Another Proposal To Mix Data Centers With Affordable Housing Faces Pushback In Loudoun County

Officials in Loudoun County, Virginia, are recommending the denial of a project that would mix a data center with affordable housing — the second such project to be stalled by community opposition this year in the heart of the world’s largest data center market.

Last week, planning commissioners in Leesburg recommended that the town reject a plan by developer Keane Enterprises to build a 450K SF data center and 184 units of affordable housing on 165 acres in the town’s Oaklawn neighborhood, LoudounNow reported. Known as Greenview, the mixed-use project was submitted to town officials as an all-or-nothing proposition, with neither the data center nor housing component viable by itself.  

The planning commission’s recommendation to nix the project comes after significant community opposition was raised during a pair of public hearings in August and September, according to LoudounNow. Officials cited multiple reasons for their decision, from the data center’s potential negative impact on a nearby neighborhood to the project’s failure to meet requirements for parking and accessible open space. 

Ashburn-based Keane Enterprises had responded to public pushback by reducing the size of the proposed data center by 250K SF and eliminating plans for an electrical substation on the site. But officials had made clear for months that the presence of any kind of data center would likely doom the project, even if that meant stalling the construction of what commissioners said was much-needed affordable housing units.

“[Affordable housing] is what the town wants, but because of its inextricable link to the proposed data center, there’s no consideration for it,” Leesburg Planning Commission Chair Gigi Robinson said during the August hearing, according to the Loudoun Times-Mirror.

The Leesburg project isn't the first proposal to blend affordable housing and data centers to stall in Loudoun County this year.

In July, county officials said they wouldn't support a proposal in Sterling to combine data centers with hundreds of units of affordable housing. As in Leesburg, county supervisors said the inclusion of a data center was a non-starter for approval of the Innovation Gateway project, a joint venture between San Diego-based Fairfield Residential and D.C.'s The BlackChamber Group.

First proposed in May 2022, plans for Innovation Gateway included a pair of data centers totaling 700K SF alongside a multifamily building with 300 housing units, all of them affordable. The project would also include 80K SF of office space. 

But plans for Innovation Gateway ran headlong into the county’s goal of steering development away from data centers, particularly in the area around its new Metro stations. The property is about a mile from the Innovation Center station, part of the Silver Line Phase 2 extension that opened in late 2022. 

While Loudoun’s political climate over the past 20 years has been famously friendly toward the data center industry, the will to further regulate data center development has grown recently as the market has become saturated.

In July, county supervisors voted to advance legislation that would eliminate by-right zoning for data centers. If passed, that bill would likely have a significant impact on the future of data center development in a county that is home to Data Center Alley and boasts the highest concentration of these facilities in the world.