rego:

"The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor. If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign. The good news is that there are plenty of other places that want them."

He added that politicians who "kill the Golden Goose" would "only have [themselves] to blame," and that "China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement."

Earlier in August he had told reporters that Republican candidates opposing data centers was "OK with him," and that "if I was a mayor or if I was a governor in the state, I would want to have the data centers because they bring tremendous income." That is four testable claims: lower taxes, more wealth, higher home values, and the avoidance of poverty, crime and squalor. We take them in order.

The president's first promise is lower taxes. The largest data center subsidy in America is not a local abatement; it is a statewide sales and use tax exemption on servers, cooling and power equipment that 37 states grant automatically to any project meeting an investment threshold. The states are now disclosing what those exemptions cost, and the numbers have been revised upward by orders of magnitude. The following figures are from Good Jobs First's August 2026 report, which compiles official state disclosures and projections.

State	Annual revenue loss	What the state itself says
Georgia	$1.9 billion (2025), $2.5 billion (FY2026), about $3 billion (FY2027)	In January 2026 Georgia raised its FY2026 estimate by 664 percent, from $327 million. Localities alone are projected to lose $1.1 billion in 2026 and $1.4 billion in 2027. Three-year cumulative loss projected at $7.3 billion.
Texas	$1 billion (FY2025), $1.3 billion (FY2026), $1.6 billion (FY2027)	Cumulative loss 2025 to 2030 forecast at nearly $9 billion. Local sales taxes are not abated.
Virginia	$1.94 billion (FY2025, state and local)	Three successively higher loss projections issued between December 2025 and February 2026.
Ohio	$555 million (2024), $1.6 billion (2025)	The 2025 figure is twelve times the state's original projection of $135.8 million. Localities lost an additional $166.8 million in 2024. Governor DeWine paused the program for new applications days after the figures were released in May 2026.
Indiana	$655 million cumulative through 2025	Disclosed only after Good Jobs First named the state for non-disclosure. More than 83 percent went to Amazon: $50.5 million in 2024 and $561 million in 2025.
Oregon (local property tax)	$616 million, 2016 to 2025	Abatements to facilities owned by Amazon, Apple, Alphabet and Meta. Annual program cost rose 762 percent over the period.
Wisconsin	$1.5 billion during construction, $269 million a year after	Legislative Fiscal Bureau projection if four planned projects are built, produced only because a state senator asked.

Fourteen of the 37 states with an exemption do not publish an annual loss figure at all. Good Jobs First's summary of the structure is worth quoting because it is the mechanism behind every number in the table: "All of these subsidies favor capital investment, not job creation, such that taxpayer costs routinely exceed $1 million per permanent job."

Two things follow for a resident hearing "lower taxes" at a hearing. First, the exemption is granted by the legislature, not the county; the county cannot decline it, condition it or claw it back. Second, the loss is not abstract. Food and Water Watch, using Virginia's own figures, notes that the state's $673 million exemption cost in 2022 alone equals the median income of nearly 8,000 Virginia households, against roughly 7,600 people the group estimates worked in Virginia data centers in 2024.

The second promise is wealth. The most rigorous recent evidence is a July 2026 study from Georgia Tech's Scheller College of Business, "The Local Economic Effects of Data Center Entry," by Daniel Yue and Yiyang Zeng. Across counties where a data center enters, the authors find employment rises about 3.5 percent, wages about 5 percent, business establishments nearly 5 percent and household income about 2 percent. Then they split the sample: "Metropolitan areas capture most of the economic benefits from data centers, while rural areas see far fewer spillover effects." Specifically, "while metro counties saw increases in employment and new business growth, non-metro counties saw no measurable gains," apart from a small drop in unemployment. The same study found electricity prices rise about 5 percent after entry.

That matters because the president's audience is rural. The fights on our tracker are in Holly Ridge, Louisiana (population under 2,000), Sharon, Kansas, Hermantown, Minnesota, Wheeler County, Texas, and Stokes County, North Carolina. The study that measured the effect found it does not reach them.

