The east side nonprofit Eastside Community Network hosted a data center town hall on April 28. Over two dozen Detroit residents. A couple of advocacy groups. The subject: what the spread of data center development across Michigan means for neighborhoods that already carry more than their share of industrial neighbors.
Bridge Detroit reported the meeting, which took place just over a month after Detroit City Council passed a resolution calling on Mayor Mary Sheffield and the city's planning and permitting departments to hold off on data center permits until health and environmental regulations are in place. The resolution calls for a two-year moratorium. Sheffield has not made a final decision, according to city spokesperson John Roach.
Starting in May, ECN will run a biweekly study group on data centers. Goal: educate east side residents on the economic, environmental, and health impacts of the facilities. Deliverable: a set of community recommendations for city and state officials by end of summer.
"Too often, things are imposed on our communities," said Ricky Ackerman, ECN's chief program officer, citing the Stellantis Mack Assembly Plant as a reference. Ackerman said the study group is designed to give residents the policy vocabulary to show up with specific asks, not just concerns.
One site was front of mind at the town hall: a brownfield on Shoemaker Street that has been discussed as a potential data center location, according to attorney Andrew Bashi of the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center. The property has a documented contamination history. Lead foundries, an oil house, and a coal yard once operated there. Federal regulators have flagged the site for heavy metals, VOCs, and PCBs.
Bashi's policy checklist, delivered to the room: a dedicated zoning category for data centers, a prohibition on open-loop cooling systems, stronger transparency requirements from developers, and financial bonds as accountability insurance. He pointed to Saline Township — which lacked these rules and ended up in litigation after refusing to rezone land for a data center — as a lesson for Detroit to absorb before the proposals arrive at City Hall.
Rose Jones, secretary of the District 4 Community Advisory Council, did not soften the framing. "We are in an urgent situation," she said. "This has been going on. It's been coming up and folks have had blinders on. I just hope that we have more urgency in coming up with what we need to protect our land, our air, and our people."
Presenters from the Green Door Initiative and the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center walked attendees through documented cases: data centers in rural Michigan communities and a facility built by Elon Musk in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Memphis to power the Grok AI chatbot.
Two parallel tracks are running at the city level. District 3 Councilmember Scott Benson recently stood up a citywide working group to fast-track a data center zoning policy before end of year. A Michigan House bill would extend a statewide moratorium on data centers until April 2027.
"It's really important that we do this soon," Bashi said. The east side's study group is the attempt to make sure residents are in the room when the policy gets made — not handed the result afterward.
