Data Center Backlash Is Heating Up—and Everything Else You Need to Know About This Week
Homeownership is only becoming further out of reach for young Americans, Japan’s traditional folk houses are being revived, and more.
Homeownership is only becoming further out of reach for young Americans, Japan’s traditional folk houses are being revived, and more.
Opposition to data centers is intensifying. More than 530 U.S. cities and counties now have local laws restricting or banning new projects, and the surge of zoning changes has already killed dozens of proposed developments this year. (Heatmap)
- While many communities are fighting to block data centers from being built, the town of Jay, Maine, embraced one as a chance to create jobs after its paper mill exploded in 2020. The data center, which was actually planned to be built on land where the mill once stood, could have meant economic revival for residents—until it was put on indefinite hold. (The Atlantic)
As millions of Japan’s traditional folk houses, known as kominka, sit abandoned or demolished, preservationists are giving them a second life by dismantling, shipping, and rebuilding them around the world. Here’s how these homes, some of their parts over 200 years old, are now being reimagined. (The New York Times)
From Walter Gropius’s 1938 Bauhaus home in Massachusetts—where a new fieldstone restroom will replace an unsightly port-a-potty—to Philip Johnson’s Glass House and Luis Barragán’s Casa Pedregal, house museums are making an effort to become more welcoming and accessible to visitors while still preserving the original homes. (Dwell)
House museums like Gropius House are upgrading visitor amenities, like replacing the lackluster port-a-potty pictured above with a more thoughtful design.
Courtesy of Historic New England
The median U.S. home price has climbed to a record $440,600 after rising more than 50 percent in the last six years, widening the wealth gap between owners and renters as more Americans are priced out of buying. Here’s what the gap means for many young American delaying the milestone. (NPR)
Top photo by Thomas Simonetti / AFP via Getty Images