The jobs figures behind the wealth claim are consistent across sources:

• Virginia's legislative auditors (JLARC, December 2024) report that a typical 250,000 square foot data center employs about 50 full-time workers, roughly half of them contractors. Construction takes 12 to 18 months with about 1,500 workers on site at peak.
• Food and Water Watch, analyzing Virginia Economic Development Partnership data, calculates one permanent job for every $13 million invested since 1990, and one for every $54 million invested from 2020 through late 2025, against about $322,000 per job outside the sector. It also notes that the industry's own PricewaterhouseCoopers report ranks Virginia ninth in data center employment despite Virginia holding a third of national capacity, because the report counts an entire federal industry code that includes web hosting and other services.
• Meta's Hyperion in Louisiana, described as the largest data center in the world, expects about 5,000 construction workers at peak and about 500 permanent employees when complete in 2030, per the Gulf States Newsroom.
• Google's proposed Hermantown, Minnesota campus, a $650 million first phase, is promised at "at least 40 permanent jobs" by the Duluth Area Chamber of Commerce and about 100 by the city.

None of this says the jobs are not real. Construction jobs are real, and building trades councils support these projects for that reason. It says the president's "jobs all over the place" describes 12 to 18 months, after which a rural county is left with a building that employs a few dozen people and a tax exemption it did not vote on.

The third promise is home values, and here the president has evidence on his side, with an asterisk large enough to change the conclusion.

The Northern Virginia study. George Mason University's Center for Regional Analysis, in "Data Centers and 2023 Home Sales in Northern Virginia" by Terry Clower and Keith Waters, compared 2023 home sales across Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William counties to the locations of data centers built or permitted by August 2024. Homes closer to data centers sold for more. The analysis "fails to demonstrate statistical evidence that proximity to a data center negatively impacts housing values." Developers now cite it at hearings nationwide. The authors' own explanation is the reason to read it carefully: "This is at least partially true due to the amenities," Waters said, meaning data centers in Northern Virginia sit where the roads, utilities, airports and jobs already are. A facility dropped on farmland beside a rural subdivision shares none of those confounders, and the authors note their findings may be "more applicable in areas with constrained housing demand."

The Indiana appraisal. Integra Realty Resources examined estimated values from 2021 onward for homes within 1.5 miles of four Indiana data centers, prepared in support of a developer's zoning variance in Indianapolis, as reported by WVPE. Values rose near all four. In three of the four, they rose less than the rest of the county: in LaPorte, 42 percent near Microsoft's facility against 48 percent countywide. The exception was Amazon's New Carlisle site, where nearby values rose 49 percent against 32 percent countywide.

What both studies cannot see. Each measures a ring of a mile and a half. A data center's effect concentrates at the fence line. AI GridWatch documents a paired Northern Virginia case in which a four-bedroom home roughly 200 feet from a hyperscale campus was listed at $580,000 against comparable homes with no adjacency at $685,000 to $710,000, a discount of 15 to 18 percent. Average one house at minus 18 percent across hundreds of unaffected homes in the ring and the signal disappears. That is not a contradiction of the studies. It is the resolution of them.

Two more data points from the record. In Hermantown, Minnesota, a Google subsidiary named Harmony Group LLC paid nearly $6 million in January 2026 for parcels that St. Louis County assesses at $1.9 million combined, according to the Minnesota Star Tribune; the second lawsuit against the city alleges about 70 remaining homeowners face "a large reduction" in property value from the rezoning. And in Prince William County, Virginia, a family described moving their newborn to the basement because of the constant industrial noise inside their home, per reporting cited by Neighbors Against Data Centers. Neither appears in a regression.

The fourth claim is the one the president made twice, and it is the one with the least evidence in either direction. We could find no study linking data center operation or construction to criminal activity, and we do not make that claim. Older Justice Department research on "boomtown" law enforcement in energy regions found sheriffs and police reporting large crime increases with rapid population influx, but that literature concerns oil, gas and mining, not data centers, and we cite it only as context.

What the record does contain is a documented public safety story from the construction phase, and it is not the one the president tells.

Holly Ridge, Louisiana: 64 crashes against nine

Meta broke ground on Hyperion, a $27 billion campus the company describes as the largest data center in the world, in December 2024 in Richland Parish, where nearly a quarter of residents live below the poverty line. The Gulf States Newsroom's Drew Hawkins, publishing in the Louisiana Illuminator on November 22, 2025, obtained the police crash records for the roads around the site:

