Data center opposition is usually waved off with a familiar shorthand: NIMBYism, misinformation, or economic anxiety. The assumption is that resistance comes from communities that are poorer, less educated, or reflexively hostile to change.

That explanation doesn’t hold up.

After decades working across energy, investment, and community engagement, I’ve seen the same pattern repeat: projects don’t fail because communities don’t understand them. They fail because engagement starts after decisions are effectively locked in. New data helps explain why that pattern is showing up so consistently around data centers.

Looking across counties where data center projects have failed, stalled, or halted, economic distress is not the defining feature. County-level data shows that median household incomes, education levels, and poverty rates in these places largely track national averages. Many are at or above them.

Take Pickaway County, Ohio, Cass County, Missouri, or Hanover County, Virginia. These are not struggling communities on the margins. Median household incomes cluster in the $70,000–$85,000 range. Bachelor’s degree attainment is often close to or above the national average. Poverty rates are unremarkable. Even in more rural counties, the data does not support the idea that opposition is driven by economic precariousness.

What does stand out is demographic composition. Across the dataset, counties with sustained opposition are consistently whiter, less foreign-born, and more linguistically homogeneous than the nation as a whole. In many of these counties, more than 85 percent of residents identify as white, while the share of foreign-born residents and households speaking a language other than English is well below the national averages.

That pattern shows up across very different geographies. It appears in Midwestern counties facing new development pressure, Southern counties navigating growth corridors, and exurban communities adjacent to major metropolitan areas. The common thread is not ideology or income. It is capacity.

Opposition in these counties is rarely episodic. It shows up as zoning appeals, permitting challenges, litigation, ballot initiatives, and multi-year organizing campaigns. That kind of sustained resistance requires time, money, legal familiarity, and political coordination. Whatever residents’ motivations, these are communities positioned to translate concern into action.

This is where the NIMBY label breaks down. It flattens very different kinds of community response into a single caricature and obscures the role of governance, process, and local leverage. What looks like knee-jerk resistance from the outside often reflects well-organized, informed engagement on the ground.

Resource concerns sharpen these conflicts. In counties such as Palm Beach County, Florida, Imperial County, California, and parts of Virginia and Georgia, opposition has centered on water use, environmental impact, and long-term resource availability. These objections are not framed locally as abstract debates about technology or growth. They are framed as concrete questions about land use and control over local resources.

None of this suggests that income or education cause opposition. But it does challenge the idea that resistance is primarily a knowledge problem. Communities with the capacity to organize respond very differently when they feel excluded from decision-making. When engagement comes late, opposition hardens. Timelines stretch. Capital sits idle.

I’ve seen this dynamic across energy and infrastructure sectors. Projects that integrate community engagement early tend to move faster and face fewer disruptions. Projects that treat opposition as a messaging problem tend to discover that permission is not something you secure after the fact.

Community opposition is not a story of fear or ignorance. In many cases, it is a story of communities that are neither poor nor disengaged, but organized, capable, and willing to say no when they believe decisions have already been made without them.

Ignoring that reality doesn’t make projects easier to build. It just makes failure more expensive.