HILLSBORO, Ore. — Where hay fields, livestock, and open horizon once stretched across the Tuality Plains, towering concrete monoliths and roaring electrical substations have moved in. In the heart of Washington County’s expanding tech hub, the historic Shute-Meierjurgen Farmstead, built in 1890 by infamous banker John Shute and his first wife, Elizabeth Constable, now finds itself literally surrounded, a solitary 19th-century relic marooned inside Hillsboro’s ever-growing “Data Center Alley”.
For Lisa Haag Goldbeck, whose family has cared for the property for generations, the transformation has felt both surreal and relentless.
Columbia Insight, a news media outlet in Oregon’s Columbia Gorge, sent up video journalist Deborah Bloom to look around our community and see what has unfolded. Bloom came and spent days here in our community, and I supported and collaborated with her as she oriented herself to our unfolding story. Once she saw the Shute Farm and met with Lisa, she knew she had the story she came for.
What she found was a story so familiar to many of us locally, but not to people who live just a few miles away. From an outsider’s perspective, she did a masterful job of showing and telling this story in an impactful way, and Video trumps the written word every time. Here is the work for your review.
“There they are. Looks like a spaceship built, you know, like weird,” Goldbeck says, surveying the massive, windowless tech facilities that have replaced the pastoral landscape. “You blink your eye, and trees are gone, fields are gone… concrete shows up, asphalt, big rigs, big dirt movers. It’s just been watching it disappear.” https://columbiainsight.org/this-is-how-data-centers-kill-farms-in-the-pnw/
The contrast is stark. Behind the 1910 barn—where pioneer hand-hewn timbers still frame the loft—a buzzing power substation hums day and night. Several of them do, with the constant sound of construction adding to the broken air. While multi-billion-dollar hyperscalers receive heavy tax breaks and zoning approvals to build warehouse-sized server halls, the farmstead faces an uphill battle to survive. Goldbeck points out that industrial rezoning around the parcel has cut off traditional financing options, freezing long-held dreams of restoring the property into a community bed-and-breakfast or floral event center.
Lisa, her husband Randy, her brother Mark Haag, and his wife Erin Knight Haag, have given everything they have to save the farm. A farm that has become the face of the Oregon Data Center dilemma. They have become the faces and the voices of all that is wrong with our leadership, of this industry that is designed to destroy and disconnect people from each other in favor of machines, and of heartless land use and tax codes that allowed this to happen.
For context, I have known the Haags for 50 years. I knew Raymond and Carol Haag, who were beloved members of the community in their own right. And this farm was a farm until Hillsboro’s hunger for growth brought the Urban Growth Boundary expansions West of Shute Road (now Brookwood) and to the Haags’ doorstep. They were promised they would be fine. They were promised they could get mortgages. They were told by Mayor Callaway and others in power at the time that they could stay and live peacefully. This is the problem with political promises: they are almost always broken or left unfulfilled, and in this case, that is very true.
This is an important piece of work, and we salute Deborah Bloom and Columbia Insight for showing up, caring, and getting the story right. As the Hillsboro Planning Commission approved new code language this week and the City Council will pass it into law soon, we still do not have any protections to ensure that more residents will not end up just like the Haags.
We must have the will to ensure that anyone in the future can get a mortgage, live peacefully, and continue as they choose, and we need an option, as a City, to give them a lifeline by offering financing or a guaranteed buyout. That needs to be discussed right now and incorporated into the final code revisions happening in early October. Mayor Beach Pace and Council President Rob Harris can do that and get the support they need. The question is, will they or do they not see the real value in a real story like this one?
Ray & Carol Haag were wonderful people! Our youngest daughter, during high school & college in the 90’s, worked for the Haag’s and adored them. Our insurance agency insured the Haag’s home, cars, and other properties for years. We were given a copy of the history book Ray wrote about the farmstead during a visit to the farmhouse.
What subsequently took place was an abomination!
The city of Hillsboro, lead by Steve Callaway, should absolutely be condemned, for not only what they did to Ray & Carol, but for the many other atrocities that have befallen this once beautiful and livable area. To allow this devastation to continue is to further illustrate the decay we have had to endure under recent decades of the “leadership” at the City of Hillsboro.
Ray & Carol, I’m sure, would not want Steve Callaway to continue to promote his version of progress, AKA Destruction, if elected a Washington County Commissioner. It’s high time that Callaway Go Away, perhaps return to California, and leave us to repair the many Injustices he has wrought upon us.
What is most concerning, however, is your mention of Beach Pace & Rob Harris as the current stewards representing us, as well as Danny Dias and his SECRETIVE group of city “staff”. Bundle this group with the weakling city manager and you gotta believe we’re in Big-Big trouble.
May Ray & Carol Haag continue to Rest in Peace and may God Bless Lisa & Randy as well!