An Easy Yes and a Hard No

Most pickleball business at City Hall is the dull kind: resurfacing contracts, light poles, a tennis court restriped for four games at once. Of the 36 pickleball court projects we found coming up for a vote or decision, 26 moved forward. Where a roll call was recorded, 13 of 21 votes to move a project forward passed with no one voting no. Three decisions in the extracted record restricted play, each over noise or over who gets the court. The extraction misses some; Brentwood’s closure, below, is one.

The people at the microphone are mostly players. In 28 of the 43 places where someone took a side, the room leaned for. When Pleasanton, California, proposed charging $6 an hour to reserve three courts at Muirwood Community Park, residents packed the meeting, and a council member who had planned to vote the other way moved to send the plan back to the parks commission. The council agreed.

The biggest pickleball fight in our sample was barely about pickleball. In Palmetto Bay, Florida, the council voted 3–2 in July 2025 to build an indoor pickleball center on a village-owned parcel and hire a private operator to run it. Residents who spoke against it mostly objected to the spending and the operator deal, not the game, and a few who raised the cost said they liked the idea. That one town supplied 37 of our 135 pickleball speakers. Without it, the room ran about 64 percent for.

Outside Palmetto Bay, most of pickleball’s opposition comes from the same place: next door. The game is loud in a particular way, a hard plastic pop repeated hundreds of times an hour, and courts tend to go where tennis courts and basketball courts already were, which is often behind somebody’s house.

In Brentwood, California, a neighbor of the Creekside Park courts told the council in September that she and her household had “been very patient.” She was careful not to blame the players.

The council voted that night to close Creekside, stripe temporary courts in a parking lot elsewhere and set aside about $1.7 million for new ones. Nobody on the dais proposed doing without pickleball, just doing it someplace else.

That’s the usual fix. Marco Island, Florida, voted on sound barriers for its racquet center. Stallings, North Carolina, wrote noise rules for new courts. Ojai, California, reserved its Libbey Park courts for tennis. The remedies are walls, hours and distance, and they come because people like the game but don’t want it outside the bedroom window.

Data centers draw a different crowd and a different argument, and the argument doesn’t stop at the property line. We took a random sample of 80 of the 464 public-comment periods that mentioned them, at most two per place, from 63 places. Of the 298 people who spoke to the topic, 290 were against them. Six spoke in favor, and two of those worked for the company that wanted to build one. “Against” here includes people who asked for a pause, or for rules before any approval, not only those who wanted a ban.

The objections come wherever a project is proposed. People talk about water, about electric bills, about noise, about how few jobs the buildings bring, about tax breaks, and about nondisclosure agreements that, speakers said, kept projects secret. Noise is a next-door complaint, the kind a wall or a setback can answer. Water and electric bills are shared by a whole town, and moving the building across town doesn’t change them. And the remedies councils reach for are different, too: moratoriums and zoning rules, not sound walls. In Memphis, one speaker put it in terms of who lives next to them.

Councils have been answering. Over the same two years, of the 127 places in Hamlet’s record that took a recorded action on data centers, 89 adopted a moratorium, a ban, a cap or some other restriction, and 34 wrote new rules for them. That count treats a temporary pause the same as a ban, and pauses can stretch. Oakland’s council, whose vote isn’t in our count, voted 7–0 in October for a 45-day pause after a developer announced plans for a downtown data center, then on Nov. 10 extended it to October 2027. Where a roll call was recorded, 56 of 77 votes to restrict data centers passed with no one voting no, compared with 13 of 31 votes to approve one. Those are votes, not places, and a few places held many of them.

The case for saying yes is real, and Fresno’s mayor laid out part of it himself: some cities welcome data centers, he said, usually the ones with cheap electricity, room on the grid and plenty of water. Even Nick Richardson, the Fresno council member who proposed the ban, told GV Wire that “everything is being associated with data centers right now, incorrectly.” John Andril, who tracks the market for the brokerage Avison Young, told the outlet the worry about water is “most definitely a concern that can be mitigated.”

Builders make the case at the microphone, too. In DeKalb County, Georgia, where commissioners were weighing data-center rules in October, Peter Rumbold, the chief executive of Shadowbox Studios, whose company wanted to build one, told the board that data centers don’t belong everywhere but that “their existence in the appropriate locations should be welcomed, not vilified.”

Some councils say yes. Of the 19 places that approved a data-center project or incentive in our period, the approvals clustered in Prince William and Loudoun counties in Northern Virginia, Cheyenne and Laramie County in Wyoming, Indianapolis, San Jose and Phoenix. Seven places approved a project and passed a restriction in the same two years, among them Prince William County, Virginia; Charlotte; Indianapolis; and Fort Worth. There the answer wasn’t simply yes or no: those places approved a project and also put limits on data centers.

The harder cases are councils that hear a hard no and answer more softly. In February, a bill to pause new data centers in St. Louis until zoning rules were ready couldn’t reach the floor of the Board of Aldermen: it needed 10 votes to be introduced and got seven, with eight against. In Memphis, after two months of packed meetings, a moratorium deadlocked 6–6 on Oct. 20 and failed. The council passed rules instead, limiting how large data centers can cool their buildings and draw water and pushing them toward cleaner power. In Fayetteville, North Carolina, the council spent most of the year writing zoning rules while residents asked for a pause. On Oct. 19 it voted 6–4 to have staff draft a moratorium after all, and on Nov. 9 it set a hearing for Dec. 7.

Ballots measure something public comment can’t: the voters in the towns that hold them, and this year those voters have mostly sided with the people who show up. In June, Monterey Park, California, voters approved a ban on data-center development, 86 percent to 14. On Nov. 3, voters in 10 states weighed 41 local measures on data centers, 21 of them in Ohio, where five towns, Piqua and Upper Sandusky among them, added bans. Voters in Monroeville, Ohio, rejected an advisory measure that would have let officials pursue data centers. In Joliet, Illinois, 79 percent voted no on an advisory question about approving AI data centers. Those counts are from election night and aren’t yet certified.