Wow they had the condition that the land be used as a park baked into the deed when they sold it to the city for $10, the city sold it, and when the family went to court their suit was dismissed. Now their home is worthless because nobody wants to live next to a data center.
When are we going to hold local government officials accountable for bullshit like this? Send them to prison.
It was unclear from this summary but there are a few parties here: the original farmer A, the neighbouring family B, the city C, and the datacenter builder D.
A sold to C with the deed restriction
C sold to D without the restriction
B tried to sue to stop D from building the datacenter, but B has no standing.
Okay, that makes sense. It seems to me that A or C has standing, but not B. And depending on the way it's written (IANAL) perhaps only C has standing. But either way, B is just some random person in this relationship.
Why shouldn't B have standing? They presumably are residents of and taxpayers to city C, and they face property devaluation stemming from nearby municipal actions.
presumably because it's not their land and if A wanted to build a data center on it to begin with then B could do nothing about it.
the key issue is C doing things that it's taxpayers dont want done.
in this case though taxpayer money is not being spent, the property is being sold which means money is being generated for the taxpayers, and the new property owner is
ultimately A never had the authority to contract the land as a park indefinitely and relied on C to have respect for the deal and intent. Maybe a timeframe needed to be stipulated, but even then we are talking about land ownership - once C owns it they own it. If you wanted to buy a house and the seller said something about you never being allowed to develop a section of the backyard because they buried their goldfish there or something, and you respect that wish but now need to move as well, are you stuck with passing that obligation forward? someone can just arbitrarily decide that land cannot be used?
No thats why there is no standing, they have every right to use the land to better the taxpayers. the problem is not the method or authority, the problem is that people dont want to give up a park for a data center and dont see the data center as something that benefits the taxpayers. that issue is not one that should be settled by the deed.
the property devaluation is a problem that should be addressed independently on its own merits and not through the means of challenging if they have the authority or not.
If you want to sell real estate while still retaining rights to visit a grave sited thereupon, the legal instrument is called an "easement". Sometimes the access grant is associated with ownership of another property (e.g. shared driveway), but it can just as easily be just to a sentimental goldfish aficionado.
This is well thought out and a good point, it does feel like though there should be some “special case” for donating land to keep for public use as a park.
You are right though, how long can someone who doesn’t own that land, have authority on how it is used.
> Why shouldn't B have standing? They presumably are residents of and taxpayers to city C, and they face property devaluation stemming from nearby municipal actions.
It's extremely common. They get called NIMBYs, because they bought a property at a certain price and a low-ability local bureaucrat wants to do something that destroys that value.
Depends how it works in the jurisdiction, but in common law usually this form of restriction is like a contract, but between two pieces of land, or between a piece of land and the public, rather than between two persons. In the former case only the current owner on the benefited property can complain. In the latter case, any member of the public can - but I'm not sure if a member of the public can create such a restriction.
It would generally be the opposite, what law gives them standing to sue?
My knowledge as a non-lawyer generally agrees with above, most states won’t allow you to sue for neighbors doing something legal that decreases your property value (CA is the exception I’m aware of, and even then it’s a “sometimes” kind of thing).
I’m not even sure who they’d sue. Presuming the land is zoned for a datacenter, the datacenter is allowed to do datacenter things. You could sue the city to try to prevent the zoning, but sovereign immunity would preclude suing them for doing their job (zoning, in this case).
The question is about doing something illegal, such as removing a covenant that was involved in a sale when reselling? If it is something that could have been objected to by the original seller (they would have had standing to sue) and they have not agreed to change the covenant (because they are dead), it seems as if anyone affected should be able to sue.
The breaking of the covenant is what is being sued over.
> Presuming the land is zoned for a datacenter, the datacenter is allowed to do datacenter things.
If my house is zoned for a possible datacenter, that doesn't mean that anyone can build a datacenter there - it is still my house. If there is a covenant that says that the land will be a park, that's the "zoning" by the seller being stricter than local zoning, which means that it also conforms to local zoning.
The zoning doesn't say "The land must be a datacenter."
edit: It would be bizarre if we can sue over terms of service as if they constitute law, but we couldn't sue over terms of sale. I can sue Facebook if they allow another user to violate their terms of service.
> If it is something that could have been objected to by the original seller (they would have had standing to sue) and they have not agreed to change the covenant (because they are dead), it seems as if anyone affected should be able to sue.
They don’t because it’s a private agreement, so only the involved parties can sue. In this case, if the original seller died then standing to sue would be inherited (I believe). If the inheritor doesn’t care, then neither does the government.
There’s also a bunch of weird edges. Like if the land just isn’t usable as a park because it’s too out of the way to be worth maintenance or building it would be insane because it’s a literal swamp, what is the city supposed to do with that? Own it and just do nothing with it in perpetuity?
> If there is a covenant that says that the land will be a park, that's the "zoning" by the seller being stricter than local zoning, which means that it also conforms to local zoning.
Sellers don’t get to do any zoning, the city does. You can add a covenant that says a single family home in San Francisco can only be used for fracking, despite the fact that there’s no oil and zoning wouldn’t allow it.
> I can sue Facebook if they allow another user to violate their terms of service.
No, you can’t. Or rather, you can file it, but it will be tossed out immediately. There is no tort for failing to enforce your own ToS. You might be able to sue Facebook for negligently failing to stop a user from breaking an actual law.
It’s against Facebook ToS to use a name other than your legal name on your account. How confident are you that you could win a lawsuit against Facebook because Post Malone’s account isn’t named “Austin Post”?
> Real covenants affect the landowner’s property rights and “run with the land,” meaning that future owners of the property are bound by the covenant.
Since there's a covenant on this land, the current owners are bound by it, regardless of the terms of sale they thought they were getting.
The reason that restrictions on real estate work this way is pretty simple: ownership of real estate is tracked in a giant centralized registry, so arbitrary restrictions can be recorded there.
Is this a good idea as a policy matter? Absolutely not. But we have the law we have.
Go look at their page for “covenant”, because “real covenant” is a subtype that only specifies the ways it’s different from a non-property covenant https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/covenant
Quoting from that page:
“The party capable of enforcing the covenant depends on whether the burden or the benefit runs with the land. In other words, only the party who the covenant is designed to help can enforce it.”
Your page spells out the other relevant bits. Real covenants must benefit one party at the expense of another (horizontal privity), so the heirs of the man who donated the land are the benefactors. That it helps (or at least doesn’t harm) the neighbor does not make them the benefactor here because their benefit was incidental (ie they aren’t legally “the benefactor”).
Covenants being centrally registered is a matter of convenience when house shopping, not a declaration that the state will enforce them.
I’d actually bet there are a lot of houses that have racial segregation covenants on them still because the benefactors quit trying to enforce them. I know my city has a bunch of racist laws on the books still because the city quit enforcing them ages ago, city council doesn’t want to spend time revoking laws that haven’t been used in 50 years, and no one has standing to sue to revoke them unless they get arrested for them.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_(law) the requirements for standing were developed in the Constitution and elaborated in some later cases. To quote from the article, the apt criteria seem to me (2 of the 3):
1. Injury-in-fact: The plaintiff must have suffered or imminently will suffer injury—an invasion of a legally protected interest that is (a) concrete and particularized, and (b) actual or imminent (that is, neither conjectural nor hypothetical; not abstract).[44][45] The injury can be either economic, non-economic, or both.
2. Causation: There must be a causal connection between the injury and the conduct complained of, so that the injury is fairly traceable to the challenged action of the defendant and not the result of the independent action of some third party who is not before the court.[46]
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The best way to understand why standing was not found is to read the court's ruling. Unfortunately (but not unusually) 404Media has not linked to the judgement. (I will try to find it.) My guess (IANAL) is the injury is hypothetical or conjectural.
There was an interesting case Knife Rights v Garland (v1) where they determined you also don't have standing for imminent jeopardy if no one has done the imminent thing in decades in a way that results in criminal rather than just mere economic damages. This is why those in danger of getting a felony for interstate commerce of switchblades are unable to challenge the law because it's not considered an injury to merely have your business destroyed and your inventory seized.
