No More Growth: Indiana Has a Problem If We Do Not Repair

There is a fourteen-acre lot at 25th and Sherman where the Sherman Drive-In used to be. The screen came down in the 1980s. The ground has been idle ever since, and it is a brownfield, which means the soil carries what earlier industry left behind. Across the street are houses. Next door is Brightwood Plaza, which holds the Martindale Brightwood CDC and one of the only grocery stores in that part of the city. Down the block is the library.

A Los Angeles company called Metrobloks wants to put a $500 million data center on that lot. To do it, the company asked the city for a building nearly twice the height the zoning allows, seventy feet where thirty-eight is permitted, plus relief from the street setback and fewer parking spaces than the code requires. Residents organized for a year. Clergy held a press conference on the corner in January. The Greater Indianapolis NAACP wrote a letter of support, heard from the neighborhood, and reversed itself in March. The Metropolitan Development Commission approved the project anyway in April, six to two. The City-County Council approved the rezoning in May. On the first of that month, residents and the Hoosier Environmental Council filed for judicial review, and they used the phrase sacrifice zone, which is a phrase people only reach for after they have tried every other one.

Nate Feltman looked at this year in Indiana and wrote that we have a problem if fears of growth prevail. He is the owner and publisher of the IBJ, and he ran the Indiana Economic Development Corporation as secretary of commerce under Mitch Daniels. He knows how a deal gets built. I consider Nate and his family friends of our family, and I am writing this the way friends write to each other. His worry is legitimate and I share half of it. Indiana's population growth is slowing. Our best young people leave. A state that answers every new thing with "not here" will eventually hear "not Indiana," and that is a real risk with real consequences for real families.

But he has the diagnosis backward. What is rising in Indiana is not fear of growth. It is the experience of growth that never came back around. Ask Martindale Brightwood, which has been growing things for a century and keeps getting handed the leftovers of somebody else's growth. The opposition is not anti-growth. It is pro-repair. And those are not the same conversation at all.

Start with the subsidy. In 2019, before anyone was talking about generative AI, the legislature passed House Enrolled Act 1405. It gives qualifying data centers an exemption from state sales and use tax on equipment and on the electricity they burn. For projects over $750 million, that exemption can run fifty years. Counties can layer property tax abatements on top.

For six years the state did not report what that cost. Then a watchdog group named Indiana as a non-discloser, and the numbers came out this June. Between 2019 and 2025, Indiana forgave $655 million in sales and use tax to data centers. More than eighty percent of it, roughly $561 million, went to Amazon's data center subsidiary in a single year. That was an eleven-fold jump from Amazon's $50.5 million share the year before. Counting the full life of the projects already on the books, Good Jobs First puts Indiana's commitment to Amazon at about $8.2 billion, which they estimate is eight times larger than the next-biggest data center subsidy package anywhere in the country. Ohio revealed its own number and paused new applications within days. Indiana revealed its number and changed nothing.

Now put jobs beside it. Indiana Michigan Power told state regulators in 2024 that the AI data centers coming into its territory would produce about 0.26 jobs per megawatt of load. A quarter of a job per megawatt. Meta's campus in Lebanon is a $10 billion, 1,500-acre, four-million-square-foot project, and the permanent headcount when it is fully running is around 300. Amazon has done better than its own projection in New Carlisle, more than a thousand hired against an original estimate of 450, with about 450 of those from St. Joseph County. That deserves to be said plainly, because it is the strongest fact on Feltman's side of the ledger. It is also one campus, in one county, against a subsidy the state committed through the 2070s.

Then the bills. Citizens Action Coalition compared July residential bills at 1,000 kilowatt hours across Indiana's five investor-owned utilities and found an increase of 17.5 percent in a single year, about $28 a month statewide, the sharpest jump in at least two decades. NIPSCO customers took $50 a month. Duke took nearly $26. AES took almost $17 and won approval for more, with another $8.50 a month landing in January. Governor Braun removed the chairman of the utility commission over it. Here again, the honest counterpoint: Indiana Michigan Power has now proposed cutting rates by $79 million a year and freezing them for three, and says large customers including data centers are what make it possible. That is a genuine data point and it should be tested, not dismissed. It is also one utility, in one territory, making a promise it has not yet kept.

