The same public subsidies that fund Memphis’s slumlords now bankroll Elon Musk’s pollution, revealing a single, profitable system that organizers are challenging by uniting the struggles for housing and environmental justice.
In late 2022, residents at a HUD-subsidized complex in Memphis’s Midtown neighborhood, launched the Memphis Towers Tenants Union’s first campaign against Millennia, the slumlord who owned their property. For almost a year, residents of Memphis Towers –– elders and people with disabilities –– had suffered without consistent access to hot water. This issue wasn’t unusual: residents had lived for years with unreliable elevators that would leave them stuck for hours in a 4’ x 5’ cell. The front doors to the towers were broken, giving anyone access to residents’ homes anytime day or night. Mold in the walls, broken appliances, and bedbugs were all common issues for residents. “They just got rid of everything that makes a home feel safe,” said MTTU member Yvonne Collins at the time. And when tenants tried to speak up about these conditions, they would face harassment, assault, and even eviction.
Three years later, the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, announced his plan to build the world’s largest supercomputer –– Colossus –– in the Boxtown neighborhood of South Memphis. To power this data center, Musk brought in dozens of unauthorized methane gas turbines, spewing toxic fumes into the surrounding neighborhood of Boxtown. The 33 turbines produce nitrogen oxide contributing to smog, known to complicate respiratory illnesses. “I had an asthma attack for the first time in over a decade,” says Alexis Humphreys, a resident of Boxtown. Residents of Boxtown, already dealing with intense air pollution, are now facing a battle for their lungs and their lives.
These fights are distinct, but the exploitation of renters in Memphis and the poisoning of residents in 38109, the South Memphis ZIP code where Colossus is being built, are both made possible by a clique of wealthy elites, who use public money to subsidize the profits of corporate slumlords and polluting corporations.
Across our country at all levels of government, politicians are facilitating, through deregulation and tax breaks, the exploitation of our communities to enrich themselves and the billionaires to whom they are beholden. This is particularly true with the tech industry, which is pouring billions of dollars into data center infrastructure, displacing energy costs to residents, consuming massive amounts of water, poisoning our air, and hurtling us toward climate apocalypse. Just as corporate landlords and the financial industry treat tens of millions of tenants as disposable vehicles for profit, the tech oligarchs are making our communities uninhabitable to enhance their racist algorithms, displace workers, raise our rents, and expand surveillance –– all in the name of their shareholders.
Far too often, our organizations miss these connections. Navigating scarce capacity while struggling against giant corporations, it can seem both easier and more practical to “stay in our lane.” And yet even when we do manage to win our fights, we see these gains slowly rolled back or a new threat emerges to replace our old opposition. In fact, much of the logic that guides our organizations is the logic that we hear on the doors. Some tenants pride themselves on “keeping to myself” or “minding my business.” But just as the organizer struggles with members to gradually expand the aperture of their concern –– helping them to see that they can only really transform their conditions through building collective power and transforming the systems that create their individual conditions –– so too must we escape our organizational silos and understand the connections between our struggles in order to build the power we need to win.
The building of these data centers –– which are deeply unpopular, offer no benefit to our communities, and threaten our lives –– highlights the same antidemocratic and exploitative structures that undergird the housing system. Fusing the struggle for housing justice and environmental justice can create ideological clarity, build the collective power of a broader social base, and help us to identify strategic chokepoints we can target to win transformative change. Fighting against data centers, like contesting the financial industry’s control over land and housing, means fighting for a future where organized communities make decisions about how we live and where we live.
BACKGROUND
Memphis’s history is one of exploitation, made possible by disenfranchisement and white supremacist authoritarianism. This history, beginning with the theft of the land from indigenous people and the enslavement of Black people, benefitted the planter elite. Even after the abolition of slavery, these exploitative labor relationships remained, and these elites used redlining to segregate Black families into North and South Memphis. As in much of the rest of the nation, the end of legal segregation gave birth to new forms of de facto segregation.
