I Am Watching Home Get Sold Out in Real Time

I've spent more than eleven years working in critical infrastructure. I know exactly what Project Jupiter will do to El Paso.

I'm not here to prove credentials or back up claims with citations. I'm documenting what is happening right now. My reality. Timestamped on the internet. This will age well, because when people in my community, their kids, and their kids' kids are dealing with the consequences of decisions being made today, there will be a record that someone saw it coming and said something.

My community is largely older-generation Mexican Americans. We care about family, tradition, honest work, and authenticity. It's easy to assume my community doesn't know what a data center is, or what a 500-megawatt continuous load does to a utility grid, or what that means for electric bills. But that's not ignorance. That's trust.

They're humble, honest people who don't expect threats to come from infrastructure. Why would they? We've never had to. Developers are pitching billions of dollars to a low-wage border town. Do you really think anyone making these decisions cares about the utility rate impacts on people earning minimum wage? On seniors on Medicare? On families relying on food assistance? What happens when electric bills spike? When more local businesses that have survived for generations finally close?

The developers' reality is already distorted. We're living with six percent mortgages. Most of the population is on or near minimum wage. Housing costs are set nationally, wages are local, and now we're layering in infrastructure costs the community never saw coming, never agreed to, and won't understand until they're already paying for it. At that point, it's too late.

I have the technical knowledge to see exactly how this unfolds. I don't have the power to stop it. The people with real decision-making authority are unlikely to be subject-matter experts in critical infrastructure. My community won't understand what happened until it's already done.

The first rule of my research lab is simple: do no harm.

That doesn't just mean not causing harm yourself. It means not standing by while others do. It means not letting people make decisions about communities they don't understand, using infrastructure those communities will pay for, justified by economic projections that only work if you ignore who actually lives there. That's us.

I'm angry because I know better, and I also know that none of these words may matter. This is not how you build infrastructure in communities. I'm documenting this because when the bills arrive, when the businesses close, when people ask how nobody saw this coming, I can say that someone did.

This is my timestamp. This is what I knew, when I knew it, and how powerless I was to change it.