alt Hacker NewsFarmer donates land for a park, city sells it for $10M as data center land
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American zoning is weird. You can't walk to a grocery store, but you can walk to a data center.
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.
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?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446439
Have there been any updates?
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.
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.
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.
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"...
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.
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.
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.
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?
Why are people so mad?
This stuff is legal in Texas. It's exactly the desired outcome from the lack of regulation.
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.
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.
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
It’s so funny how data centers became a popular boogieman on social media.
Modern information warfare
not too far from an onion video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkDKmSMvfmk
Are deeds with conditions like that legal in that jurisdiction?
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'.
New homes for AI agents.
[dead]
Good deed for our robot overlords!
$10 gift became $10M for city government, with $30M tax expected over next decade
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.
Maybe this will fund a bigger better park with playgrounds and water features?
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.
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.
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.