Today, Memphis is one of the most segregated and economically exploited cities in the US. 17 Memphis neighborhoods are at least 98% Black. This segregation has created uneven development that impacts where and how people live. In some areas of the city, like the Medical District where Memphis Towers is located, luxury developments and ongoing gentrification are quickly displacing working class Black residents. In other areas of the city, like North and South Memphis, renters are dealing with overpriced, dilapidated apartments and facing near constant displacement. More than 14% of renters across the city face eviction each year, 82% of those evictions impact Black renters, and in some majority Black neighborhoods, filing rates are as high as 58%. (This data doesn’t even account for constructive and illegal evictions.)
Boxtown, where Elon Musk is building Colossus, is unique. Despite being 99% Black with a median income of less than $25,000 per year, a majority of residents are homeowners. This is because of the unique history of Boxtown, one of the earliest settlements of Black freedmen in Memphis founded in 1863. The neighborhood’s name came from the ingenuity of these displaced workers, many of whom built their homes from the cast off timbers and planks from the Illinois Central Railroad. In contrast to myths about the social mobility that homeownership affords, Boxtown’s residents have been targeted by industry; economically as workers and physically through industrial pollution.
The minimum wage in Memphis is $7.25 per hour. This disproportionately affects Black Memphians: in 2023, more than a quarter of Black Memphians were living at or below the poverty line (compared to 10% of white Memphians). Memphis has the fifth highest poverty rate of US cities with more than 500,000 people.
Cohering the collective power of working class Memphians requires understanding how these distinct conditions are connected to the structures of racial capitalism and aligning our struggles around a shared strategy.
PROFITING OFF OF PAIN
In December 2022, Memphis Towers Tenants Union members launched a media campaign that lit a fire under Millennia –– the slumlord profiting off Memphis Towers and, at the time, the third largest owner of HUD-subsidized housing in the US. Within two weeks of escalating, residents had won the new boiler that Millennia had claimed could not be replaced because of “supply chain issues.” However, it wasn’t until the following summer, while working on their next campaign, that tenants and organizers discovered that Millennia was receiving a nearly half-million dollar annual subsidy for Memphis Towers through the city’s PILOT –– payment in lieu of taxes –– program.
So tenant leaders visited the monthly meeting of the Health, Educational, and Housing Facilities Board, which gave out the subsidy, to tell the Board about the conditions they were living with at Memphis Towers. There, they discovered that in the previous three years, the HEHF Board had given $25 million in subsidies for landlords across the city. They also discovered that not once in the history of the HEHF Board had the board heard from the residents of the properties for which they granted subsidies.
The Memphis Tenants Union’s investigation into the HEHF Board revealed startling truths: landlords that received tax subsidies were among the worst evictors in the city, and tenants at their properties were dealing with some of the worst living conditions (Research available on request). Millennia, the Ohio-based slumlord that owned Memphis Towers, was receiving millions for its five properties across the city. As tenant leader Norris Cansler put it at the time, Millennia was “feeding at the public trough, but doing nothing for the public.”
However, it is not just the landlords who are being subsidized. More than six related boards appointed by city and county officials give an average of $41 million in annual tax subsidies to the largest, most profitable, and most polluting corporations across the city. Billions of dollars flow through Memphis every year, virtually untaxed due in part to these subsidies. The Memphis International Airport is the busiest cargo airport in North America and the third busiest in the world. Two major interstates, running the width and length of the US, intersect in Memphis, carrying billions of dollars of commodities through the city. Five Class I railroads operate in Memphis, and Memphis is home to the 2nd busiest port on the Mississippi River. FedEx, one of the largest distributors in the country, has its hub in Memphis, and in recent years Amazon has strategically located multiple distribution centers around the city.
