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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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].
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.)
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 Part 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
$10 gift became $10M for city government, with $30M tax expected over next decade
I mean... pretty easy to see why...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
Transfer the land to the city either for free or for a nominal fee, but with a covenant. City resells the land and ignores the covenant.
Yes, we know that title or deed is only as good as the enforcement behind it. But if governments discard that to enrich themselves, then that's what a certain amendment is for, as that is pure tyranny.
Lots of endowments come with strings attached. We made a charitable donation to a local university for them to buy some specific science outreach equipment, they bought it.
This all seems reasonable to me. If you want my money or things, you’ll have to use them like I suggest.
But there are limits - with finite resources like land, the present-day owners should not be subject to the whims of men who've been dead for 150+ years.
If in my great-great-great-grandfather's day he wanted part of his legacy to be land passed to his son who'd pass it on to his son and so on - that shouldn't stop me passing it on to my daughter.
And they end up in court cases where the people using it contrary go in with an argument like, "we really need it" or "we already spent it". Depending on how connected they are versus the person who has already passed, they frequently win.
Granting land conditionally such that the ownership reverts once the condition stops being met is very much a thing. I can't find the full details of this particular case, but it sounds like the property went through a long sequences of transfers that probably make the legal situation tricky.
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.
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.
This increases stakes to protest quite a lot, compared to European worker protection and social security.
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...
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.
Now when I was a kid...getting thrown into a paddywagon while hammered after mouthing off to a cop was a right of passage.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.)
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.
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.
[1] https://signalscv.com/2025/03/fbi-launches-task-force-to-inv...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
Can you imagine the number of H100s we could have put in there if this was Texas?
Have there been any updates?
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.
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.
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.
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?
Letting kids into places where science and technology happens has such an impact. We should really enable that as much as we can.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor_Institute_Delft
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
https://lonestarlandlaw.com/deeds-in-texas/
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities
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.
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.
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'.
Yes, we know that title or deed is only as good as the enforcement behind it. But if governments discard that to enrich themselves, then that's what a certain amendment is for, as that is pure tyranny.
This all seems reasonable to me. If you want my money or things, you’ll have to use them like I suggest.
But there are limits - with finite resources like land, the present-day owners should not be subject to the whims of men who've been dead for 150+ years.
If in my great-great-great-grandfather's day he wanted part of his legacy to be land passed to his son who'd pass it on to his son and so on - that shouldn't stop me passing it on to my daughter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defeasible_estate
Granting land conditionally such that the ownership reverts once the condition stops being met is very much a thing. I can't find the full details of this particular case, but it sounds like the property went through a long sequences of transfers that probably make the legal situation tricky.
Demand the government be made accountable.
Government can actually work despite all the vapid puerile tropes.