the key issue is C doing things that it's taxpayers dont want done.
in this case though taxpayer money is not being spent, the property is being sold which means money is being generated for the taxpayers, and the new property owner is
ultimately A never had the authority to contract the land as a park indefinitely and relied on C to have respect for the deal and intent. Maybe a timeframe needed to be stipulated, but even then we are talking about land ownership - once C owns it they own it. If you wanted to buy a house and the seller said something about you never being allowed to develop a section of the backyard because they buried their goldfish there or something, and you respect that wish but now need to move as well, are you stuck with passing that obligation forward? someone can just arbitrarily decide that land cannot be used?
No thats why there is no standing, they have every right to use the land to better the taxpayers. the problem is not the method or authority, the problem is that people dont want to give up a park for a data center and dont see the data center as something that benefits the taxpayers. that issue is not one that should be settled by the deed.
the property devaluation is a problem that should be addressed independently on its own merits and not through the means of challenging if they have the authority or not.
That's not what a deed restriction is.
are you stuck with passing that obligation forward
Generally yes. Which is why the deed restriction can affect the market value of the property.
my wording was too vague though, youre right in that I took for granted we were talking about the city and this doesnt generally apply to normal ownerships or else HOAs wouldnt be anywhere near as annoying as they are.
I think a lot of people, including many of the citizens of this city would say this is not in the best interest of the city.
You are right though, how long can someone who doesn’t own that land, have authority on how it is used.
Yes, deed restrictions in Texas are contractual obligations that run with the land. Due diligence in acquiring land in Texas involves making sure existing deed restrictions do not impede your intended use.
Some cities in Texas don't even have zoning (Houston is the largest such city, though it does have some land use controls these days that it historically didn't have), it's deed restrictions all the way down.
It's extremely common. They get called NIMBYs, because they bought a property at a certain price and a low-ability local bureaucrat wants to do something that destroys that value.
My knowledge as a non-lawyer generally agrees with above, most states won’t allow you to sue for neighbors doing something legal that decreases your property value (CA is the exception I’m aware of, and even then it’s a “sometimes” kind of thing).
I’m not even sure who they’d sue. Presuming the land is zoned for a datacenter, the datacenter is allowed to do datacenter things. You could sue the city to try to prevent the zoning, but sovereign immunity would preclude suing them for doing their job (zoning, in this case).
The question is about doing something illegal, such as removing a covenant that was involved in a sale when reselling? If it is something that could have been objected to by the original seller (they would have had standing to sue) and they have not agreed to change the covenant (because they are dead), it seems as if anyone affected should be able to sue.
The breaking of the covenant is what is being sued over.
> Presuming the land is zoned for a datacenter, the datacenter is allowed to do datacenter things.
If my house is zoned for a possible datacenter, that doesn't mean that anyone can build a datacenter there - it is still my house. If there is a covenant that says that the land will be a park, that's the "zoning" by the seller being stricter than local zoning, which means that it also conforms to local zoning.
The zoning doesn't say "The land must be a datacenter."
edit: It would be bizarre if we can sue over terms of service as if they constitute law, but we couldn't sue over terms of sale. I can sue Facebook if they allow another user to violate their terms of service.
They don’t because it’s a private agreement, so only the involved parties can sue. In this case, if the original seller died then standing to sue would be inherited (I believe). If the inheritor doesn’t care, then neither does the government.
There’s also a bunch of weird edges. Like if the land just isn’t usable as a park because it’s too out of the way to be worth maintenance or building it would be insane because it’s a literal swamp, what is the city supposed to do with that? Own it and just do nothing with it in perpetuity?
> If there is a covenant that says that the land will be a park, that's the "zoning" by the seller being stricter than local zoning, which means that it also conforms to local zoning.
Sellers don’t get to do any zoning, the city does. You can add a covenant that says a single family home in San Francisco can only be used for fracking, despite the fact that there’s no oil and zoning wouldn’t allow it.
> I can sue Facebook if they allow another user to violate their terms of service.
No, you can’t. Or rather, you can file it, but it will be tossed out immediately. There is no tort for failing to enforce your own ToS. You might be able to sue Facebook for negligently failing to stop a user from breaking an actual law.
It’s against Facebook ToS to use a name other than your legal name on your account. How confident are you that you could win a lawsuit against Facebook because Post Malone’s account isn’t named “Austin Post”?
That isn't generally how legal restrictions on the use of real estate work. They're just part of the property.
Compare https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/real_covenant :
> Real covenants affect the landowner’s property rights and “run with the land,” meaning that future owners of the property are bound by the covenant.
Since there's a covenant on this land, the current owners are bound by it, regardless of the terms of sale they thought they were getting.
The reason that restrictions on real estate work this way is pretty simple: ownership of real estate is tracked in a giant centralized registry, so arbitrary restrictions can be recorded there.
Is this a good idea as a policy matter? Absolutely not. But we have the law we have.
Quoting from that page:
“The party capable of enforcing the covenant depends on whether the burden or the benefit runs with the land. In other words, only the party who the covenant is designed to help can enforce it.”
