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.
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.
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.
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]
---
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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?
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'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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Supply and demand. YIMBY includes data centers, this is just dimwitted NIMBY opposition to something that has the power to change the world. AGI is right around the corner and Terrence Tao tells me that Anthropic's new version of Opus will enable us to finally unite QFT and relativity. There's no way that's hyperbole or marketing by people with aligned perverse incentives.
Anyone pooh-poohing these developments is a NIMBY, and uh, proud YIMBY here! If someone wants to build a data center in my neighborhood, I'm all for it. It is going to help push humanity to Mars, as Elon often says, who I trust because he is very smart and always thinks before he speaks. I can't wait to have a robot wife on Mars while AI slop porn eats my brain alive, because I never had enough game to find a human one. Oh well. If a data center brings that to fruition, let's go for it! Enough with this NIMBY nonsense. Silicon Valley is much smarter than rednecks in Appalachia, and we know what's best for them. We're totally not soft-eugenicists and totally don't listen to Curtis Yarvin's deranged tripe. We also are totally ANTHROPIC, not misanthropic, in fact, so much so that Dario Amodei named his company that! Totally trust him, bro.
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.
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..?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(a) has to sue and they will prevail.
(b) does not have standing.
.. and if A is dead?
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.
you dont have standing from indirect harm or costs.
What is the legal precedent for this statement? I am not disagreeing, I just would like to know what the law is.
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] ---
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.
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).
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
But that is how deed restrictions are enforced. If you didn't have that mechanism, then they would just not exist upon death, etc.
I wouldn't call a community member some random person.
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.
> Please tell me how I can just strip deed restrictions simply because I don't like them and/or they're inconvenient for me.
Easy - be a municipality. There's a reason the phrase "can't fight city hall" exists, and is for the most part universally true.
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.
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.
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 one leads to some very odd lawsuits.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/06/24/corner-cros...
Yeah at that point it should be in a perpetual trust or some other holding co who can fend off the city. Never trust your neighbors with your stuff.
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.
>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.
It's actually a pretty common thing: https://www.propublica.org/article/conservation-easements-th...
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...
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.
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.
Apparently not in South Dakota.
Public parks should not be developed on for the sake of the community. We need wild areas.
We need wild areas in the community? Why? Let the wild be in the wild.
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?
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
I thought parks aren't wild.
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.
Farm land isn't wild.
There is less and less wild left over.
It won't be very wild sitting in the midst of a human settlement.
> 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.
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.
Stipulating that such contract must expire after a period of time seems more reasonable than saying such a contract isn't valid at all.
So add a time-limit to the restriction.
Conservation easements are a thing. Many people support protecting natural spaces and the law is composed of such general understandings.
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.
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?
> Old people ossifying things to how they prefer via preventing future generations to freely operate is not how I want a society to run.
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"
Then people won't donate their land to the city for the public good. So you still won't get your preferred outcome.
> If they wanted a time limit, they could have put it in the contract, or not signed the contract.
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.
There are some terms that are not allowed in a contract. I believe most deed restrictions are among those terms.
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"
Not a lawyer but my understanding is that a valid contract must involve an exchange of value from both parties
Even more bizarre, the $10 cash never changes hands.
Sounds like that sale should be null and voided at that point
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.
Would that mean the original owner gets it back? Would they have to pay property tax backlog retroactively? Might be huge..
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.
>"Send them to prison"
Dream of my life to see politicians to be personally responsible for fuckups they cause to people.
At today's rate in the US, executive immunity is going to extend to all elected or appointed officials in perpetuity.
Why would you ever ever trust city government?
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 did the suit get dismissed? Local good ol boys doing the K-Drama USA dance?
My guess is standing. The family bringing the suit is not the family that donated the land.
So deed restrictions are unenforceable then?
If it is a park, does it mean anyone living in the city has standing because their entire city lost the park?
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?
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.
Yeah, there's no point to deed restrictions if the average person doesn't have standing to do anything about them.
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.
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.
(Sorry, I don't have access to read the full article)
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.
Tangentially related: https://youtu.be/F4SmgrAmdUQ
“When nothing belongs to everyone, the rich will own everything, including the rebellions against them,”
Tragedy of the commons, re-framed
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?
https://www.taylorpress.net/article/10705,judge-rules-in-fav... has a bit more info.
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.
Possibly... there is a lot of unknown details here. The article posted appears to be rage bait rather than a well researched article.
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!
https://www.kut.org/energy-environment/2025-09-26/taylor-tex...
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.
To be fair the article never says that the family who donated the land was the one who was suing.
Okay, I can only see a few sentences and was going off what other commenters have said.
This may be a stupid question... do cities need to pay state property tax on properties they own?
I oppose deed restrictions. They last forever and who knows what is correct for future generations.
This is a jerk move by the city, but that is a different issue.
I could see some kind of legal max duration of a deed restriction, but it seems totally reasonable as long as both parties know the agreement.
If I can't write in a deed restriction then I also don't want the government writing easements and land use restrictions.
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.
Deed restrictions can be modified. There are processes for doing it.
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.
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.
But think about how many parks that data center's AI can design...
Fair enough, and post scarcity should mean we have as many parks as we want.
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."
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)
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?
> The land trust you work with - are they accredited with LTA?
They are. Great comment, I could not agree more with your thoughts.
> 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.
Can they sue and get the land back? The city can deal with the relocation of the datacenter since it's their doing.
"... the city for $10, the city sold it, and when the family went to court their suit was dismissed."
I think your quote is incorrect. I haven't seen that the family has done anything since the donation. It was unrelated neighbors who sued.
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.
https://wildlandsconservancy.org this was the actual nonprofit I was thinking of
This is a a worthy legal gofundme if I ever saw one!
its a digital 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.
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.
Supply and demand. YIMBY includes data centers, this is just dimwitted NIMBY opposition to something that has the power to change the world. AGI is right around the corner and Terrence Tao tells me that Anthropic's new version of Opus will enable us to finally unite QFT and relativity. There's no way that's hyperbole or marketing by people with aligned perverse incentives.
Anyone pooh-poohing these developments is a NIMBY, and uh, proud YIMBY here! If someone wants to build a data center in my neighborhood, I'm all for it. It is going to help push humanity to Mars, as Elon often says, who I trust because he is very smart and always thinks before he speaks. I can't wait to have a robot wife on Mars while AI slop porn eats my brain alive, because I never had enough game to find a human one. Oh well. If a data center brings that to fruition, let's go for it! Enough with this NIMBY nonsense. Silicon Valley is much smarter than rednecks in Appalachia, and we know what's best for them. We're totally not soft-eugenicists and totally don't listen to Curtis Yarvin's deranged tripe. We also are totally ANTHROPIC, not misanthropic, in fact, so much so that Dario Amodei named his company that! Totally trust him, bro.
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.
(I get that you're being ironic.)
> No one wants to live next to a refinery
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.
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.
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..?
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.
>we can scale this up exponentially
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.
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.
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.
However, That doesnt make it not real.
> Totally trust him, bro.
I was really expecting a /s at the end of this, but that'll do pig. that'll do
Land that was conquered in war. It is reasonable to find this distasteful, but it is not unethical in any coherent way.
3000 years of philosophy, but fortunately you're here to tell us "war exists, so nothing can ever be bad or good".