05/14/2026
There are 525 Hobart homes in what we’ll call Amazon’s “Supreme Sacrifice Zone.”
All of them are within a mile of the proposed Amazon data center site.
The Supreme Sacrifice Zone comprises stand-alone houses as well as residences in five major subdivisions along 61st Ave., stretching from Wisconsin St. west to Liverpool Road, and houses on Colorado St. south of 61st to the railroad tracks, and along 62nd Pl. west of Colorado and 69th Ave. east of Colorado.
Roughly 1,340 Hobart citizens live there.
The men, women and children living in the Zone already are putting up with the noise, dust, mud, anxiety and ugliness of the Amazon construction project as they drive to and fro.
The proposed, two-part, 755-acre Amazon data center has cast a pall over the entire City of Hobart, whose officials are unresponsive to the demands of its residents who continue to oppose the project and want it stopped.
The recalcitrance of Hobart city officials pushing the Amazon project has triggered widespread public discussion about their poor judgment and, worse, speculation regarding their integrity.
A cloud of moral injury hangs over our community, forming a city-wide sacrifice zone in which civil and civic expectations clash with a twisted political reality.
Yet, the homes and owners in the Supreme Sacrifice Zone are at the greatest, most immediate risk.
The single-family houses and townhomes in the Zone had an average value of $234,000 and a combined value of $122.9 million, according to 2024 assessments, public records show.
Churches and 40 parcels of vacant land bump up the total value of Zone properties to $126.5 million dollars, records indicate.
According to the recently expressed personal and professional opinion of local Realtor Sophia Mason, the immediate impact of the Amazon project was most closely associated with the high-end, Eagle Creek Crossing subdivision, northeast of Arizona St. and 61st Ave.
It is the newest and most ritzy of the five subdivisions in the Zone. The Eagle Creek averages are: home size, 2,341 square feet; year built, 2022; and assessed value, $389,890.
Its southernmost back yards are a mere softball lob across 61st Ave. to Amazon project land.
Four homes in Eagle Creek had remained on the market for more than 100 days while Hobart properties elsewhere were sold in less than two weeks, said Mason, who testified under oath Feb. 17 in Lake Superior Court in Gary. Abnormally high days on the market are common harbingers of future price reductions.
Mason appeared as an expert witness on behalf of the Hobart community and four Hobart homeowners, including two in Eagle Creek, in a lawsuit that sought to block a massive, 10-year, 100% tax property break the City Council gave to Amazon and its developers.
Judge Kristina Kantar ruled in favor of the city and the Amazon developers.
It was a legal victory for the city, but an eye-opener for the project’s besieged residential neighbors, who were never asked if they were willing to take financial risks or make sacrifices of comfort for Amazon, the city administration or “the greater good.”
Mason testified that she’s been a Hobart resident for more than 30 years and a Realtor for 23 years. She has handled as many as 400 real estate transactions, she said.
Due to recent increases in overall Hobart housing prices, Eagle Creek homes today should have a price point of $400,000 to $450,000, Mason said.
Those prices would make Eagle Creek a premier Hobart neighborhood, but now there’s a problem.
“Okay, are they selling?” asked David Dearing, attorney for the four Hobart homeowners.
“No,” Mason said.
What’s the problem?
Across 61st Ave. are about 170 acres of farmland that Amazon Data Services, Inc., and its developer, Hobart Owner LLC, want to convert into a data center campus.
“The house that I did show (in Eagle Creek) was stunning, beautiful and well-priced for what was there,” Mason said, “but the client did not like the fact that there was a data center.”
To the west along 61st, Amazon aims to bury another 555 acres of farmland under a second set of data center buildings and tarmac.
That western site sits across the street from, and logically, puts at similar risk, the Amber Creek subdivision, with 68 homes ($20.1 million total value, $316,827 average) and 34 town homes ($7.2 million, $210,956).
Dearing asked, what about beyond Eagle Creek, “in your opinion, does that negative effect extend as much as two miles?”
