Do Data Centers Hurt Home Values in Whitehouse, Waterville, Oregon and Monclova? Lucas County Leads Ohio on the Ban, Here Are the Numbers

Lucas County has now put more names on the statewide data center ban petition than any other county in Ohio, about 10,700 as of Tuesday, and it does not even have a hyperscale data center. Wood County does. Oregon votes on its own 25-megawatt limit on November 3. Whitehouse and Waterville petitions get filed next week. And the towns doing the organizing are, not by accident, the four most expensive places per square foot in Greater Toledo. I'm a contractor's kid and I went to Ohio State for marketing, so I pulled every 2026 resale closing in each of those towns to see what exactly is being defended.

What is actually happening, town by town?

Start with the thing that is real and on a ballot. Oregon residents, organized as United Neighbors of Oregon, collected 1,684 valid signatures against a minimum of 1,369 for a charter amendment that prohibits building a data center with an aggregate monthly demand or peak load above 25 megawatts inside the city. Council accepted the certification unanimously in August, which under the charter was a paperwork duty, not an opinion. It goes to Oregon voters November 3, 2026. The trigger was Vantage Data Centers' plan to buy about 170 acres near Wynn and Corduroy roads for a campus and an electric substation. The mayor's public position has been that he is keeping an open mind and that the developer put almost two years into the project. The activists' position, in their spokesman's words, was that all they ever wanted was for people to get a chance to vote on it. Both of those can be true.

Then the statewide layer. Conserve Ohio is gathering signatures for a constitutional amendment that would add a Section 36a to Article II and flatly prohibit construction of any data center above the same 25-megawatt line, measured across contiguous or aggregated parcels. The Ohio Ballot Board approved it as a single issue in April. The group missed the 2026 deadline and is now aiming at November 2, 2027. It needs 413,487 valid signatures on 2022 turnout math, a number that will change after this November's governor's race, plus 5 percent of the governor vote in at least 44 of the 88 counties. It had roughly 130,000 as of Tuesday. Lucas County led with about 10,700, ahead of Franklin at 10,190, Cuyahoga at 8,016, Stark at 7,727 and Wood at 5,446.

Then the layer that matters most if you own west of the river. The regional organizer, Lyn Cox of Monclova Township, told The Blade in August that the plan is a charter amendment for every city and village in Lucas and Wood counties that has a charter. Whitehouse and Waterville petitions were circulating then and, as of Tuesday, were close enough that organizers expect to submit both next week, on the same day, hoping the two cities can share the cost of a special election. Rossford, Perrysburg, Bowling Green, Holland, Sylvania and Maumee were described as early planning. Her line on why Lucas County leads the state without a single hyperscaler: "We don't have a hyperscaler here, but there are definitely threats," pointing at the Regional Growth Partnership's own marketing, where a site-selection consultant calls northwest Ohio one of the top markets in the industry because of "wide-open farmland to build these big data center campuses."

Her read on Wood County is the one that should make Lucas County owners pay attention. Meta's Middleton Township campus north of Bowling Green was announced at 280 acres, 715,000 square feet, more than $800 million and about 100 permanent jobs. Her claim, and it is her claim, is that the footprint under construction is now over 1,000 acres. "It feels like a giant bait and switch for people there." I could not verify the 1,000-acre figure from a county record on Tuesday, so treat it as an organizer's number until it is not. What I can verify is that Wood County, which has the thing, has half the signatures Lucas County has, which does not. Fear of the next one organizes faster than resentment of the current one.

What do the organizing towns actually sell for?

This is the part nobody at a petition table has, so here it is. Every resale closing in the NORIS MLS for 2026 through September 6, new construction excluded, days measured from listing contract to purchase contract. Builder days on market is an advertising choice and never belongs in this table.

Town (2026 resale)	Closings	Median price	Per sq ft	Days to contract	Above original ask
Monclova	42	$505,000	$201	42	33%
Whitehouse	54	$437,500	$197	35	39%
Waterville	77	$390,000	$184	38	43%
Perrysburg	335	$363,050	$186	39	34%
Sylvania	297	$354,000	$169	35	46%
Holland	134	$334,000	$163	40	38%
Maumee	240	$310,000	$173	35	48%
Bowling Green	161	$270,000	$162	36	51%
Oregon	133	$240,000	$158	36	53%
Rossford	34	$220,500	$167	34	59%
Toledo	2,134	$154,200	$118	38	39%

Read the top of that table against the list of towns where petitions are circulating first. Monclova, Whitehouse and Waterville are the three most expensive places per foot in the region, and they are also where the farmland is, which is exactly what the site-selection consultant was advertising. The Anthony Wayne corridor is a custom-build corridor. The people who bought a $500,000 house on two acres out there did it for the two acres and the quiet, and a 715,000-square-foot building with its own substation is the precise opposite of what they paid for. That is not a market forecast. That is just why the signature count looks the way it does.

Oregon is a different market and a different argument. The median is $240,000, the price per foot is $158, and 53 percent of resales closed above the original asking price this year. That is a working-family town with tight inventory and a lot of buyers at the same number, and the Vantage site is on the edge of it. The amendment there is not defending a luxury premium. It is defending whether the next 170 acres is houses or servers.

