A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center

https://www.404media.co/a-farmer-donated-land-to-turn-into-a-park-the-city-is-building-a-massive-data-center-instead/

by greedo • 1 month ago

491 512 1 month ago

404media.co

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/farmer-donates-la...

nativeit• 1 month ago

Tangentially related: https://youtu.be/F4SmgrAmdUQ

“When nothing belongs to everyone, the rich will own everything, including the rebellions against them,”

bigp3t3• 1 month ago

Tragedy of the commons, re-framed

burnt-resistor3• 1 month ago

https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/the-myth-of-the-tragedy-of...

impossiblefork• 1 month ago

Beautiful work, that video.

burnt-resistor3• 1 month ago

Unincorporated areas of London that were previously shared informally were commodified and transferred to the rich roughly around the 19th century, depriving commoners of them and gradually pushed them out.

ninalanyon• 1 month ago

Happened all over England and started much earlier than that.

helterskelter• 1 month 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.

Glyptodon4• 1 month ago

Why did the suit get dismissed? Local good ol boys doing the K-Drama USA dance?

dwohnitmok3• 1 month ago

My guess is standing. The family bringing the suit is not the family that donated the land.

jmyeet• 1 month ago

I'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.

coredog64• 1 month ago

Is 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.

projektfu3• 1 month ago

Even more bizarre, the $10 cash never changes hands.

dylan6049• 1 month ago

There's lots of places that give 99 year leases for obscenely small amounts like $10. The neighborhood church near where I grew up owned way more land than it currently used. They "leased" the land to farmer/ranchers to grow hay in part of it and graze animals in other parts. It was leased with similarly friendly terms if not the 99 year lease.

These things are more common that people might expect. Not everyone is a lawyer-esque asshole, but that does open situations up to disagreements where people respond with "should have talked to a lawyer"

georgeburdell• 1 month ago

Not a lawyer but my understanding is that a valid contract must involve an exchange of value from both parties

Aunche• 1 month ago

There 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.

ImPostingOnHN2• 1 month 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.

miltonlost• 1 month ago

Public parks should not be developed on for the sake of the community. We need wild areas.

ceejayoz• 1 month ago

This one leads to some very odd lawsuits.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/06/24/corner-cros...

infinite_spin• 1 month ago

seems like this behavior would have a chilling effect on deathbed donations, especially when it sends the message gives: "screw you, we'll do what we want"

I also don't see how this behavior is in the public good, even if the donor has some ulterior motive, governments are free to reject donations

PyWoody• 1 month ago

What you're describing sounds like what we call "in current use" in New Hampshire. I know Maine has something similar but I can't remember what they call it.

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.

sandworm1012• 1 month ago

The law addressed this centuries ago. The general rule is that you can enforce such rules for a generation plus twenty years. That may seem like a long time, but the rule prevents the "cold hand from the grave" dictating how living people should act.

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.

cucumber3732842• 1 month ago

There 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

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.

jvanderbot2• 1 month ago

Yeah at that point it should be in a perpetual trust or some other holding co who can fend off the city. Never trust your neighbors with your stuff.

arjie• 1 month ago

It 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.

jjk166• 1 month ago

Why 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.

NDlurker• 1 month ago

I wouldn't call a community member some random person.

Glyptodon4• 1 month ago

So there are two issues: (c) shouldn't be able to sell without the restriction, and (b) knowing of the restriction made decisions in good faith believing it would be followed and hence have been harmed by it not being followed, no? If (b) doesn't have standing, nobody does and deed restrictions are de facto useless.

gfisher• 1 month ago

But that is how deed restrictions are enforced. If you didn't have that mechanism, then they would just not exist upon death, etc.

msandford2• 1 month ago

Please tell me how I can just strip deed restrictions simply because I don't like them and/or they're inconvenient for me.

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.

mindslight• 1 month ago

B should have standing from the park designation creating a public easement. I'm guessing the deed restrictions are pretty thin, and that pages++ of legalese would have done a better job. But this is the exact dynamic that everyone (rightly) hates attorneys for, both on the giving side ($$$ to hire an attorney to copypasta all that crap), as well as on the receiving side (pages of legalese are bound to create a bunch of extra facets to be dealt with by both the city and residents). Rather than the same rough type of structure needing to be reinvented over and over out of common law cloth, we really need reform aimed at defining commonly understood constructs that can simply be instantiated by reference.

reactordev• 1 month ago

In which case C should be held culpable for the violation of the terms from A. As the condition of the sale. B should not sue D, but C. Try to get an A witness.