These industries bring with them horrifying amounts of lethal toxins that cloud our air every day. Memphis has one of the highest rates of toxic air pollution in the US, and 90% of the toxic release facilities in Memphis are concentrated in 38109, the ZIP code for Southwest Memphis. Industrial polluters emit tons of low-level ozone, or smog, which causes asthma and other lung conditions like COPD. Memphis has been designated as asthma capital of the nation due to the disproportionate number of emergency room visits and deaths from asthma. (Shelby County has the highest rate of youth emergency room visits due to respiratory complications in the state of Tennessee according to the Tennessee Department of Health.) These industries also emit millions of tons of carbon, driving climate change meaning hotter summers and more frequent, less predictable violent weather events.
Corporations and politicians have long deemed 38109 a sacrifice zone, where the lives of the community are deemed less valuable than corporate profits. In 2018, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) replaced its coal plant in 38109 with a 1.1 gigawatt gas power plant and dumped the remaining 3.5 million cubic yards of toxic coal ash in a nearby landfill, leading to increased rates of cancer in the community. Valero Energy’s refinery in 38109 was the largest stationary source of air pollution in the country in 2017. The City placed its wastewater treatment facility and its garbage dump in 38109. And now xAI is operating 33 methane gas turbines without pollution controls or oversight from the Health Department, the EPA, or any regulatory agency to power Colossus, spewing tons of formaldehyde, nitrogen oxide, toxic particulate matter, and greenhouse gases into the air. All of this as a June, 2025 IPCC report called for a 45% reduction in emissions by 2030 to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees C.
Just as the US government provides an astounding $760 billion of annual subsidies to the destructive fossil fuel industry, Memphis and Shelby County have subsidized the invasion of 38109 by industry. When Electrolux built its facility (which is now home to Colossus) in 2014, it was itself a recipient of huge incentives from the city and county –– free land, more than $800 million in tax abatements through PILOTs, $42 million from the city and county, $95 million from the state, and $3 million from the Federal government. Electrolux operated for just 9 years before shutting down, and 500 workers (just half of the workers Electrolux promised to hire) lost their jobs overnight. Elon Musk has been clear that using the vacant Electrolux plant for their data center made it possible to get Colossus online in just 122 days.
By the time the community found out about the project, it was already in motion, facilitated by the Memphis Chamber of Commerce. Local elected officials had known about the project for months and had signed Non-Disclosure Agreements, allowing the project to develop in secret. The City and County have justified this by pointing to the tax revenue that Musk’s data center will generate. However, the $12 billion project has been assessed for property taxes at just $2.2 billion, effectively cutting property taxes by 82%. Memphis Light Gas and Water, the local utility company, plans to provide the facility with electricity at just half the rate of Memphians. All of this to facilitate the richest man in the world building a facility that will provide no public benefit, employ a negligible number of local workers, destroy the health of thousands of residents of 38109, and accelerate the climate crisis.
THE LIMITATIONS OF ISOLATED STRUGGLE
Our communities have mounted powerful fights against these slumlords and polluting corporations. In 2023, after a year-long campaign, the Memphis Towers Tenants Union forced the HEHF Board to pull the tax subsidies from Millennia. Because their profits relied on these public giveaways, this forced Millennia to give up Memphis Towers, while the national Millennia Resistance Campaign that MTU had helped to bring together forced the company to sell a majority of its properties across the country.
In 2021, Valero and Plains All American attempted to run an oil pipeline through Boxtown, labeling the neighborhood “the path of least resistance.” The company used deception and threats of imminent domain to attempt to displace working class homeowners and pave the way for the pipeline. In response, community leaders in 38109 formed Memphis Community Against the Pipeline, now Memphis Community Against Pollution, mounted a year-long campaign that defeated the company, blocked the pipeline, and protected people’s homes.
These victories of organized communities against billion-dollar corporations are exciting, and show us what is possible when people join together to fight back. But they also show us the limitations of these single-issue campaigns. When Millennia announced that they would be stepping away from Memphis Towers, we discovered that there was a ‘silent, limited partner’ in the project –– Richman, a Connecticut-based private equity firm –– that would be taking full ownership. While the union was able to force Richman to concede major improvements in the building, two years later, tenants are still subjected to bad living conditions for the profit of a corporation.
