A 24.4-acre stretch of land at 4001 Ridge Road, sitting roughly 100 feet from residential rowhouses near the former Congoleum flooring plant, has become the center of a fight between two adjoining Delaware County municipalities and the residents who live in their shadow. Trainer Borough’s zoning officer issued a favorable preliminary zoning determination for a data center there in August, while neighboring Lower Chichester Township said in July that data-center use was not permitted under its current zoning.
The parcel straddles the municipal line, with most of the land in Trainer Borough and a small portion in Lower Chichester Township, according to WHYY. The municipalities have different preliminary zoning positions on the proposal: Trainer issued a favorable preliminary determination, while Lower Chichester said data-center use was not permitted under current zoning. As NBC10 Philadelphia reported, the potential data center would be surrounded by homes on at least two sides, bordering residences in Trainer and across the municipal boundary in Marcus Hook.
Neighbors Say They’re Being Punished
Lorraine DeLassio, who lives about a football field from the site, told NBC10 she feels residents are being punished and don’t deserve to have the project land in their backyard. She said she moved to the area 14 years ago and doesn’t want a data center at her front door. Another resident, Christine Reeder, questioned why the project would be sited in her densely populated neighborhood at all, rather than somewhere with more open space.
Those concerns brought residents from Trainer and Marcus Hook together for a community meeting Wednesday, where people voiced worries about noise, pollution, and what the facility could mean for property values, per the station’s report. Zulene Mayfield, chairperson of Chester Residents Concerned With Quality Living, said people at the meeting are concerned, afraid, and want to learn how to fight together. She said residents who already deal with significant pollution have come together to oppose the project.
From Warehouse to Data Center
The pivot to a data center is a fairly recent one. Link Logistics originally marketed the site as the “Juniper Pointe Logistics Center,” a proposed 443,000-square-foot industrial warehouse, and inquired in April about data center zoning instead, according to the same account from WHYY. Link Logistics was founded by Blackstone in 2019 to manage industrial real estate. The company’s former chief investment officer, Nicholas Pell, moved over to lead the newly created Blackstone Digital Infrastructure Trust, which is built to acquire stabilized data center assets, per Link Logistics…