This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Angel Crawford, who owns 18 rental properties in northeastern Louisiana and runs a third-party website connecting tenants with property owners. Construction for Meta’s largest-ever AI data center has begun in Holly Ridge, an unincorporated community about 10 minutes away from her home in Delhi.
My husband and I have been in Delhi for four years. We’re originally from this area, but we’ve moved around because of our nursing careers. I was a quality manager, and my husband was a director of case management.
We were empty nesters looking for something to do, so we started with real estate and rentals because they are very much needed in this area. It’s very rural here, so when there are fluctuating prices in the market, it doesn’t really hit us because there are never enough houses for sale or rent.
In 2024, we started buying older houses that had been on the market for a long time or needed a lot of work. We had a vision to create a mobile home park and already purchased some land when we heard about Meta’s data center. That’s what pushed us to keep going forward. We understood there wasn’t enough housing for residents, and our dream of building more multifamily houses was right in line to do that.
Around here, people feel one way or the other about the data center. Either people are excited about the opportunities, or they hate it. There’s no in between. I see it as an opportunity for us to have more experiences in our area and jobs for our children, so they can stay here instead of moving away.
We began Parish Line Properties, which now operates 18 properties, in 2024. I also created StayNELA, a third-party website to connect listing agents with tenants, in 2025.
The impact of Meta’s data center on real estate
Parish Line Properties has 18 homes, and 14 of those are workforce housing.
Location is very important to Meta’s workers because they work six to seven days a week and 12-plus hours a day. They leave around 4:30 in the morning, and they don’t come home until 7 at night.
One of the big things my tenants tell me is that if they live in Dallas and it’s 30 miles to work, it takes about 30 minutes. Well, in rural areas, 30 miles could take 60 minutes because of all the back roads and little towns you have to go through. The closer they can get to the job site, the better.
A fully-furnished four-bedroom, two-bathroom home that’s eight miles from the data center costs an average of $3,000 a month. I don’t have any problem with getting tenants in those homes at that price point. Before Meta arrived, an unfurnished house in the same area would probably go for around $1,200 to $1,500 a month.
We’ve assured our local long-term tenants that we won’t increase their rent. That’s not what we’re about. We’re not going to put local tenants in a bind. We’re going to find different and new properties to help with workforce housing.
We opened our Antley Pines mobile home park in December 2025. We added two homes last December, four this May, and our last four in July. All the homes were secured by deposits from Meta workers before we even got them into the park.
Separately, I created StayNELA because there weren’t many resources for anybody who wasn’t a local to find rental homes. I did a lot of research for several months by driving around the area and looking at all the different signs in people’s yards or at four-way stops that you couldn’t read properly. I kept a log, took pictures, and kept them in a folder on my phone. If anything was on Facebook about a rental, I saved it.
When I finally took the leap to design a webpage, I reached out to everybody that I had found through phone numbers, Facebook posts, and listings. I’m not a real estate agent, so I’m helping people advertise. When I list a property, I include the owner’s phone number so potential tenants can go straight to the owner of that house.
My goal was to bridge that gap for people looking for rentals here from other states.
The impact of Meta’s data center on the local economy
Each home in our mobile park is on one-fourth of an acre. After Meta’s gone, we can sell them individually or rent them out.
We’ve seen a lot of laundromats, RV parks, and mobile home parks come to the area. It’s great for the economy in our area because people who we’ve worked with who install electrical systems, septic systems, plumbing, gravel, and all those things are busy because Meta’s here.
For example, getting a property surveyed is extremely hard, whereas it used to be pretty easy. Before, you could call them, and they’d say, “Yeah, I’ll be there to come do your survey in a week or so.”
Now, you have to get on a list and wait for your turn.
