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phil21 | on: A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center
Such contracts should simply not be legal. Past owners should in generally speaking terms not be able to limit development and land use decisions of future owners. It’s no longer your land. You sold it. Want to privately limit rights via contract? Consider not selling.

If it gets zoned as parkland as part of a sale - great! You should be able to make that part of a sale contract. But if the governing body then votes to make it something else a decade later, that should simply be part of how things work.

Old people ossifying things to how they prefer via preventing future generations to freely operate is not how I want a society to run. If anything the older you get the less say in the future you should have.

alex_young | parent | next
Conservation easements are a thing. Many people support protecting natural spaces and the law is composed of such general understandings.
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triceratops | parent | next
You're right if the land is sold at market price. If it's sold at a discount because of the restrictions, then continuing to enforce those restrictions is valid. The land's value is permanently reduced due to the inability to build, and the price reflects that.
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_heimdall | parent | next
How is this about old people ossifying things? The land owner chose to effectively give it to the city for free with a clear contract stipulating the use. The city took it knowing good and well what was in the contract.

I see plenty of people here angry when the idea is floated of the US government opening up public land for mining, drilling, etc. You may not be one of them obviously, but how is this different?

bigstrat2003 | parent | next
Then people won't donate their land to the city for the public good. So you still won't get your preferred outcome.
bluefirebrand | parent
> Old people ossifying things to how they prefer via preventing future generations to freely operate is not how I want a society to run.

What do you think the outcome of this would actually be?

Someone wants to sell land to develop a parkland but they aren't allowed to dictate that it must be a parkland.

So they just don't sell it ever. Now instead of a nice park it's a direlect lot for decades

The answer to this problem isn't "fuck you old people we're taking your land and building data centers"