There isn't a single precedent; standing and jurisdiction are like 70% of civil procedure in law school. This page is a good jumping off point: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/standing
Right, standing seems like a series of technicalities until you realize it's fundamentally what keeps judges from becoming philosopher-kings that control the entire rest of the government: judges only exercise power in actual cases and controversies between formally-identified parties.
I find that standing makes judges philosopher-kings in collusion with the rest of the government. If they don't like the plaintiff, they reject them for not having "standing". If they do like the plaintiff, they'll find standing, no matter how thin a connection they have to rely on for it.
For example, the Supreme Court case where they found standing for somebody to refuse to make a same-sex wedding web site, even though nobody had actually asked for one and the person didn't even make wedding web sites. (303 Creative v Elenis)
There was no actual case. The Court invented one because they wanted the opportunity to overturn a state law, and they invented it out of whole cloth.
As opposed to the case where citizens are having their votes essentially erased because of district boundaries explicitly designed to target them. They lack standing to sue over it.
I have zero faith in "standing" as anything other than a tool for picking and choosing on ideological grounds, without having to address any facts of the matter.
Lots of questions about the colloquial (mis)understading of standing, and the actual standard, so might as well reply here.
IAAL, and the legal precedent is... the doctrine of standing. The article is paywalled halfway down for me, so I don't know the particulars of the complaint, but it's presumably in state court. Either way, most state doctrines are some variant of the essential elements for Article III (federal) standing, which are 1) An injury in fact that has or will imminently occur (i.e., no speculative or indefinite injury); 2) That injury must be a direct consequence (but-for causation) of the defendant's actions or inactions; 3) The injury must be redressable by the court. "Soandso did something and I, an otherwise unconnected party, may potentially lose value on my home's resale value at some undefined point in time in the future" is the type of abstract, speculative injury that never clears the hurdle. To the extent you actually want to soak in the torment of 1Ls everywhere, Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife and TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez are your big ones.
Outside of that, you'd likely need standing created by statute to bring a claim. But standing is just a threshold question that every litigator with a brain will attack because it kills the whole thing before reaching the merits. Even if Ps had standing, the prospects of prevailing aren't great given the timing, parties, and issues involved.
So there are two issues: (c) shouldn't be able to sell without the restriction, and (b) knowing of the restriction made decisions in good faith believing it would be followed and hence have been harmed by it not being followed, no? If (b) doesn't have standing, nobody does and deed restrictions are de facto useless.
Property rights would inherit. So one of their relatives or heirs. If they had no one to inherit the restriction it would go to the state - but the state would have gotten the land unrestricted in that case anyway.
B doesn't have standing because they are indirectly harmed? So if I sell a home in an HOA without the HOA covenant on the deed, can the HOA sue? It seems they are also only indirectly harmed.
In which case C should be held culpable for the violation of the terms from A. As the condition of the sale. B should not sue D, but C. Try to get an A witness.
Please tell me how I can just strip deed restrictions simply because I don't like them and/or they're inconvenient for me.
Deed restrictions are the mechanism that basically all HOAs are built upon so if you can just skirt around them because $reasons there are millions of people who would like to know.
Yeah, city law can easily override deed laws. But further, eminent domain allows the city to strip away deed restrictions through a "one weird trick". The city can eminent domain the land from themselves removing the restriction and then sell it privately.
The same way the city can eminent domain your home and put a road through it. The HOA can't stop the city from putting in a new road.
Aren't deed restrictions usually done at the state level? If so, the city can't just magic them away. State law is going to trump city law unless the city's restrictions are tighter.
> And depending on the way it's written (IANAL) perhaps only C has standing.
It can't possibly be the case that only C has standing. In your outline of the scenario, C is the only party in the wrong. They purported to sell something they didn't possess. A lawsuit would have to be filed against them, not by them.
I don't know how the law works in the US, but isn't the selling by C illegal and moot? C accepted the conditions, but did not repect them.
Shouldn't C be attacked (legally of course) automatically?
Say C decides to build on a land they own a nuclear plant with known life endengering issues. Or a place to publicly hang people. Or other completely illegal things. They will surely be stopped by someone (the state?) from doing this? Automatically, that is without the need for a citizen to raise the point.
This is a similar case: they want to do something illegal (not follow what they ageed to)
B should have standing from the park designation creating a public easement. I'm guessing the deed restrictions are pretty thin, and that pages++ of legalese would have done a better job. But this is the exact dynamic that everyone (rightly) hates attorneys for, both on the giving side ($$$ to hire an attorney to copypasta all that crap), as well as on the receiving side (pages of legalese are bound to create a bunch of extra facets to be dealt with by both the city and residents). Rather than the same rough type of structure needing to be reinvented over and over out of common law cloth, we really need reform aimed at defining commonly understood constructs that can simply be instantiated by reference.
"standing" is a made-up concept with a fairly short history. Remember how we look back at the early part of the 20th century as being filled with virtuous people at every level of industry and govt? me neither:
The modern U.S. doctrine of standing traces back to mid-20th-century Supreme Court cases that crystallized the “injury in fact,” causation, and redressability triad, but its roots lie in early 20th-century rulings such as Fairchild v. Hughes (1920) that first linked federal judicial power to a plaintiff’s concrete injury.
It is exactly same like when OEM will make you sign agreement that you won't try to reverse engineer the car, but if you will flip it without the restriction, then all is clear.
There is a tax loophole where you buy a lot of land and donate 90% of it to the government to be "public parkland". However, in actuality, you're the only person who has convenient access to this land and nobody else can build there, so you get nearly all the benefits of this land while claiming a big tax deduction.
It doesn't sound like what is happening here, but I don't think you should be able to block development on land you donated indefinitely.
What you're describing sounds like what we call "in current use" in New Hampshire. I know Maine has something similar but I can't remember what they call it.
You don't pay taxes on land in current use, but, if you or whomever you sold the land to, wants to build on it, they have to pay the back taxes first. It's a great for conservation.
You can get a hefty tax break on forest land in WA state as long as you have a forestry plan in place, and the same goes for fields in Florida for cattle grazing.
seems like this behavior would have a chilling effect on deathbed donations, especially when it sends the message gives: "screw you, we'll do what we want"
I also don't see how this behavior is in the public good, even if the donor has some ulterior motive, governments are free to reject donations
This sounds like the better approach. Create a trust that runs a private park open to the public. This prevents the city from owning the land. The trust can also work out a deal with the city for tax benefits for running the park. The trust can also be set up so that a family member is always given an overriding voice while allowing the city to submit plans for proposed use, upgrades, permitting, etc.
Basically you need to pay a lawyer to set up a trust which requires trustees if you care or donate to an institution with their own lawyers who you trust with a presumably long institutional timeline.
Trusts have always seemed to me to be pretty vulnerable. You have to trust the entire line of future trustees to actually implement what's written down in the agreement. Say I donate my property to a trust set up to keep that property a public park for 1000 years. I choose someone I trust to implement it when I'm dead. But, then that person has to choose someone they trust, and so on, and at some point in the future, inevitably it's going to fall into the hands of someone who would rather sell the land and spend the proceeds on hookers and blow.
It'd be nice to have a non-profit that honors these. Made of collective like-minded individuals. Protected by case law. You know, like a government is supposed to be.... But I suppose a big non-profit would work. Make one.
Everything is ultimately vulnerable, especially once you're gone. No institution lasts forever. Some are probably more likely to endure than others but there are no guarantees.
The law addressed this centuries ago. The general rule is that you can enforce such rules for a generation plus twenty years. That may seem like a long time, but the rule prevents the "cold hand from the grave" dictating how living people should act.
It can be done. A basic strategy would be to donate the land,but retain "air rights", retain an easment controlling all biuldings over a few feet tall. This is regularly done to protect views when selling land downhill of a house. Farms and parks would be OK, but not construction of a datacenter.
But governments have eminant domain powers. They can always force a purchase if they really want to.
