A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center
404media.cohttps://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/farmer-donates-la... 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. I am so glad to hear this. Thank you for your work in support of land conservation! > 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. > Local government will do whatever is best at the time Must have spent most of your years in better States than I! My apologies, my thought was "for them." American zoning is weird. You can't walk to a grocery store, but you can walk to a data center. You cant walk to a data center either Literally in the article is a proposed development that is (easily) walkable from residential houses. Who the hell wants to walk to data centers? From residential houses or whatever. One of the key skills of a software developer is inference and you guys need to go get some more coffee and come back and try reading this thread again. For code only, even then only sometimes or even rarely. The HN comments section is like a gold mine of the Dunning Kruger effect for social awareness/intelligence. It's not even worth pointing out because you'll just get 5 paragraphs in response of "no, you're wrong because I'm smart and so I'm right". It's exhausting. Some days you show up to work and start by deleting everything you wrote for the last 3 hours the day before. They aren't all good days. So you can avoid paying for remote hands when something goes wrong with a server. A singular example. Thanks for the "gotcha", very redditor behavior. It seems more like you’re exhibiting “redditor behavior”. Ostensibly, the comment you replied to was about TFA, and you replied flippantly with a statement of fact “you can’t walk to a data center” when the discussion is about an article related to a data center in a residential area. They didn’t pull a “gotcha”, you got got by your own ignorance of the topic at hand. You obviously have never been to Ashburn, Virginia. Look up Lord Fairfax Pl. in Ashburn, VA on Google Maps and note the data center just outside that neighborhood. And just up the road in Arlington you can walk to a grocery store The zoning for that lot would allow a grocery store. Not being able to walk to the grocery store isn’t a zoning issue in this case. Mwah, that depends on what you consider walking distance. I remember walking back from a Rite-Aid in SF when attending an IETF conference, entering the conference hotel and being asked by other attendees 'where the hell I managed to find a Rite-Aid here'? Well, it may have been a 1.5 km walk but it was there, sure enough. I did not look it up beforehand, just started walking out of the centre and found one. Sure, if you only look in the local block you won't find one but then again if I walk 1.5 km from where I live I only find more trees so everything is relative. I used to walk from the main library to the metreon every sunday (made a day of visiting library and seeing a movie). It's not a long walk to most americans. It's easy, in that its a flat walk. Less easy (at least then) as it wasn't always the most pleasant area to walk through depending which way one went (detours et al). Staying on market was fine, walking up minna (sp?) less so. I mean to be fair if you add that 3km onto the walking you're already doing for the conference, that's a lot for most of us. Zigzagging a conference floor all day is a LOT of steps. Not sure if this is sarcastic? It's like 20 minutes each way if you're not walking that quickly? What? This depends entirely on where you are. And for far more people, I would expect they can far more easily walk to a grocery store than they can any sort of industrial thing. I have two grocery stores within 5 miles of me. Both paths to the grocery store take me by an Amazon warehouse before I arrive at the grocery I have no doubt such locations exist. I would not at all present this as a common outcome in the US. Certainly not due to zoning. You may be surprised. Many cities have urban sprawl and a desperate need for housing meaning subdivisions are being built in previously zoned industrial areas. That's certainly what's happened in my city. Fair that I can be surprised/wrong. As a new zealander walking to a grocery store sounds weird. I've lived in 7 houses some rural some urban and in none of them could I walk to a grocery store, so it's very weird to hear it exalted as some "standard" that America always fails in. New Zealand, along with Australia, shares a lot of its urbanism with the US and Canada. In the rest of the (urbanised) world, I'd say it's expected to be able to walk to stores, especially in cities. It's interesting to ponder if it's just the low density (caused by "having too much land" to expand on) or other factors that deprioritise walking like this. Whats really frustrating is how silicon valley fights tooth and nail to stop housing from being built in their community only to force these data centers onto everybody else's communities. Just makes you wonder how many of the SV types are wanting to use AI as the final solution for the poor. Many of them, like Thiel and Ellison, are basically all but saying that sort of thing already. I'd give it under a year before one of them lets it slip. Sam Altman already tried to counter the accusation that AI uses too much energy by complaining that raising children who can't contribute to the economy for the first 18 years of their life is more wasteful than building data centers. I wish that there could be a normal world where people who want to cooperate don't have to deal with sociopaths and all the sociopaths could go live in another world to have fun and rape each other instead of raping normal people, it's a pity that humanity never evolved to handle globalism and it's a pity that life itself is selfishness codified edit: all humans are psychopaths, sociopaths are merely the extreme end of the psychopathy scale I walk to the grocery store, and can't walk to a data center. It all makes sense once you realise the purpose is to maximise the amount of car storage. You're allowed to build car storage in every zone. Many zones even have a minimum amount of car storage required to accompany anything else you want to build. 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. 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. https://old.reddit.com/r/InterstellarKinetics/comments/1u0cf... 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. 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). It's exhausting that the "solution" to problems like this is getting tens or hundreds of thousands of citizens stressed until enough public attention gives some small chance of redress. I'm not calling for violence, but if we can't get these things fixed in court there has to be a more effect and more forceful avenue for protest than venting on internet forums. I saw a clip the other day of an American comedian doing crowd work in Paris. He asked the audience what America should do, and the French said - something like - they should punch the police more and light things on fire. To me that sounds crazy! But, I can see how it works for the French. They protest all the time, and the government is very responsive to the needs of the people. Much more so than the American government sees to be. I don't know how effective the French protests are, since I haven't lived in Europe for a while. But even as a Swiss, at least judging from TV, protests in the U.S. generally seem very tame. Not advocating punching the police as a default, but in my opinion, protests need to be disruptive if they're going to get anyone's attention at all. I don't really see what a few people standing on the sidewalk with cardboard signs are supposed to accomplish. American police are much more inclined to escalate any violence instead of trying to de-escalate. And if there isn't violence, the police tend to escalate things and make it violent. I suspect this works to prevent/neuter any serious protests so long as the potential protestors still have something to lose, and in America there is very little in the way of a safety net, so living conditions would have to (continue to?) deteriorate quite a bit before protests started heading in a French direction. Yep, and even when the majority of protests don’t turn violent, the media does an amazingly good job of making it seem like they did. I remember multiple family members posting about, and even talking about in our group chat, how multiple US cities were on fire and essentially war zones in 2020. I don't know if you know, but quite a few European countries are known to send police or "state" confederates into protests to give authorities an excuse to Escalate. You also see lots more water cannons being used over there. In Paris the burning and destruction typically happens in the outer "boroughs" of the city -usually by disaffected groups -sometimes they happen to be disenfranchised- though typically they harm the older generation's property and that generation typically frowns upon the destruction. Of course, in the US, we've had organizations who on paper are for justice and redress being found to foment agitation. It's a total corruption of their mandate. We had an "anti-hate" group paying hate groups to "do things"[1]. [1]https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/119311/witnesses/... So your "evidence" is the transcript of an interview that references an indictment containing information that hasn't been publicly substantiated. There was also testimony to the Congress by its CEO which wasn't very convincing. There is a dude running for congress in Maine who has a troubling political background due to his past associations and this guy could not call him out. I'm pretty sure if the congress hopeful were running as an IND or repub he'd be treated differently by this organization in question. If the things stop happening then the non profit will have to shut down destroying jobs Only because the people don't fight back. If they know that folks would fight back, they would behave themselves in the most polite and proper ways you won't believe. It's rarely acknowledged but a big reason why ATF and FBI toned things down after Waco is because McVeigh (he was there watching) directly retaliated causing nearly 1000 casualties of government employees. At that point they went to the current plan of just divide and conquer a single person at a time via surveillance of the targeted group after things quiet down rather than try to take on groups head on. Yep, you can see it in the way ICE operates. 10 agents jump out of several cars, they grab one helpless person and they all drive away. Like a pack of hyenas picking off a young calf. I’m sure that fear of retaliation had some impact, but I’d say it pales in comparison to their fear of the optics of another Waco. Post Waco, favorable opinion of the FBI dropped from 70% to below 40%. Is this supposed to be sarcasm? As far as I know, America is the only nominally democratic country where cops routinely shoot people, and their number one excuse is that they thought they could be shot. Nothing makes cops more trigger-itchy than the thought that a random stranger could "fight back" any moment. Haha have you never watched COPS? I’ve seen tamer UFC fights than some COPS episodes. > American police are much more inclined to escalate any violence instead of trying to de-escalate. American police inclined to do nothing, because it is locally hired and not paid/controlled by government. Are you just being intentionally ignorant here? What are you even trying to convey? In the US if you're with a group of people and there is some leader or group planning unlawful property destruction or violence, there is a very very good chance it is a fed or confidential informant operation and you are the mark/patsy to which all the blame will be assigned when you're staring at a sheet of paper that says US v [your name]. Not really a "very very good chance", but the few instances of this happening have accomplished the intended effect of making everyone terrified of the possibility and thus never doing it. Are you trying to say the US are snitches? Or in any case, more snitches than the Europeans? More snitches than the ex-communists from the Eastern Europe? Not snitches but paid government workers trying to get you to commit crimes and then you get arrested. Americans don't even protest on weekdays, they wait for a weekend to do it. So it is easy to say that they aren't serious but on the other hand, they're a lot closer to the knife's edge of stability and missing a day of work can get them fired (especially in at-will employment states), Europe is not like this as much. And if they lose the job they lose their insurance, thus their medication. This increases stakes to protest quite a lot, compared to European worker protection and social security. Yes, they've wound up having their whole lives very effectively taken hostage. Also criminals lose the right to vote don't they? Seems like the