Small-town America gets economic boost from data centers - Entrepreneur Generations

Photo by İsmail Enes Ayhan, Unsplash

Umatilla, Oregon, was once a place “known for a former chemical-weapons depot nearby, a state prison on the city’s outskirts and the strip clubs once dotting its main drag,” David Uberti reported for The Wall Street Journal.

Now its economy is being revived by Amazon, which has poured millions of dollars into the area to build its data centers – and the same thing is happening in various rural counties across the United States.

“The need for technicians, electricians and more has helped mint new members of the middle class in a job market previously geared toward manual labor in fields and warehouses and factory work turning the region’s bountiful potato harvests into french fries,” Uberti wrote.

Thousands of construction workers are populating these towns and boosting revenues through taxes and their expenditures in the community. But this sudden economic boom also raises questions about what will happen to the small-town economies when the data centers are finished.

“Sometimes I do worry: What’s going to happen once they stop building?” Leon-Tejeda, a resident and real estate agent in Umatilla, said in an interview with Uberti. “Not everyone is going to stay here for good.”

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/QC9LOhW Small-town America gets economic boost from data centers - Entrepreneur Generations

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