Hillsboro’s Data Center Gold Rush Isn’t Creating New Jobs — It’s Moving Them (And Oregon’s Paying the Price)

More Perfect Union dropped a video today that finally does what too many officials and press releases won’t: it walks right into the belly of the beast and asks the question regular people have been living with for years — what are we actually getting in return for this data center boom?
Today’s short feature film, “I Worked At A Google Data Center: What I Saw Will Shock You,” hit YouTube and all the socials today and has already garnered almost 500,000 views.

Reporter Dan Lieberman didn’t just parachute in. He came to Hillsboro, and the Hillsboro Herald spent a full day with his team (and more time after) running the numbers, tracing the abatements, and pinning down the facts. And I’ll tell you straight: once they toured what we call North Hillsboro Data Center Alley — that east–west lineup of massive cement boxes stretching from Cornelius Pass Road to Jackson School Road — they were visibly shocked by what they found.

Because when you stand out there, it’s not theory anymore. It’s not “economic development.” It’s land — real, finite, once-and-done land — getting locked up by buildings that don’t behave like job engines the way the public has been sold. The video starts where the truth lives: the old farmhouse, the farmland that used to be there, and the new reality — data centers everywhere you look. Farmers and local families spell out the ripple effects: land prices jump, other industries get squeezed out, and the community starts feeling the shortfall in the places that matter most — schools, staffing, basic services. The film pulls in Good Jobs First’s work on abatements and what that lost revenue could have meant for classrooms, and it doesn’t sugarcoat the emotional cost when parents are forced to watch teachers do “more with less.”

Then the story hits the part that should end the debate as we’ve been having it: the “jobs boom” is mostly a mirage. Lieberman surfaces what economist Michael Hicks argues plainly — these aren’t net-new jobs raining down from the cloud. A lot of the work is job transfer: people pulled off housing projects, commercial construction, and other sectors — or forced out of shrinking industries — and rerouted into building data centers for a stretch. The pay can be real for traveling trades during construction, no disrespect to the workers grinding it out. But once the buildings are up, the long-term headcount is thin. So the jobs shift, the land disappears, and the promised community payoff doesn’t show up the way the brochures claim.  This is not conjecture but my own observation on the ground here, watching every square inch be logged, excavated, paved over, and built up. Only 2 families still exist on what was once the birthplace of settlement in the entire Pacific NW – the historic Tualatin Plains and Five Oaks.

And if you want to know why Oregon gets hit especially hard, it’s right there in the math. We don’t have a sales tax. Local governments rely heavily on property taxes to fund schools, parks, fire and police services, and other city services. So when you stack multi-year enterprise zone waivers and property-tax abatements onto developments that don’t create meaningful net new local employment — while we’re already watching major employers like Intel cut jobs — the deal turns upside down. We’re sacrificing some of the most valuable industrial land in the West’s biggest semiconductor cluster — the kind of land that can support deep, lasting employment ladders — and trading it for a model that can leave us with lower long-term job density, delayed revenue, and a community footing the bill for infrastructure while profits flow out the back end like water through a sieve.

Related: Hillsboro’s Data Center Tax Deals, the Classroom Myth, the Bond Reality

Props where they’re due: More Perfect Union made a serious piece of work here. It connects Hillsboro to the national story, follows the workers, follows the money, and follows the consequences — all the way to Texas — without losing the plot back home. And that’s the point: this isn’t “anti-tech.” It’s pro-community, pro-truth, pro-accountability.

If this is the future, then the people of Hillsboro deserve a real say in it — and Oregon deserves deals that actually pay us back instead of asking us to smile while the ground gets sold out from under our kids.

It was a real pleasure having Dan, Better Jobs First, and More Perfect Union read our work here at the Herald and bring their teams here to learn about what we are experiencing. These are heavyweight players back East, and our story is now being shared around the world. Calls are coming in, and now we may see some real change happen… I, for one, sure hope so.