perfect incentive to criminalize any political movements that are contrary to the ruling class. But in latin America and poor countries don't have these benefits and still people protest way worse Well maybe you can get some worker protection and social security by protest... oh, wait. That's somewhat understandable, what I find more interesting is that people around me won't show up unless it's between 70-80 degrees out. Do you think perhaps the two are related Oof, could never be the case. Guys, I feel like we should get another anti-union thread here soon. It’s getting a little too hot for comfort. I’ll start. Whew While I do like unions in theory, I was really peeved when I was getting my start in the working forces as a banana picker and this guy Bob took midday naps... I agree. people should be shutting down all commerce, but people are so overworked or living from paycheck to pay check its probably hard to do the kind of protesting that needs to happen. Seems like UK is bad. There are people with cardboard signs, and there are BLM protests or occupy Wall Street. Can't remember when the last disruptive protests were in Switzerland, but in Germany I'd say tame protests are the norm and disruptions are an exception 99% of BLM protests were just people with cardboard signs. There's always the occasional anonymous asshole who might throw a rock at a window and run off, but that's the nature of any gathering of 100,000+ people. There will always be a turd. In the other 1%, the police decided on a policy of always picking a fight with crowd, every fucking day, until they ran out of gas. There was a lot of arson at BLM protests, and plenty of people beaten in the street, some of whom were in no way asking for it. The majority of the violence probably was the cops though. Watch any random sampling of body cam footage and you won't think the majority of violence was the cops. I'm amazed at the restraint honestly. Now when I was a kid...getting thrown into a paddywagon while hammered after mouthing off to a cop was a right of passage. Do you think the selection of what body cam footage cops make available is without bias? Still I can't think of an event where Swiss cops would be able to collect similar footage. Maybe a football game? I think it’s important that the ultra powerful never feel they’re unreachable by guillotine. > the French said - something like - they should punch the police more and light things on fire. I'm trying to wrap my head around this as well. Do these people want "punching the police and lighting things on fire" to be a freely permitted form of free speech? If so, should anyone be legally allowed to destroy any amount of stuff, for any reason they feel unhappy about? Or is this a case of "blowing stuff up should only be permitted for causes I like, not for causes I dislike"? If not, do they see the irony in endorsing behaviors that they simultaneously believe should not be legalized? No, it should be illegal, otherwise everything would get destroyed whenever someone is slightly destroyed. Illegality serves as a kind of filter so that when enough people risk jail or death for a cause, that's because they really had enough. I haven't given that a lot of thought, and it feels weird to say, but maybe the opinion that an act should be done and should be illegal can be true at the same time. When a citizen commits a crime, they messed up. When ten commit a crime, they messed up. When half the village destroys the chief's home, the chief messed up. I think you've misunderstood. Such things are also illegal in France. But there are times you need to be prepared to break the law to bring about political change, eg if a government repeatedly demonstrates indifference to public concern. Suppose you are living under very corrupt or autocratic governance, and you protest in the conventional way (marching, waving signs and banners and so on) bu the government simply ignores it, or slanders the protestors for having a different opinion. What do you do then? Maybe in their eyes those are the less-violent alternatives than their other options. > god forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion - Thomas Jefferson France is a much smaller country. When there is a mass protest in the US, it ends of being a bunch of smaller protests all over the country, which lacks the power of a single concentrated protest. These various satellite protests just end up being a minor nuisance, which don’t amount to much. The media in the US often ignores the protests they (or their owners) don’t agree with. This also weakens them significantly. I remember having to go to Twitter to see what was going on with a lot of the Occupy Wall Street stuff, because the news was acting like it wasn’t going on. Without attention, and fractured across the country, it faded out. The protest area where I was living at the time slowly shifted into a homeless encampment, before they eventually cleared them out. Democracy needs real journalism to function. Having all the rich people own all the journalists isn't going to end well. We need to find a working business model for journalism that doesn't rely on rich folks. I think news outlets need to be run as a non-profit to remove the types of people with aspirations of wealth, instead of aspirations to report and inform the public, from the sector. Usually rich folks buy newsrooms not to make a profit, but to control the narrative. No journalist joins a newsroom to become rich. Famous, maybe, but not rich. The business model used to be advertising, but the internet destroyed that model. And we don't have a replacement, while democracy doesn't work without someone holding the politicians to account. Is the French government more responsive than those of neighbouring countries? Probably because we have a well established history of regularly changing regimes. Since we overthrew royalty in 1789 we've had five republics, two empires, three monarchies and a bunch of short-lived totalitarian regimes, coups and other major political events. If anything, the longevity of the Fifth Republic is starting to become unusual (only the Third Republic and the Ancien Régime have lasted longer). Maybe we're overdue to flip the table again as per tradition. How well did they turn out for people each time? Health insurance, unions, paid vacation... al in all I'd say not that bad. Plenty of other countries have those things as well. And plenty of countries that have even more frequent political upheaval don’t have those things. I don’t know that regular political violence is positively correlated with worker protections. > I don’t know that regular political violence is positively correlated with worker protections In fact, it's quite easy to find examples of political violence being used to reduce worker protections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_Uni... also >two empires, three monarchies and a bunch of short-lived totalitarian regimes, coups and other major political events. Do you think you'd still have the Health insurance, unions, and paid vacation after another roll of the dice I'm only pointing out that ever since the French revolution, we have a rich history of regime change (and also of strikes and demonstrations). Some were due to external factors (like the Vichy régime during WW2) and some were bloodless (like the end of the Fourth Republic). Us rolling the dice whenever we have a major political crisis is a meme at this point, for better or for worse we're just not the kind of people to keep the same constitution around for 250 years. I don’t think that addresses my question. I know that "French strikes" and "French setting fire to things" is a popular American trope, but things really don't work like that. If that were the case France would be a much better place than other European countries, and it really is not. > "French setting fire to things" is a popular American trope, but things really don't work like that. They worked like that when I was in Paris ~3 years ago! At the time, people were rioting over the retirement age changes. I walked around the city the day after the protests. The city smelled like burned plastic. There were burned out rubbish bins and the husks of melted lime bikes & scooters all over the place. I've never seen anything like it. Only if you believe that always caving in to a violent mob burning random (private citizen-owned, non-government) cars in Paris leads to better outcomes for the country. That only works for the French because they're afraid to disappear their own citizens. US has been doing it for the last year and a half. >US has been doing it for the last year and a half. Individual jurisdictions have been doing that for much longer than a year and half. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-poli... You are basically admitting that the US is already past the point of no return on the road to full-blown oppression: too many government workers not accountable to the people. Those two things are contradictory. Obviously the government isn't very responsive if they are constantly protesting. It’s not contradictory, protesting doesn’t make sense as a one time thing, you have to continuously put pressure and show you have power as a group Only if you have a government that isn't responsive or accountable to you. I feel like in the US if you punched a cop the cop and his colleagues are much more likely to just shoot you, or at least unleash brutal violence on you and the rest of the crowd. I guess the idea is to provoke these kind of battles in hopes that the cops can be overwhelmed or at least public opinion goes to your side? It is much more than that, egalitarianism is fundamental to French culture. That's alot less risky in France where the police have more than an 8th grade education, no guns, and aren't jacked up on right-wing hate propaganda 24/7. You punch a cop in the US and there's more than a 50% chance, that a given cop has been dreaming of "protecting himself" by any means necessary. In other words, you are going to get shot in the chest. Or a shot in the back. In Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy, he reviewed Roman records and compared provinces with heavily fortified seats of power to ones that weren't as fortified. The ones that were more fortified tended to be governed in a way that was more callous, less efficient, and less popular. He concluded that it was good for governors to have a reasonable fear of those they governed. The U.S.'s institutions of power are heavily fortified. Political leaders of most countries travel about with a security detail of a few cars at most. The U.S. president has a gargantuan motorcade that's only rivaled in size by those of third world dictators. Arguably, the U.S. president doesn't hold power so much as wield it in the interest of oligarchs, who are even more insulated from the public. If Americans want better government, what they really need to do is make oligarchs and politicians feel like they might actually be made to feel the consequences of their actions. That doesn't necessarily have to mean violence though, if people are creative enough. e.g. Elon Musk wants so much to control what the world thinks of him that he bought Twitter and had Grokipedia made in an attempt to kill Wikipedia, since they have honestly reported on his misadventures with the same standards of rigor applied to other public figures. If you want to make Elon Musk feel consequences, just never let up on him. The dude made Nazi salutes during Trump's inauguration twice. His DOGE idiocy is why Texas livestock is being banned in other countries because of screwworms. Keep talking about that and don't stop. By what measure does it work for the French? They have 8% unemployment, 30% less GDP per capita than the US, and many other problems. Government by caving in to riots is not in general being responsive to the needs of the people. Well gee, to start France has higher healthcare quality/access, higher life expectancy, much lower treatable mortality, better work-life balance (less hours worked, more guaranteed leave), lower wealth inequality, higher voter turnout (indicative of less apathy or less efforts to disenfranchise), among others. One of the problems with just using economic metrics is it seems to confuse the fact that the economy is supposed to serve society, not the other way around. So it leads one to wonder: with those better economic measures, what is it buying for US citizens? Also France scores hugely better on the international cheese index Many Americans have a strong bias for measuring everything in money. If you've lived there, it can be shocking how pervasive the thinking is in EVERY decision. To quote de Tocqueville: “I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken a stronger hold on the affections of men…” All these things become meaningless when you cross the ~50th income percentile. Besides work/life balance, the US gets much better as you earn more, and frankly high earners are generally less concerned with time off work too.