• 64 crashes between January and mid September 2025, compared with nine for all of 2024, an increase of more than 600 percent.
• A dump truck hauling dirt left the road and struck a tree in August 2025, killing the driver, according to the Richland Parish Coroner's Office.
• In September 2025, an 18-wheeler collided with a dump truck turning toward the site. The driver told the deputy that "he does not and has never had a driver's license."
• In another crash two dump trucks collided head-on; the driver at fault had an expired Mexican license and was airlifted from a field behind the elementary school.
• A hit-and-run where the dump truck left the scene; an 18-wheeler that tried to beat a train across the tracks and backed into another vehicle; a driver who abandoned his wrecked vehicle in the median so he would not miss a morning meeting at the site.
• Louisiana DOTD traffic counts in front of Holly Ridge Elementary rose from 1,817 vehicles a day in February 2022 to 5,224 in July 2025, in summer with no school traffic.
• Holly Ridge Elementary closed its playground, which faces the truck route. "You can't pay attention," a fourth grader told the reporter. "And then you get off track and you lose what the teacher was telling you to do."

Greg Fischer of the Louisiana Highway Safety Commission called the unlicensed driver "shocking": "You would think that a company would vet their drivers, at least to the extent that they have a commercial driver's license before they put them out on the road." Documents obtained by the newsroom show Meta, through developer Laidley LLC, agreed it was responsible for ensuring public safety in the work zone. Meta told the newsroom it sets strict speed and safety guidelines and did not respond to questions about specific crashes. Governor Jeff Landry, who visited in June 2025 and called the project "transformational," said "like all good things, it comes with good problems." Several of the crashes above occurred after his visit and after the state converted three intersections to all-way stops.

The scale of the influx is the context. Local officials believe about 8,000 workers a day now enter a parish with a 2025 population estimate of 19,500, nearly half its population, according to The Advocate's Tyler Bridges as summarized by the American Press. A 130 acre workforce housing development, Holly Ridge Lodge and RV Resort, is being built to hold 300 RVs and 1,000 workers in modular buildings, per the Richland Beacon News. Sheriff's deputies now work the two-lane highways to keep traffic moving.

Jerome Township, Ohio: 84 emergency calls and a moratorium

Two Amazon data centers under construction in Jerome Township, Union County, Ohio, generated 84 calls to firefighters between their 2021 approval and September 2025, about two a month, as The Columbus Dispatch reported and Data Center Dynamics summarized. One worker was crushed to death during construction at the Warren Road site and another fell to his death at the Industrial Parkway site. A fire at Industrial Parkway in April 2025 occupied crews for 30 hours and caused $50 million in damage. Firefighters told the Dispatch they were held at the gates by security guards for up to an hour. "We're not a huge fan of the data centers," fire chief David Baird said. The township enacted a nine-month moratorium on new data center projects. Because the projects are tax-abated, the township was covering those responses without the revenue.

Two more deaths on the record

On October 6, 2025, Maurice McGowan, 28, was struck and killed by an articulating truck inside the gates of Rowan Digital Infrastructure's "Cinco Project" site in Medina County, Texas, according to the Medina County Sheriff's Office and KSAT. Turner Construction suspended all work. On June 28, 2025, Anthony Riera Azuaje, 25, was electrocuted on a scissor lift at the QTS data center campus in Fayetteville, Georgia and died four days later; his parents' wrongful death suit alleges an improperly grounded conduit and wrong fittings, as reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and 11Alive.

That is the "crime" record we can document: not criminality by residents, but a construction phase that has killed workers, filled rural roads with unlicensed drivers, closed a playground and drained volunteer fire departments, in exactly the towns that said yes.

The president's last word was squalor. Here is what residents of towns that approved a data center have put in court filings and told reporters.

• Louisa County, Virginia. In July 2026 a homeowner sued Amazon over brown, contaminated well water, dust and noise from data center construction, pleading private nuisance, negligence and property damage. It is the first individual homeowner water suit against a hyperscaler on our tracker.
• Newton County, Georgia. Four families living near Meta's Stanton Springs campus sued Meta and the four-county development authority in late August 2026, alleging that clearing, blasting and excavation for the more than $1 billion campus disturbed the aquifer and filled their wells with mud, silt and clay that clogged lines and ruined appliances.
• Holly Ridge, Louisiana. Joseph and Robin Williams, who live across the street from Hyperion, told the Gulf States Newsroom their power goes out without notice and their water turns "rust-colored." Dorothy Lively said workers park in her yard without asking, dust from the site gets into her home, and she is "scared to death" to pull out of her driveway. Tatjana Thompson waits until evening to walk to her mailbox.
• Prince William County, Virginia. Great Oak residents documented likely exceedances of the county's 60 decibel daytime noise ordinance, which drove Amazon's mitigation. Virginia's legislative watchdog described the sound residents complain about as a constant "drone" or "hum."
• Granbury, Texas. An Earthjustice nuisance suit for residents against Marathon Digital documents migraines, tinnitus and sleep loss among more than two dozen people from 24/7 fan noise at the Wolf Hollow bitcoin mine.
• Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin. A 2026 class action over noise from Microsoft's Fairwater campus covers everyone within 1.5 miles, more than 1,000 households.

