Posted by greedo 2 hours ago
When are we going to hold local government officials accountable for bullshit like this? Send them to prison.
A sold to C with the deed restriction
C sold to D without the restriction
B tried to sue to stop D from building the datacenter, but B has no standing.
Okay, that makes sense. It seems to me that A or C has standing, but not B. And depending on the way it's written (IANAL) perhaps only C has standing. But either way, B is just some random person in this relationship.
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).
1. Injury-in-fact: The plaintiff must have suffered or imminently will suffer injury—an invasion of a legally protected interest that is (a) concrete and particularized, and (b) actual or imminent (that is, neither conjectural nor hypothetical; not abstract).[44][45] The injury can be either economic, non-economic, or both.
2. Causation: There must be a causal connection between the injury and the conduct complained of, so that the injury is fairly traceable to the challenged action of the defendant and not the result of the independent action of some third party who is not before the court.[46] ---
The best way to understand why standing was not found is to read the court's ruling. Unfortunately (but not unusually) 404Media has not linked to the judgement. (I will try to find it.) My guess (IANAL) is the injury is hypothetical or conjectural.
https://search.txcourts.gov/Case.aspx?cn=15-25-00202-CV&coa=...
Pamela Griffin, Ralph Griffin, Michelle Griffin, Corey Griffin, Individually and as Trustee of The Griffin Revocable Living Trust, and Polly Randle
v.
NCP Travis TPP Project, LLC
But the records only go up to February 20th.
(b) does not have standing.
Deed restrictions are the mechanism that basically all HOAs are built upon so if you can just skirt around them because $reasons there are millions of people who would like to know.
Easy - be a municipality. There's a reason the phrase "can't fight city hall" exists, and is for the most part universally true.
The same way the city can eminent domain your home and put a road through it. The HOA can't stop the city from putting in a new road.
It doesn't sound like what is happening here, but I don't think you should be able to block development on land you donated indefinitely.
You don't pay taxes on land in current use, but, if you or whomever you sold the land to, wants to build on it, they have to pay the back taxes first. It's a great for conservation.
I also don't see how this behavior is in the public good, even if the donor has some ulterior motive, governments are free to reject donations
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/06/24/corner-cros...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities
In this case, the farmer should have talked to a lawyer first. There are ways to set thing up to prevent misuse.
While I'm sure that's happened once or twice and serves as great fodder to get people of a certain ideological bent riled up, for the most part nobody is giving government land that's worth a shit. They're doing it to land that's effectively unusable due to regulation. Like if you own a strip that's a many acre 30ft wide along a steep river bank plus some space for a house (the lot layout could be the result of an old railroad or industrial thing) you gain literally nothing being on the hook for all that and you can't use it. That sort of thing is the typical case in which these sorts of things are invoked. It's more of a "well if you jerks care so much about what I do with it you can have it" type deal than a tax dodge.
It even sprouted a cottage industry of REITs selling investors a product built around it, syndicated conservation easements: https://www.propublica.org/article/syndicated-conservation-e...
On land you contractually purchased with the condition that development be blocked indefinitely? Then why sign the contract? If they wanted a time limit, they could have put it in the contract, or not signed the contract.
If it gets zoned as parkland as part of a sale - great! You should be able to make that part of a sale contract. But if the governing body then votes to make it something else a decade later, that should simply be part of how things work.
Old people ossifying things to how they prefer via preventing future generations to freely operate is not how I want a society to run. If anything the older you get the less say in the future you should have.
It gets nuanced - but in general speaking terms this sort of thing should never be forever set in stone because someone alive 100 years ago decided as such via a private contract. Many other ways to go about setting aside areas for conservation.
Even conservation trusts make more sense to me. It’s still private, but they have an incentive to stay receptive to public comment and be a bit flexible. They might swap that 10 acres for another 100 acres somewhere else that creates a 1200 acre contiguous wilderness or what have you in order to stay relevant to contemporary needs while still staying true to the 250 year old mission.
I simply do not think you should be able to dictate (via private means) what happens to a property after you sell it. That’s for the next person who owns it to decide - in accordance with current local zoning and land use guidelines.
I see plenty of people here angry when the idea is floated of the US government opening up public land for mining, drilling, etc. You may not be one of them obviously, but how is this different?
What do you think the outcome of this would actually be?
Someone wants to sell land to develop a parkland but they aren't allowed to dictate that it must be a parkland.
So they just don't sell it ever. Now instead of a nice park it's a direlect lot for decades
The answer to this problem isn't "fuck you old people we're taking your land and building data centers"
Most contracts are legally mandated to have time limits. I think that's a good policy.
In this case an explicit number of years it has to stay a park would probably work better than an attempt at indefinitely defining the land.
Common Texas boilerplate: That for and in consideration of ten dollars ($10.00), cash in hand paid, and other good and valuable considerations, the receipt and sufficiency of which are hereby acknowledged, the Grantor has bargained and sold, and does hereby bargain, sell, convey, and confirm unto the Grantee the following described real estate.
These things are more common that people might expect. Not everyone is a lawyer-esque asshole, but that does open situations up to disagreements where people respond with "should have talked to a lawyer"
Dream of my life to see politicians to be personally responsible for fuckups they cause to people.
It wasn’t even that long ago.
Now, for a certain class, theft and rape are hardly a risk.
My local park is zoned as no "dog poop allowed", and it is one giant toilet for dog owners. Everyone from miles away cones to dump their shit there.
If you complain, you get brutally assaulted.
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.
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.
Some of these ideas strongly carry over to the idea of AIs acting as autonomous agents as well.
(Most people struggle to reach this step)
“When nothing belongs to everyone, the rich will own everything, including the rebellions against them,”
This is a jerk move by the city, but that is a different issue.
If I can't write in a deed restriction then I also don't want the government writing easements and land use restrictions.
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.
This is closer to the time of the lawsuit and has some more details - they sold it to a trust who then sold it to the city some years later, and the city rezoned it in 2005. It's possible they missed the timing maybe?
No shame against this family, they and their gift were taken advantage of by their city and its representatives. You don't know what you don't know, "unknown unknowns."
https://theconservationfoundation.org/protect-conservation-l...
> Conservation land trusts work for private and public land. There are many options available to help landowners preserve, protect, and restore land. Two of the most popular options are fee simple and conservation easements. The fee simple option has the conservation land trust owning and managing the land that is donated or sold. A conservation easement is where landowners and a land trust enter a legal agreement to permanently limit the use of an area to protect conservation values. Landowners can either sell or donate the easement to land trusts. Landowners retain ownership of the land, can sell their land in the future, or pass it on. But the conservation restrictions remain forever.
(i work with a land conservation trust in the midwest)
The land trust you work with - are they accredited with LTA?
They are. Great comment, I could not agree more with your thoughts.
Looks like they chose the trust poorly - the trust is the one who sold it to the city I think?
To be clear, I guess that a city who had ownership rights but not development rights could be stupid and ignore a conservation easement, but I guess that is not likely.
Must have spent most of your years in better States than I!