HWR_143• 1 month ago

B doesn't have standing because they are indirectly harmed? So if I sell a home in an HOA without the HOA covenant on the deed, can the HOA sue? It seems they are also only indirectly harmed.

general1465• 1 month ago

It is exactly same like when OEM will make you sign agreement that you won't try to reverse engineer the car, but if you will flip it without the restriction, then all is clear.

fsckboy• 1 month ago

"standing" is a made-up concept with a fairly short history. Remember how we look back at the early part of the 20th century as being filled with virtuous people at every level of industry and govt? me neither:

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.

adjejmxbdjdn• 1 month ago

Are B not part of the city?

Why wouldn’t they have standing on an action by their government?

(This is a genuine question, not a rhetorical one).

BrandoElFollito• 1 month ago

I don't know how the law works in the US, but isn't the selling by C illegal and moot? C accepted the conditions, but did not repect 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)

thaumasiotes2• 1 month ago

And depending on the way it's written (IANAL) perhaps only C has standing.

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.

insane_dreamer• 1 month ago

If the deed was restricted, how could C legally sell to D without restriction?

Is the answer "yes it was illegal but A would have to file suit and they're dead"?

xp84• 1 month ago

It's worse (in terms of complexity and therefore chances of arriving at justice). From the article:

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."

SwellJoe4• 1 month ago

In Texas it is exactly the neighbors who have standing to sue over deed restrictions violations.

no-name-here5• 1 month ago

deed restriction

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

FpUser• 1 month ago

"Send them to prison"

Dream of my life to see politicians to be personally responsible for fuckups they cause to people.

_heimdall7• 1 month ago

At today's rate in the US, executive immunity is going to extend to all elected or appointed officials in perpetuity.

DANmode3• 1 month ago

Citizens 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• 1 month ago

Politicians 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.

thrance• 1 month ago

Government 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.

SilverElfin• 1 month ago

This 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• 1 month ago

Or 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• 1 month ago

Yup, 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/prote...

melon18• 1 month ago

I'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• 1 month ago

Don'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.

tartoran• 1 month ago

Can they sue and get the land back? The city can deal with the relocation of the datacenter since it's their doing.

dingdingdang2• 1 month ago

"... the city for $10, the city sold it, and when the family went to court their suit was dismissed."

mminer237• 1 month ago

I think your quote is incorrect. I haven't seen that the family has done anything since the donation. It was unrelated neighbors who sued.

toomuchtodo4• 1 month ago

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)

nemomarx2• 1 month ago

In their lawsuit, Griffin and the others aim to stop all commercial development and construction on the site, including Blueprint's data center project. They reference a land deed from 1999 that shows previous owners, the Cromwell family, granted the property to a nonprofit, the Texas Parks and Recreation Foundation, "to be held in trust for future use as parkland."

Looks like they chose the trust poorly - the trust is the one who sold it to the city I think?

toomuchtodo4• 1 month ago

Entirely possible, I will have to read the deed and legal filings to speak authoritatively vs a hot take. Sometimes we trust the wrong people, which is a potential lesson in stronger controls and guardrails legally in this context.

slwvx• 1 month ago

To be explicit, if one separates ownership rights and development rights, and gives the development easement to a conservation trust/foundation that has a mandate to never sell them, I guess things will go better. There are land conservation trusts all over the US and if there isn't one you can create one.

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.

alhirzel2• 1 month ago

I have been on the board of directors of a land trust, and this situation is a poster-child for why an existent concern must retain standing to litigate. A lot of what the Land Trust Alliance (LTA) does is ensure things like the legal nuts-and-bolts of conservation stays possible and durable, including conservation easements. CEs can be a lot of work, especially as the legal landscape changes. I think the dismissal of this lawsuit is not necessarily a risk to CEs, but could be widened into one in the future. This is the risk that LTA exists to mitigate.

The land trust you work with - are they accredited with LTA?

toomuchtodo4• 1 month ago

The land trust you work with - are they accredited with LTA?

They are. Great comment, I could not agree more with your thoughts.

DANmode3• 1 month ago

Local government will do whatever is best at the time

Must have spent most of your years in better States than I!

toomuchtodo4• 1 month ago

My apologies, my thought was "for them."

bluGill5• 1 month ago

I oppose deed restrictions. They last forever and who knows what is correct for future generations.

This is a jerk move by the city, but that is a different issue.

dylan6049• 1 month ago

Deed restrictions can be modified. There are processes for doing it.

bluGill5• 1 month ago

Maybe. Many are forever. If the restriction is a via HOA there is generally a process to modify the HOA agreement. However there are other restrictions and some don't make provisions.

