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  • 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.
    by b3ing
  • Notwithstanding the merits of this case, I'm against the concept of unlimited time deed restrictions on property. Dead people should not be able to decide what living people can do with land or any other property indefinitely. That's why we have things like the rule against perpetuities, and requirements that charitable foundations spend a certain percentage of their assets every year.

    Some of these ideas strongly carry over to the idea of AIs acting as autonomous agents as well.

    by cameldrv
  • Today the Sagrada Familia, now the tallest church in the world, was inaugurated in Spain, 100 years after the death of its architect Gaudì.

    Can you imagine the number of H100s we could have put in there if this was Texas?

    by sebastiennight
  • 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.
    by zug_zug
  • What I'm seeing from the article is that the land is 87 acres and the data center is going to take up ~4 of them. Perhaps with the extra $3 million a year in tax revenue the city could build a park too.

    The article didn't really convince me that the homes are going to be significantly devalued or that people are going to be thrust into poverty. It says so, and dismisses out of hand claims to the opposite, but doesn't give much in the way of evidence for its points.

    I'm sympathetic to the agreement for the original donation. If the original deed said that the stipulation of donation was not only "only use this for a park" but also "never sell to anyone who might do something else," then I do think the city owes some very large compensation amount to somebody. If not, though... the city sold the land in 2008 to the Taylor Economic Development Corporation, at which point it doesn't really sound like the original deed has much value. If you buy land from someone privately and 18 years later it turns out it was gifted to them with the stipulation that they never sell, how much recourse should another party really have to stop you doing what you want with that land?

    by alex0015
  • American zoning is weird. You can't walk to a grocery store, but you can walk to a data center.
    by enaaem
  • Since this seems to be a misapprehension by a couple of commentators I'll put this as a top-level comment. The family bringing the lawsuit is not the family that donated the land.
    by dwohnitmok
  • Whenever possible, conservation land should go into a conservation trust, not to the city, with a conservation easement. Defense in depth. Local government will do whatever is best at the time with whomever is in charge, conservation trusts will optimize to conserve and protect the land.

    No shame against this family, they and their gift were taken advantage of by their city and its representatives. You don't know what you don't know, "unknown unknowns."

    https://theconservationfoundation.org/protect-conservation-l...

    > Conservation land trusts work for private and public land. There are many options available to help landowners preserve, protect, and restore land. Two of the most popular options are fee simple and conservation easements. The fee simple option has the conservation land trust owning and managing the land that is donated or sold. A conservation easement is where landowners and a land trust enter a legal agreement to permanently limit the use of an area to protect conservation values. Landowners can either sell or donate the easement to land trusts. Landowners retain ownership of the land, can sell their land in the future, or pass it on. But the conservation restrictions remain forever.

    (i work with a land conservation trust in the midwest)

    by toomuchtodo

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