Are data centers the next constraint on affordable housing supply?

[Editor’s note: This is part 2 of a 3-part HousingWire special series on the impacts of data centers in housing. Part 1 is here.]In 1998, when Steve Alloy succeeded his father, Martin, as president of Northern Virginia-based Stanley Martin Homes, buying land wisely was, as it is now, both a point of pride and a business necessity.A cardinal rule of engagement and survival, as any homebuilder competing in the NVR- and Ryan Homes-dominated Mid-Atlantic region knew, was to counterpunch on land acquisition rather than compete head-to-head with the nation’s most efficient and profitable public homebuilder. Being able to “zag” when NVR “zigged” meant getting good at finding residential development locations that NVR land strategists would regard as too “hairy,” too time-consuming, or too fraught with engineering, permitting, or zoning complexities to fit into NVR’s hyper-efficient, asset-light land take-down system.“We pursue different sites many more times than our national competitors do, just because our strategies are different,” Alloy told HousingWire/TBD. “We see many of them on a variety of sites, but in a lot of places, we would be kind of the go-to home builder on a difficult zo...