_heimdall7• 1 month ago

I could see some kind of legal max duration of a deed restriction, but it seems totally reasonable as long as both parties know the agreement.

If I can't write in a deed restriction then I also don't want the government writing easements and land use restrictions.

bluGill5• 1 month ago

I consider easements only valid when in use, or 5 years. That is once you build the "thing" you get to keep the easement, but if you stop using that pipe/cable/... you get 5 years to clean it up. If you are planning on building, you get 5 years to complete it, otherwise you have to start over getting another easement.

limagnolia5• 1 month ago

There seems to be some missing details from the few sentences in this article. Does anyone have the full story? Why did the court dismiss the families lawsuit?

nemomarx2• 1 month ago

https://www.kut.org/energy-environment/2025-09-26/taylor-tex...

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?

limagnolia5• 1 month ago

Thanks, I actually just found that article- and it gives a completely different view of events than the posted article. For one, it says the suit was from a group of residents, not the family who donated the land.

kbelder• 1 month ago

This may be a stupid question... do cities need to pay state property tax on properties they own?

cldellow2• 1 month ago

https://www.taylorpress.net/article/10705,judge-rules-in-fav... has a bit more info.

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.

limagnolia5• 1 month ago

Possibly... there is a lot of unknown details here. The article posted appears to be rage bait rather than a well researched article.

etaham• 1 month ago

But think about how many parks that data center's AI can design...

_heimdall7• 1 month ago

Fair enough, and post scarcity should mean we have as many parks as we want.

BenFranklin100• 1 month ago

Something similar happened in Boston decades ago when the city decide to build Storrow drive over what was supposed to be parkland donated by Charles Storrow’s widow. Instead, they turned Boston’s riverfront into a ghastly highway.

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.

dingdingdang2• 1 month ago

This is a a worthy legal gofundme if I ever saw one!

kylehotchkiss2• 1 month ago

Much better to donate that land to nonprofits like https://naturecollective.org who actually can turn things into parks. They're private too, which gives the legal right to trespass people who are trying to live on the park.

kylehotchkiss2• 1 month ago

https://wildlandsconservancy.org this was the actual nonprofit I was thinking of

dwohnitmok3• 1 month ago

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.

_heimdall7• 1 month ago

(Sorry, I don't have access to read the full article)

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.

sapphicsnail• 1 month ago

The land has changed hands a few times since it was deeded to the county. They're sueing the entity that sold it to the people developing the data center.

culi3• 1 month ago

1. Cromwell family donated 87 acres to nonprofit Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation in 1999

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...

AbrahamParangi3• 1 month ago

Land that was conquered in war. It is reasonable to find this distasteful, but it is not unethical in any coherent way.

f33d5173• 1 month ago

3000 years of philosophy, but fortunately you're here to tell us "war exists, so nothing can ever be bad or good".

AbrahamParangi3• 1 month ago

and how much of that philosophy do you even know?

wilg• 1 month ago

Good luck finding pure and true land that never changed hands from war or conquest.

AbrahamParangi3• 1 month ago

yeah, that’s the point

beanjuiceII• 1 month ago

its a digital park

b3ing• 1 month ago

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.

wagwang2• 1 month ago

Donating money is just not it. It's so easy to spend money you didn't work hard to make yourself. If you wanna do good, figure out how to deploy the resources to your cause.

DANmode3• 1 month ago

Step 1: Have a stated cause or known interest

(Most people struggle to reach this step)

rcxdude4• 1 month ago

The main thing is to trust who you're donating it to. Charities often struggle to do important but boring stuff because donors want to add all kinds of strings to the donation.

tyrust• 1 month ago

There are plenty of highly effective charities.

elzbardico• 1 month ago

Never donate things for the government. No matter if it is local, state, NEVER trust politicians.

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.

JuniperMesos3• 1 month ago

You can't necessarily assume that the people in charge of managing a foundation or natural conservancy organization or church will act as wise stewards of that resource in the future either.

cameldrv• 1 month ago

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.

crossroadsguy• 1 month ago

Yes, they should if they are selling the land for $10. You don't want limits? Pay without limits.

bitmasher92• 1 month ago

Should the limitations really exist in perpetuity? It seems unreasonable that land is forced to be a park in 1000 years because it was donated. The people in one hundred generations should be able to use the land how they see fit.

francisofascii• 1 month ago

Agreed, but I am also against government selling public land, since we have so few parks and public spaces. It is much harder to buy it back later.

phkahler• 1 month ago

> 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.

