Chad Murray has lived for a decade on a tree-lined street in Atlanta’s historic Howell Station neighborhood, roughly three miles northwest of downtown.

Out his front door and across the street is the city’s largest data center campus.

Many Howell Station residents have been locked in fights with the facility’s operator QTS over the constant construction, its requested tax breaks and its electricity needs. Murray was distraught in May to learn most of the neighborhood’s tree buffer with the Fulton County Jail will be clear-cut to build transmission lines to a substation on the QTS campus.

“There’s many people who live here who say that they’re only going to be carried out in a box,” Murray said. “If I do have to go somewhere else, I want to feel like I’m going toward something. I d

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