45 Texas ZIP Codes Got a Data Center. Home Values Barely Moved.

In nearly every hearing on data centers, at least one person makes the claim that a data center nearby will lower property values. You hear it in county commissioner meetings, in zoning hearings, and now in the interim charge hearings in the Legislature. It's repeated enough that it seems like it must have some basis. But according to the Texas data we have measured, it has none.

For our latest special report, we ran the numbers ZIP code by ZIP code, and across the Texas data centers that have been operating long enough to study, there has been no measurable effect on home values. And since the technology has been improving consistently on water, noise, and energy, it stands to reason that if older data centers have had no measurable impact, newer ones would be even less likely to have a negative one.

Why Texas needs its own answer

The most-cited evidence on this question is a March 2026 white paper from land development firm Tract. It found that homes closer to Northern Virginia data centers sold for slightly more on average, and that of 130 U.S. ZIP codes with large data center campuses, only one saw values fall over five years.

Our Texas analysis points the same way, on different data and with a different design. We ran it on Texas because the stakes here are about to get much larger: Texas is projected to pass Virginia as the state with the most data centers by 2030, and the Legislature is weighing major new rules for the industry. Decisions that consequential should rest on the best evidence available for Texas specifically, and that is what this report sets out to provide.

Also, Texas is a non-disclosure state, so actual sale prices aren't public, and a sale-by-sale regression of the kind run in Northern Virginia can't be replicated here. So we used the Zillow Home Value Index, the same monthly ZIP-level index Tract used for its national trend numbers, and built a matched comparison design around it.

How we tested it

The method is a matched difference-in-differences study, and the idea behind it is simple. For every Texas ZIP code that gained its first data center, we found a set of comparison ZIP codes in the same metro area that looked just like it beforehand: same home-value level, same appreciation trend, same regional housing market. Then we tracked the gap between the two over time. If a data center drags down nearby values, the host ZIP should fall behind its matched twins after the data center opens.

One discipline matters more than any other here, and it's the clock. A facility that opened in 2025 hasn't had time to move a smoothed home-value index, and the Texas boom is overwhelmingly a 2022-and-later story. So the primary analysis anchors on the 45 ZIP codes that got their first data center at least three years ago, by mid-2023, measured against 168 same-metro comparison ZIPs. Three years provides enough time to see what the impact will be, and eliminates short-term noise.

What the numbers show

The effect on nearby home values is about +0.2 percent. The margin of error runs a few points in either direction, which tells you two things at once: the data can't separate the effect from zero, and it rules out any large move up or down. That result held across nine different specifications and four ways of calculating the statistics, including matching only within the same metro, varying the number of comparison ZIPs, and re-running the whole thing with a bootstrap built for small samples. Not one specification produced a statistically significant drop in home values.

This is a null result, and the report treats it as one: no evidence that data centers raise nearby home values, and none that they lower them. The property-value-harm claim simply has no support in the Texas data.

Where a skeptic would push

There's one place a careful reader can push, and the report shows it instead of burying it. On the full set of sites, the pre-arrival trends for host ZIPs and their matched comparisons aren't perfectly identical, and the pre-trend test catches it.

That gap doesn't change the answer. It's tiny, a few tenths of a percent, nowhere near enough to move any home price anyone worries about. It also traces back to the lowest-confidence sites in the sample. Drop those, keep the cleanest data, and the test passes clean, same zero result.

The direction cuts the other way. In the years before their data centers arrived, host ZIPs were drifting up against their matches, not down. Push the clock back two years with a placebo test, pretending each data center opened early, and it picks up a phantom +5.7 percent gain, confirming that the pre-existing drift runs upward. That tilts the whole study toward finding a positive effect. It still lands at zero.

For hidden harm to be sitting in this data, a real decline would have to be exactly canceled out by that upward drift. Nothing in 45 ZIP codes and nine specifications says that's what's happening.

What the schools show

Property values are only half the local story. The other half is the school tax base, and here the Texas data is richer than anything in the national debate, because district finances are public.

The mechanism that makes data centers fiscally attractive is that they add taxable value without adding kids to educate. The data backs that up cleanly: host districts didn't see enrollment grow any faster than comparable districts after a data center arrived, an effect of +1 percent that's statistically indistinguishable from zero. Whatever a data center puts on the tax rolls, it doesn't show up at the schoolhouse door asking for new classrooms.

The benefit is real, and it's concentrated rather than uniform. In a tiny rural district a single data center can be a large share of the entire tax base. Patton Springs ISD's data centers are roughly 47 percent of its tax base; Del Valle ISD's Tesla site is about 14 percent; Northwest ISD's Meta and Amazon campuses about 5 percent. In a big urban district the same facility is a rounding error, a few tenths of a percent. And for the wealthier districts that pay into the state's recapture system, part of that added value gets equalized to the rest of Texas instead of staying home. A data center is a major fiscal event for a small or rural district and a minor one for a large urban district, and policymakers should resist anyone selling it as uniform. They should also correct anyone claiming any case exists where it is negative.

What it means for the siting debate

Strip it down and the empirical case looks like this. The property-value harm that gets cited to justify restricting where data centers can be built does not show up in the Texas data through mid-2026. A rule that limits data center siting to protect nearby home values would have the Texas evidence pointing the other way. On the fiscal side, the measure that matters is net contribution, what a facility pays in against the services it consumes, and a data center adds tax base without adding students.

None of this settles every question about data center growth in Texas. Power, water, and grid reliability are real constraints, and we cover them here every week. But the specific claim that these facilities hurt the neighbors' home values is one the Texas data does not support.

The full report, with the complete methodology, every robustness test, the school-finance analysis, and the limitations, is available to Hyperscale News annual subscribers below.