Your page spells out the other relevant bits. Real covenants must benefit one party at the expense of another (horizontal privity), so the heirs of the man who donated the land are the benefactors. That it helps (or at least doesn’t harm) the neighbor does not make them the benefactor here because their benefit was incidental (ie they aren’t legally “the benefactor”).
Covenants being centrally registered is a matter of convenience when house shopping, not a declaration that the state will enforce them.
I’d actually bet there are a lot of houses that have racial segregation covenants on them still because the benefactors quit trying to enforce them. I know my city has a bunch of racist laws on the books still because the city quit enforcing them ages ago, city council doesn’t want to spend time revoking laws that haven’t been used in 50 years, and no one has standing to sue to revoke them unless they get arrested for them.
Why would the city buy it with the original stipulation attached if that were the case? Seems dishonest (which isn't illegal), but yeah...
This is purely from a legal perspective. Morally it’s abhorrent (at least as presented).
1. Injury-in-fact: The plaintiff must have suffered or imminently will suffer injury—an invasion of a legally protected interest that is (a) concrete and particularized, and (b) actual or imminent (that is, neither conjectural nor hypothetical; not abstract).[44][45] The injury can be either economic, non-economic, or both.
2. Causation: There must be a causal connection between the injury and the conduct complained of, so that the injury is fairly traceable to the challenged action of the defendant and not the result of the independent action of some third party who is not before the court.[46] ---
The best way to understand why standing was not found is to read the court's ruling. Unfortunately (but not unusually) 404Media has not linked to the judgement. (I will try to find it.) My guess (IANAL) is the injury is hypothetical or conjectural.
https://search.txcourts.gov/Case.aspx?cn=15-25-00202-CV&coa=...
Pamela Griffin, Ralph Griffin, Michelle Griffin, Corey Griffin, Individually and as Trustee of The Griffin Revocable Living Trust, and Polly Randle
v.
NCP Travis TPP Project, LLC
But the records only go up to February 20th.
For example, the Supreme Court case where they found standing for somebody to refuse to make a same-sex wedding web site, even though nobody had actually asked for one and the person didn't even make wedding web sites. (303 Creative v Elenis)
There was no actual case. The Court invented one because they wanted the opportunity to overturn a state law, and they invented it out of whole cloth.
As opposed to the case where citizens are having their votes essentially erased because of district boundaries explicitly designed to target them. They lack standing to sue over it.
I have zero faith in "standing" as anything other than a tool for picking and choosing on ideological grounds, without having to address any facts of the matter.
> nobody had actually asked for one and the person didn't even make wedding web sites
> There was no actual case
303 Creative v. Elenis started out because the web designer sought injunctive relief from a Colorado state law that would have made her unable to refuse to make a website for a same-sex wedding. She had received a request to make a wedding website (for a heterosexual couple), and preemptively wanted to preserve her right to refuse in light of the Colorado law and to put up a public-facing notice stating as much. The case was appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court by the designer herself.
It doesn't read to me that any standing was "invented" here. Notably, the dissent in this 6-3 decision does not discuss standing at all; and in fact, the Tenth Circuit that decided against the designer (prior to the SC appeal) did find that she had standing.
It sounds like you have your own personal gripes with this decision, which is fair, but an attack on the grounds that there was no standing is misguided.
IAAL, and the legal precedent is... the doctrine of standing. The article is paywalled halfway down for me, so I don't know the particulars of the complaint, but it's presumably in state court. Either way, most state doctrines are some variant of the essential elements for Article III (federal) standing, which are 1) An injury in fact that has or will imminently occur (i.e., no speculative or indefinite injury); 2) That injury must be a direct consequence (but-for causation) of the defendant's actions or inactions; 3) The injury must be redressable by the court. "Soandso did something and I, an otherwise unconnected party, may potentially lose value on my home's resale value at some undefined point in time in the future" is the type of abstract, speculative injury that never clears the hurdle. To the extent you actually want to soak in the torment of 1Ls everywhere, Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife and TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez are your big ones.
Outside of that, you'd likely need standing created by statute to bring a claim. But standing is just a threshold question that every litigator with a brain will attack because it kills the whole thing before reaching the merits. Even if Ps had standing, the prospects of prevailing aren't great given the timing, parties, and issues involved.
If Mcdonalds raises the price of burgers, I have more costs, but that alone is not grounds to sue Mcdonalds.
If a burgler robs mcdonalds driving a price hike, that is not cause for a customer to sue the robber.
The original grantor (or heirs)
A property owners’ association
Or someone specifically granted enforcement rights
(b) does not have standing.
You would then have violated your contract with the HOA.
I also expect that the city violated their contract with A('s heirs). B still has no standing.
Why wouldn’t they have standing on an action by their government?
(This is a genuine question, not a rhetorical one).
You only have standing if the government is actually directly harming you.
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.
Easy - be a municipality. There's a reason the phrase "can't fight city hall" exists, and is for the most part universally true.
The same way the city can eminent domain your home and put a road through it. The HOA can't stop the city from putting in a new road.
But we're all guessing at Lawyer Facts(tm).
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.
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)
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.
Is the answer "yes it was illegal but A would have to file suit and they're dead"?
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."
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
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.