“Yes,” Mason said. There will be some effect. “Not as bad,” she said, “but not good.”
For many, if not most of the owners of homes in the Supreme Sacrifice Zone, and throughout Hobart, their residential real estate purchases represent the largest financial investments of their lives.
Yet, outside of perfunctory public hearings, home investors in the Zone – or anywhere else in Hobart -- were not consulted regarding the city’s or Amazon’s plans or their financial impact.
A 10% drop in value would mean an average loss of $23,400 for the 525 homeowners in the Zone; a 20% dip – which Hobart has seen at least twice in the past half century -- would cost the average Zone home investor $46,800.
Such a drastic stripping of home equity could flip recent, highly-leveraged home buyers in the Zone “upside down,” leaving them owing more to their lenders than their homes are worth.
These days, Zone residents awake mornings to giant, noisy earth movers and dump trucks, which have been banging and clanging on site for several months.
That early racket comes thanks to “fill” and “grading” permits graciously granted to both data center developers by Hobart city government’s data center sycophants long before petitions for more comprehensive site plans were heard by the Plan Commission Thursday (May 7, 2026).
Thus far, a series of so-called public hearings on the city’s administrative steps required by Indiana law have been little more than dumb shows.
Hundreds of remonstrances by data center opponents – whose speaking time was limited by city fiat to two minutes -- were ignored.
And though Brandie Schaeffer, Amazon’s top land development official, said under oath that the company wants to be “a good neighbor,” she never said she’d spoken with any of Amazon’s potential residential neighbors in Hobart before the company green light a sprawling Amazon industrial complex across or down the street from them.
Possibly, the tech giant, controlled by 250-times-a-billionaire Jeff Bezos, considered its $47 million payment into city government coffers, with more millions promised to come -- ironically called “community benefit payments” -- sufficient communication with the locals.
Schaeffer is the former town manager of Warrenton, VA, where the town and a citizen-led not-for-profit organization are snarled in controversy over open records related to a proposed Amazon data center project there.
The more than one-square-mile Hobart farmland site came to Amazon’s attention, Schaeffer testified, “through an RFP (request for proposal) from the Northwest Indiana Forum.”
Schaeffer described the Forum as an organization “that markets and puts information together on development.”
Both NIPSCO and Indiana-American Water are positioned to be key providers of energy and water to the proposed Hobart center. Both are Forum “member” corporations. Both have employees on the Forum’s board of managing directors.
The Forum and its six-figure salaried president and CEO, Heather Ennis, hosted a March 31 online meeting with Hobart Mayor Josh Huddlestun and Amazon data center representatives to tout the project.
In the past few months, Amazon has forced Hobart residents to swallow a bitter civics lesson.
With only a few rare and sporadic dissenters, the city’s economic development directors, redevelopment commissioners, sanitary and stormwater board members, plan commissioners, city council members and two mayors – Huddlestun and his mayoral predecessor, Brian Snedecor -- discounted the interests of hundreds of Hobart homeowners in the Supreme Sacrifice Zone – all to serve the God of “development.”
By the hundreds, Hobart citizens, many of them obviously unaccustomed to public speaking, have gone to Hobart Plan Commission and City Council meetings, risking expulsion or possible arrest, or worse, the “psychological harm” likened to PTSD, “incurred from committing, witnessing, or being subject to actions that violate one’s moral code.”
They’ve expressed their opposition to the city’s proposed industrial projects, only to walk away, shaking their heads, realizing the lie they’ve held as truth for most of their lives, the naive notion implanted in them since their school days that, in America, government officials, whose salaries they pay through their taxes, were supposed to work for them.
What they learned, instead, was “realpolitik.”
The interests of outsiders -- land speculators, industrial “developers,” payrollers from the Northwest Indiana Forum and its industrial members, including two likely prime suppliers to Amazon -- NIPSCO and Indiana American Water Co. -- which stand to sell many millions of dollars in electricity, gas and water to the data center – mattered most, while the hundreds of millions of dollars these Hobart residents have invested in their homes, counted for little or naught.