>There is a tax loophole where you buy a lot of land and donate 90% of it to the government to be "public parkland". However, in actuality, you're the only person who has convenient access to this land
While I'm sure that's happened once or twice and serves as great fodder to get people of a certain ideological bent riled up, for the most part nobody is giving government land that's worth a shit. They're doing it to land that's effectively unusable due to regulation. Like if you own a strip that's a many acre 30ft wide along a steep river bank plus some space for a house (the lot layout could be the result of an old railroad or industrial thing) you gain literally nothing being on the hook for all that and you can't use it. That sort of thing is the typical case in which these sorts of things are invoked. It's more of a "well if you jerks care so much about what I do with it you can have it" type deal than a tax dodge.
There is a huge Bay Area... not sure what to call it - public/private charity? - called the Peninsula Open Space Land Trust, that has a huge amount of donated land in the Silicon Valley, and is a very popular charity with very deep pockets that can buy land to basically turn into parkland.
They have over $300 million in assets and own over 97,000 acres, and have partnerships with quasi-governmental agencys like the Mid-Peninsula Regional Open Space District to administer those lands as parkland.
The idea that noone is doing this is bullshit, and the idea that it is only done as a tax break is also bullshit.
This organization is a leading reason why living in the Bay Area is valuable and isn't complete urban sprawl. I wouldn't be willing to pay Bay Area prices if not for the existance of the land preserved through organizations like this.
Having natural spaces within communities is vital for mental health. For example, Central Park in NYC is a vital resource for the city allowing people to enjoy nature close to home. Kids need places to go and play. Adults need space to recreate. Pets need space too. Why would you want to have no green spaces within your community?
It's farm land. Sounds pretty wild to me. Also, we have wild land set up as parks as in national/state parks. A park doesn't have to mean slides/swings and a bunch of ankle biters running around.
Because people want/need accessible parks? Texas in particular has relatively very little parkland compared to its size, and its population-to-park ratio is getting increasingly out of whack
It just depends on the size. I know of several 1000+ acre parks that would be essentially considered wild areas with the exception of a few hiking paths.
They are full of wildlife ranging from small rodents to bears.
> I don't think you should be able to block development on land you donated indefinitely.
On land you contractually purchased with the condition that development be blocked indefinitely? Then why sign the contract? If they wanted a time limit, they could have put it in the contract, or not signed the contract.
Such contracts should simply not be legal. Past owners should in generally speaking terms not be able to limit development and land use decisions of future owners. It’s no longer your land. You sold it. Want to privately limit rights via contract? Consider not selling.
If it gets zoned as parkland as part of a sale - great! You should be able to make that part of a sale contract. But if the governing body then votes to make it something else a decade later, that should simply be part of how things work.
Old people ossifying things to how they prefer via preventing future generations to freely operate is not how I want a society to run. If anything the older you get the less say in the future you should have.
Yes, and they need to be flexible via public policy. If two generations from now some 10acre plot of land made into wildland is now surrounded by skyscrapers it probably makes a whole lot of sense for there to be a means for the local population to vote to remove that protection and turn it into affordable housing or whatnot.
It gets nuanced - but in general speaking terms this sort of thing should never be forever set in stone because someone alive 100 years ago decided as such via a private contract. Many other ways to go about setting aside areas for conservation.
Even conservation trusts make more sense to me. It’s still private, but they have an incentive to stay receptive to public comment and be a bit flexible. They might swap that 10 acres for another 100 acres somewhere else that creates a 1200 acre contiguous wilderness or what have you in order to stay relevant to contemporary needs while still staying true to the 250 year old mission.
I simply do not think you should be able to dictate (via private means) what happens to a property after you sell it. That’s for the next person who owns it to decide - in accordance with current local zoning and land use guidelines.
You're right if the land is sold at market price. If it's sold at a discount because of the restrictions, then continuing to enforce those restrictions is valid. The land's value is permanently reduced due to the inability to build, and the price reflects that.
The price only reflects the future value out so far. The market price is based on a small number of decades. So for the purpose of respecting the discount, that reason dries up after a while.
How is this about old people ossifying things? The land owner chose to effectively give it to the city for free with a clear contract stipulating the use. The city took it knowing good and well what was in the contract.
I see plenty of people here angry when the idea is floated of the US government opening up public land for mining, drilling, etc. You may not be one of them obviously, but how is this different?
Is it true that it was sold for $10? There’s a common phrase in Texas deed transfers similar to the below which just means “The sale price is none of your business”
Common Texas boilerplate:
That for and in consideration of ten dollars ($10.00), cash in hand paid, and other good and valuable considerations, the receipt and sufficiency of which are hereby acknowledged, the Grantor has bargained and sold, and does hereby bargain, sell, convey, and confirm unto the Grantee the following described real estate.
There's lots of places that give 99 year leases for obscenely small amounts like $10. The neighborhood church near where I grew up owned way more land than it currently used. They "leased" the land to farmer/ranchers to grow hay in part of it and graze animals in other parts. It was leased with similarly friendly terms if not the 99 year lease.
These things are more common that people might expect. Not everyone is a lawyer-esque asshole, but that does open situations up to disagreements where people respond with "should have talked to a lawyer"
Yes, but that value can be pretty trivial. It's not uncommon in the UK to have a 'ground rent' of one peppercorn a year (for weird reasons of property ownership rules of flats).
Someone apparently thought that about a Texas option contract but the Texas Supreme Court disagreed and said the contract was still valid, endorsing the fiction.
Yup, part of the problem is the City broke their agreement, but it seems no one with standing exists to legally protest.
One way to do this sort of thing so that it works is not a deed restriction, but to donate the rights to a third party.
We can think of property as a bundle of rights, the right to build, the right to cross the land on various vehicles or with wires or pipes, the right to subdivide, the right to mine or extract minerals, water rights, etc. For example, a piece of land may have an easement for the power company to erect poles or run lines across a strip on the land, or there may be an easement for a road or railway tracks.
Related to this particular example, the Nature Conservancy [0] runs programs whereby landowners can put a conservation easement on some or all of their land which prohibits further development (there are also other orgs doing similar work, particularly in smaller parcels as the NC often works with large areas).
The owner gets a tax deduction for donating the land development rights to a charitable org (and this usually reduces the price at which the land can be sold, at least in the short term), and the Nature Conservancy now has the right to ensure no one ever develops the land. The land can then be passed on to heirs and/or sold, but the land cannot be developed because the Nature Conservancy now owns the development rights and has standing to sue to protect the rights from being exploited.
And just behind that is politicians getting beat down in the streets when people realize the rule of law means nothing anyways and they have no reason to play along.
Rule of law will always apply to the commoners. Congress critters can speed on the highways and ignore the Do Not Call registry, but the rest of us still have to obey the laws.
Politicians are just foot soldiers/weeds in this game. Pluck one corrupt politician. 2 more grow in its place.
I would like the billionaires to be jailed, their political pawns in government removed from office, Citizens United to be nullified, FEC regulations re-worked from ground up, and codified.
Government officials are just revolving villains, send them to prisons and others will pick up right where they left. You have to uproot and get rid of the source: lobbying and moneyed interests.
This feels a lot like what happens with taxes too. You pass some measure to fund a particular thing voters want. That money then gets spent on unrelated things or just siphoned off into a city’s general fund, disappearing into corrupt grifts and waste. Meanwhile the thing you wanted is unaddressed, and a couple years later, that same thing ends up being recycled into yet another new tax to vote for. But you, the voter, still won’t get what you think you will pay for.
There is no accountability. And it starts with the notion of immunity. I think we need to get rid of that concept altogether. Politicians, cops, etc. must be liable for their actions. Personally. Otherwise even when they do something wrong, it’s taxpayer money that is lost. The perpetrators face ZERO consequences.
As an example: If a politician does something to violate your constitutional rights like when ICE does something bad or when legislation violates your first or second amendment rights, that politician should pay fines and end up in jail. If a cop makes a wrongful arrest or commits brutality, they should pay fines and end up in jail. If civil forfeiture steals from a law abiding citizen, those performing the act must be in jail. And so on.
Hopefully just being a resident of a city doesn’t give you standing to sue over any decision that has a tenuous adverse effect on you. I mean if that holds why shouldn’t visitors who might one day hope to visit the given park have standing to sue?
> just being a resident of a city doesn’t give you standing to sue over any decision that has a tenuous adverse effect on you
Why not? If you are impacted, why not? When do you have a standing then?