Also why the US enjoyed ~30 years of European brain drain, those benefits are much less enticing when you are the one paying more and getting less. Median US income is $45k. Almost 18% of US household income goes to healthcare costs. So you’re saying healthcare access/quality, time off, and mortality are moot once you make $23/hr? Color me skeptical. I mean, you're on the cusp there but $23/hr is around where "full benefits" jobs become the norm. Also keep in mind that French pay a lot for healthcare too, except it's called taxes. That $23/hr in France would be taxed at 30% compared to 12% in the US. This only gets more dramatic as you climb the income scale, which inevitably means (in France) you are paying way more taxes (41% at $100k) while using those social services the least. Compare to the US where you are paying 22% on $100k and likely getting high tier health insurance for ~$200/mo from such a job. The takeaway is that America sucks if you are poor, but gets much better if you can make it out of the bottom half, and way better if you can get to the top 25%. P.S. there is a reason the media only talks about the bottom 50% and the top 1%. Talking about the 50-99% would reveal where the real money in the country is (and offend/call out half the country too). > That $23/hr in France would be taxed at 30% compared to 12% in the US. So, since you're full of shit, let's do the math. I'll even be kind, I'll go 1$ = 1€. 23€ per hour, 35h/week, 4 weeks per month (broadly). 3220€ gross, which, to cut things short and not even get into gross -> net, let's assume 100% of your gross is now net, is 38640€ / year. The 30% tax BRACKET starts at 29316€. 25% gets taxed at 30%, 60% gets taxed at 11%. Anyways, you're full of shit, I just needed people reading you to know it. When was the last time you lived on $23/hour? Benefits are paid based on hours worked not on rate. You also seem to confuse marginal and effective tax rates because you don’t factor in the other tax structures in the US like FICA/state/local taxes. On the US healthcare side, you have to factor in deductibles; my annual family HSA deductible is $8k. And on and on. As a general rule, I try not to spend much time debating with new accounts that miss basic facts/principles. But this all digresses from the point: simple economic indicators like GDP without fuller context are a lazy and misleading metric for evaluating the health of a society. Being 'stressed' about the corruption and ineffectiveness of governance is literally the exact and only way you make government not be corrupt and ineffective. Democracy is not a spectator sport and voting is just the polite mechanism. Mass protest and outrage is the actual mechanism of democracy - voting is just there to make them afraid of the protest so you don't have to throw moltovs. It certainly feels like we need a reset on the expectations placed upon politicians at all levels of governance. Somehow. I think politicians have completely lost the plot in their job and who they represent. Instead, they seem all ideologically or financially motivated, and largely seem to get their marching orders from select wealthy CEOs. It's a very bad look that will get worse since trust in govern being so low goes hand in hand with voted apathy. And voted apathy means we get more of the same. It's a bad cycle and I think we'll land on a civil esque war sooner or later. Society's elites have forgotten that civil institutions exist to be an alternative to resolving disputes through violence. If they completely bend those institutions to their will and leave the common people out in the cold, the result isn't acquiescence, it's revolt. I, too, worry that they're going to rediscover this the hard way at some point. Shouldn't this revolution be planned for sooner than later. I mean, after the billionaires have robot armies.. I always assumed that this was the end goal of the AI. It's not for normal people, it's for the super wealthy to magnify their power, both economically and physically. I am ambivalent about whatever this controversy is (taking it at face value, it seems pretty bad, I don't know all the backstory) but we have in fact in the US the exact opposite problem: tiny, nonrepresentative groups of noisy stakeholders have an alarming track record of halting development, which has been deployed in the service of keeping home prices high, neighborhoods white and/or wealthy, transportation inefficient, and the power grid fossil-based and rickety. The solution here might be the appeals court, since there is a deed restriction. The city agreed to it when they paid $10 for the land. The article mentions that Texas courts tend to be pretty serious about enforcing deed restrictions. > there is a deed restriction Was there ever a deed restriction? The government says no, but they say there was something else which I don’t understand. > In the notes about the grantee, the cash warranty deed states that the property was to be held in trust for future use as parkland by Williamson County, Texas. This was not a deed restriction. The rest of the page doesn’t display properly on iOS. https://taylortx.gov/1293/Blueprint-Projects-Data-Center That property was transferred multiple times after the farmer gave it away. I can’t tell if that save deed restriction followed those sales Encumbrances and easements tend to follow the land even if they aren’t explicitly mentioned in the deed in question from the most recent transaction. They must be explicitly struck. Source: land attorney when asked this question about a deed restriction from a past deed. It was about NH real estate law, but I was told this was a general principle. It’s part of the reason title searches are done. The effective deed is a fold over the sequence of deeds. I went through the deeds the other night. The first transfer from Bland to Texas Parks and Rec Foundation had a restriction to be held in trust for a city park (or for parkland or something). The transfer from tp&r to williamson county park foundation only said to be held in trust. The transfer from the park foundation to the city didn't mention it. I don't know enough about texas real estate law to know if the restriction would tend to follow or not. I also don't know if the city would have done title research to have seen the restriction, so they may not have knowingly violated it (which may or may not matter; and maybe they should have known). Also, fwiw, the 'one month later' sale reported in the article was more like a few months later, in case you date restrict deed searches. AFAIU, the people suing have no privity; they're just a neighbor and don't have any right to enforce the covenant. (If the covenant had granted them an interest, they could have.) Presumably the original property owner who granted the land, or their successors in interest, could sue to enforce the covenant, but they haven't. > I'm not calling for violence We all know that you are, and that that's fine, and you're just hedging because you're scared of the list you'll be placed on. Do not worry, you're on it already. You would never have mentioned it if you weren't. I’ve organized so much that I’m exhausted from organizing but if somebody else wants to organize I will 100% show up So consider me first on the list of people ready to do whatever it takes to fix this shit yeah, it's interesting how we're not allowed to call for violence, eh. The problem is that, while there are times when violent acts may bring about positive outcomes, it is extremely rare for those outcomes to be in the minds of those committing the acts. It is far more common for someone to commit violence as an expression of their anger, while rationalising that it is justified because they are aware of the arguments in favour of violence apply to whatever it is that they really want to do in the moment. Do you think that people haven't had enough time to think about wealth disparity? This argument you make is fine for spur of the moment violence, but for acts resulting from the structure violence of the super wealthy. Dunno. in no way does this truth imply that violence is an invalid response, merely that preconsideration is required to determine whether a violent act is morally just We absolutely CAN call for violence. And especially political violence. Theres even a TV show with it as a name. Its calling for "Law and Order". Its violence against the 'correct group'. You absolutely can call for violence (now) against protestors, ANTIFA, anti-surveillance (DEFLOCK), unionists, homeless, drug users, and other deemed by federal, state, and local officials as undesirable. You cant directly call for violence to black people by name, but eupamisms are still fine to allude to. "Those people", "ghetto", etc. And the violence BY police and government way exceed the violence by the public they target. Also, thou shalt NEVER advocate for violence against CEOs, business leaders, politicians, and the like. Their lives are worth like 1M of us plebes. So those who come to their defense will do so crazily and way over-respond, like cops do routinely. Thats why the feds threw threw the book at Luigi Mangione. Cause if he did it, his way is illegal but tremendously effective. And the elites have little defense against this. (Case in point. In my local area, a person took $100 from a cash register, and got arrested for a class A misdemeanor and 2 other charges. Whereas the same restaurant had their owner committed mass wage theft of 27 people to the tune of $72000, and only had to pay a fine. There absolutely hypocrisy who can advocate and not for violence.) We aren't, but the president and certain politicians sure are. You're edging on terrorism What is left when all other options are exhausted? The American War of Independence, French Revolution and English Civil War were acts of terrorism. Were those acts justified? Not if you're the ones who were initially holding the power. Calling the American Revolution terrorism, in the modern sense, is a stretch. It was a war waged primarily between soldiers and materiel with the goal of ending the enemy's ability to wage war. Systematic use of terror as a policy to induce fear in the general public to push them to coerce their government's policy was not widely used. I’m pretty patriotic but even I can recognize some parallels. There are examples of targeting civilians (tarring and feathering loyalists, or destroying their property). If you consider the attacks against Tesla to be terrorism [1] then the Boston Tea Party would probably fit that bill as well. I’d probably consider it irregular warfare, but I wouldn’t call it a stretch for someone to disagree. [1] https://signalscv.com/2025/03/fbi-launches-task-force-to-inv... If setting warehouses on fire can be called terrorism today, then the Boston Tea Party was equally an act of terrorism then. If Palestine Action committed terrorism then absolutely the American Revolution was a terrorist act. This is massively disingenuous. If you showed up in public in the US today with a bunch of men in uniform and announced your intention of using military force to secure some perceived political rights, you'd be denounced as a terrorist by the authorities while you were still reading out your carefully drafted rules of engagement. Here's a very recent example of public authorities describing activism against data centers as a possible vector of 'anti-tech extremism': https://www.wired.com/story/us-law-enforcement-warns-of-anti... Likewise, the proponent of a huge data center project in Utah and the Secretary of the Interior are both arguing that opposition to data centers is the result of Chinese communist propaganda: https://fortune.com/2026/06/10/kevin-oleary-trump-administra... As far as I'm aware there have been zero acts of violence related to data center construction, or even threats of same. I will be happy to steer you to work by philosophers and legal researchers on the construction of 'terrorism' as a political concept and the difficulty of cleanly differentiating it from 'legitimate' forms of violent political action. The french revolution was terrible and made every single person in france worse off. It is the exact evidence that shows that even in a revolution restraint is still needed. I am a freedom fighter, you are a rebel, and he is a terrorist. You're edging on support of a terrorist state. The entire goal of groups like ICE is to instill terror. It doesn't get more terrorist than that. People have weird kinks these days If a government does not respond to the wishes of its people, violence is an inevitability. It is in the best interest of the state to be accommodating enough to placate the citizens. 