Overview:
A walking tour near a CoreSite data center raised concerns about air quality, water use and who shapes development in GES.
Nearly 50 residents, activists and community members walked through Elyria-Swansea on Tuesday, Sept. 1, using drums, guitar and colorful flags to draw attention to neighborhood concerns about Denver’s growing data center industry.
“Money speaks,” said Julia Wade, an East Coast native who has lived in Denver for six years. “These challenges are faced across the country by the poor communities – the use of land or the improper use of land because of the lack of power.”
The group started at Green House Connection Center on Claude Court, less than a mile from CoreSite’s DE3 data center under construction at 4900 Race St., before walking through the neighborhood as part of the 15th Data Center Walk & Talk Tour hosted by the Inter-Neighborhood Cooperation (INC) Sustainability Committee.
These walks have brought more than 450 people to Elyria-Swansea over the past year. The Sept. 1 event included remarks and conversation with Green House Connection Center director Harmony Cummings, council member Darrell Watson and Jeff Ackermann of Together Colorado, who addressed residents’ concerns about the data centers’ potential impact on air quality, water use, energy demand, noise and neighborhood health.
“We are here tonight to talk to have some difficult conversations and also figure out how we come together to do better and protect this community,” Cummings said. “And I don’t know what that looks like.”
Mercedes Gonzalez, a longtime resident involved with the GES Coalition, said the walks are meant to bring the community’s issues with data centers into the open.
“This vulnerable, low-income community [is] hardworking, where they’re planting a data center. It’s an injustice for us and shows a lack of respect,” Gonzalez said. “They’re contaminating our planet, our air. Everything we have in this world is being contaminated with all the data centers they’re building.”
CoreSite’s data center has become a flashpoint in a broader debate over how Denver should regulate an industry tied to artificial intelligence and other digital infrastructure. Residents at the walk said the issue feels familiar in Elyria-Swansea and Globeville, neighborhoods already shaped by Interstate 70, industrial uses, the National Western Center and other major projects.
“It is already located in one of the most polluted communities in Colorado and one of the most polluted areas in the country,” Cummings said. “The data center itself is located just 75 feet away from where they’re building a nursing home and within 150 feet of a park, a rec center, an affordable housing complex and a healthcare clinic. These types of buildings should not be happening, and they definitely should not be happening here.”
CoreSite has been reluctant to engage with the community. At the last minute, CoreSite pulled out of a public meeting in February 2026 and has not attended one of the INC’s neighborhood gatherings. Aside from its own press release in Oct. 2025, the company has not commented on the DE3 data center.
“At CoreSite, we are committed to supporting the cities and communities where we operate,” said Adam Post, SVP of Corporate Development and Finance at CoreSite, according to a company statement. “Our nearly 190 Denver-based employees are beyond excited to further invest in their hometown.”
Alfredo Reyes, a candidate for Denver City Council at-large, said he attended because the issue reflects a larger pattern in communities of color and under-resourced neighborhoods.
“It concerns me the way that communities of color and under-resourced communities continue to be targeted with what is sold to us as development,” Reyes said. “But it is more the same: extracting our water, extracting our clean air, extracting our resources and selling it back to us as progress.”
Outside the CoreSite facility and near the new Viña Apartments, residents directed questions to council member Watson, whose District 9 includes Elyria-Swansea. Josie Medina, a longtime resident whose family has lived in the GES neighborhood for generations, said she was frustrated by what she described as a lack of neighborhood approval.
“I’m so confused why this building was even allowed to be built without our approval,” Medina said.
Watson told residents that City Council did not directly approve the building through a council vote. He also pointed to Denver’s temporary moratorium on some new data center applications, saying the pause affects additional proposed CoreSite buildings but does not stop the already approved project.
“So Denver City Council never had a vote,” Watson said. “It’s not just us; it’s municipalities across the region across the street. We are all facing the same situation with data centers: there is no existing (regulation), so I’m honored to be working with city council members Paul Kashmann and Pro Tem Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez to put forward the first moratorium.”
The moratorium has delayed some additional data center applications while Denver studies possible regulations. Residents at the walk said they want that process to include people who live closest to existing and proposed sites.
“We don’t need ventilation,” interrupted one resident during the walk. “We need a ban.”
After participants returned to Green House Connection Center, the data center had become part of a larger question residents have raised for years: how much more industrial development Elyria-Swansea should be asked to absorb, and how much say neighbors will have before the next project arrives.
“In this area, 10% of the people either have oxygen ventilators or CPAPs, and I always ask the question, ‘When that thing is overloaded, what are we gonna do about electricity?’” said a local named Gilbert during the community gathering. “So I say no (more) data centers!”
By walking from Green House toward the CoreSite property, organizers asked visitors and elected officials to see the data center from the same sidewalks, homes and apartment buildings that residents use every day.
“We are gathering people physically in the places where these events and pollution and harms are occurring so that they can see it, smell it, taste it, hear it, and feel it in their bodies,” Cummings said. “We especially need decision-makers to come out. And so tonight is the first time that city councilman Darrell Watson, who represents this area, is coming out tonight … We need to do better to protect the people, the planet and the future.”