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?

culi3• 1 month ago

Unfortunately this is just the only defense we currently have against powerful interest groups. It's the reason we still have any redwoods today. Absent of a fair replacement, a powerful corporation will, over time, always win even if it's not the net social benefit.

NoMoreNicksLeft• 1 month ago

Good thing he's not donating his body to science... they'd carve him up and sell him to plastic surgeons for parts.

burnt-resistor3• 1 month ago

The IDF is practicing on the bodies of Americans donated to "science".

https://www.aljazeera.com/podcasts/2026/5/13/the-takehow-us-...

https://www.uscannenbergmedia.com/2025/10/01/usc-sold-dead-b...

alex0015• 1 month ago

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?

culi3• 1 month ago

The full 87 acres were donated to the nonprofit Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation. The city sold 53 acres for $10 million to the developer. In addition:

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.

https://www.taylorpress.net/article/10705

limagnolia5• 1 month ago

In another article, it mentions that there is a buffer zone still owned by the city between the houses and the datacenter. They also mention that there is another park nearby (doesn't say how near).

6d6b73• 1 month ago

In 20 years all these datacenters will be Superfund sites where taxpayers will have to cover the cost of environmental damage.

claudeomusic• 1 month ago

This is the most American news story ever

alasdair_• 1 month ago

Does this mean Mamdani can build a datacenter in the middle of central park if he wanted to?

JuniperMesos3• 1 month ago

No, the specific land use regulations around central park in new york city have basically nothing to do with the specific land use regulations around this particular piece of land in Texas.

metalman• 1 month ago

we have a causway built by a private family, that then turned into a beach through natural forces, a HUGE sand beach with waves on one side, and a sheltered shallow bay on the other, which was used as private access to a string of small islands, which was donated to the province, with certain conditions, which include that if the conditions are broken, it returns to the family, one condition is that the beach remains open for anyone to drive and park on. And time and time again groups form to try and gain controll of this several mile long hard sand beach, only to discover what a good contract that thousands of people know about is worth.

clickety_clack• 1 month ago

I don’t get why you would sell the land instead of putting it in a trust inherited by your descendants and leased to the city for some long period of time. Then everybody wins and the city can’t just decide to sell it to someone else.

ProllyInfamous2• 1 month ago

The US Federal Government donated surplus ammunition depots to the city of Chattanooga, decades ago. Deed restrictions limited its usage as "parkland."

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.

JuniperMesos3• 1 month ago

Why is it better for the city of Chattanooga to use land formerly occupied by ammunition depots as parkland, than for it to sell it to VW so they can use it to expand their assembly line?

ProllyInfamous2• 1 month ago

Currently VW is contracting (as is most of non-tech global manufacturing). Third-shift has entirely stopped. Severance-buyouts offered.

...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.

foxyv• 1 month ago

Meanwhile I can't build a carport for my driveway because of the "Character of the Neighborhood"

silexia• 1 month ago

Maybe this will fund a bigger better park with playgrounds and water features?

readthenotes1• 1 month ago

Possibly, but only if the mayor and a couple of city council members own the new land

radley• 1 month ago

It will, just not in the U.S. Probably in private resorts in Albania, Saudi Arabia, etc.

breezybottom3• 1 month ago

Don't forget Israel and Qatar

postflopclarity• 1 month ago

that costs a $200 monthly subscription to access, the profits going directly to grifter's pockets.

Innittech• 1 month ago

Are deeds with conditions like that legal in that jurisdiction?

SwellJoe4• 1 month ago

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.

FireBeyond• 1 month ago

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.

ryukoposting2• 1 month ago

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?

https://lonestarlandlaw.com/deeds-in-texas/

jeffbee• 1 month ago

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.

snickerbockers5• 1 month ago

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.

lovich• 1 month ago

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities

rvz• 1 month ago

New homes for AI agents.

trashface• 1 month ago

Yep its Texas.

pixl972• 1 month ago

I'd seen these headlines but until you said that I didn't realize how close it was to me.

type0• 1 month ago

Good deed for our robot overlords!

asdfman123• 1 month ago

No good deed goes unpunished

mohamedkoubaa• 1 month ago

Nor unviolated, in this case

enaaem• 1 month ago

American zoning is weird. You can't walk to a grocery store, but you can walk to a data center.

logancbrown2• 1 month ago

You cant walk to a data center either

ojame• 1 month ago

Literally in the article is a proposed development that is (easily) walkable from residential houses.

thepryz• 1 month ago

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.

snickerbockers5• 1 month ago

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.

pixl972• 1 month ago

Just makes you wonder how many of the SV types are wanting to use AI as the final solution for the poor.

lmm• 1 month ago

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.

