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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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)

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

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.

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.

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

its a digital park

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.

Supply and demand. YIMBY includes data centers, this is just dimwitted NIMBY opposition to something that has the power to change the world. AGI is right around the corner and Terrence Tao tells me that Anthropic's new version of Opus will enable us to finally unite QFT and relativity. There's no way that's hyperbole or marketing by people with aligned perverse incentives.

Anyone pooh-poohing these developments is a NIMBY, and uh, proud YIMBY here! If someone wants to build a data center in my neighborhood, I'm all for it. It is going to help push humanity to Mars, as Elon often says, who I trust because he is very smart and always thinks before he speaks. I can't wait to have a robot wife on Mars while AI slop porn eats my brain alive, because I never had enough game to find a human one. Oh well. If a data center brings that to fruition, let's go for it! Enough with this NIMBY nonsense. Silicon Valley is much smarter than rednecks in Appalachia, and we know what's best for them. We're totally not soft-eugenicists and totally don't listen to Curtis Yarvin's deranged tripe. We also are totally ANTHROPIC, not misanthropic, in fact, so much so that Dario Amodei named his company that! Totally trust him, bro.

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