[ImPostingOnHN]

> I don't think you should be able to block development on land you donated indefinitely.

On land you contractually purchased with the condition that development be blocked indefinitely? Then why sign the contract? If they wanted a time limit, they could have put it in the contract, or not signed the contract.

[phil21]

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]

Conservation easements are a thing. Many people support protecting natural spaces and the law is composed of such general understandings.

[phil21]

Yes, and they need to be flexible via public policy. If two generations from now some 10acre plot of land made into wildland is now surrounded by skyscrapers it probably makes a whole lot of sense for there to be a means for the local population to vote to remove that protection and turn it into affordable housing or whatnot.

It gets nuanced - but in general speaking terms this sort of thing should never be forever set in stone because someone alive 100 years ago decided as such via a private contract. Many other ways to go about setting aside areas for conservation.

Even conservation trusts make more sense to me. It’s still private, but they have an incentive to stay receptive to public comment and be a bit flexible. They might swap that 10 acres for another 100 acres somewhere else that creates a 1200 acre contiguous wilderness or what have you in order to stay relevant to contemporary needs while still staying true to the 250 year old mission.

I simply do not think you should be able to dictate (via private means) what happens to a property after you sell it. That’s for the next person who owns it to decide - in accordance with current local zoning and land use guidelines.

[ImPostingOnHN]

> Even conservation trusts make more sense to me.

That seems to be what was used here. Then the trust sold it for some cash.

[triceratops]

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.

[Dylan16807]

The price only reflects the future value out so far. The market price is based on a small number of decades. So for the purpose of respecting the discount, that reason dries up after a while.

[_heimdall]

Stipulating that such contract must expire after a period of time seems more reasonable than saying such a contract isn't valid at all.

[triceratops]

So add a time-limit to the restriction.

[bluefirebrand]

> 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"

[bigstrat2003]

Then people won't donate their land to the city for the public good. So you still won't get your preferred outcome.

[_heimdall]

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?

[Dylan16807]

> If they wanted a time limit, they could have put it in the contract, or not signed the contract.

Most contracts are legally mandated to have time limits. I think that's a good policy.

In this case an explicit number of years it has to stay a park would probably work better than an attempt at indefinitely defining the land.

[bluGill]

There are some terms that are not allowed in a contract. I believe most deed restrictions are among those terms.