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.

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.

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.

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.

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

You're edging on terrorism

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.

You cant walk to a data center either

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

Nor unviolated, in this case

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

"value creation"

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.

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/

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

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.

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

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

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

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