More Perfect Union dropped a video today that finally does what too many officials and press releases won’t: it walks right into the belly of the beast and asks the question regular people have been living with for years — what are we actually getting in return for this data center boom? Today’s short feature film, “I Worked At A Google Data Center: What I Saw Will Shock You,” hit YouTube and all the socials today and has already garnered almost 500,000 views.
Reporter Dan Lieberman didn’t just parachute in. He came to Hillsboro, and the Hillsboro Herald spent a full day with his team (and more time after) running the numbers, tracing the abatements, and pinning down the facts. And I’ll tell you straight: once they toured what we call North Hillsboro Data Center Alley — that east–west lineup of massive cement boxes stretching from Cornelius Pass Road to Jackson School Road — they were visibly shocked by what they found.
Because when you stand out there, it’s not theory anymore. It’s not “economic development.” It’s land — real, finite, once-and-done land — getting locked up by buildings that don’t behave like job engines the way the public has been sold. The video starts where the truth lives: the old farmhouse, the farmland that used to be there, and the new reality — data centers everywhere you look. Farmers and local families spell out the ripple effects: land prices jump, other industries get squeezed out, and the community starts feeling the shortfall in the places that matter most — schools, staffing, basic services. The film pulls in Good Jobs First’s work on abatements and what that lost revenue could have meant for classrooms, and it doesn’t sugarcoat the emotional cost when parents are forced to watch teachers do “more with less.”…