America Is Building Big Things Again. Have We Learned Anything?

Oct 29

This article grew out of Stakeholder Engagement That Doesn't Suck, a New York Climate Week conversation hosted by Sam Hartsock, Maha Khan, and Carly Ferro, and informed by everyone who brought their experience, questions, and ideas into the room.

At qb., our work is built around helping organizations make better decisions with the people affected by them. Explore our work at qb.

published 10.30.26

America has a long history of building big things and asking the people who live nearby to live with the consequences.

The US laid railroad tracks across Indigenous lands, built highways through established neighborhoods, and constructed dams that decimated entire river systems. These investments connected cities, powered industries, and created enormous economic opportunity, at a cost borne by people who had little influence over the decisions.

We now know the interstate highway system alone displaced more than a million people. The decisions have been studied, consequences documented, and decades spent developing laws and public processes intended to prevent us from repeating them. And here we are, alive during one of the most extraordinary and potentially devastating infrastructure booms

Which raises a pretty reasonable question: What, exactly, have we learned?

qb. gathered a room full of people who care about that answer

During New York Climate Week, we hosted a collaborative discussion with The SideBar called Stakeholder Engagement That Doesn't Suck: Who Gets a Say and Who Benefits from the AI Buildout? We built the dialogue around hardware manufacturing and data centers, and participants applied their experience to three case studies. We had sustainability people, technology people, human rights people, and community engagement people in the same room. As you might imagine, they didn't all see the problem the same way.

Across all three case studies, we heard similar tensions. Companies are racing to build, while communities scramble to understand what's coming, organize, and influence decisions already underway, often without funding, media attention, or access to information locked behind NDAs. We talked about who gets invited into the process, who's left out, and what happens when the people who know a place best disagree with the people planning to build there.

Meanwhile, across the country...

Some of these questions are being answered right now—and very differently—depending on which state you live in, by legislatures, county commissions, and governors, all working in hypermode. We've been keeping our eyes on:

Pennsylvania, where Governor Shapiro's August executive order ties expedited permitting to commitments around community engagement, environmental protection, and local benefits. Read more.
Texas, because of the sheer scale of what's proposed. With hundreds of gigawatts in large-load interconnection requests, state officials are seeking more information about water, electricity, incentives, and local impacts. How much can communities meaningfully influence when the state itself is still working to understand the cumulative consequences? And a hugely consequential governor election this year, with promises that may not follow through after the election. Follow the inquiry.
California’s seven new laws address electricity costs, water reporting, and land use, intended to keep households from paying for the infrastructure these projects require and to make developers' resource use transparent. See the legislation.
Utah, where residents are organizing against massive proposed data centers, including a project in Box Elder County with significant water demands. A new statewide survey found that 85% of respondents consider public participation in data center decisions very important, and 89% want residents to influence those decisions. Read more.
New York, because Governor Hochul imposed a one-year moratorium on new hyperscale data centers while the state studies their environmental and community impacts. And New York City Public Schools banned student-facing generative AI from pre-K through eighth grade for the 2026–27 school year after engaging with families and educators. Two very different decisions about where AI belongs, and who gets to decide. Read more + NYC schools policy.

None of these approaches guarantees communities more say in what gets built. But across these states, we're seeing something worth paying attention to. People are pushing back, asking questions, organizing their neighbors, and demanding a say in decisions that might otherwise be made without them.

The future of AI isn't inevitable, and neither are the terms on which its infrastructure is built. Residents can challenge proposals, local officials can demand more from developers, and state governments can decide that some things deserve more time and scrutiny before moving forward. There's still opportunity to influence what gets built, where, and on whose terms.

What we can do now (choose your own adventure)

There's more than one way to influence what happens next. Find yourself in the list below:

You're a resident or community organizer: Who owns the land? Who's developing the project? Which county commission, utility board, or state agency gets the next decision? Find out when that decision happens. And find your people. Organizing is a lot of work, and nobody should have to do it alone.
You're a local or state official: Ask for information about water, electricity, and local impacts before approving projects. Give people enough notice to participate in hearings because silence is not approval. Where the law allows, attach enforceable conditions to permits. Public participation shouldn't depend on whether a developer feels like listening.
You're a developer: Map who lives, works, worships, gathers, and depends on a place before selecting a site. Understand who holds influence and whose knowledge is missing. Tell people what's genuinely up for discussion and what isn't. Don't ask them to spend their time on a process that can't change anything.
You're financing the project: Commit to knowing what concerns people raised, what the company did about them, and whether any of it affected the project. Ask who will be responsible for commitments if ownership changes.
You're negotiating community benefits: Put commitments around jobs, environmental protections, and local investments in writing. Fund independent monitoring, give monitors access to information, and establish what happens when promises aren't kept. Residents shouldn't be expected to provide decades of unpaid oversight.

There's a business case for doing all of this well. Community opposition can delay projects, increase costs, and expose risks that could have been identified much earlier. And promises of job creation deserve scrutiny, especially when permanent local jobs may be only a fraction of what construction announcements suggest.

But reducing business risk cannot be the only measure of whether engagement was successful. Neither can the number of public meetings held or jobs promised. And when projects affect Tribal Nations, we're talking about sovereign governments with rights and authority that go well beyond being another stakeholder to consult. Where consent is required, consultation isn't a substitute.

Some election day inspired homework for all of us

At qb., we're consultants (hi), but we're also parents, neighbors, artists, conservationists, backyard farmers, organizers, and people who serve on local commissions. We spend our professional lives helping organizations make decisions that affect people, and our personal lives being some of those people.

So here's one thing we'd love for you to do: find a proposed data center or major infrastructure project near you. Figure out who's behind it, who gets to make the next decision, and when. Then ask four questions:

Who's behind this project? Who's developing it, financing it, and benefiting from it?
What information must be public before the decision is made?
Who gets a meaningful say while plans can still change?
Who makes sure promises are kept five years from now?

Bring those questions to a city council meeting, a candidate forum, a conversation with a developer, or the next meeting where your company discusses a major investment.

Okay, that wasn’t one thing. 😜

JUST REMEMBER:

The protections we have today didn't appear because someone building a highway thought to ask nicely. People organized, challenged decisions, and changed the rules.

Because we care about the future, obviously. We also live here now.