90s medical advertisement disclaimer voice Only if what those people want is something I agree with otherwise I think the state holds the monopoly on violence and we need to mobilize it against the wrong thinker. The funny thing is it's neither terrorism nor illegal if you're just lobbying the government to do it on your behalf. So why do people keep pointing at an Amendment when it comes to gun control? It is quite easy to get the government do if the people really want it. Just stop using a car. Stop buying gas. Stop consuming the stuff and cause business real pain. Then the government will listen. Because businesses, not people, are what governments really listen to. In India, Gandhiji made it work like 5 decades back in India against the British, where the whole country rejected consumption of foreign goods on his call. Whats the problem here? Farmer gives land to city. City goes "We can have 10 million dollars AND a brand new data center, hot diggity" City is enriched in both money AND services. Thanks Mr Farmer. No. Farmer SELLS land (for $10) with a deed restriction that it is to be used for a public park. Hand wavey timey wimey... Deed restriction 'magically' goes away. Gets sold for $10M. So a city should tie its hands permanently because of a gift? Donations can now override city planning? Tired of paying property tax? Gift your house to the city with a deed that says they have to rent it back to you forever for $1 a year? Lets be clear, this wouldnt even be news if it wasnt for "Datacentre" The city could have refused to buy the land for $10 if they didn't agree to the terms. Or claim eminent domain and pay a fair price maybe. > Gift your house to the city with a deed that says they have to rent it back to you forever for $1 a year? What if I write a note saying that you need to pay me $10,000? That's not a contract, that's just a fever dream. But if you shake my hand and sign that piece of paper, that's a different story. The same applies here. If you get the city to agree (and they don't get raided by the FBI after that), then sure, they should be bound by the deal they made. Note that this works both ways. If you own nice rural acreage, the federal or state government will often be happy to pay you some token amount and give you a tax break for a conservation easement that prevents not only you, but all future owners, from using the land in certain ways. It's still yours, but it's now a scenic corridor and you can't build there anymore. There's plenty of such easements in California and other Western states. If I'm bound by such a perpetual, deed-attached restriction, why can't the government be? If the city used eminent domain to snatch it away from the farmer this wouldnt even be news. If the farmer deeded it to someone else, like a neighbor, and said they could only use it to build a park, no one would expect that to apply once the government had yoinked it by eminent domain. It follows then, that government entities really aren't bound by deeded restrictions. If you made them jump through some hoop, where they had to gift the land and then eminent domain it back, that would probably be more wasteful than just letting them do whatever they think is best. The oddest outcome I can imagine is the government being able to compulsorily acquire other peoples property, but being permanently stuck with a fixed use asset that they cant do anything with that they actually own. Thats bonkers. Yes. Society doesn't work if the government is above contract law. If the city can't abide by it's contracts it should not enter into them. Unlike abusive software TOSs the sale was/is not self executing/binding/changed after the fact. The city chose to enter into it with their eyes open. But the government can unilaterally end other peoples contracts and forcibly acquire property. Why does it then follow that they must follow a contract that they could otherwise end just by giving it away and compulsorily acquiring it back? Its like a pet bear that is allowed to eat from the floor but not when the meat is dangled over its nose. Imagine a scenario where the government is building a rail line from A to B, and compulsorily acquires every piece of land on the route, but right smack dab in the middle is land they already own. You expect them to say "Well gosh dern we cant break that contract we signed guaranteeing that this would be a public urinal for the next 1000 years, after forcibly acquiring 10000 other parcels of land at gunpoint, cancel the project". Its entirely unrealistic to expect an entity that is designed to use its land to facilitate society, and can get whatever land it wants to think in terms of some random contract it can break completely legally in any other scenario. Sounds like government should consider that before choosing to enter into contracts that constrain them then doesn't it? If it needs the flexibility it should not choose to limit the flexibility voluntarily and contractually. Well yes and no. Ultimately if the contract was between 2 other parties they could unilaterally end it. It only follows that if they are one of the parties they can still unilaterally end it. If they don’t want to use it for the agreed upon purpose, they could either offer to pay the true value so they can use it for something else or give it back to the farmer/heirs. The real problem seems to be one city gave the land to a parks nonprofit who then sold it to another city, but the original park intent did not follow those sales. And if they need it for something else they could just compulsorily acquire it from themselves for 10 more dollars? I’m not sure I follow. Are you implying $10 is the material value of the property? Farmer donates land for a park If you are my friend and I gift you a nice item … I would be majorly pissed at you and would not talk to you ever again if you would sell it online. I would expect you give it back or pass for free to someone who is also close to you. When you put it that way, i disagree. A gift is a gift. Once you give it to someone its their's to do with as they please. A gift with strings is not a gift. This story is different though, the farmer sold the land for cheap in exchange for some conditions. This situation is more like going back on a contract. Sure, a gift if a gift, but if I give you a gift and then you go off and sell it for $10mil you're a terrible friend. If we are extending this metaphor, given the property passed through many hands, i feel like the equivalent would sort of be like giving a friend a gift, the friend eventually dies, their children sell it when dealing with the estate because they dont have use for the item. That seems like a pretty normal thing to do. I don't think the metaphor extends. A family gave their city land conditionally, decades went by, and then the city sells the land do develop a data center. I don't understand what type of cope you are trying to achieve by excusing this as an okay thing to do. Today the Sagrada Familia, now the tallest church in the world, was inaugurated in Spain, 100 years after the death of its architect Gaudì. Can you imagine the number of H100s we could have put in there if this was Texas? We can right these wrongs. Vertical cooling seems feasible. A Google Maps 3D tour of the interior would be much more accessible. You’re not anti-accessibility, right? This is a moral imperative. Thank you for pointing this out. The cooling towers are right there. It’s true. All we have to do is figure out how much money it will take to steamroll the area backwards NIMBY dumb dumbs that don’t understand how much more societally beneficial this is, and how much more important our vision and shareholder stakes are. Make it GB300s and now you're cooking with gas (specifically the gas in the supplemental methane turbine generators that will be on site for when the grid is overwhelmed) 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. Agreed, but I am also against government selling public land, since we have so few parks and public spaces. It is much harder to buy it back later. Unfortunately this is just the only defense we currently have against powerful interest groups. It's the reason we still have any redwoods today. Absent of a fair replacement, a powerful corporation will, over time, always win even if it's not the net social benefit. >> 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? Yes, they should if they are selling the land for $10. You don't want limits? Pay without limits. 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. Step 1: Have a stated cause or known interest (Most people struggle to reach this step) There are plenty of highly effective charities. Maybe but the ones in my city(who take city money) have literally nothing to show for. Tangentially related: https://youtu.be/F4SmgrAmdUQ “When nothing belongs to everyone, the rich will own everything, including the rebellions against them,” 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. Happened all over England and started much earlier than that. Beautiful work, that video. Gonna play a little devil's advocate here. Setting aside whether I think data centers or good or bad and just focusing on the sale of the land (for whatever purpose). The land was donated back in 99 and looks like they never followed through on making it anything. Which is pretty shitty to Mr Bland's vision. Though that donation itself is a bit weird because literally on the just the other side of the neighborhood is. a park! https://maps.app.goo.gl/jwcANZ59bW17sTmm7 according to the town site the park was dedicated in 1955 https://www.taylortx.gov/244/Fannie-Robinson-Park I suspect It just sat fallow for 25 years because there was already a park nearby and nobody bothered to press them on using the land for it's donated purpose. It switched hands a few times. Likely someone turned it up in some meeting and realized at this point they were never going to do anything with it and might as well sell it. Edit: In considering the protracted timeline, I revise the assumption to "nobody at the office knew why they had the land or any stipulations attached to it". it's even possible that the buyers in 08 didn't know the terms of the original deed from nearly a decade before. Not that it makes it right to sell it but the intent wasn't likely malicious, the land wasn't donated just last year or anything. Calling that a park is stretching it, even if someone named it "park". That's a playground, some grass, and a parking space. Not something where you can enjoy a stroll for a couple hours. A city of ~20k doesn't have to go crazy here, but surely you can maintain something nicer (especially once you have that data center money!) It's a playground, some grass, a parking lot (a "parking space" is for one car), a basketball court, a baseball diamond, and what looks like a decent paved, tree-lined trail that goes all the way past the animal shelter to a neighborhood. Seems.... fine? I recently moved from the inter-mountain West to the east and that is one thing that is fascinating to me is how differently the term park is used between the 2. Out west a couple of swing sets and a slide with a small patch of grass is considered a park whereas out east a park is multi acre wilderness with trees streams and miles of trails. It's just funny to me how even though it's the same country it's 2 totally different things meant by the word "park" I don't think this is an east-coast/west-coast thing, but I think people all over the USA use the word "park" to mean anything on the scale of corner playground to national wilderness area. As someone who lived in the West my entire life, not many people would call a couple of swing sets and a slide a park. A playground maybe, but not a park. Now I believe the city would officially call it a park, but that doesn't make it a park. > Though that donation itself is a bit weird because literally on the just the other side of the neighborhood is. a park! To be fair, parks don't just mean playground equipment. It could be a forested area with trails. It could be a drainage pond you can fish in. It could be a garden or prairie. It could even just be a big grass lot where people can play games and do whatever. Next up is the argument that it was to be used for future park land, but: they didn't specify a timeframe... taps head It's crazy how people in this thread wanted to physically cause harm to this city's councilmen when it does seem pretty believable that "nobody at the office knew why they had the land or any stipulations attached to it" when someone takes a second to look into it @dang what kind of site are you trying to run here? 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. 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. The courts have no choice - they are following the law as they should. However that doesn't mean the law is just or right. This is an important philosophical difference A philosophical difference for sure, I happen to find plenty of laws to be unjust, not right, and even unconstitutional. In this comment chain that seems a bit out of place though, I thought we were specifically talking about the laws at play here (maybe I misread it though!) 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. 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. No good deed goes unpunished Nor unviolated, in this case 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. That's 404media for you. They are anti-tech-industry activists who exist to get people riled up against tech companies. 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! According to https://www.taylorpress.net/article/10664,blueprint-data-cen..., the restriction on the deed was gone by the time the property was transferred to the city of Taylor. That seems to have been in 2003. 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. Yes, the old "well that's just the law" while ignoring the material effects of said law. They're just following orders after all right? Just ignore the playbook big tech has been using across development boards in America to somehow always get the outcomes they want while civilians suffer with little to no reprecaussions. 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? This commercial abuse is reminiscent of what Wimbledon is doing with land left for public park land which various parties are ignoring so the land can be used for tennis facilities. I'm a fan of the tennis but that doesn't mean they can arbitrarily ignore what was agreed as a condition for letting the council have the land in the first place. 