Visitors out of town have less standing than the people paying taxes to the town, that is fair, but the city IS the people, each and every person, not an abstract third party that herds them like cattle.
The impact should need to be material and related to some legal right you have, it seems to me. In general you cannot sue to enforce a contract or agreement you are not a party to, even if the outcome of adhering to that contract affects you.
I've been trying to find this out. I suspect it was dismissed because they lacked standing. Because there were a bunch of transfer, likely only the last seller has standing to sue for ignoring a deed restriction and of course they don't care.
That's not absolute. There can be other cases where you have standing even if you aren't involved in the transaction but those cases are limited.
Now it's also possible that the deed wasn't properly recorded. If it was, there might be more people who have standing, such as those near the project who are negatively impacted. It's possible that the district court erred or maybe the people bringing suit didn't live in the area or otherwise have standing.
It does seem wrong that you can effectively invalidate a deed restriction by simply selling it enough times.
What I'm seeing from the article is that the land is 87 acres and the data center is going to take up ~4 of them. Perhaps with the extra $3 million a year in tax revenue the city could build a park too.
The article didn't really convince me that the homes are going to be significantly devalued or that people are going to be thrust into poverty. It says so, and dismisses out of hand claims to the opposite, but doesn't give much in the way of evidence for its points.
I'm sympathetic to the agreement for the original donation. If the original deed said that the stipulation of donation was not only "only use this for a park" but also "never sell to anyone who might do something else," then I do think the city owes some very large compensation amount to somebody. If not, though... the city sold the land in 2008 to the Taylor Economic Development Corporation, at which point it doesn't really sound like the original deed has much value. If you buy land from someone privately and 18 years later it turns out it was gifted to them with the stipulation that they never sell, how much recourse should another party really have to stop you doing what you want with that land?
The full 87 acres were donated to the nonprofit Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation. The city sold 53 acres for $10 million to the developer. In addition:
> The Taylor City Council and the EDC are giving Blueprint a 50% rebate on property taxes for 10 years on each of the three phases of construction for the $1 billion project. In addition, the company would get a 50% rebate on local sales-and-use tax collected on construction material purchases.
In another article, it mentions that there is a buffer zone still owned by the city between the houses and the datacenter. They also mention that there is another park nearby (doesn't say how near).
Since this seems to be a misapprehension by a couple of commentators I'll put this as a top-level comment. The family bringing the lawsuit is not the family that donated the land.
1. Cromwell family donated 87 acres to nonprofit Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation in 1999
2. City sold 53 of those acres to Blueprint for $10 million in 2024. In addition, the city gave Blueprint 50% rebate on property taxes for 10 years and a 50% rebate on local sales-and-use tax collected on construction material purchases
3. Local neighbors sue to stop the violation of the deed. Judge dismisses the case on "no standing" in 2025.
The land has changed hands a few times since it was deeded to the county. They're sueing the entity that sold it to the people developing the data center.
Notwithstanding the merits of this case, I'm against the concept of unlimited time deed restrictions on property. Dead people should not be able to decide what living people can do with land or any other property indefinitely. That's why we have things like the rule against perpetuities, and requirements that charitable foundations spend a certain percentage of their assets every year.
Some of these ideas strongly carry over to the idea of AIs acting as autonomous agents as well.
>> Notwithstanding the merits of this case, I'm against the concept of unlimited time deed restrictions on property. Dead people should not be able to decide what living people can do with land or any other property indefinitely.
I used to disagree with you, but your stance is the only one that makes sense. The way you control property use is through ownership.
In this case the original family wanted it to be used as a park, but they didn't want to set up an entity to own and maintain the park so they tried to conditionally donate it to the city. And that worked for a long time. The weird thing is that the city agreed to this, and the state apparently honored the deed restriction and considered it valid, but now it can just be thrown out?
Should the limitations really exist in perpetuity? It seems unreasonable that land is forced to be a park in 1000 years because it was donated. The people in one hundred generations should be able to use the land how they see fit.
Reminds me a teacher lived thriftily in life and donated 2 or 3 million to a school in his will when he died. The school used it to buy a state of the art high school football scoreboard.
Donating money is just not it. It's so easy to spend money you didn't work hard to make yourself. If you wanna do good, figure out how to deploy the resources to your cause.
The main thing is to trust who you're donating it to. Charities often struggle to do important but boring stuff because donors want to add all kinds of strings to the donation.
Unincorporated areas of London that were previously shared informally were commodified and transferred to the rich roughly around the 19th century, depriving commoners of them and gradually pushed them out.
I consider easements only valid when in use, or 5 years. That is once you build the "thing" you get to keep the easement, but if you stop using that pipe/cable/... you get 5 years to clean it up. If you are planning on building, you get 5 years to complete it, otherwise you have to start over getting another easement.
I was recently involved in a civil suit where an 50+ year old easement was brought up. I’m glad you only consider the easement valid for 5 years or when in use, but the courts disagree.
Maybe. Many are forever. If the restriction is a via HOA there is generally a process to modify the HOA agreement. However there are other restrictions and some don't make provisions.
Nothing is forever. You just have to get enough people to agree. Look at the current US situation. Things thought of as forever are now being shown to be much less permanent.
There seems to be some missing details from the few sentences in this article. Does anyone have the full story? Why did the court dismiss the families lawsuit?
I don't know how to pull the actual court documents without paying for them, but the article indicates the case was dismissed for lack of standing.
The plaintiffs tried to argue that as neighbours, they had an interest in the land usage being enforced. The court disagreed.
I presume the original family could bring a case? It doesn't seem like the 404 article or the Taylor Press article talked to them to see how _they_ feel about how their gift is being used.
Yes, as we all know big tech absolutely follow the rules and don't skirt regulations. It's clearly the journalists causing the problems and not the government that has a history of ignoring contracts when it benefits them!
Is the idea that "when it benefits them" was... 23 years ago, and then they just sat on the land waiting for big tech to come along and want to buy it?
As mundane as it may sound, it seems most likely this was a clerical error made a long time ago. Maybe it can get unwound, but maybe not. If the people of this town are being screwed, it's by incompetence on someone's part 23 years ago, not by big tech.
This is closer to the time of the lawsuit and has some more details - they sold it to a trust who then sold it to the city some years later, and the city rezoned it in 2005. It's possible they missed the timing maybe?
Thanks, I actually just found that article- and it gives a completely different view of events than the posted article. For one, it says the suit was from a group of residents, not the family who donated the land.
Whenever possible, conservation land should go into a conservation trust, not to the city, with a conservation easement. Defense in depth. Local government will do whatever is best at the time with whomever is in charge, conservation trusts will optimize to conserve and protect the land.
No shame against this family, they and their gift were taken advantage of by their city and its representatives. You don't know what you don't know, "unknown unknowns."
> Conservation land trusts work for private and public land. There are many options available to help landowners preserve, protect, and restore land. Two of the most popular options are fee simple and conservation easements. The fee simple option has the conservation land trust owning and managing the land that is donated or sold. A conservation easement is where landowners and a land trust enter a legal agreement to permanently limit the use of an area to protect conservation values. Landowners can either sell or donate the easement to land trusts. Landowners retain ownership of the land, can sell their land in the future, or pass it on. But the conservation restrictions remain forever.
(i work with a land conservation trust in the midwest)
I have been on the board of directors of a land trust, and this situation is a poster-child for why an existent concern must retain standing to litigate. A lot of what the Land Trust Alliance (LTA) does is ensure things like the legal nuts-and-bolts of conservation stays possible and durable, including conservation easements. CEs can be a lot of work, especially as the legal landscape changes. I think the dismissal of this lawsuit is not necessarily a risk to CEs, but could be widened into one in the future. This is the risk that LTA exists to mitigate.
The land trust you work with - are they accredited with LTA?
> In their lawsuit, Griffin and the others aim to stop all commercial development and construction on the site, including Blueprint's data center project. They reference a land deed from 1999 that shows previous owners, the Cromwell family, granted the property to a nonprofit, the Texas Parks and Recreation Foundation, "to be held in trust for future use as parkland."
