Peoria’s council has directed staff to rewrite a data center code that is more than twenty years old, written back when the term of art was “telecom hotel.” AZBEX reported the direction on September 23. The proposed package pulls data centers out of by right approval in industrial zones and into special use permits, and adds a 500 foot minimum setback, a 50 foot landscaping buffer, a power demand study, a third party noise assessment, and a requirement that equipment be concealed from public view.
Pima County supervisors approved a 120 day moratorium on new data center projects the same day. Peoria is the latest Valley jurisdiction to tighten, not the first, and it will not be the last.
Sort that Peoria list into two piles. The power study and the noise assessment are real questions with real answers. The setback, the buffer and the concealment clause are a different kind of item. They are a city saying out loud that it has stopped expecting the building to be worth looking at, so the best available outcome is distance and shrubbery.
The industry accepted that framing without much of a fight. That is the part worth arguing about.
You cannot defend what you promised to hide
Entitlement fights are rarely won by the applicant. They are won by somebody on the other side of the dais who wants the project and now has a sentence to say out loud. “It brings four hundred construction jobs” is a sentence, and a weak one, because every project in the packet says the same thing.
Concealment gives that person nothing. When the entire public case is that residents will not see it, you have handed the council a promise that only gets tested when it fails. Nobody stands up at a microphone to defend a berm. And the first time a neighbor sees the wall through a gap in the oleanders, the one thing you told them turns out not to be true.
A building that has to be hidden is a building nobody committed to designing.
These are the most consequential buildings going up in the Valley
Be plain about what they are. The compute demand behind them is not imaginary. We build with these tools every day, the industries we work in are wiring them into everything, and the racks and the electricity have to sit somewhere physical. Metro Phoenix has land, power and a semiconductor ecosystem, which is why the projects keep landing here instead of somewhere else.
So the Valley is going to absorb a great deal of two story windowless building. Takanock’s Project Baccara, north of Luke Air Force Base, proposes two of them at roughly a million square feet each on a 160 acre site, with its own gas plant. By floor area that is a larger architectural event than anything happening downtown, and it is being processed as a screening problem.
The NTT campus in Mesa is the counterexample. Brought to the city’s design review board in January, the Corgan team consolidated two planned buildings into one and put additional glazing, window shrouds, overhangs and architectural lighting on the south and east elevations. Nobody is going to call that beautiful. It is a building with a public face, which is a different and more useful thing, because it gives a city something to point at.
Negotiate the edge, not the distance
If you are bringing one of these forward, the setback is the wrong fight. Trade it. Ask instead for the standards that produce a public edge: a facade requirement on street facing elevations, a landscape plan that is habitat rather than hedge, a real lighting plan, and the substation treated as part of the composition instead of as the thing you park behind a wall.
Those cost money. They cost less than a 120 day moratorium, and much less than a special use permit hearing you lose after eighteen months of carry. They are also the only version where the city gets something durable in exchange for its water and its grid capacity, and where the applicant walks in with a case that survives a full council chamber.
The buildings are coming either way. What Peoria is actually deciding is whether the West Valley ends up with a few hundred acres of concealed equipment yard or a few hundred acres of edge worth driving past. Right now the industry is arguing for the first one and calling it a compromise.