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. You can't necessarily assume that the people in charge of managing a foundation or natural conservancy organization or church will act as wise stewards of that resource in the future either. Yep its Texas. I'd seen these headlines but until you said that I didn't realize how close it was to me. This is why people donate land to orgs like The Nature Conservancy. Although even there, if you donate land in a location they feel they won't be able to manage, they may sell it to purchase other land/pad the endowment. In theory they will end up being land swaps if you wait long enough, but nana's favorite tree could still end up under a Walmart. Totally unrelated fun story. Recently I learned that the park nearest where my parents lived was named after a Mr Park, hence the name of the park, 'Park Gardens'. It contains a war memorial, albeit with Mr Park's name on it, albeit his son. WW1 for you. Up until 1920 the park was pasture, then Mr Park bought it and it was landscaped very nicely. Since then it has been a well maintained park and actively used. For housing it would make a very good earner for the council, due to its location. As a data centre though? Only lots of bribery and tear gas would get that approved. Once upon a time the park was just a farmer's field, for pasture. Nowadays it is proudly owned by the town and more than just land. As for the story that 'land' might just be land, but, in time, it could have been another wonderful 'Park Gardens'. Huh. I lived in Taylor about 6 years ago. It's your typical small Texas town about 30-minutes east of Austin. Very Texas. It's not the sort of thing I'd think would happen here. Small town folks talk. But with the huge new Samsung fab going up on one side of town, this datacenter on the other, and the unfathomable growth in this part of Texas; I guess things are a changing. Hopefully all the attention this is getting will enforce the original deed restrictions. It's too bad it's a data center; there's already so much hysteria around those and this being a data center project really has nothing to do with the city purposely going around the deed restrictions. But the money, I guess. > the deed restrictions Was there ever a deed restriction? The government says no, but they say there was something else which I don’t understand. > In the notes about the grantee, the cash warranty deed states that the property was to be held in trust for future use as parkland by Williamson County, Texas. This was not a deed restriction. The rest of the page doesn’t display properly on iOS. https://taylortx.gov/1293/Blueprint-Projects-Data-Center Perhaps not. I'm certainly not an expert in Texas property law. Be interesting to see what happens. Quite a deal for the city if it sticks; get land for $10, hold it for awhile, sell for $10M, get taxes from a $1B data center build. On the one hand, the wishes of a donor should be respected to some degree. On the other hand, the government should be allowed to make the best use of land in its jurisdiction for the people who live there today, since “The earth belongs in usufruct to the living” and we should “preserve the soil of the country from being daily more & more absorbed in Mortmain” as Thomas Jefferson might say. Our land should not be bound forever by the preferences of the dead. And I am concerned that the purpose of slanted anti-datacenter coverage by the likes of 404media.co and perfectunion.us is to inspire memetic NIMBYism that has and will cause tremendous damage to the US. 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. 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 The picture at the top of the article seems at odds with the text of the article. The text says 135,000 square feet for the data center. Given the area marked city owned property says it is 560 feet. 135,000 square feet would be an area 240 feet wide alongside the road. The area marked in red. is substantially larger than that. 130680 square feet is three acres. I wonder if the number is a rounded conversion from acreage. It seems a bit short of the 87acres that is specified as the amount given to the city. Maybe the entire red outlined area is 87Acres, It's kinda hard to eyeball an irregular shape like that. pretty sure the red is the bulk of parcel R130425000A0001 52.42 acres. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1601-Martin-Luther-King-J... I measured it out. I think it's the bulk of red, possibly ending at the dashed lines at the right-top. That area going all the way down including the housing development and cutting out both of the substations is 87 acres. Each of the three marked buildings (assuming the two grey and three white rectangles make up a single building) is 135,000 square feet. The uniqueness of this episode suggests that there are people out there who are fully occupied searching every square foot of the earth for places where they can wheedle their way into a land deal. If it's not for a data center, then it's a CAFO, a mine, logistics center, etc. NIMBYism is not just a matter of wanting to preserve exorbitant land values, but a knowledge that every square foot of land and gallon of water is in demand by nefarious people who are not revealing their actual intentions. More than once I've read stories about small local counties selling huge plots of lands to companies promising to build data centers, only for those companies to flip the land instantly for double or triple the price. There seems to be no shortage of desperate rural areas that are more than willing to sign ridiculous no-strings-attached deals with companies, in the hopes that they'll geta a couple of years with economic stimuli. I can't blame them, I'm from a small place like that, and have seem some atrocious deals go through. I think that if you're unscrupulous enough, there's a killing to be made by those type of grifts. But why don't those small local counties desperate for funds just sell their plots of land for double of triple the price themselves? Lack of network/connections. The first company that flips the land, will go into the deal with potential buyers, and lowball the crap out of the seller. Sometime the sales (when they flip) are done via acquisition by the target company. In all practical sense, the first buyer functions as a scout, doing research and negotiations, and make at tops a couple of million. A nice payday, but not enormous amounts of money. But for sure money that would have come handy for the county that owned the land. Well the city could just sell the land for 2-3x the price from the get go, but Karen and the people she elects wants to pretend like their zoning and red tape policies are saving the spotted owl or keeping their retirement nest egg valuable or whatever, so inevitably they red tape themselves into a corner at which point the grift just becomes too juicy and the greedy voters hand the opportunity to an even greedier and cunning bastard on a silver plate who will package it up and sell it to a fake "data center" and the developers get their way anyway. "value creation" 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. 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. Rumour was an old lady donated posthumously alot of money she had saved up her whole life, to build a university at Estepona in Spain. After she died they never built it. The town remains pretty much the same as it always was. Last time I was there they had replaced the red marble promenade that was cracked on the beach with some sort of rubber playground cement, and for some reason that I can only put down to malice, built a large statue that resembles a rat about 8 feet tall and placed it at the intersection of the promenade with the town center, where there used to be old spanish men and youths playing on many free foosball tables Bear in mind this fishing town is next to Marbella perhaps the richest destination in the mediterranean. Its almost as if as a child I fell asleep and woke up in a nightmare, when I visited. Fortunately they left what remains of the old town alone and its still a beautiful (in parts) tourist destination. For the median worker in a small town in Spain, an entire life savings of scrimping and saving could still be only a fraction of what it would take to build one lecture hall. Might not even pay for a single year of salaries, operations, and expenses. Put a million Euros into an endowment, and at 5% annual returns, that's 50,000 Euros, enough to hire maybe one person to run and teach everything. Even if it was 10 million Euros, that's a lot less than you think if you want to start even a small school and not run out of money in a few years. It depends on how rich the old lady was. In my hometown (Cáceres, also in Spain) an old rich lady left a whole palace to the city, which is now a museum, and a lot of money to start a cultural foundation. the point of the story was that it was given to the council on condition they built a university with it ( she wasn't a fishermans wife ). as in she was rich bro edit> are you trolling me? You call this a rumor at the top of your comment. It’s all hearsay and you can’t really criticize people for assuming something different than you assume. There’s no factual information here to discuss. I didnt criticise anyone, and rumours are the shadows cast by coming events. That reminds me of the story of the university librarian who lived frugally and left his savings to the university, which went ahead and spent a million of those dollars on a silly football scoreboard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Morin_(librarian) > Rumour was an old lady donated posthumously … to build a university Was it only a rumor or did you find a reliable source? Presumably that type of thing would make at least the national news, especially if it’s been years - a university costs exponentially more than (empty?) parkland. its the equivalent of a literal fishermans tale. Theres always some truth behind them. Im just saying what I heard on the grapevine. If people could stop busting my balls Id appreciate 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. 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. A never had the authority to contract the land as a park indefinitely ... once C owns it they own it 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. The city usually has the authority to dismiss deed restrictions if it is in the best interest of the city. my wording was too vague though, youre right in that I took for granted we were talking about the city and this doesnt generally apply to normal ownerships or else HOAs wouldnt be anywhere near as annoying as they are. > if it is in the best interest of the city I think a lot of people, including many of the citizens of this city would say this is not in the best interest of the city. the point is that argument can be made regardless of deed restrictions. the city generally does things it believes to be in the best interest of the city, so making a deed restriction with it is borderline meaningless with respect to authority. it is purely symbolic, but you would hope that people representing the city see the deal for what it is and respect it unless it's absolutely necessary to override it.. rather than treating the original owner like a sucker and putting up a data center 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. In Seattle the city is not allowed to take away park land without replacing it with the same area of new park land. No need to special case “if it was given by a citizen to be a park” - just make it park land at the time, and it’s permanent enough. If you want a park, then build a park. Don’t give away the land and hope someone else builds a park. The Trustees of Reservations, in the Boston area, are a great example of this working well. Yea, I suppose if you gave the land to an organization dedicated to building parks then you could reasonably expect to get a park out of it. Of course, they might decide to build a garage to house and maintain their fleet of mowing and gardening equipment instead. "someone can just arbitrarily decide that land cannot be used?" Yes, deed restrictions in Texas are contractual obligations that run with the land. Due diligence in acquiring land in Texas involves making sure existing deed restrictions do not impede your intended use. Some cities in Texas don't even have zoning (Houston is the largest such city, though it does have some land use controls these days that it historically didn't have), it's deed restrictions all the way down. They don't have standing on the deed restriction, and would have to sue for the property devaluation directly. IANAL. That's not true. In Texas the neighbors are exactly the people who have standing to sue for deed restrictions violations. In Texas, only certain parties can enforce deed restrictions, usually: 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. > 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. 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. 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). > neighbors doing something legal 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”? > They don’t because it’s a private agreement, so only the involved parties can sue. 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. 