Looks like they chose the trust poorly - the trust is the one who sold it to the city I think?
Entirely possible, I will have to read the deed and legal filings to speak authoritatively vs a hot take. Sometimes we trust the wrong people, which is a potential lesson in stronger controls and guardrails legally in this context.
To be explicit, if one separates ownership rights and development rights, and gives the development easement to a conservation trust/foundation that has a mandate to never sell them, I guess things will go better. There are land conservation trusts all over the US and if there isn't one you can create one.
To be clear, I guess that a city who had ownership rights but not development rights could be stupid and ignore a conservation easement, but I guess that is not likely.
we have a causway built by a private family, that then turned into a beach through natural forces, a HUGE sand beach with waves on one side, and a sheltered shallow bay on the other, which was used as private access to a string of small islands, which was donated to the province, with certain conditions, which include that if the conditions are broken, it returns to the family, one condition is that the beach remains open for anyone to drive and park on.
And time and time again groups form to try and gain controll of this several mile long hard sand beach, only to discover what a good contract that thousands of people know about is worth.
Never donate things for the government. No matter if it is local, state, NEVER trust politicians.
You want to give something for the community? for nature? create a foundation or deed it to a natural conservancy organization, another foundation, a church, but never the government.
Much better to donate that land to nonprofits like https://naturecollective.org who actually can turn things into parks. They're private too, which gives the legal right to trespass people who are trying to live on the park.
Something similar happened in Boston decades ago when the city decide to build Storrow drive over what was supposed to be parkland donated by Charles Storrow’s widow. Instead, they turned Boston’s riverfront into a ghastly highway.
I don’t know the particulars of this Texas case, but the lack of green space in American cities is often the result of a car centric and building height limited urban planning.
Paris is an excellent example of how urban density and green space can go hand-in-hand.
YIMBYism is about relaxed zoning so that commerce and diverse types of housing aren't physically segregated, but even in the most "free" places industry is segregated because the needs of industry are incompatible with human habitation. No one wants to live next to a refinery, nor should they be put in a position where that's their only option.
My neighborhood is across the street from a company that specializes in the repair of hydraulic hammers, a water treatment plant, paper mill and recycling center and a freight rail so we've got it pretty good as is but I see no reason not to continue improving.
Yeah no worries, apart from the facetiousness I'm a pretty YIMBY person un-ironically. But it is infuriating that people adopt YIMBY rhetoric to try and defend data centers and other harmful industrial uses in areas with high land value. It's not only completely counter to the ideals of YIMBYism but also insulting as YIMBY has always been about lowering housing and commercial use costs through heavily relaxed zoning, NOT pushing through anything that anyone wants to develop in some sort of libertarian wet dream.
YIMBYism is about telling people who are mad about some structure being built near where they live, and who are engaging in poltical activism to try to stop that construction, that their anger about the structure shouldn't let them stop it from existing.
In this respect there is very little difference between a NIMBY getting mad about a data center and getting mad about a new housing development that will make the area more crowded and use more water.
The only difference is that you yourself are mad about data centers. If you are a YIMBY generally-speaking try to see how the anger you feel about data centers is like the anger your opponents have about new housing, and let that empathy make you a more effective YIMBY.
Honestly, it sounds kind of incoherent to me. How do you imagine YIMBY relaxing zoning and allowing things at lower cost and not simultaneously allowing people with money to push through what they want?
It sounds more like you are saying YIMBY but imagining MIMBY (maybe in my ...) where you've just replaced those other guys making the decisions with your own cabal?
> How do you imagine YIMBY relaxing zoning and allowing things at lower cost and not simultaneously allowing people with money to push through what they want?
Relaxing zoning laws never meant throwing them completely out the window. It has always been a matter of pruning zoning rules that overly restrict land use to the point that minor deviation from the norm is impossible.
Whatever the level of relaxation, I don't understand how you think it is going to enable low cost development of your preferred things, while excluding those with money from absolutely pushing rules to their limits to build their preferred things..?
Let's say the law is currently "this area is zoned for single family residences limited to at most two stories" and you change that law to "this area is zoned for residences limited to at most four stories." You have relaxed the law. It doesn't guarantee that you will get higher density housing, but the zoning obstacle has been removed and in many cases that is the sticking point.
Such a change does not permit a massive datacenter, or an oil refinery, or even a 5 story apartment building to be built. The laws aren't being pushed, they are being purposefully changed.
Now if some city council members get an attractive offer "for their constituents" to rezone a plot of land to build a datacenter on, that doesn't really have anything to do with the original zoning restrictions, and certainly is not affected by the YIMBY efforts. Zoning reform is not a strategy to reduce corruption.
I've seen a lot of people indicate they think people's predictions for the future with AI are like a psy-op and that none of them really believe it.
Isn't it simpler to believe that people like Terrance Tao who have been in good standing with the academic community for a long time are telling the truth? Like you may very well disagree with their predictions based on your lived experience or theories... But it doesn't take some crazy leap of faith to follow their logic of "AI could get better at fundamental/ applied STEM research than humans -> we can scale this up exponentially -> scaled up human level or super human level research will lead to major scientific breakthroughs".
Like sure CEO's like Amodei/ Altman/ and Musk may have an incentive to hype things up but not every opinion by every smart person has to be part of some grand conspiracy.
Lost me here. It usually means something will require exponentially more resources, and eventually a finite limit (money, time, raw materials, land, energy, lifespan, speed of light, etc) will be hit.
I'm not sure what you mean, we have already scaled up AI exponentially. The amount of AI compute in the world has been doubling every 7 to 8 months [1], so it is already exponential despite not being able to do human or super human research. The % of all AI compute going towards academic style knowledge research is quite low as well. So it stands to reason AI Compute used to do research would in fact scale up exponentially if we did figure out how use weights in a datacenter to do frontier research.
That doesn't mean were going to go right to Dyson spheres so that every possible molecule is going towards scaling.
Academics aren't infallible at all. The studies showing tobacco as non-harmful had the collaboration of a great many cooperative scientists. Generally speaking, many academics are amoral and will do very unscrupulous things for grant funding and exposure. It is a business.
> AI could get better at fundamental/ applied STEM research than humans -> we can scale this up exponentially -> scaled up human level or super human level research will lead to major scientific breakthroughs".
Again, this is a misapprehension of the technology itself and its most ideal use cases. Any software producing stochastic or probabilistic output and cannot produce verifiable, repeatable, and predictable data cannot fundamentally replace something that requires a high level of proof and validation. If you do this, you will expend valuable resources verifying the output that would be better spent just verifying the inputs in the first place. I'm no Luddite and I do think AI is cool and incredible technology. If you reframed that sentence as "AI could get better at taking the busywork and tedium out of fundamental/ applied STEM research than humans -> we can scale this up exponentially -> leveraging human strengths with AI's super-human strengths at assorting and analyzing information will lead to major scientific breakthroughs" then I would have absolutely no issue with it. But the marketing copy never says that and instead frames it as "AI can do anything a human can do and better," which is a) patently untrue, and b) suggests a very troubling agenda that the big corporations will have to answer for at some point or another.
My point is just we don't need to jump right to everything is a hype train and it's all a conspiracy to pump stocks. You are welcome to disagree with Tao or anyone elses line of thinking.
> Any software producing stochastic or probabilistic output and cannot produce verifiable, repeatable, and predictable data cannot fundamentally replace something that requires a high level of proof and validation
Human output is also stochastic and probabilistic - our brains are not deterministic software. There is no fundamental reason we couldn't replace the human role in research with some form of AI (LLM or otherwise) if AI keeps improving.
Medicine researched even with government funding is out of reach for a lot of people. It's going to take a leap of faith to think that "breakthroughs" researched from a private business is going to be enjoyed by the masses.
Socialized risk and privatized profit is the default. AI isn't going to change that. If it is as successful as the hype, it's going to exacerbate it.
When are we going to hold local government officials accountable for bullshit like this? Send them to prison.
A sold to C with the deed restriction
C sold to D without the restriction
B tried to sue to stop D from building the datacenter, but B has no standing.
