KJS 10-26 DC
The era of building wherever the money points is ending.
Look at data centers. Local opposition blocked or delayed at least 75 projects worth a combined $130 billion in the first quarter of 2026, according to Data Center Watch. The same report found opposition groups have doubled to 833 across 49 states. In the next quarter, at least 45 more projects valued at nearly $68 billion were stopped or stalled.
Energy companies, developers, finance and private equity have spent a generation choosing sites and then announcing them. Communities have learned to answer. Siting has become a political issue in town halls across the country. A project that ignores the people next door now pays for it in time, money and reputation.
So let’s talk about where we should be building.
Walk past the vacant lot
Every town has one. A fenced parcel where a plant used to be. A dry cleaner that closed thirty years ago. A rail yard grown over with sumac. People walk past it every day on the way to school and work.
The EPA calls these brownfields: properties whose reuse is complicated by contamination, real or suspected. Nobody knows exactly how many there are. The agency still relies on a government estimate that 450,000 to 1 million brownfields sit abandoned or underused across the country. The EPA says they are likely found in every city or town in the nation.
That vacant lot has a history with the people who live around it. It was where their parents worked. Then it was where the jobs left from. Then it became the place nobody cleaned up. For many neighborhoods, it’s a daily reminder of who made decisions about their community and who didn’t.
Many of those sites still sit on corporate balance sheets. Some owners have held them for decades. They carry the cost, the liability and the stigma, and they can’t find a way out.
A marketplace that doesn’t exist yet
There’s no true market* for this land. The sellers can’t move it without fight – Sellers: those who may want to get it off their books, can’t see whether the community will accept sale new use. That’s even more risk for buyers. The buyers and the sellers both have to fight to put the land in a reuse position. Meanwhile, the community has never been asked what it wants on the site or what it wants to see it become.
A faster and more sustainable way to get these sites moving is to let the community invite the project in.
This changes the order of everything.
Readiness comes first. Before any sale, we measure the community around the site: where trust sits, how cohesive it is, what it values and where friction is likely. We build a deep understanding of the place before anyone talks price.
Engagement comes second. Authentic engagement, carried by people the community already trusts, starts with what the neighborhood wants this land to become. It begins well before there’s a plan to defend.
The sale comes third. Only then does the property change hands, with a buyer whose plan the community has helped shape.
We run that process end to end, with a site-science partner alongside us. As it matures, we bring in financial intermediaries and direct land transactions toward places where community readiness already exists. Capital follows readiness.
The project that comes out of it is community-based from the start. That’s what makes it sustainable. It also removes most of the delay, the legal fights and the redesigns that drain a typical deal. The savings are real, though they’re a subject for another day.
An invitation to the environmental community
Here’s the case for nature.
The country needs land for renewable energy, storage, transmission and the infrastructure that runs on it. Every one of those projects needs a site. Today too many of them land on farmland, forest edges and open space, and then fight the communities next door.
Brownfields offer another path. In congressional testimony, the EPA reported that every acre of brownfields reused saves 4.5 acres of greenspace. Clean energy sited on land a community has invited it onto moves faster. The open land it would have taken stays open. Contaminated ground gets cleaned and put back to work. Neighborhoods that carried the old economy’s damage get a real say in the new one.
So to the conservation groups, land trusts, clean energy advocates and environmental funders: join us. This may be the best way to keep renewable siting moving while rehabilitating nature through better land use.
The shift
For a century, the vacant lot was where decisions about a neighborhood were made somewhere else. We think it can become the place where a community decides for itself and invites the right project in.
The land is already there. The people are already there. What’s been missing is a way for them to lead.
10/4/26