And water. The pipeline network built to serve the LEAP district in Boone County is designed to move two million gallons a day to Lebanon by 2027, ten million by 2028, and twenty-five million a day by 2031, drawing on Eagle Creek Reservoir among other sources, at a cost around $560 million. Meta says it will pay the full freight of its own water and wastewater service, put more than $75 million into public water infrastructure, and restore 200 million gallons a year for ten years through an irrigation partnership with farmers in the Upper Wabash basin. Those are real commitments by a company that keeps most of them. They are also commitments made by one party to a bargain that the people downstream never got to negotiate.

Nearly a third of Indiana counties have now moved to restrict data centers. Marshall and Cass banned them outright. Indianapolis paused new approvals through the end of 2027, twenty-three to one on the council and unanimously at the MDC, with $150,000 in the mayor's budget to study what standards should look like. Feltman reads all of that as a state losing its nerve. I read it as the only tool ordinary people had left. When the only lever available is the emergency brake, everyone starts pulling the emergency brake. That is not a fear problem. That is a design problem.

Here is the sentence I would put on the wall at the Statehouse. The state evaluates growth one transaction at a time. Families experience it all at once.

Every single approval can be defended on its own. The zoning variance was legal. The abatement penciled out. The rate case was litigated and settled. The pipeline had an engineering study. No one institution took anything from anybody. And yet the household in Martindale Brightwood pays a higher electric bill, watches a seventy-foot wall go up across from the grocery store, absorbs the noise, carries the brownfield, and holds a tax exemption that will outlive every official who voted for it. Nobody did that to them. Everybody did that to them.

That is the whole argument, and it is not an argument against growth. It is an argument that the wrong thing is being counted. Indiana counts capital investment announced. It does not count what has to be repaired afterward, or who does the repairing, or with whose money.

Repair is not a program you fund after the fact. It is the term of the deal. Indianapolis has fifteen months of moratorium and a consultant hired this month. That window can produce a noise ordinance, or it can produce something worth the wait. Five things belong in it.

Publish the subsidy per project, per year, in public, the way the state now publishes it in aggregate only because it got caught. Tie the electricity exemption to a measured effect on residential bills, so that if household rates rise, the exemption shrinks. Remediate the brownfield before the slab is poured, not as a condition buried in a development agreement nobody reads. Meter and publish water in and water out, monthly, at the meter, not as a corporate sustainability goal. And require an ownership stake, not a donation. A community benefits agreement is charity with a lawyer. An equity position is repair.

Then build the other thing. In Mapleton Fall Creek we have designed a neighborhood-owned data center that sits twelve to sixteen feet underground in Indiana clay, which holds a steady 54 degrees year round. It cools itself with earth tubes and a thermal chimney. It consumes no water at all. Phase one costs $1.58 million to build and $425,000 a year to run, which for a neighborhood of 10,000 is $42.50 per person per year. Federated across the city, it falls to about $7.50 a head. It runs a continuous neighborhood census instead of waiting ten years for the federal one, and it labels every output by confidence so residents can see what the machine actually knows. Data brokers currently pull somewhere between half a million and five million dollars a year out of that neighborhood's information. This keeps it home.

Read the prospectus: the Waterless Data Center →

I am not arguing that a neighborhood vault replaces a hyperscale campus. It does not. I am arguing that compute is not one thing, and that the state has bet fifty years of tax policy on exactly one version of it, the version where the machines are owned somewhere else and the water and the wattage and the noise are owned here.

Feltman is right that Indiana cannot become a place where the answer is always no. He is right that we have to hold our graduates and win the industries that pay. So let us compete on the thing nobody else is offering. Any state can hand out an exemption. Ours already handed out the biggest one in the country. What Indiana could offer instead is a deal where the neighborhood that hosts the machine owns part of the machine, where the household that powers it sees its bill go down, and where the ground that carries it gets cleaned first.

Indiana does not have a problem because fears of growth might prevail. Indiana has a problem if we do not repair.