Okay, that makes sense. It seems to me that A or C has standing, but not B. And depending on the way it's written (IANAL) perhaps only C has standing. But either way, B is just some random person in this relationship.
the key issue is C doing things that it's taxpayers dont want done.
in this case though taxpayer money is not being spent, the property is being sold which means money is being generated for the taxpayers, and the new property owner is
ultimately A never had the authority to contract the land as a park indefinitely and relied on C to have respect for the deal and intent. Maybe a timeframe needed to be stipulated, but even then we are talking about land ownership - once C owns it they own it. If you wanted to buy a house and the seller said something about you never being allowed to develop a section of the backyard because they buried their goldfish there or something, and you respect that wish but now need to move as well, are you stuck with passing that obligation forward? someone can just arbitrarily decide that land cannot be used?
No thats why there is no standing, they have every right to use the land to better the taxpayers. the problem is not the method or authority, the problem is that people dont want to give up a park for a data center and dont see the data center as something that benefits the taxpayers. that issue is not one that should be settled by the deed.
the property devaluation is a problem that should be addressed independently on its own merits and not through the means of challenging if they have the authority or not.
That's not what a deed restriction is.
are you stuck with passing that obligation forward
Generally yes. Which is why the deed restriction can affect the market value of the property.
You are right though, how long can someone who doesn’t own that land, have authority on how it is used.
It's extremely common. They get called NIMBYs, because they bought a property at a certain price and a low-ability local bureaucrat wants to do something that destroys that value.
My knowledge as a non-lawyer generally agrees with above, most states won’t allow you to sue for neighbors doing something legal that decreases your property value (CA is the exception I’m aware of, and even then it’s a “sometimes” kind of thing).
I’m not even sure who they’d sue. Presuming the land is zoned for a datacenter, the datacenter is allowed to do datacenter things. You could sue the city to try to prevent the zoning, but sovereign immunity would preclude suing them for doing their job (zoning, in this case).
The question is about doing something illegal, such as removing a covenant that was involved in a sale when reselling? If it is something that could have been objected to by the original seller (they would have had standing to sue) and they have not agreed to change the covenant (because they are dead), it seems as if anyone affected should be able to sue.
The breaking of the covenant is what is being sued over.
> Presuming the land is zoned for a datacenter, the datacenter is allowed to do datacenter things.
If my house is zoned for a possible datacenter, that doesn't mean that anyone can build a datacenter there - it is still my house. If there is a covenant that says that the land will be a park, that's the "zoning" by the seller being stricter than local zoning, which means that it also conforms to local zoning.
The zoning doesn't say "The land must be a datacenter."
edit: It would be bizarre if we can sue over terms of service as if they constitute law, but we couldn't sue over terms of sale. I can sue Facebook if they allow another user to violate their terms of service.
They don’t because it’s a private agreement, so only the involved parties can sue. In this case, if the original seller died then standing to sue would be inherited (I believe). If the inheritor doesn’t care, then neither does the government.
There’s also a bunch of weird edges. Like if the land just isn’t usable as a park because it’s too out of the way to be worth maintenance or building it would be insane because it’s a literal swamp, what is the city supposed to do with that? Own it and just do nothing with it in perpetuity?
> If there is a covenant that says that the land will be a park, that's the "zoning" by the seller being stricter than local zoning, which means that it also conforms to local zoning.
Sellers don’t get to do any zoning, the city does. You can add a covenant that says a single family home in San Francisco can only be used for fracking, despite the fact that there’s no oil and zoning wouldn’t allow it.
> I can sue Facebook if they allow another user to violate their terms of service.
No, you can’t. Or rather, you can file it, but it will be tossed out immediately. There is no tort for failing to enforce your own ToS. You might be able to sue Facebook for negligently failing to stop a user from breaking an actual law.
It’s against Facebook ToS to use a name other than your legal name on your account. How confident are you that you could win a lawsuit against Facebook because Post Malone’s account isn’t named “Austin Post”?
That isn't generally how legal restrictions on the use of real estate work. They're just part of the property.
Compare https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/real_covenant :
> Real covenants affect the landowner’s property rights and “run with the land,” meaning that future owners of the property are bound by the covenant.
Since there's a covenant on this land, the current owners are bound by it, regardless of the terms of sale they thought they were getting.
The reason that restrictions on real estate work this way is pretty simple: ownership of real estate is tracked in a giant centralized registry, so arbitrary restrictions can be recorded there.
Is this a good idea as a policy matter? Absolutely not. But we have the law we have.
Quoting from that page:
“The party capable of enforcing the covenant depends on whether the burden or the benefit runs with the land. In other words, only the party who the covenant is designed to help can enforce it.”
Your page spells out the other relevant bits. Real covenants must benefit one party at the expense of another (horizontal privity), so the heirs of the man who donated the land are the benefactors. That it helps (or at least doesn’t harm) the neighbor does not make them the benefactor here because their benefit was incidental (ie they aren’t legally “the benefactor”).
Covenants being centrally registered is a matter of convenience when house shopping, not a declaration that the state will enforce them.
I’d actually bet there are a lot of houses that have racial segregation covenants on them still because the benefactors quit trying to enforce them. I know my city has a bunch of racist laws on the books still because the city quit enforcing them ages ago, city council doesn’t want to spend time revoking laws that haven’t been used in 50 years, and no one has standing to sue to revoke them unless they get arrested for them.
1. Injury-in-fact: The plaintiff must have suffered or imminently will suffer injury—an invasion of a legally protected interest that is (a) concrete and particularized, and (b) actual or imminent (that is, neither conjectural nor hypothetical; not abstract).[44][45] The injury can be either economic, non-economic, or both.
2. Causation: There must be a causal connection between the injury and the conduct complained of, so that the injury is fairly traceable to the challenged action of the defendant and not the result of the independent action of some third party who is not before the court.[46] ---
The best way to understand why standing was not found is to read the court's ruling. Unfortunately (but not unusually) 404Media has not linked to the judgement. (I will try to find it.) My guess (IANAL) is the injury is hypothetical or conjectural.
https://search.txcourts.gov/Case.aspx?cn=15-25-00202-CV&coa=...
Pamela Griffin, Ralph Griffin, Michelle Griffin, Corey Griffin, Individually and as Trustee of The Griffin Revocable Living Trust, and Polly Randle
v.
NCP Travis TPP Project, LLC
But the records only go up to February 20th.
For example, the Supreme Court case where they found standing for somebody to refuse to make a same-sex wedding web site, even though nobody had actually asked for one and the person didn't even make wedding web sites. (303 Creative v Elenis)
There was no actual case. The Court invented one because they wanted the opportunity to overturn a state law, and they invented it out of whole cloth.
As opposed to the case where citizens are having their votes essentially erased because of district boundaries explicitly designed to target them. They lack standing to sue over it.
I have zero faith in "standing" as anything other than a tool for picking and choosing on ideological grounds, without having to address any facts of the matter.
IAAL, and the legal precedent is... the doctrine of standing. The article is paywalled halfway down for me, so I don't know the particulars of the complaint, but it's presumably in state court. Either way, most state doctrines are some variant of the essential elements for Article III (federal) standing, which are 1) An injury in fact that has or will imminently occur (i.e., no speculative or indefinite injury); 2) That injury must be a direct consequence (but-for causation) of the defendant's actions or inactions; 3) The injury must be redressable by the court. "Soandso did something and I, an otherwise unconnected party, may potentially lose value on my home's resale value at some undefined point in time in the future" is the type of abstract, speculative injury that never clears the hurdle. To the extent you actually want to soak in the torment of 1Ls everywhere, Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife and TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez are your big ones.
Outside of that, you'd likely need standing created by statute to bring a claim. But standing is just a threshold question that every litigator with a brain will attack because it kills the whole thing before reaching the merits. Even if Ps had standing, the prospects of prevailing aren't great given the timing, parties, and issues involved.
(b) does not have standing.
You would then have violated your contract with the HOA.
I also expect that the city violated their contract with A('s heirs). B still has no standing.
Why wouldn’t they have standing on an action by their government?
(This is a genuine question, not a rhetorical one).
You only have standing if the government is actually directly harming you.
Deed restrictions are the mechanism that basically all HOAs are built upon so if you can just skirt around them because $reasons there are millions of people who would like to know.
