7 ms·
Wow 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
by helterskelter 5mo ago
Wow 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.
- redsocksfan45 5mo ago[dead]
- Glyptodon 5mo agoWhy did the suit get dismissed? Local good ol boys doing the K-Drama USA dance?
- dwohnitmok 5mo agoMy guess is standing. The family bringing the suit is not the family that donated the land.
- AdrianB1 5mo agoIf it is a park, does it mean anyone living in the city has standing because their entire city lost the park?
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5mo agoHopefully just being a resident of a city doesn’t give you standing to sue over any decision that has a tenuous adverse effect on you. I mean if that holds why shouldn’t visitors who might one day hope to visit the given park have standing to sue?
- AdrianB1 5mo ago> just being a resident of a city doesn’t give you standing to sue over any decision that has a tenuous adverse effect on you Why not? If you are impacted, why not? When do you have a standing then? Visitors out of town have less standing than the people paying taxes to the town, that is fair, but the city IS the people, each and every person, not an abstract third party that herds them like cattle.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5mo agoThe impact should need to be material and related to some legal right you have, it seems to me. In general you cannot sue to enforce a contract or agreement you are not a party to, even if the outcome of adhering to that contract affects you.
- AdrianB1 5mo agoThat is the point: as a citizen in a city, you are part of that city and any contract the city is part of. Otherwise, what/who is a city?
- asdfasgasdgasdg 4mo agoIn the US, normally, citizens of a city do not have the right to act on behalf of the city. They cannot sue on behalf of the city, they cannot unilaterally attempt to enforce the city’s laws, etc. There are some rare exceptions where cities and states pass laws that create private rights of action when regulations are violated but these are the exception.
- Glyptodon 5mo agoSo deed restrictions are unenforceable then?
- jmyeet 5mo agoI've been trying to find this out. I suspect it was dismissed because they lacked standing. Because there were a bunch of transfer, likely only the last seller has standing to sue for ignoring a deed restriction and of course they don't care. 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.
- Glyptodon 5mo agoYeah, there's no point to deed restrictions if the average person doesn't have standing to do anything about them.
- coredog64 5mo agoIs it true that it was sold for $10? There’s a common phrase in Texas deed transfers similar to the below which just means “The sale price is none of your business” 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.
- projektfu 5mo agoEven more bizarre, the $10 cash never changes hands.
- dylan604 5mo agoSounds like that sale should be null and voided at that point
- projektfu 5mo agoSomeone apparently thought that about a Texas option contract but the Texas Supreme Court disagreed and said the contract was still valid, endorsing the fiction.
- dylan604 5mo agoHmm, if I refuse to pay my car note, they repossess it. If you fail to pay taxes, the gov't places a lien on the property. Can the family that never received payment put a lien in place instead? That would prevent the $10million sale. That'd get someone's attention
- projektfu 5mo agoThe thing is it's just a promise. If it would actually torch the deal to not hand over the $10, you can do it at any time. But the court agreed that it was just a fiction. Presumably if you didn't pay the option price, which may not have been specified directly in the contract, or was in some other exhibit, the deal never happened. But this technicality of consideration is not the same thing.
- Aunche 5mo agoThere is a tax loophole where you buy a lot of land and donate 90% of it to the government to be "public parkland". However, in actuality, you're the only person who has convenient access to this land and nobody else can build there, so you get nearly all the benefits of this land while claiming a big tax deduction. 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.
- ImPostingOnHN 5mo ago> I don't think you should be able to block development on land you donated indefinitely. 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.
- phil21 5mo agoSuch contracts should simply not be legal. Past owners should in generally speaking terms not be able to limit development and land use decisions of future owners. It’s no longer your land. You sold it. Want to privately limit rights via contract? Consider not selling. 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.
- alex_young 5mo agoConservation easements are a thing. Many people support protecting natural spaces and the law is composed of such general understandings.
- phil21 5mo agoYes, and they need to be flexible via public policy. If two generations from now some 10acre plot of land made into wildland is now surrounded by skyscrapers it probably makes a whole lot of sense for there to be a means for the local population to vote to remove that protection and turn it into affordable housing or whatnot. 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.
- arjie 5mo agoIt 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 written (IANAL) perhaps only C has standing. But either way, B is just some random person in this relationship.
- gfisher 5mo agoBut that is how deed restrictions are enforced. If you didn't have that mechanism, then they would just not exist upon death, etc.
- ortusdux 5mo agoDepends on the wording. "Upon X, the land shall revert to Y, or current heir" is common verbiage in deed restrictions.
- jjk166 5mo agoWhy shouldn't B have standing? They presumably are residents of and taxpayers to city C, and they face property devaluation stemming from nearby municipal actions.
- s1artibartfast 5mo agoyou dont have standing from indirect harm or costs.
- waynecochran 5mo agoWhat is the legal precedent for this statement? I am not disagreeing, I just would like to know what the law is.
- 5mo ago
- FpUser 5mo ago>"Send them to prison" Dream of my life to see politicians to be personally responsible for fuckups they cause to people.
- _heimdall 5mo agoAt today's rate in the US, executive immunity is going to extend to all elected or appointed officials in perpetuity.
- AngryData 5mo agoAnd just behind that is politicians getting beat down in the streets when people realize the rule of law means nothing anyways and they have no reason to play along.
- DANmode 5mo agoCitizens used to hold leadership responsible. It wasn’t even that long ago. Now, for a certain class, theft and rape are hardly a risk.
- xyst 5mo agoPoliticians are just foot soldiers/weeds in this game. Pluck one corrupt politician. 2 more grow in its place. I would like the billionaires to be jailed, their political pawns in government removed from office, Citizens United to be nullified, FEC regulations re-worked from ground up, and codified.
- throfktjj 5mo ago[flagged]
- thrance 5mo agoGovernment officials are just revolving villains, send them to prisons and others will pick up right where they left. You have to uproot and get rid of the source: lobbying and moneyed interests.
- crossroadsguy 5mo ago[flagged]
- SilverElfin 5mo agoThis feels a lot like what happens with taxes too. You pass some measure to fund a particular thing voters want. That money then gets spent on unrelated things or just siphoned off into a city’s general fund, disappearing into corrupt grifts and waste. Meanwhile the thing you wanted is unaddressed, and a couple years later, that same thing ends up being recycled into yet another new tax to vote for. But you, the voter, still won’t get what you think you will pay for. 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.
- LorenPechtel 5mo agoOr the local game of putting stuff on the ballot that on the surface is for some reasonable purposes--but when you dig into it they're actually attempting to finance stuff that should be paid out of the current budget. To date I've voted against 100% of bond proposals because of this. Meanwhile, city hall got built without any financing. And I can't imagine how it complies with the fire code. I really would not want to be upstairs in an evacuation!
- toss1 5mo agoYup, part of the problem is the City broke their agreement, but it seems no one with standing exists to legally protest. 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/protect-water-and-land/ https://www.nature.org/en-us/what-we-do/our-priorities/prote...
- melon18 4mo agoI'm a little skeptical the farmer's family didn't see this coming. $10 in 1999 for 87 acres?That's basically giving it away with a handshake. City councils change, money talks.
- toxicunderGroov 4mo agoDon't the Chinese execute their corrupt officials/rich ppl while there families do the GoT shame walk? 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.