taeric3• 1 month ago

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.

malfist2• 1 month ago

I have two grocery stores within 5 miles of me. Both paths to the grocery store take me by an Amazon warehouse before I arrive at the grocery

Leonard_of_Q4• 1 month ago

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.

hinkley4• 1 month ago

I mean to be fair if you add that 3km onto the walking you're already doing for the conference, that's a lot for most of us. Zigzagging a conference floor all day is a LOT of steps.

compsciphd• 1 month ago

I used to walk from the main library to the metreon every sunday (made a day of visiting library and seeing a movie). It's not a long walk to most americans. It's easy, in that its a flat walk. Less easy (at least then) as it wasn't always the most pleasant area to walk through depending which way one went (detours et al). Staying on market was fine, walking up minna (sp?) less so.

cowsandmilk• 1 month ago

The zoning for that lot would allow a grocery store. Not being able to walk to the grocery store isn’t a zoning issue in this case.

pie_flavor• 1 month ago

I walk to the grocery store, and can't walk to a data center.

mikrotikker2• 1 month ago

As a new zealander walking to a grocery store sounds weird. I've lived in 7 houses some rural some urban and in none of them could I walk to a grocery store, so it's very weird to hear it exalted as some "standard" that America always fails in.

dvdkon• 1 month ago

New Zealand, along with Australia, shares a lot of its urbanism with the US and Canada. In the rest of the (urbanised) world, I'd say it's expected to be able to walk to stores, especially in cities.

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.

Theodores• 1 month ago

Totally unrelated fun story.

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'.

zug_zug• 1 month ago

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.

josephg2• 1 month ago

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.

nicbou2• 1 month ago

Is the French government more responsive than those of neighbouring countries?

breezybottom3• 1 month ago

Those two things are contradictory. Obviously the government isn't very responsive if they are constantly protesting.

smoe• 1 month ago

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.

LiquidSky• 1 month ago

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?

andrepd• 1 month ago

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.

al_borland2• 1 month ago

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.

BurningFrog• 1 month ago

By what measure does it work for the French?

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.

Waterluvian• 1 month ago

I think it’s important that the ultra powerful never feel they’re unreachable by guillotine.

frogperson2• 1 month ago

That's alot less risky in France where the police have more than an 8th grade education, no guns, and aren't jacked up on right-wing hate propaganda 24/7. You punch a cop in the US and there's more than a 50% chance, that a given cop has been dreaming of "protecting himself" by any means necessary. In other words, you are going to get shot in the chest.

squidsoup• 1 month ago

It is much more than that, egalitarianism is fundamental to French culture.

whack• 1 month ago

the French said - something like - they should punch the police more and light things on fire.

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?

beloch• 1 month ago

In Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy, he reviewed Roman records and compared provinces with heavily fortified seats of power to ones that weren't as fortified. The ones that were more fortified tended to be governed in a way that was more callous, less efficient, and less popular. He concluded that it was good for governors to have a reasonable fear of those they governed.

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.

ranger_danger• 1 month ago

That only works for the French because they're afraid to disappear their own citizens. US has been doing it for the last year and a half.

fylo• 1 month ago

You're edging on terrorism

diordiderot2• 1 month ago

People have weird kinks these days

fwip• 1 month ago

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.

bcrosby95• 1 month ago

The funny thing is it's neither terrorism nor illegal if you're just lobbying the government to do it on your behalf.

hilbert42• 1 month ago

What is left when all other options are exhausted?

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.

_carbyau_• 1 month ago

So why do people keep pointing at an Amendment when it comes to gun control?

deaux2• 1 month ago

I am a freedom fighter, you are a rebel, and he is a terrorist.

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.

SecretDreams• 1 month ago

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.

wat10000• 1 month ago

Society's elites have forgotten that civil institutions exist to be an alternative to resolving disputes through violence. If they completely bend those institutions to their will and leave the common people out in the cold, the result isn't acquiescence, it's revolt.

I, too, worry that they're going to rediscover this the hard way at some point.

cyanydeez• 1 month ago

yeah, it's interesting how we're not allowed to call for violence, eh.

pesus3• 1 month ago

We aren't, but the president and certain politicians sure are.

Lerc5• 1 month ago

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.

mystraline2• 1 month ago

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.)

protocolture6• 1 month ago

Whats the problem here?

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.

mystraline2• 1 month ago

No.

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.

ozim• 1 month ago

Farmer donates land for a park

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.

