A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center
404media.co
404media.co
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!
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.
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...
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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 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.
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...
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.
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.
I, too, worry that they're going to rediscover this the hard way at some point.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
Can you imagine the number of H100s we could have put in there if this was Texas?
Some of these ideas strongly carry over to the idea of AIs acting as autonomous agents as well.
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?
(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.
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.
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!)
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.
@dang what kind of site are you trying to run here?
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?
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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
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.
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.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1601-Martin-Luther-King-J...
Each of the three marked buildings (assuming the two grey and three white rectangles make up a single building) is 135,000 square feet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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)
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.
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
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.
Why wouldn’t they have standing on an action by their government?
(This is a genuine question, not a rhetorical one).
Is the answer "yes it was illegal but A would have to file suit and they're dead"?
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.
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.
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.
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...
Dream of my life to see politicians to be personally responsible for fuckups they cause to people.
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.
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.
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.
as in she was rich bro
edit> are you trolling me?
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Long Now foundation hosted a talk [0] on this, “Continuity: Discovering the Lessons behind the World’s Longest-lived Organizations”
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.
My brain officially only understands "up" as "down"...
Odd for something that I am assured is the bright future for mankind.
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.
> 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?
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.
This stuff is legal in Texas. It's exactly the desired outcome from the lack of regulation.
https://www.aljazeera.com/podcasts/2026/5/13/the-takehow-us-...
https://www.uscannenbergmedia.com/2025/10/01/usc-sold-dead-b...
Modern information warfare
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
$10 gift became $10M for city government, with $30M tax expected over next decade
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.
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.
Also, there is already a park right to the west of the residential section shown in the map, called Fannie Robinson park.
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.
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.
In practical terms, it’s not clear that an entity with the power of imminent domain can meaningfully be constrained by deeds.