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. > 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? Why would the city buy it with the original stipulation attached if that were the case? Seems dishonest (which isn't illegal), but yeah... The guy donated it, so they didn’t buy it per se. This is purely from a legal perspective. Morally it’s abhorrent (at least as presented). 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. Update: this is the most up-to-date info I could find: Case 15-25-00202-CV 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. 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. It would be even worse for city planners if anyone could sue for a reduction in their property values due to a decision they made. 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. > the Supreme Court case where they found standing > nobody had actually asked for one and the person didn't even make wedding web sites > There was no actual case 303 Creative v. Elenis started out because the web designer sought injunctive relief from a Colorado state law that would have made her unable to refuse to make a website for a same-sex wedding. She had received a request to make a wedding website (for a heterosexual couple), and preemptively wanted to preserve her right to refuse in light of the Colorado law and to put up a public-facing notice stating as much. The case was appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court by the designer herself. It doesn't read to me that any standing was "invented" here. Notably, the dissent in this 6-3 decision does not discuss standing at all; and in fact, the Tenth Circuit that decided against the designer (prior to the SC appeal) did find that she had standing. It sounds like you have your own personal gripes with this decision, which is fair, but an attack on the grounds that there was no standing is misguided. "In collusion with the rest of the government" makes that statement meaningless. 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. IANAL, but from all the legal podcasts/commentary I consume, I get the general impression that standing is a bit of a mess and is applied in highly inconsistent ways throughout the legal system This statement is far too vague semantically to be meaningful. It is technically correct under some extreme definitions of indirect (e.g. no affecting in any way) but if you are harmed in many inobvious manners you have recourse. In this specific example the neighbor is harmed through their property valuation - whether that will be a successful suit I cannot comment on but there is observed harm. Additionally, if a relatively forgotten homeless person is murdered and the murderer is found we still charge them - even if no individual is directly harmed by the murder happening we have a general understanding that murder is bad. Would you consider murder is bad to be a direct harm and thus skirt around the vague statement above or would you consider murder is bad to be an indirect harm and thus challenge the validity of charging someone with murder of someone without any obvious social ties? Also, if it's just some random person being murdered is the emotional distress on a family enough of a direct harm to qualify for your statement or do you think that murder (when it is not a failed attempt) is a crime for which no person has standing (aka the Telvanni way). If we are taking about standing to sue, we are talking civil lawsuits, not criminal law. This distinction sresolves many of your questions. Yes there are nuances, but in general I think it is a reasonable huristic. If Mcdonalds raises the price of burgers, I have more costs, but that alone is not grounds to sue Mcdonalds. If a burgler robs mcdonalds driving a price hike, that is not cause for a customer to sue the robber. It's worse (in terms of complexity and therefore chances of arriving at justice). From the article: July 7, 1999 – A granted the land to (T) Texas Parks and Recreation Foundation, a public trust, for $10 on the condition it be used as a park, 2003 - T granted the land to (W) Williamson County Park Foundation, 2003, one month later, W gave the land to the (C) City of Taylor, 2008 - C sold the land to E (Taylor EDC) for $15,000, 2025 – E sold the land to (D) data center developers Blueprint for $10 million. At some point between T -> W -> C -> E -> D the deed restriction ('accidentally'??) got deleted. I'm sure T, W, C, and E will each point fingers at any/all of the other parties, and D will just point to their done deal that had no such terms in it. If I had to guess wildly who, if anyone, had nefarious intent my bet would be that the City conspired with "W" (WCPF) to launder the deed somehow with the intent (way back in 2003) of sneakily putting the land to some non-park use that whoever runs the City government wanted at the time - perhaps at that time it was selling it off for housing development. Then maybe in 2008 (note the year) they decided building housing was a terrible idea and changed plans to shop it around for some kind of commercial use so they shuffled it to the "EDC." if you've ever bought and sold a house, you will know people who look at deeds and titles aren't very detail oriented. they even have title insurance because it happens so often. 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? 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. > 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. 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. 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 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. No because the HOA represents the other members of the community who were also subject to the same CCRs. Why would that make them harmed? My understanding is that the HOA could sue you, presuming that they baked into your purchase contract the force of their authority. 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. 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. 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. Can they do so retroactively? If they didn't declare imminent domain beforehand, I'd expect this is contract violation. But we're all guessing at Lawyer Facts(tm). So, the threat of violence (police/legal) if you complain about members of city hall lining their pockets with data center contracts. Dig up the names and addresses of the public officials responsible for that decision and watch the phrase disintegrate. But that is how deed restrictions are enforced. If you didn't have that mechanism, then they would just not exist upon death, etc. Depends on the wording. "Upon X, the land shall revert to Y, or current heir" is common verbiage in deed restrictions. > deed restriction Was there ever a deed restriction? The government says no, but they say there was something else which I don’t understand. > In the notes about the grantee, the cash warranty deed states that the property was to be held in trust for future use as parkland by Williamson County, Texas. This was not a deed restriction. The rest of the page doesn’t display properly on iOS. https://taylortx.gov/1293/Blueprint-Projects-Data-Center "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. 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. Are B not part of the city? Why wouldn’t they have standing on an action by their government? (This is a genuine question, not a rhetorical one). Generally the idea is that if you don’t like what the government does you deal with it through politics (elections and so on). You only have standing if the government is actually directly harming you. If the deed was restricted, how could C legally sell to D without restriction? Is the answer "yes it was illegal but A would have to file suit and they're dead"? In Texas it is exactly the neighbors who have standing to sue over deed restrictions violations. 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. 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. 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. 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... There is actually a ton of this. 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. 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 If you take one step further back, you can make the discussion about what deed restrictions are reasonable rather than about breaking the deed restriction. Like for an example with different dynamics, Menard's will say you can't use the building as a hardware store when they sell to build elsewhere. That's a stupid restriction for society to allow. 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. 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. 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? Central Park isn't wild. I replied to someone who said we need more wild areas. I'm all for parks. There is a huge gradation of "how wild". Central park is way more wild than a playground, which is way more wild than a city street corner. The Yosemite National Park front country is way more wild than Central Park. The federally-protected wilderness areas, where it is illegal to use a chainsaw for trail management as that is not sufficiently wild, in the Sierra Nevadas are even more wild, but still have a ton of people, trails etc. The Brooks Range in Alaska is yet even more wild - no/few trails, take a bush plane in/out, etc. Allowing a bit more wilderness is always a utility - it doesn't have to be binary wild/not wild (and very little land habitable by humans has ever not been severely influenced by humans) 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. Once you stop farming it, it'll be wild right quick. Not really sure why you're quibbling this way. Ahh, maybe it's because your just a bot 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. There is less and less wild left over. It won't be very wild sitting in the midst of a human settlement. 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. 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. > Even conservation trusts make more sense to me. That seems to be what was used here. Then the trust sold it for some cash. 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. > 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. 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? > 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 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). Having a rancher grow hay and graze their animals on your property is valuable: it means you don't have to take care of the land, which might otherwise become host to invasive species, or overgrown. A neighbor used to let us graze horses on his property for the same reason: "that way I don't have to bother mowing it." 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. Hmm, if I refuse to pay my car note, they repossess it. If you fail to pay taxes, the gov't places a lien on the property. Can the family that never received payment put a lien in place instead? That would prevent the $10million sale. That'd get someone's attention The thing is it's just a promise. If it would actually torch the deal to not hand over the $10, you can do it at any time. But the court agreed that it was just a fiction. Presumably if you didn't pay the option price, which may not have been specified directly in the contract, or was in some other exhibit, the deal never happened. But this technicality of consideration is not the same thing. Would that mean the original owner gets it back? Would they have to pay property tax backlog retroactively? Might be huge.. I'd put any tax bill owed back to the city. They are the ones that cheated on the deal. Of course, I live in fantasy land with that kind of notion Generally only if there was some effort to collect it. 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. [0] https://www.nature.org/en-us/what-we-do/our-priorities/prote... >"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. 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. Except that it usually works out to "rule of law for thee, but not for me." Citizens used to hold leadership responsible. It wasn’t even that long ago. Now, for a certain class, theft and rape are hardly a risk. 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. Don't the Chinese execute their corrupt officials/rich ppl while there families do the GoT shame walk? I also like Oprah's 'you get to be a Luigi, and you, and you' etc approach. Maybe someone can vibe code a corpo calorie calculator (CCC tm) so when u upload a pic u get an estimate how long it can feed your fam. There has to be a way for the hoi polloi to get some cake too. 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. Or the local game of putting stuff on the ballot that on the surface is for some reasonable purposes--but when you dig into it they're actually attempting to finance stuff that should be paid out of the current budget. To date I've voted against 100% of bond proposals because of this. Meanwhile, city hall got built without any financing. And I can't imagine how it complies with the fire code. I really would not want to be upstairs in an evacuation! I'm a little skeptical the farmer's family didn't see this coming. $10 in 1999 for 87 acres?That's basically giving it away with a handshake. City councils change, money talks. 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. Why did the suit get dismissed? Local good ol boys doing the K-Drama USA dance? 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. My guess is standing. The family bringing the suit is not the family that donated the land. 