DennisP• 1 month ago

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.

bumby8• 1 month ago

That property was transferred multiple times after the farmer gave it away. I can’t tell if that save deed restriction followed those sales

no-name-here5• 1 month ago

there is a deed restriction

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

tptacek3• 1 month ago

I am ambivalent about whatever this controversy is (taking it at face value, it seems pretty bad, I don't know all the backstory) but we have in fact in the US the exact opposite problem: tiny, nonrepresentative groups of noisy stakeholders have an alarming track record of halting development, which has been deployed in the service of keeping home prices high, neighborhoods white and/or wealthy, transportation inefficient, and the power grid fossil-based and rickety.

AndrewKemendo• 1 month ago

I’ve organized so much that I’m exhausted from organizing

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

idiotsecant• 1 month ago

Being 'stressed' about the corruption and ineffectiveness of governance is literally the exact and only way you make government not be corrupt and ineffective. Democracy is not a spectator sport and voting is just the polite mechanism. Mass protest and outrage is the actual mechanism of democracy - voting is just there to make them afraid of the protest so you don't have to throw moltovs.

qsera• 1 month ago

It is quite easy to get the government do if the people really want it. Just stop using a car. Stop buying gas. Stop consuming the stuff and cause business real pain.

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.

deaux2• 1 month ago

I'm not calling for violence

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.

hmokiguess• 1 month ago

Can it be both? Trying to think of a data centre themed expedition now where you go visit the robots and interact with the machines

ipdashc4• 1 month ago

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?

snickerbockers5• 1 month ago

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.

waffleiron• 1 month ago

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor_Institute_Delft

rogerrogerr• 1 month ago

DC tours are probably a nightmare to do in a PCI-compliant (and the myriad other standards they claim compliance with) environment.

dataflow2• 1 month ago

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.

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.

buildbot• 1 month ago

Or build a park on top of the datacenter as a living roof?

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.

ionwake4• 1 month ago

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.

jubilanti• 1 month ago

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.

ionwake4• 1 month ago

the point of the story was that it was given to the council on condition they built a university with it ( she wasn't a fishermans wife ).

as in she was rich bro

edit> are you trolling me?

pezezin• 1 month ago

It depends on how rich the old lady was. In my hometown (Cáceres, also in Spain) an old rich lady left a whole palace to the city, which is now a museum, and a lot of money to start a cultural foundation.

no-name-here5• 1 month ago

Rumour was an old lady donated posthumously … to build a university

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.

ionwake4• 1 month ago

its the equivalent of a literal fishermans tale.

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.

radpanda• 1 month ago

That reminds me of the story of the university librarian who lived frugally and left his savings to the university, which went ahead and spent a million of those dollars on a silly football scoreboard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Morin_(librarian)

sebastiennight• 1 month ago

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?

DrewADesign2• 1 month ago

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.

vntok• 1 month ago

The cooling towers are right there.

connicpu• 1 month ago

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)

spicyusername• 1 month ago

    $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.

vasco2• 1 month ago

It's the US so it's probably going to fund lawsuits against the police department.

mothballed5• 1 month ago

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.

iteria• 1 month ago

The problem is that these things often don't manifest. There's a massive data centers near me. Supposedly we're supposed to get all this blah blah blah. Well, the data center "accidentally" didn't pay for several months of water to the point where the local cost of water went up what what they thought was a shortfall until they realized nope, we were just stolen from. And no way could we fine them for this total accident of not paying their massive water bill for several months. They're put business partners. Somehow.

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.

TrackerFF2• 1 month ago

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.

smallmancontrov• 1 month ago

"value creation"

mothballed5• 1 month ago

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.

lII1lIlI11ll3• 1 month ago

But why don't those small local counties desperate for funds just sell their plots of land for double of triple the price themselves?

TrackerFF2• 1 month ago

Lack of network/connections. The first company that flips the land, will go into the deal with potential buyers, and lowball the crap out of the seller.

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.

jinpan• 1 month ago

not too far from an onion video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkDKmSMvfmk

analog31• 1 month ago

The uniqueness of this episode suggests that there are people out there who are fully occupied searching every square foot of the earth for places where they can wheedle their way into a land deal. If it's not for a data center, then it's a CAFO, a mine, logistics center, etc.

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.

nmstoker• 1 month ago

This commercial abuse is reminiscent of what Wimbledon is doing with land left for public park land which various parties are ignoring so the land can be used for tennis facilities. I'm a fan of the tennis but that doesn't mean they can arbitrarily ignore what was agreed as a condition for letting the council have the land in the first place.

Lerc5• 1 month ago

The picture at the top of the article seems at odds with the text of the article.

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.

ticulatedspline2• 1 month ago

pretty sure the red is the bulk of parcel R130425000A0001 52.42 acres.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1601-Martin-Luther-King-J...

