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.
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A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center
101–110 of 574 posts
Re: A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center
#102Reminds 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.
Re: A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center
#103Wow 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 wri…
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.
Re: A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center
#104I 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.
Re: A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Possibly... there is a lot of unknown details here. The article posted appears to be rage bait rather than a well researched article.
Yes, as we all know big tech absolutely follow the rules and don't skirt regulations. It's clearly the journalists causing the problems and not the government that has a history of ignoring contracts when it benefits them!
Re: A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center
#107But 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.
Re: A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center
#108Re: A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wri…
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.
Re: A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So add a time-limit to the restriction.