Do data centers actually hurt home values?

Honest answer: nobody in Lucas County can prove it either way yet, because nothing has been built and then sold next to. I will not hand you a national study and pretend it is Whitehouse. What I can tell you is what the record shows and does not show.

It does not show a Wood County effect yet. Haskins, the one village inside Middleton Township where Meta is building, closed 11 resale homes in 2026 at a median $342,500, with 64 percent above original ask and a median 42 days to contract. Eleven sales is not evidence of anything except that eleven people bought there. Bowling Green next door closed 161 at $270,000 and 51 percent over ask, which is a healthy market, not a fleeing one. If the Meta campus is pushing prices down around it, it has not shown up in a closed sale I can find. If it is pushing them up because a thousand construction workers need somewhere to sleep, that has not shown up cleanly either.

What a ban does, mechanically, is put a ceiling on one specific use of land. That has two effects on value, and they pull in opposite directions. For the farm parcel itself, the hyperscale buyer was the highest bidder on the planet, and a 25-megawatt cap removes that bidder. Anyone holding acreage on the Anthony Wayne side hoping to sell to a data center should understand that is the bid being voted away. For the houses around that parcel, the cap removes the risk that the field behind you becomes a campus, and buyers price risk even when they cannot name it. In a corridor where one in three homes already closes above asking, that reassurance is worth something. How much is a question the next two years of closings will answer, not a blog post.

The grid, water and rate arguments are real and I am not the person to referee them. Conserve Ohio's petition language is about strain on the grid, utility costs, water consumption and the character of communities. The Regional Growth Partnership's language is about land, energy and people. Both of those are on the record and you can read them yourself. What I am the person for is the number on your street, and the number on your street says the organizing towns are the ones with the most per-foot value to protect.

What should you do if you own in one of these towns?

If you are in Oregon, you have a ballot in seven weeks and the Vantage parcel is a known location. If you are thinking about selling in the next year, the question is whether to list before or after November 3, and the honest answer depends on which side of Wynn Road you are on and how a buyer would read a campus going up or not going up behind you. That is a street-level call, not a town-level one.

If you are in Whitehouse or Waterville, nothing is on a ballot yet. Petitions get filed next week, each city has to certify signatures, and then there is a special election to schedule and pay for. The Trenton case at the Ohio Supreme Court, decided this summer, settled that a city council cannot refuse to certify a valid charter petition by inventing its own signature math, so the path is clearer than it was in the spring. Expect a vote in 2027 rather than this year. In the meantime, your market is doing what it has done all year: a median 35 to 38 days to contract and four in ten homes closing above the original ask.

If you are in Monclova Township, you are in a township, and townships in Ohio do not have charters. The charter-amendment route does not exist for you, which is why the organizer who lives there is running the statewide petition instead. Your protection, if it comes, is either the 2027 constitutional amendment or the township's own zoning, and zoning is a trustees meeting, not a ballot.

If you own farmland anywhere in the corridor and had a data center in mind as an exit, the window for that conversation is the window before a vote, and it is closing at the speed of a signature table. I would rather tell you that plainly than have you find out from a headline.

And if you are one of the people who signed, the thing worth knowing is that what you are defending is measurable. Whitehouse is $197 a foot. Toledo is $118. That gap is the corridor's entire value proposition, and a campus with a substation is the fastest way I know to test whether it holds.

Send me your address and I will send back three things: whether your town has a charter and what has actually been filed there, the nearest proposed or rumored site to your parcel, and every resale closing on your street in 2026 with what it means for your number. That is a one-page read, not a pitch. Start with a home value estimate if you are weighing a sale, or set up a home search if the corridor is where you want to land, and I will run it myself.

Related reading: the Whitehouse, Waterville and Monclova submarket pages, what West Side homes actually sold for in 2026, and new construction in Waterville against resale.

Adam Geuy, Realtor - Blacktree Realty. ABR, PSA, SRS. Greater Toledo, Ohio. 419.540.8659.

Sources

• Lucas County signature count, statewide total, county ranking, requirement math, Oregon ballot status, Whitehouse and Waterville filing plan, other communities, Cox and Turner quotes, Meta acreage claim, Trenton ruling: The Blade, September 8, 2026.
• Oregon signatures (1,684 valid, 1,369 minimum), Vantage 170 acres, the every-charter-city plan, towns in early planning: The Blade, August 13, 2026.
• Oregon council acceptance, United Neighbors of Oregon, Wynn and Corduroy location, mayor and organizer quotes: 13abc, August 18, 2026.
• Oregon measure text and November 3, 2026 date: Ballotpedia. Statewide amendment text, Section 36a, November 2, 2027 target: Ballotpedia.
• Meta Middleton Township campus, 280 acres, 715,000 square feet, $800 million, jobs: Regional Growth Partnership; resident opposition timeline: BG Independent News, February 24, 2026.
• All sale prices, counts, price per square foot, days to contract and over-ask shares: NORIS MLS closed residential resale listings, January 1 through September 6, 2026, computed by Adam Geuy from MLS exports. Builder days on market is intentionally not reported.