Lerc5• 1 month ago

I measured it out. I think it's the bulk of red, possibly ending at the dashed lines at the right-top. That area going all the way down including the housing development and cutting out both of the substations is 87 acres.

Each of the three marked buildings (assuming the two grey and three white rectangles make up a single building) is 135,000 square feet.

dmix• 1 month ago

It’s so funny how data centers became a popular boogieman on social media.

Modern information warfare

Loughla• 1 month ago

I don't want a massive industrial looking building across the road from my house, nor do I want the noise or traffic or anything else that comes along with it. I'm not sure it's information warfare as much as garden variety NIMBY people doing what they do best. . . . Making noise constantly.

yonran3• 1 month ago

On the one hand, the wishes of a donor should be respected to some degree. On the other hand, the government should be allowed to make the best use of land in its jurisdiction for the people who live there today, since “The earth belongs in usufruct to the living” and we should “preserve the soil of the country from being daily more & more absorbed in Mortmain” as Thomas Jefferson might say. Our land should not be bound forever by the preferences of the dead.

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.

yonran3• 1 month ago

handoflixue• 1 month ago

Our land should not be bound forever by the preferences of the dead.

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.

dpark2• 1 month ago

I disagree with you in principle. I think a town that accepts a donation of land for a specific purpose should be as bound as anyone else to the terms of the deed.

In practical terms, it’s not clear that an entity with the power of imminent domain can meaningfully be constrained by deeds.

yonran3• 1 month ago

In principle, I think there aught to be a rule against perpetuities. Including conservation easements. The community should be able to decide where their parks will be, not some former landowner. There is another 55-acre park (Fannie Robinson Park, 1009 E MLK Jr Blvd) about 1/2 mi down the street from the datacenter site (1601 E MLK).

Legally, this case is about the terminology of a deed that was sloppily made “in trust… for parkland”, and standing to sue. It’s currently on appeal. (Trial court: https://judicialrecords.wilco.org/PublicAccess/CaseDetail.as.... Appeal, 15th Court of Appeals: https://search.txcourts.gov/Case.aspx?cn=03-25-00831-CV&coa=.... Appeal, 15th Court of Appeals: https://search.txcourts.gov/Case.aspx?cn=15-25-00202-CV&coa=...).

It’s a shame that the deed was poorly granted. Perhaps it would have been better for everyone if it had been held privately and taxed as such.

And as far as newsworthiness is concerned, the actual deed lost its restriction in 2003, and the city transferred it to the Economic Development Corporation in 2008. It could have then been sold to any industrial purpose. This is not really a national story about datacenters. It is the story about a 2008 sale for industrial purposes. The fact that this is recirculated as a datacenter story is meant to poison the public on any mention of the word datacenter. I think this trend of biased news is intentional.

According to opus 4.8, here’s the chain of title for the 87.797‑acre Taylor tract:

1. 7/7/1999 — Bonnibel Bland Cromwell & family → Texas Parks & Recreation Foundation (deed carries the "held in trust… for parkland" restriction). Recorded #199947198. Consideration: $10 (charitable donation).

2. 10/7/2003 — Texas Parks & Recreation Foundation → Williamson County Park Foundation, Inc. Recorded #2003100356. Consideration: $10 (nominal/recited).

3. 11/20/2003 — Williamson County Park Foundation → City of Taylor. Consideration: $10 (nominal/recited).

4. 11/12/2008 — City of Taylor → Taylor Economic Development Corporation. Recorded #2008084718. Consideration: $15,000 cash + a land swap — the EDC also conveyed two tracts back to the City “by exchange” (a ~22.708‑ac tract in the Samuel Pharass Survey + a 16.658‑ac tract in the Coursey Survey); no dollar value stated for the swapped tracts.

5. 11/19/2024 — (Plat Map Recording Sheet; not a transfer)

6. 4/11/2025 — Taylor Economic Development Corporation → NCP Travis TPP Project, LLC (Blueprint Data Centers). Consideration on the deed: "Cash and other good and valuable consideration" — no figure stated; reported at ~$10 million in the press.

strix_varius• 1 month ago

If you can't trust your deeds to be respected then no rational actor would donate land. Instead the farmer would just have kept it.

d_burfoot• 1 month ago

The people of the town decided they'd rather have $10M and $3M/year instead of some random extra parkland. That money is significant for a small, non-wealthy Texas town.

Also, there is already a park right to the west of the residential section shown in the map, called Fannie Robinson park.

https://shorturl.at/jbWuw

hinkley4• 1 month ago

This is why people donate land to orgs like The Nature Conservancy.