Easy - be a municipality. There's a reason the phrase "can't fight city hall" exists, and is for the most part universally true.
The same way the city can eminent domain your home and put a road through it. The HOA can't stop the city from putting in a new road.
But we're all guessing at Lawyer Facts(tm).
It can't possibly be the case that only C has standing. In your outline of the scenario, C is the only party in the wrong. They purported to sell something they didn't possess. A lawsuit would have to be filed against them, not by them.
Shouldn't C be attacked (legally of course) automatically?
Say C decides to build on a land they own a nuclear plant with known life endengering issues. Or a place to publicly hang people. Or other completely illegal things. They will surely be stopped by someone (the state?) from doing this? Automatically, that is without the need for a citizen to raise the point.
This is a similar case: they want to do something illegal (not follow what they ageed to)
The modern U.S. doctrine of standing traces back to mid-20th-century Supreme Court cases that crystallized the “injury in fact,” causation, and redressability triad, but its roots lie in early 20th-century rulings such as Fairchild v. Hughes (1920) that first linked federal judicial power to a plaintiff’s concrete injury.
It doesn't sound like what is happening here, but I don't think you should be able to block development on land you donated indefinitely.
You don't pay taxes on land in current use, but, if you or whomever you sold the land to, wants to build on it, they have to pay the back taxes first. It's a great for conservation.
I also don't see how this behavior is in the public good, even if the donor has some ulterior motive, governments are free to reject donations
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/06/24/corner-cros...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities
In this case, the farmer should have talked to a lawyer first. There are ways to set thing up to prevent misuse.
But governments have eminant domain powers. They can always force a purchase if they really want to.
While I'm sure that's happened once or twice and serves as great fodder to get people of a certain ideological bent riled up, for the most part nobody is giving government land that's worth a shit. They're doing it to land that's effectively unusable due to regulation. Like if you own a strip that's a many acre 30ft wide along a steep river bank plus some space for a house (the lot layout could be the result of an old railroad or industrial thing) you gain literally nothing being on the hook for all that and you can't use it. That sort of thing is the typical case in which these sorts of things are invoked. It's more of a "well if you jerks care so much about what I do with it you can have it" type deal than a tax dodge.
It even sprouted a cottage industry of REITs selling investors a product built around it, syndicated conservation easements: https://www.propublica.org/article/syndicated-conservation-e...
There is a huge Bay Area... not sure what to call it - public/private charity? - called the Peninsula Open Space Land Trust, that has a huge amount of donated land in the Silicon Valley, and is a very popular charity with very deep pockets that can buy land to basically turn into parkland.
They have over $300 million in assets and own over 97,000 acres, and have partnerships with quasi-governmental agencys like the Mid-Peninsula Regional Open Space District to administer those lands as parkland.
The idea that noone is doing this is bullshit, and the idea that it is only done as a tax break is also bullshit.
This organization is a leading reason why living in the Bay Area is valuable and isn't complete urban sprawl. I wouldn't be willing to pay Bay Area prices if not for the existance of the land preserved through organizations like this.
https://openspacetrust.org/ https://www.openspace.org/
They are full of wildlife ranging from small rodents to bears.
On land you contractually purchased with the condition that development be blocked indefinitely? Then why sign the contract? If they wanted a time limit, they could have put it in the contract, or not signed the contract.
If it gets zoned as parkland as part of a sale - great! You should be able to make that part of a sale contract. But if the governing body then votes to make it something else a decade later, that should simply be part of how things work.
Old people ossifying things to how they prefer via preventing future generations to freely operate is not how I want a society to run. If anything the older you get the less say in the future you should have.
It gets nuanced - but in general speaking terms this sort of thing should never be forever set in stone because someone alive 100 years ago decided as such via a private contract. Many other ways to go about setting aside areas for conservation.
Even conservation trusts make more sense to me. It’s still private, but they have an incentive to stay receptive to public comment and be a bit flexible. They might swap that 10 acres for another 100 acres somewhere else that creates a 1200 acre contiguous wilderness or what have you in order to stay relevant to contemporary needs while still staying true to the 250 year old mission.
I simply do not think you should be able to dictate (via private means) what happens to a property after you sell it. That’s for the next person who owns it to decide - in accordance with current local zoning and land use guidelines.
I see plenty of people here angry when the idea is floated of the US government opening up public land for mining, drilling, etc. You may not be one of them obviously, but how is this different?
What do you think the outcome of this would actually be?
Someone wants to sell land to develop a parkland but they aren't allowed to dictate that it must be a parkland.
So they just don't sell it ever. Now instead of a nice park it's a direlect lot for decades
The answer to this problem isn't "fuck you old people we're taking your land and building data centers"
Most contracts are legally mandated to have time limits. I think that's a good policy.
In this case an explicit number of years it has to stay a park would probably work better than an attempt at indefinitely defining the land.
Common Texas boilerplate: That for and in consideration of ten dollars ($10.00), cash in hand paid, and other good and valuable considerations, the receipt and sufficiency of which are hereby acknowledged, the Grantor has bargained and sold, and does hereby bargain, sell, convey, and confirm unto the Grantee the following described real estate.
These things are more common that people might expect. Not everyone is a lawyer-esque asshole, but that does open situations up to disagreements where people respond with "should have talked to a lawyer"
One way to do this sort of thing so that it works is not a deed restriction, but to donate the rights to a third party.
We can think of property as a bundle of rights, the right to build, the right to cross the land on various vehicles or with wires or pipes, the right to subdivide, the right to mine or extract minerals, water rights, etc. For example, a piece of land may have an easement for the power company to erect poles or run lines across a strip on the land, or there may be an easement for a road or railway tracks.
Related to this particular example, the Nature Conservancy [0] runs programs whereby landowners can put a conservation easement on some or all of their land which prohibits further development (there are also other orgs doing similar work, particularly in smaller parcels as the NC often works with large areas).
The owner gets a tax deduction for donating the land development rights to a charitable org (and this usually reduces the price at which the land can be sold, at least in the short term), and the Nature Conservancy now has the right to ensure no one ever develops the land. The land can then be passed on to heirs and/or sold, but the land cannot be developed because the Nature Conservancy now owns the development rights and has standing to sue to protect the rights from being exploited.
[0] https://www.nature.org/en-us/what-we-do/our-priorities/prote...
Dream of my life to see politicians to be personally responsible for fuckups they cause to people.
It wasn’t even that long ago.
Now, for a certain class, theft and rape are hardly a risk.
I would like the billionaires to be jailed, their political pawns in government removed from office, Citizens United to be nullified, FEC regulations re-worked from ground up, and codified.
There is no accountability. And it starts with the notion of immunity. I think we need to get rid of that concept altogether. Politicians, cops, etc. must be liable for their actions. Personally. Otherwise even when they do something wrong, it’s taxpayer money that is lost. The perpetrators face ZERO consequences.
As an example: If a politician does something to violate your constitutional rights like when ICE does something bad or when legislation violates your first or second amendment rights, that politician should pay fines and end up in jail. If a cop makes a wrongful arrest or commits brutality, they should pay fines and end up in jail. If civil forfeiture steals from a law abiding citizen, those performing the act must be in jail. And so on.
My local park is zoned as no "dog poop allowed", and it is one giant toilet for dog owners. Everyone from miles away cones to dump their shit there.
If you complain, you get brutally assaulted.
Why not? If you are impacted, why not? When do you have a standing then?
Visitors out of town have less standing than the people paying taxes to the town, that is fair, but the city IS the people, each and every person, not an abstract third party that herds them like cattle.
That's not absolute. There can be other cases where you have standing even if you aren't involved in the transaction but those cases are limited.
Now it's also possible that the deed wasn't properly recorded. If it was, there might be more people who have standing, such as those near the project who are negatively impacted. It's possible that the district court erred or maybe the people bringing suit didn't live in the area or otherwise have standing.
It does seem wrong that you can effectively invalidate a deed restriction by simply selling it enough times.
The article didn't really convince me that the homes are going to be significantly devalued or that people are going to be thrust into poverty. It says so, and dismisses out of hand claims to the opposite, but doesn't give much in the way of evidence for its points.