And then the electric bill, which every household in a region pays whether or not it lives near the facility. PJM, the grid operator for 13 states and Washington, D.C., saw its capacity auction price rise from $28.92 per megawatt-day for 2024/25 to $269.92 for 2025/26 and $329.17 for 2026/27, per IEEFA. PJM's independent market monitor, Monitoring Analytics, attributed 63 percent of the 2025/26 increase to data centers: $9.3 billion recovered from customers in higher rates in one year. In May 2026 the monitor reported wholesale power in PJM up almost 76 percent year over year in the first quarter, $136.53 per megawatt-hour against $77.78, and said data center load in the last two auctions "translated into a $13 billion cost increase." Its words, as reported by E&E News: "The price impacts on customers have been very large and are not reversible." Pepco residential customers in Washington saw bills rise an average of $21 a month from June 2025, about half of it from capacity prices, per the D.C. Office of the People's Counsel. IEEFA estimates capacity costs add about $18 a month in western Maryland and $16 in Ohio. In Oregon, an early data center hub, Portland General Electric rates rose 50 percent in five years, per the Minnesota Reformer. The Georgia Tech study's 5 percent electricity price effect after entry is the conservative, national version of the same finding.

The president promised that approving a data center avoids squalor. The court dockets say the towns that approved one are now suing over their wells, their sleep and their bills.

The president says towns "have your choice." The polling says the choice is already made.

Poll	Field dates	Finding
Gallup	March 2 to 18, 2026, n=1,000	71 percent oppose constructing an AI data center in their local area, 48 percent strongly. 26 percent favor, 7 percent strongly. Strong opposition: 56 percent of Democrats, 48 percent of independents, 39 percent of Republicans.
Fox News	August 2026	70 percent oppose a data center in their area to support AI, including 60 percent of Republicans and 76 percent of Democrats, per The Hill.
Annenberg Public Policy Center	June to July 2026	61 percent oppose new data centers in their area, up from 49 percent in the survey ending in March, a 12-point rise in four months.
Heatmap Pro	August 2026	75 percent would oppose a new data center near where they live; more than six in ten strongly.
Public First and ITIF	August 2026	Data centers are Americans' least favored form of development. 46 percent oppose, 26 percent support.

The political record follows the polling, and it is not partisan. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who once touted Amazon's data centers, signed an order removing fast-track permits and requiring local approval. Texas Governor Greg Abbott paused data center construction pending state audits. Mike Rogers, the Republican Senate nominee in Michigan, called for a one-year moratorium. Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock called for a statewide pause. Ohio and Illinois paused their tax incentive programs. New York instituted the nation's first statewide freeze on new hyperscale data centers. Jerome Township, Ohio, host to two Amazon sites, passed its own moratorium. Our tracker counts 40 states with at least one local ban or moratorium, 94 of them adopted in 2026.

The president called this "anti Data Center movement" something China "can't believe is happening." It is being led, in large part, by his own party's governors.

None of the above is a reason to do nothing. It is a reason to insist on the paper before the vote.

• Ask for the fiscal note. The sales tax exemption is state law and your county cannot decline it, but the property tax abatement, the PILOT, the road use security and the decommissioning bond are all local. Our tax abatement guide lists the documents to request.
• Know the clock. The window to challenge a zoning decision is about 30 days in 8 of the 12 states we checked, and it starts when the decision is entered. See zoning appeal deadlines by state.
• Make construction safety a condition. Holly Ridge's crash record is the argument for licensed driver verification, haul route agreements with enforcement, and a funded traffic plan before the first truck. Jerome Township's is the argument for fire department access agreements and cost recovery on abated parcels.
• Measure before it opens. Baseline noise and well water readings are what turned Great Oak's complaints into Amazon's mitigation. Our evidence guide explains how.
• If it is already next to you, the claims are nuisance, negligence and trespass, and the cases on our tracker show what they look like. A free case review is where that starts.