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? > 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. That is the point: as a citizen in a city, you are part of that city and any contract the city is part of. Otherwise, what/who is a city? In the US, normally, citizens of a city do not have the right to act on behalf of the city. They cannot sue on behalf of the city, they cannot unilaterally attempt to enforce the city’s laws, etc. There are some rare exceptions where cities and states pass laws that create private rights of action when regulations are violated but these are the exception. So deed restrictions are unenforceable then? Can it be both? Trying to think of a data centre themed expedition now where you go visit the robots and interact with the machines You know, you joke (I think?) but data center companies could genuinely at least open up for tours to try to appeal to the public, if public approval is apparently such a concern. It's funny that they haven't done it at all yet. Think nuclear power plants in the 60s or 70s, many of them were open for tours or school field trips or such to try to make them more appealing to the populace around them. I haven't heard of a single DC doing the same thing, unless you're a potential customer. Isn't this stuff kind of basic? In the Netherlands I visited a nuclear reactor in middle/highschool. Literally something that left such an impression that I still talk about two decades later. Letting kids into places where science and technology happens has such an impact. We should really enable that as much as we can. I genuinely think it was a big loss to our society that we stopped regularly doing this. I had a few such field trips in grade school, but nothing comparable to a factory or nuclear plant. It's a combination of post-9/11 security paranoia, companies not wanting to do anything that doesn't directly make them money, and the loss of manufacturing and heavy industry in the West, all together. It's sad. DC tours are probably a nightmare to do in a PCI-compliant (and the myriad other standards they claim compliance with) environment. Yeah, but draconian laws aside (I jest a bit) if you can ensure safety for kids (and clumsy adults) visiting factories and NUCLEAR plants I guess you could manage the same for data centers and deal with a reasonable number of headaches. It's not really too complicated, iirc. They already generally have visitor processes set up for customers and prospective customers. The servers themselves are in cages, of course, and presumably the tour wouldn't actually go into those. Plus, yeah, what the other comment said. > data center companies could genuinely at least open up for tours to try to appeal to the public, if public approval is apparently such a concern. Do you actually find anything appealing about a datacenter? I've been to one and while it was mildly cool from the standpoint of "wow how do they manage this many machines" I didn't find anything appealing about it that would make me want it in my neighborhood. Sure, I think they're neat. I've been inside a few smaller ones but not any true modern hyperscaler style ones. They're big buildings with cool security systems, power setups, HVAC setups. It'd be fun to see inside. Nothing on the level of a nuclear plant, of course, but about as cool as it'd be to tour any big industrial facility, I'd imagine. Which isn't to imply I'm "pro data center" or whatever but if they're going to build them it'd at least be nice to show people inside. This seems like pretty basic PR stuff that developers of large industrial facilities (again, nuclear plants, hydro dams etc) figured out ages ago. That won't work when your tour guide can't even answer questions about what the computers do because theyre all running VMs that are rented out on an ad-hoc basis. They could say anything and the visitors would have to believe it. A canyon tour guide tells me a story about why a rock formation is named the way it is. I have no clue if it’s true. But I enjoy it still. The tour guide could just give that answer to any such question. It'd be comparable to the answer given to someone who wants to know what that new railroad which was built where there used to be fields or forest is used for: people ride it to go somewhere, freight is passing over it going places. Having said this I do feel like these data centres should be built in such a way that waste heat is used in some way. Use it to heat structures, greenhouses, whatever. I used to live in a place where a large fraction of the block heating came from a nearby power plant with additional gas-fired heating for when the waste heat wasn't enough. The same can be done with waste heat from data centres by using heat pumps. This can work in colder climates and in the cooler seasons in moderate climates. I don't think train tracks are comparable because they're effectively one dimensional. You dont need to burn down the forest you just need about 20 feet or so on either side of the track. WRT the environmental aspect, I think it's patently obvious that nobody who builds these things cares because there are a number of far simpler ways to reduce their footprint which dont get implemented. Pumping waste heat out to residential heating or some hypothetical industrial application is, at best, just recycling. It only makes sense if you have to accept that the waste inevitably exists whether you recycle it or not, otherwise recycling is never the best way to do anything. I think there's also inherent risk in building infrastructure that relies on the continual operation of this massive facility that could just as easily be shut down in a few years and written off as a fad. Trusting silly valley to support any product over the long term is never a safe bet. Waste heat from power plants isn’t always useful because it is low grade heat… but it is still much, much, much better than the 35-60C water you could get from a data center. That is what you use the heat pumps for, to transform what you call "low-grade heat" to... "higher-grade heat"? The COP for a heat pump doing such a transformation can be very high, i.e. for a relatively low power input you get a lot of gain. Do the math on pumping 40C water any distance in a loop. It is hard to make it worth it. The water cools off and the pumping takes significant energy, plus the pump and all the piping cost something. Then using a heat pump on it makes it even worse. Low grade heat source is not a term I made up- it refers to heat sources under 100C. Even much hotter low grade heat usually goes unused. You usually need a perfect confluence of a warmer source, very close need for building heat, and a willingness to pay more for environmental friendliness for it all to work out. Here's an article on the subject of using waste heat from data centres and other sources for district heating. It includes the math you told me to do as well as references to other articles on the specific subject of using "low-grade heat sources" in combination with heat pumps to feed district heating networks. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403212... And, again, the economics. The hypothetical Polish project cited in the paper showed a breakeven in 6.1 years... if one ignores time value of money and assumes it is delivered for the estimated cost. The annuity formula tells me that at a reasonable 10% discount rate, payback would be in 10 years. Modest overruns in cost from this naive estimation push that to never. https://scispace.com/pdf/planning-data-center-waste-heat-re-... And again this is a pretty idealized case-- very nearby housing, optimistic estimated costs. Other projects analyzed in your paper had "raw" paybacks of 15 years and 17 years-- AKA never in actuality. When we are talking about protecting the environment, efficiency and return on capital is important. You'd be better dumping those projects into generating more green energy instead of trying to reclaim the DC energy. This is why: > > Even much hotter low grade heat usually goes unused. You usually need a perfect confluence of a warmer source, very close need for building heat, and a willingness to pay more for environmental friendliness for it all to work out. Or build a park on top of the datacenter as a living roof? Maybe even use the waste heat to help grow things in cold, dark climates? It’s pretty different; but locally they covered a good chunk of a freeway with a very nice park to mollify the residents. The US Federal Government donated surplus ammunition depots to the city of Chattanooga, decades ago. Deed restrictions limited its usage as "parkland." Recently, our mayor attempted to sell this parkland (technically zoned "industrial") to gain a quick half-million for the county. It is adjacent to VW's Tennessee assemblyline. Fortunately this was rejected, and now it's being greenwashed as "conservation" by that same mayor. Why is it better for the city of Chattanooga to use land formerly occupied by ammunition depots as parkland, than for it to sell it to VW so they can use it to expand their assembly line? Currently VW is contracting (as is most of non-tech global manufacturing). Third-shift has entirely stopped. Severance-buyouts offered. ...so currently unnecessary. Also, the parkland has heavily-used trails, and this would block off almost the entire south of the park from pre-existing public access/neighborhoods. Our county recently (a few years ago) purchased the largest remaining farm, with intentions of developing an industrial business park – IMHO: also foolishly: it's so far away that it has no infrastructure and is difficult to access – but perfect for bluecollar (county-living) workers, nearby. ---- Thankfully this issue has been tabled, for now. NPS just gave the county this land this century, with deed restrictions for "greenway" – I agree that 200-years-past restrictions shouldn't debilitate living populations... but most of those living (when NPS gave to county) are still living. I've had a few fantasies that if I become wealthy enough ever that I want to buy a whole bunch of multiple city blocks in my city make them public parks. But I did have that same fear is how do I ensure they survive? Do I do a land trust or something like that? How would a donation survive so something like this doesn't happen? You find an institution that is likely to continue to exist and let them manage it. You need someone to sue on your behalf 1000 years down the line. Long Now foundation hosted a talk [0] on this, “Continuity: Discovering the Lessons behind the World’s Longest-lived Organizations” Love this, thank you! Enshrine it in actual law. Theodore Roosevelt donated some of his land when the national parks became law, and that’s held up reasonably well. There’s no such thing as a guarantee, but it is pretty decent precedence. Thank you! Man o man, that's frustrating to no end. I REALLY hope there was a clause in there that if the city does ANYTHING other than turn it into a park the man can sue the city for 120% of the value of the sale or he gets 90% of the sales revenue. 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. Was anyone else bracing to read about a local ordnance that reclassified a data centers as a type of park (...for the AI to play in, duh)? My brain officially only understands "up" as "down"... I am starting to notice a pattern here: all these datacenters are located in places with cheap land and lots of poor people. Odd for something that I am assured is the bright future for mankind. First mistake was trusting the government. Never give anything to the government that they don't force you to with their threats of violence and other coercive action. I don’t get why you would sell the land instead of putting it in a trust inherited by your descendants and leased to the city for some long period of time. Then everybody wins and the city can’t just decide to sell it to someone else. Are deeds with conditions like that legal in that jurisdiction? IDK about Texas but supposedly there's a cemetery in southern Virginia that legally becomes the property of some member of my extended family (possibly even me, not that I actually want it) if the county ever digs up the bodies because it was gifted to the county by a distant ancestor on the condition that it is only public property so long as it remains a cemetery. I know they can’t be permanent because of the rule against perpetuities[1], but since this was in 99 I don’t think that applies. IMO the non permanent nature of these sorts of grants is a good thing because if we don’t have limitations then we’ll eventually end up in a necrocacy where the long dead have more say over how property and the government is managed than the living. IANAL but Texas law seems to allow a great deal of flexibility in deeds. One interesting quote I found: > spelling out any additional agreements between the parties within the four corners of the deed itself can eliminate any doubt or ambiguity as to the content of those agreements. The word "any" does some heavy lifting here, I'll admit. > How can a grantor insure that the “as is” provision is unconditionally accepted by the grantee? The answer is to require that the grantee sign and acknowledge the deed This quote is using as-is provisions since those are very common, but it seems like this doctrine applies to any condition in a deed. Did a representative for the city ever sign the deed? Property law in America is insane from all sides. It's one of the few countries