CANTON, Miss. — Johnny Sims has spent the past two years living next to a neighbor unlike any other. Less than 200 yards from his home on the outskirts of Canton, Mississippi, is a sprawling industrial park with a partially completed data center campus — one of two Madison County locations selected by Amazon to store, process and distribute massive amounts of digital data.
The arrival of the data center and adjacent development has transformed conditions in Idlebriar, the serene, tree-filled subdivision that Sims and his wife settled in three decades ago. An influx of traffic around the site has created bottlenecks in the neighborhood and lengthened residents’ commute times, and the sounds of vehicles and heavy machinery have kept Sims’ family up at night.
Ongoing construction has also caused dust to accumulate in the subdivision, covering houses, cars and vegetation and raising alarm bells about degraded air quality. The dust has proven especially damaging for Sims’ teenage daughter, who suffers from asthma and has had to wear a face covering outdoors to keep her symptoms from worsening…