I'm sympathetic to the agreement for the original donation. If the original deed said that the stipulation of donation was not only "only use this for a park" but also "never sell to anyone who might do something else," then I do think the city owes some very large compensation amount to somebody. If not, though... the city sold the land in 2008 to the Taylor Economic Development Corporation, at which point it doesn't really sound like the original deed has much value. If you buy land from someone privately and 18 years later it turns out it was gifted to them with the stipulation that they never sell, how much recourse should another party really have to stop you doing what you want with that land?
> The Taylor City Council and the EDC are giving Blueprint a 50% rebate on property taxes for 10 years on each of the three phases of construction for the $1 billion project. In addition, the company would get a 50% rebate on local sales-and-use tax collected on construction material purchases.
https://www.taylorpress.net/article/10705
Is the family suing a member of the city? If so they still seem like valid complainants in the case since its publicly owned land.
2. City sold 53 of those acres to Blueprint for $10 million in 2024. In addition, the city gave Blueprint 50% rebate on property taxes for 10 years and a 50% rebate on local sales-and-use tax collected on construction material purchases
3. Local neighbors sue to stop the violation of the deed. Judge dismisses the case on "no standing" in 2025.
https://old.reddit.com/r/InterstellarKinetics/comments/1u0cf...
Some of these ideas strongly carry over to the idea of AIs acting as autonomous agents as well.
I used to disagree with you, but your stance is the only one that makes sense. The way you control property use is through ownership.
In this case the original family wanted it to be used as a park, but they didn't want to set up an entity to own and maintain the park so they tried to conditionally donate it to the city. And that worked for a long time. The weird thing is that the city agreed to this, and the state apparently honored the deed restriction and considered it valid, but now it can just be thrown out?
(Most people struggle to reach this step)
“When nothing belongs to everyone, the rich will own everything, including the rebellions against them,”
This is a jerk move by the city, but that is a different issue.
If I can't write in a deed restriction then I also don't want the government writing easements and land use restrictions.
However that doesn't mean the law is just or right. This is an important philosophical difference
I don't know how to pull the actual court documents without paying for them, but the article indicates the case was dismissed for lack of standing.
The plaintiffs tried to argue that as neighbours, they had an interest in the land usage being enforced. The court disagreed.
I presume the original family could bring a case? It doesn't seem like the 404 article or the Taylor Press article talked to them to see how _they_ feel about how their gift is being used.
Is the idea that "when it benefits them" was... 23 years ago, and then they just sat on the land waiting for big tech to come along and want to buy it?
As mundane as it may sound, it seems most likely this was a clerical error made a long time ago. Maybe it can get unwound, but maybe not. If the people of this town are being screwed, it's by incompetence on someone's part 23 years ago, not by big tech.
This is closer to the time of the lawsuit and has some more details - they sold it to a trust who then sold it to the city some years later, and the city rezoned it in 2005. It's possible they missed the timing maybe?
No shame against this family, they and their gift were taken advantage of by their city and its representatives. You don't know what you don't know, "unknown unknowns."
https://theconservationfoundation.org/protect-conservation-l...
> Conservation land trusts work for private and public land. There are many options available to help landowners preserve, protect, and restore land. Two of the most popular options are fee simple and conservation easements. The fee simple option has the conservation land trust owning and managing the land that is donated or sold. A conservation easement is where landowners and a land trust enter a legal agreement to permanently limit the use of an area to protect conservation values. Landowners can either sell or donate the easement to land trusts. Landowners retain ownership of the land, can sell their land in the future, or pass it on. But the conservation restrictions remain forever.
(i work with a land conservation trust in the midwest)
The land trust you work with - are they accredited with LTA?
They are. Great comment, I could not agree more with your thoughts.
Looks like they chose the trust poorly - the trust is the one who sold it to the city I think?
To be clear, I guess that a city who had ownership rights but not development rights could be stupid and ignore a conservation easement, but I guess that is not likely.
Must have spent most of your years in better States than I!
You want to give something for the community? for nature? create a foundation or deed it to a natural conservancy organization, another foundation, a church, but never the government.
https://www.aljazeera.com/podcasts/2026/5/13/the-takehow-us-...
https://www.uscannenbergmedia.com/2025/10/01/usc-sold-dead-b...
https://www.wbur.org/news/2009/07/17/esplanade-future
I don’t know the particulars of this Texas case, but the lack of green space in American cities is often the result of a car centric and building height limited urban planning.
Paris is an excellent example of how urban density and green space can go hand-in-hand.
(I get that you're being ironic.)
I do.
Specifically because of who doesn't.
My neighborhood is across the street from a company that specializes in the repair of hydraulic hammers, a water treatment plant, paper mill and recycling center and a freight rail so we've got it pretty good as is but I see no reason not to continue improving.
In this respect there is very little difference between a NIMBY getting mad about a data center and getting mad about a new housing development that will make the area more crowded and use more water.
The only difference is that you yourself are mad about data centers. If you are a YIMBY generally-speaking try to see how the anger you feel about data centers is like the anger your opponents have about new housing, and let that empathy make you a more effective YIMBY.
It sounds more like you are saying YIMBY but imagining MIMBY (maybe in my ...) where you've just replaced those other guys making the decisions with your own cabal?
Relaxing zoning laws never meant throwing them completely out the window. It has always been a matter of pruning zoning rules that overly restrict land use to the point that minor deviation from the norm is impossible.
Such a change does not permit a massive datacenter, or an oil refinery, or even a 5 story apartment building to be built. The laws aren't being pushed, they are being purposefully changed.
Now if some city council members get an attractive offer "for their constituents" to rezone a plot of land to build a datacenter on, that doesn't really have anything to do with the original zoning restrictions, and certainly is not affected by the YIMBY efforts. Zoning reform is not a strategy to reduce corruption.
Isn't it simpler to believe that people like Terrance Tao who have been in good standing with the academic community for a long time are telling the truth? Like you may very well disagree with their predictions based on your lived experience or theories... But it doesn't take some crazy leap of faith to follow their logic of "AI could get better at fundamental/ applied STEM research than humans -> we can scale this up exponentially -> scaled up human level or super human level research will lead to major scientific breakthroughs".
Like sure CEO's like Amodei/ Altman/ and Musk may have an incentive to hype things up but not every opinion by every smart person has to be part of some grand conspiracy.
Lost me here. It usually means something will require exponentially more resources, and eventually a finite limit (money, time, raw materials, land, energy, lifespan, speed of light, etc) will be hit.
That doesn't mean were going to go right to Dyson spheres so that every possible molecule is going towards scaling.
[1] https://epoch.ai/trends
> AI could get better at fundamental/ applied STEM research than humans -> we can scale this up exponentially -> scaled up human level or super human level research will lead to major scientific breakthroughs".
Again, this is a misapprehension of the technology itself and its most ideal use cases. Any software producing stochastic or probabilistic output and cannot produce verifiable, repeatable, and predictable data cannot fundamentally replace something that requires a high level of proof and validation. If you do this, you will expend valuable resources verifying the output that would be better spent just verifying the inputs in the first place. I'm no Luddite and I do think AI is cool and incredible technology. If you reframed that sentence as "AI could get better at taking the busywork and tedium out of fundamental/ applied STEM research than humans -> we can scale this up exponentially -> leveraging human strengths with AI's super-human strengths at assorting and analyzing information will lead to major scientific breakthroughs" then I would have absolutely no issue with it. But the marketing copy never says that and instead frames it as "AI can do anything a human can do and better," which is a) patently untrue, and b) suggests a very troubling agenda that the big corporations will have to answer for at some point or another.
> Any software producing stochastic or probabilistic output and cannot produce verifiable, repeatable, and predictable data cannot fundamentally replace something that requires a high level of proof and validation
Human output is also stochastic and probabilistic - our brains are not deterministic software. There is no fundamental reason we couldn't replace the human role in research with some form of AI (LLM or otherwise) if AI keeps improving.
Socialized risk and privatized profit is the default. AI isn't going to change that. If it is as successful as the hype, it's going to exacerbate it.
I was really expecting a /s at the end of this, but that'll do pig. that'll do