where you can just say something is yours, and someone else can disagree, and you get to argue about it forever. The only reason it is like that is we are still pretending all lands belong to the King of England. We never went back and fixed it. Even England itself fixed this, but we're too stupid. Seems pretty straightforward to me. The land is owned by the city, that much is not in question. If they signed the deed, they agreed to the condition that they would use it to build a park. If they didn't sign the deed, they never agreed to that condition. Except when they violate civil rights (i.e. "whites only" deed restrictions are not enforceable, though they do exist), I think the answer would generally be yes. In some places in Texas, there is no zoning, only deed restrictions, Houston being the largest city where that's so, though that has evolved a bit and the city does have more say about land use than in the past. Anyway, deed restrictions run with the land and are legally binding on subsequent owners in Texas. Buying land is agreeing to the contract implied by the deed restrictions. It's part of the due diligence of acquiring land in Texas. Of course, governments can change the terms of that kind of thing in some cases. But, I suspect any honest reading of this situation would have required the city to go through a public hearing process so that the neighbors of the property were aware and had a voice in the decision, at the very least (but maybe even with that, their was a clear agreement to reserve the land for parkland, they shouldn't have taken the land if that wasn't an acceptable obligation). Property rights and contract law are pretty sacred in Texas. I lean YIMBY about a lot of things, but this gets my hackles up. It looks illegal on its face and shouldn't have made it through the cities lawyers going over this deal. Edit: I should also mention that it is literally the neighbors right/obligation to sue in these cases. I've seen the argument that the neighbors of the land don't have standing. But, for deed restrictions, the neighbors are exactly the people with standing to sue over violations of deed restrictions. Cities in Texas are not obligated to enforce deed restrictions in most cases and most do not, Houston is one major exception to that rule. > Except when they violate civil rights (i.e. "whites only" deed restrictions are not enforceable, though they do exist) In my deeply blue city in my deeply blue city there were several HOAs with covenants around "non-whites" could only live in servants quarters on property, etc. These clauses and covenants were non-enforceable, but when my city went after the HOAs to physically remove the clauses, they still encountered pockets of resistance, from "historical significance" to "what's the point, they're unenforceable" to "ugh, we'd have to hire attorneys to do that" to the point where the city had to announce sanctions ranging from fines up to investigating the possibility of forcible dissolution of the HOA. Unenforceable or not, picture how welcome you'd feel as a POC reading that in the HOA covenants for a prospective home purchase. It was given back to the city over 20 years ago. Trying to tie the current owner into what happened forever ago just does not make sense. Meanwhile I can't build a carport for my driveway because of the "Character of the Neighborhood" Why are people so mad? This stuff is legal in Texas. It's exactly the desired outcome from the lack of regulation. What happens to all of these data centers once "Data centers in space" is a thing? Good thing he's not donating his body to science... they'd carve him up and sell him to plastic surgeons for parts. The IDF is practicing on the bodies of Americans donated to "science". https://www.aljazeera.com/podcasts/2026/5/13/the-takehow-us-... https://www.uscannenbergmedia.com/2025/10/01/usc-sold-dead-b... It’s so funny how data centers became a popular boogieman on social media. Modern information warfare I don't want a massive industrial looking building across the road from my house, nor do I want the noise or traffic or anything else that comes along with it. I'm not sure it's information warfare as much as garden variety NIMBY people doing what they do best. . . . Making noise constantly. This is the most American news story ever not too far from an onion video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkDKmSMvfmk Does this mean Mamdani can build a datacenter in the middle of central park if he wanted to? No, the specific land use regulations around central park in new york city have basically nothing to do with the specific land use regulations around this particular piece of land in Texas. Umm so if the deed had a legally binding condition on it, why is that condition being ignored? The article doesn't say what the rationale was. Was the condition not legally binding in texas? Is there some time limit on it? Something else? What is the legal excuse being used? I agree that the OP article isn’t great - deep in the article it seems to say it’s legal but doesn’t explain why, even though the article goes into detail on less important matters. Regardless, the government says there was never a “deed restriction” but they say there was something else which I don’t understand: > In the notes about the grantee, the cash warranty deed states that the property was to be held in trust for future use as parkland by Williamson County, Texas. This was not a deed restriction. The rest of the page doesn’t display properly on iOS. https://taylortx.gov/1293/Blueprint-Projects-Data-Center No wonder we have less and less good people. New homes for AI agents. This is a a worthy legal gofundme if I ever saw one! its a digital park [flagged] And the outrage is about what exactly? The tribe not respecting NIMBY-sensibilities of non-indigenous Vancouver residents? What do you see as wrong with that? What was supposed to happen to the land instead? Good deed for our robot overlords! I think if the city tried to communicate what that money is going to be used for, perhaps it'd be slightly more palatable.
Or perhaps the pitchforks are already out, and it wouldn't. The problem is that these things often don't manifest. There's a massive data centers near me. Supposedly we're supposed to get all this blah blah blah. Well, the data center "accidentally" didn't pay for several months of water to the point where the local cost of water went up what what they thought was a shortfall until they realized nope, we were just stolen from. And no way could we fine them for this total accident of not paying their massive water bill for several months. They're put business partners. Somehow. Also, I've had more black outs since the data center has been active than I've ever experienced. I'm sure these things are unrelated. Along with the increased cost of electricity. And I'm on the other side of town from the data center. The locals nearby complain about more. I still don't know what supposed benefit I got from it being here. We already had a well funded government before the data center was here. I think this situation is why many are so anti-data center. The city gets the cash from the land sell and they get some temporary industry from the construction and then it's just a drain on the area. It's the US so it's probably going to fund lawsuits against the police department. 4d chess move is to sell it for the price they'll pay out in salary to the city lawyer, city engineer, favored contractors, and whoever else will show up as paid "expert witnesses" to the trial defending the sale. Whoever challenges it thinks they're costing the state, when in fact the trial is the whole grift and it doesn't even matter who wins. In 20 years all these datacenters will be Superfund sites where taxpayers will have to cover the cost of environmental damage. The people of the town decided they'd rather have $10M and $3M/year instead of some random extra parkland. That money is significant for a small, non-wealthy Texas town. Also, there is already a park right to the west of the residential section shown in the map, called Fannie Robinson park. 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". and how much of that philosophy do you even know? Good luck finding pure and true land that never changed hands from war or conquest. yeah, that’s the point Maybe this will fund a bigger better park with playgrounds and water features? It will, just not in the U.S. Probably in private resorts in Albania, Saudi Arabia, etc. Don't forget Israel and Qatar Possibly, but only if the mayor and a couple of city council members own the new land that costs a $200 monthly subscription to access, the profits going directly to grifter's pockets. On the one hand, the wishes of a donor should be respected to some degree. On the other hand, the government should be allowed to make the best use of land in its jurisdiction for the people who live there today, since “The earth belongs in usufruct to the living” and we should “preserve the soil of the country from being daily more & more absorbed in Mortmain” as Thomas Jefferson might say. Our land should not be bound forever by the preferences of the dead. And I am concerned that the purpose of slanted anti-datacenter coverage by the likes of 404media.co and perfectunion.us is to inspire memetic NIMBYism that has and will cause tremendous damage to the US. > Our land should not be bound forever by the preferences of the dead. This only came up because living people also care about it. If you want to make it illegal to dictate how land is used, do so directly. I'd be fine with the state passing a new law, voted on by the people, stripping such deeds of their status. But until then, it doesn't seem good at all to ignore an existing law at the whims of local government. And of course, at that point, don't be surprised when the people keep voting to toss data centers out - if individuals can't be expected to dictate what happens to their land, neither should corporations. I disagree with you in principle. I think a town that accepts a donation of land for a specific purpose should be as bound as anyone else to the terms of the deed. In practical terms, it’s not clear that an entity with the power of imminent domain can meaningfully be constrained by deeds. In principle, I think there aught to be a rule against perpetuities. Including conservation easements. The community should be able to decide where their parks will be, not some former landowner. There is another 55-acre park (Fannie Robinson Park, 1009 E MLK Jr Blvd) about 1/2 mi down the street from the datacenter site (1601 E MLK). Legally, this case is about the terminology of a deed that was sloppily made “in trust… for parkland”, and standing to sue. It’s currently on appeal. (Trial court: https://judicialrecords.wilco.org/PublicAccess/CaseDetail.as.... Appeal, 15th Court of Appeals: https://search.txcourts.gov/Case.aspx?cn=03-25-00831-CV&coa=.... Appeal, 15th Court of Appeals: https://search.txcourts.gov/Case.aspx?cn=15-25-00202-CV&coa=...). It’s a shame that the deed was poorly granted. Perhaps it would have been better for everyone if it had been held privately and taxed as such. And as far as newsworthiness is concerned, the actual deed lost its restriction in 2003, and the city transferred it to the Economic Development Corporation in 2008. It could have then been sold to any industrial purpose. This is not really a national story about datacenters. It is the story about a 2008 sale for industrial purposes. The fact that this is recirculated as a datacenter story is meant to poison the public on any mention of the word datacenter. I think this trend of biased news is intentional. According to opus 4.8, here’s the chain of title for the 87.797‑acre Taylor tract: 1. 7/7/1999 — Bonnibel Bland Cromwell & family → Texas Parks & Recreation Foundation (deed carries the "held in trust… for parkland" restriction). Recorded #199947198. Consideration: $10 (charitable donation). 2. 10/7/2003 — Texas Parks & Recreation Foundation → Williamson County Park Foundation, Inc. Recorded #2003100356. Consideration: $10 (nominal/recited). 3. 11/20/2003 — Williamson County Park Foundation → City of Taylor. Consideration: $10 (nominal/recited). 4. 11/12/2008 — City of Taylor → Taylor Economic Development Corporation. Recorded #2008084718. Consideration: $15,000 cash + a land swap — the EDC also conveyed two tracts back to the City “by exchange” (a ~22.708‑ac tract in the Samuel Pharass Survey + a 16.658‑ac tract in the Coursey Survey); no dollar value stated for the swapped tracts. 5. 11/19/2024 — (Plat Map Recording Sheet; not a transfer) 6. 4/11/2025 — Taylor Economic Development Corporation → NCP Travis TPP Project, LLC (Blueprint Data Centers). Consideration on the deed: "Cash and other good and valuable consideration" — no figure stated; reported at ~$10 million in the press. If you can't trust your deeds to be respected then no rational actor would donate land. Instead the farmer would just have kept it.
A more strongly written deed restriction would have specified a reversionary interest, wherein upon the conditions being broken, the property interest automatically springs back to the original owner. The rules of standing still apply but the sale to data center might not have ever gone through The original grantor (or heirs)
A property owners’ association
Or someone specifically granted enforcement rights
I mean... pretty easy to see why... $10 gift became $10M for city government, with $30M tax expected over next decade