Somebody read the fine print on the deal that's reshaping your town. It should have been you.
A data center the size of a small city. A power plant. A factory, a solar field, a transmission line marching across the horizon. When something enormous comes to your community, the pitch is always the same-jobs, growth, partnership, progress-and the deal is almost always done before you're ever really asked.
In The Price of Progress, Chad Law tells the true stories of eight ordinary Americans who learned that lesson the hard way, from opposite ends of the political spectrum. A Portland mother whose child's school quietly went without while corporations down the road paid almost nothing in taxes. A Texas nurse who recorded the round-the-clock roar of a crypto mine because no one in charge would measure it. A Missouri farm family staring at survey stakes for a power line they couldn't refuse. A 93-year-old woman sued over land her family had held for generations. Drawn entirely from published reporting and told with a novelist's eye, their stories reveal a single pattern repeating in town after town: the people who live with the consequences are the last to get a say.
But this is not a book against building. It's a book about building right. Law-a lifelong businessman who spent his career on the selling side of the table-hands readers the checklist he wishes every community had: eight plain-language rules to demand before a major project becomes permanent, covering tax breaks, energy, local jobs, environmental impact, public notice, property taxes, job guarantees, and eminent domain. Each one ends with the questions to ask out loud, in the room, before you ever vote yes.
Part investigation, part field guide, The Price of Progress reframes America's affordability and trust crisis as something simpler and more fixable than we've been told: a crisis of consent. It's a book for anyone who has ever sat in a folding chair at a public meeting, wondered why their question got applause but no answer-and decided to do something about it.
For readers of Evicted, The Fifth Risk, and Abundance.