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.

irjustin• 1 month ago

Man o man, that's frustrating to no end.

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.

msisk62• 1 month ago

Huh. I lived in Taylor about 6 years ago. It's your typical small Texas town about 30-minutes east of Austin. Very Texas.

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.

no-name-here5• 1 month ago

the deed restrictions

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

msisk62• 1 month ago

Perhaps not. I'm certainly not an expert in Texas property law. Be interesting to see what happens. Quite a deal for the city if it sticks; get land for $10, hold it for awhile, sell for $10M, get taxes from a $1B data center build.

ticulatedspline2• 1 month ago

Gonna play a little devil's advocate here.

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.

CivBase• 1 month ago

Though that donation itself is a bit weird because literally on the just the other side of the neighborhood is. a park!

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.

chmod775• 1 month ago

Calling that a park is stretching it, even if someone named it "park". That's a playground, some grass, and a parking space. Not something where you can enjoy a stroll for a couple hours.

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!)

gustavus• 1 month ago

I recently moved from the inter-mountain West to the east and that is one thing that is fascinating to me is how differently the term park is used between the 2.

Out west a couple of swing sets and a slide with a small patch of grass is considered a park whereas out east a park is multi acre wilderness with trees streams and miles of trails.

It's just funny to me how even though it's the same country it's 2 totally different things meant by the word "park"

Domenic_S• 1 month ago

It's a playground, some grass, a parking lot (a "parking space" is for one car), a basketball court, a baseball diamond, and what looks like a decent paved, tree-lined trail that goes all the way past the animal shelter to a neighborhood.

Seems.... fine?

prawn2• 1 month ago

Next up is the argument that it was to be used for future park land, but: they didn't specify a timeframe... taps head

bryan_w• 1 month ago

It's crazy how people in this thread wanted to physically cause harm to this city's councilmen when it does seem pretty believable that "nobody at the office knew why they had the land or any stipulations attached to it" when someone takes a second to look into it

@dang what kind of site are you trying to run here?

soganess• 1 month ago

Was anyone else bracing to read about a local ordnance that reclassified a data centers as a type of park (...for the AI to play in, duh)?

My brain officially only understands "up" as "down"...

bawolff3• 1 month ago

Umm so if the deed had a legally binding condition on it, why is that condition being ignored? The article doesn't say what the rationale was. Was the condition not legally binding in texas? Is there some time limit on it? Something else? What is the legal excuse being used?

no-name-here5• 1 month ago

I agree that the OP article isn’t great - deep in the article it seems to say it’s legal but doesn’t explain why, even though the article goes into detail on less important matters.

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

gamblor956• 1 month ago

Why are people so mad?

This stuff is legal in Texas. It's exactly the desired outcome from the lack of regulation.

gsky• 1 month ago

No wonder we have less and less good people.

focusgroup0• 1 month ago

[flagged]

dataflow2• 1 month ago

What do you see as wrong with that? What was supposed to happen to the land instead?

lII1lIlI11ll3• 1 month ago

And the outrage is about what exactly? The tribe not respecting NIMBY-sensibilities of non-indigenous Vancouver residents?

ElijahLynn3• 1 month ago

I've had a few fantasies that if I become wealthy enough ever that I want to buy a whole bunch of multiple city blocks in my city make them public parks.

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?

CGamesPlay2• 1 month ago

Enshrine it in actual law. Theodore Roosevelt donated some of his land when the national parks became law, and that’s held up reasonably well. There’s no such thing as a guarantee, but it is pretty decent precedence.

ElijahLynn3• 1 month ago

Thank you!

jazzyjackson• 1 month ago

You find an institution that is likely to continue to exist and let them manage it. You need someone to sue on your behalf 1000 years down the line.

Long Now foundation hosted a talk [0] on this, “Continuity: Discovering the Lessons behind the World’s Longest-lived Organizations”

[0] https://longnow.org/talks/02021-rose/

ElijahLynn3• 1 month ago

Love this, thank you!

PearlRiver• 1 month ago

I am starting to notice a pattern here: all these datacenters are located in places with cheap land and lots of poor people.

Odd for something that I am assured is the bright future for mankind.

t1234s• 1 month ago

What happens to all of these data centers once "Data centers in space" is a thing?

stinkbeetle• 1 month ago

First mistake was trusting the government. Never give anything to the government that they don't force you to with their threats of violence and other coercive action.

charcircuit2• 1 month ago

It was given back to the city over 20 years ago. Trying to tie the current owner into what happened forever ago just does not make sense.

A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center

Related Stories