Drive south on 220th Street West toward the edge of Farmington and you will pass a stretch of land that used to be Fountain Valley Golf Course. The fairways closed years ago. If you follow the usual pattern of Twin Cities suburbs, a shuttered golf course means one thing: a builder buys the land, the city rezones it for houses, and eighteen months later there is a subdivision with a name like The Fairways or Fountain Ridge and a hundred new listings competing with the resale market.
That is exactly what Farmington planned for this parcel. Back on January 16, 2007, the city rezoned the Fountain Valley property and guided it toward Low Density Residential and Low-Medium Density Residential uses in its comprehensive plan. For nearly two decades, this was housing land in waiting.
It is not becoming housing. In 2024, Farmington rezoned the same 343 acres to Mixed-Use Commercial/Industrial to make way for the Farmington Technology Park, a hyperscale data center campus proposed by Denver-based developer Tract. If you are comparing Farmington to Rosemount, Lakeville, or Eagan right now, this single parcel tells you more about how the market actually works here than any median price you will find on a portal.
What Actually Replaced the Fairways
The Farmington Technology Park, as currently planned, covers three lots across 342.81 acres, land that includes the former Fountain Valley golf course and a neighboring parcel long owned by Independent School District 192 and known locally as the Angus property. The Farmington Planning Commission approved a final plat and planned unit development in November 2024 for up to 12 data center buildings totaling more than 2.5 million square feet. At full buildout, Tract has put the project's value near $5 billion. No end user or tenant company has been publicly identified.
The money involved is not small. The school district agreed in January 2024 to sell roughly 188 acres of the Angus property to Tract for $18 million, a figure district officials have described as amounting to about $3,000 per student. Tract's own project materials project an additional $75 million in tax revenue for the school district over 20 years once the campus is operating. Tract closed on the golf course parcel itself on February 10, 2026.
Site work is underway but not finished. Tract's public updates describe demolition of the old clubhouse and outbuildings, removal of trees flagged for safety, and soil testing tied to mercury levels the company attributes to decades of golf course chemical use. The Minnesota Department of Agriculture's Voluntary Investigation and Cleanup program is overseeing that testing before any cleanup or vertical construction begins.
The Legal Fight, in Plain Terms
Two lawsuits grew out of this rezoning, and they are not the same case.
Castle Rock Township sued Farmington in January 2025, arguing the city violated its Orderly Annexation Agreement with the township when it changed the comprehensive plan designation on annexed land without the township's consent. That agreement has governed how the two jurisdictions handle annexation since 2017, and the township's position is that Farmington was required to get its consent before rezoning. This case is still active.
A separate group, the Coalition for Responsible Data Center Development, filed its own suit in late 2024 raising concerns about water use, noise, and the project's proximity to established neighborhoods including Executive Estates, Park Place, and Countryside Estates. That group withdrew its lawsuit in early September 2026, citing the rising cost of litigation the group had been funding through volunteer donations. The coalition's chair said the underlying legal arguments still had merit but that continuing to fund the case was no longer sustainable for the residents carrying it. The withdrawal does not affect Castle Rock Township's separate case, which continues to work through Dakota County District Court.
On the city's side, officials have consistently pointed to the same jobs-and-tax-base argument: hundreds of permanent positions, a larger commercial tax base, and school funding that arrives regardless of whether new families move in to fill new houses. That is the trade the council voted for, twice, by wide margins.
Why This Changes the Math for East Side Buyers
Here is the part that does not show up in a Redfin snapshot. In the three months ending May 2026, resale homes in Farmington were selling in a median of 27 days, a tight enough pace that a fresh wave of subdivision inventory would normally be welcome relief for move-up buyers stuck bidding against each other. That relief was supposed to come from this exact parcel. The 2007 zoning said so.
Instead, 343 acres that could have delivered several hundred new housing units over the coming years are now permanently off the residential supply side of the ledger. That does not make Farmington's resale market tighter in some dramatic way. It does mean one of the largest land parcels on the city's map, one that had been earmarked for exactly the kind of new-construction competition buyers in Eagan and Lakeville have watched loosen up their own markets, is not going to play that role here.
What it changes instead is the tax and infrastructure side of the equation. The $18 million payment to the school district and the projected $75 million in tax revenue over 20 years are real inputs into how the district and city fund future services, potentially including the kind of infrastructure and public safety spending that shows up in levies and, eventually, in property tax lines on a closing statement. Whether that nets out as a benefit or a cost to any individual homeowner depends on variables well outside this post's scope. What matters for a buyer today is knowing the mechanism exists at all before you fall in love with a floor plan two streets over.
What to Actually Ask Before You Buy Near It
If you are looking at homes in the neighborhoods closest to the technology park site, a short list of questions will tell you more than any listing description:
- Is the property within the areas identified in city planning documents as adjacent to the Farmington Technology Park, and how far is it from the current site boundary?
- What construction timeline has the seller's agent confirmed with the city, and has vertical construction actually started or is the site still in demolition and soil remediation?
- Has the seller disclosed any communication from the city, Tract, or neighborhood groups about the project's status?
- Is the Castle Rock Township lawsuit still pending, and what would a ruling in the township's favor mean for the project's timeline?
- Are there any setback commitments on record for the specific parcel closest to the property you are considering?
None of these questions require you to take a side in the dispute. They simply put you in the same position an informed buyer should be in for any property near active large-scale development, industrial or otherwise.
This Isn't Only a Farmington Story
Farmington is not the only southern Twin Cities suburb wrestling with this. Reporting on the original lawsuit noted that similar hyperscale data center proposals were moving through approval processes in Faribault, Cannon Falls, Chaska, and Rosemount around the same time. If you are cross-shopping Farmington against Rosemount specifically, this is worth factoring into how you read each city's long-term land use plans, not just its current listing inventory.
A Few Questions Worth Asking Before You Compare Farmington to Anywhere Else
Does the data center project affect home values in the neighborhoods nearby? There is no reliable public data yet showing a measurable effect either way. The project is still in site preparation, litigation is ongoing, and no comparable project has operated long enough in a similar Twin Cities setting to draw a clean before-and-after comparison. Anyone who tells you with certainty which way this moves is guessing.
Is the project definitely happening at this point? The land use approvals are in place and Tract has closed on the golf course parcel. The school district parcel remains tied up in the Castle Rock Township lawsuit, which is why the city split the final plat into two separate editions in April 2026, allowing work to begin on the golf course side while the other parcel's litigation plays out.
Should I avoid the east side of Farmington because of this? That is a personal call based on your own priorities, not something a market update can decide for you. What matters is going in with the facts rather than a headline, and asking specific, verifiable questions about the exact property you are considering.
Farmington's east side is going through a genuine transition, and the honest answer is that nobody, including the city, the developer, or the township, knows exactly how it resolves. What a buyer or seller in that part of town deserves is someone who reads the council minutes, tracks the litigation, and translates it into plain terms before you sign anything.
That is the kind of groundwork Michael Finstad does on every Farmington listing, whether it sits two miles from the technology park site or two miles from downtown. If you are weighing a move to this side of town, or wondering what a change like this means for a home you already own, reach out for a free consultation and home valuation. You deserve a straight answer, not a guess.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
