I’ve been thinking a lot about the 1990s lately.
Not in a nostalgia way. In a “this is exactly what’s happening right now” way.
When wireless carriers started rolling out cell tower infrastructure in the mid-90s, they had everything you’d think they needed. Capital. Federal backing. Genuine public demand for the product. And they were still getting blocked by local zoning boards in towns nobody had ever heard of.
The Telecom Act of 1996 was supposed to fix it. Localities fought it anyway. For nearly a decade, one of the most important infrastructure rollouts in American history crept forward at the pace of community opposition.
I was in the middle of that. Our team was doing permit work across markets where carriers were trying to site towers. We saw exactly how those fights played out up close.
The ones who figured it out didn’t out-lawyer anybody. They out-designed them.
Design Around the Objection
There’s an anecdote I keep coming back to. A community with a strong Native American cultural identity was fighting a standard cell tower hard. Aesthetics, property values, the usual. So the carrier designed the tower as a totem pole. A big one. Built to fit the neighborhood’s character.
It worked.
I didn’t work that project. But I heard about it, and it stuck with me, because it was such a clear example of what the smartest teams in that era were learning to do.
The objection surface shrank because the footprint changed. Same infrastructure, completely different relationship to the place it was landing in.
The carriers who built the most during that period understood something that a lot of project teams are still learning today: you don’t solve a community opposition problem with a better permit application. You solve it earlier, in the design, before anyone is asked to approve anything.
The People Who Showed Up
I’ve also been thinking about two people who worked for us during that era. John Dalton and Paul Kenny.
They were what I’d call road warriors. They showed up at city hall. They shook hands. They came back the next day. And the day after that.
What they were doing, though nobody would have described it this way at the time, was building trust through repetition. They were proving that we weren’t transient. That Burnham was going to follow through. That when we said we’d come back with an answer, we actually came back. In markets where nobody trusted developers yet, that consistency was the difference between projects that moved and projects that didn’t.
Both John and Paul have since passed. But their names haven’t left us. Our Chicago office has a Dalton Boardroom — named not for a title or a transaction, but for the way a man showed up, day after day, in rooms where nobody knew him yet. That’s the standard we still hold ourselves to.
Same Problem, Different Decade
We’re watching the same dynamics play out in data centers right now.
Roughly $64 billion in data center projects are currently blocked. Timelines have tripled in contested markets. A lot of project teams are treating this as a permitting problem, something you hand off to someone else after the real decisions are made.
The real issue is trust. And trust can’t be expedited.
The community asking hard questions at a zoning hearing isn’t being obstructionist. She’s doing her job. The developers who understand that — who show up before they have a permit application pending and treat local officials as collaborators rather than obstacles — those are the teams building right now.
We’ve been here before. We helped build the playbook twenty-five years ago. The question is who picks it up first.
The carriers who figured it out didn’t wait for the industry to catch up. Neither do we.
Carson P. Kyhl is Principal at Burnham Nationwide, the nation’s leading permit expediting and building code consulting firm. Burnham works with national developers, retailers, and technology clients across eight major markets.
Next: From Burden to Asset — What Communities Deserve to Know and Demand From Data Center Development