In Boxtown, MCAP built a powerful coalition of residents, neighborhood associations, churches, racial justice organizations, and environmental advocacy groups to defeat Valero and Plains All American. However, within a few years, Memphis’s elected leaders inked the sweetheart deal with Elon Musk to bring Colossus to Memphis. The Chamber of Commerce and the Mayor’s office didn’t even deign to talk to the community, fully expecting to operate with impunity. MCAP’s organizing has allowed the community to mount a powerful, multi-pronged resistance to Colossus, but our movements don’t yet have the collective power to stop the constant cycle of attacks on 38109 by industry.
SOLIDARITY IS THE SOLUTION
These issues –– housing and environmental racism –– are deeply connected. Renters living with mold in HEHF-subsidized properties and residents in Boxtown breathing in toxic fumes are fighting for their lives against the same exploitative system. As MTTU leader Joyce Warren says, “If we don’t come together, we ain’t going to have nothing. They’re going to keep on stepping on people and keep on killing people… If you want to live, you can come and get on board.” When people don’t have political power and are segregated into certain neighborhoods, the owning class feels emboldened to treat renters and residents as disposable in their pursuit of profits. In order to fight back, we need to align our movements and target the mechanisms that subsidize corporations exploiting the public for profit and the politicians who control them.
To target these mechanisms will require building a bloc of residents across the city who can wield sustained and collective political power. We have to build strong coalitions across issues and neighborhoods — coalitions like the one that Memphis Community Against Pollution is building against Colossus.
As housing organizers, we have to see that these data center fights are inextricable from our fights to transform the system of land and housing. Data centers like Colossus are a product of the same type of antidemocratic and exploitative systems that subsidize slumlords, invite Wall Street to speculate on our homes, and drive displacement. Just as our members see racial capitalism manifest in the mold under their sink, these data centers spewing poison into our air make manifest the contradiction between our communities and the wealthy. Fighting back against these unpopular projects can cohere our social base. What we have found at MTU is that these connections are immediately clear to our members. In a recent political education program at Memphis Towers, tenant leader Mary Collier said, “What Elon Musk is doing and what Richman’s doing –– it’s the same thing.”
Globally, the Right is escalating the brutality of the capitalist housing system, increasingly reflecting their vision for ruthless extraction and genocide. The ownership of land and housing continues to consolidate into fewer and fewer hands. The rates of homelessness continue to increase, and states and the Federal government continue to further criminalize the unhoused. The recent budget bill expanded Low-Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC), which will ensure further public subsidies for private landlords like Richman, who are held to fewer and fewer regulatory standards, following decades of the privatization, defunding, and deferred maintenance of genuinely public housing. Like these attacks on people’s access to shelter, the consolidation of data center infrastructure constitutes an existential threat to our communities. Data centers like Colossus drive up our utility costs and further privatize our energy grid, poison our communities, and accelerate the climate crisis.
Unless we can build collective power and solidarity to meet this moment and to fight the authoritarian advance, we will be helpless against it. As the authoritarian Right uses its control of the Federal government to create sacrifice zones across the US –– scrapping regulations, eroding rights, funneling public resources to subsidize the ultra-wealthy, and expanding the police state –– it is more urgent than ever that we work to articulate a set of basic and inextricable rights to clean air, clean water, and dignified housing, and that we get into alignment to fight for a future where organized communities make decisions about where we live and how we live. We must be able to gather our people across these issues to see that their suffering is caused by the same systems and individuals. We must be able to coordinate our strategies, to identify key mechanisms that the ruling class is relying on to enact its vision, and to work in alignment across organizations, sectors, and geographies to target those mechanisms. We have to hold our people to draw red lines and to take mass coordinated action when the opposition crosses those red lines. We have to build containers for our people to plan for the practice of militant solidarity in the face of existential threats.