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Why shouldn't B have standing? They presumably are residents of and taxpayers to city C, and they face property devaluation stemming from nearby municipal actions.
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presumably because it's not their land and if A wanted to build a data center on it to begin with then B could do nothing about it.

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.

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you dont have standing from indirect harm or costs.
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What is the legal precedent for this statement? I am not disagreeing, I just would like to know what the law is.
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It would generally be the opposite, what law gives them standing to sue?

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).

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> neighbors doing something legal

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.

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According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_(law) the requirements for standing were developed in the Constitution and elaborated in some later cases. To quote from the article, the apt criteria seem to me (2 of the 3):

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.

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Update: this is the most up-to-date info I could find: Case 15-25-00202-CV

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.

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There was an interesting case Knife Rights v Garland (v1) where they determined you also don't have standing for imminent jeopardy if no one has done the imminent thing in decades in a way that results in criminal rather than just mere economic damages. This is why those in danger of getting a felony for interstate commerce of switchblades are unable to challenge the law because it's not considered an injury to merely have your business destroyed and your inventory seized.
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There isn't a single precedent; standing and jurisdiction are like 70% of civil procedure in law school. This page is a good jumping off point: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/standing
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Right, standing seems like a series of technicalities until you realize it's fundamentally what keeps judges from becoming philosopher-kings that control the entire rest of the government: judges only exercise power in actual cases and controversies between formally-identified parties.
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So there are two issues: (c) shouldn't be able to sell without the restriction, and (b) knowing of the restriction made decisions in good faith believing it would be followed and hence have been harmed by it not being followed, no? If (b) doesn't have standing, nobody does and deed restrictions are de facto useless.
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(a) has to sue and they will prevail.

(b) does not have standing.

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.. and if A is dead?
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Property rights would inherit. So one of their relatives or heirs. If they had no one to inherit the restriction it would go to the state - but the state would have gotten the land unrestricted in that case anyway.
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B doesn't have standing because they are indirectly harmed? So if I sell a home in an HOA without the HOA covenant on the deed, can the HOA sue? It seems they are also only indirectly harmed.
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No because the HOA represents the other members of the community who were also subject to the same CCRs.
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Why would that make them harmed?
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My understanding is that the HOA could sue you, presuming that they baked into your purchase contract the force of their authority.

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.

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Are B not part of the city?

Why wouldn’t they have standing on an action by their government?

(This is a genuine question, not a rhetorical one).

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Generally the idea is that if you don’t like what the government does you deal with it through politics (elections and so on).

You only have standing if the government is actually directly harming you.

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But that is how deed restrictions are enforced. If you didn't have that mechanism, then they would just not exist upon death, etc.
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Depends on the wording. "Upon X, the land shall revert to Y, or current heir" is common verbiage in deed restrictions.
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I wouldn't call a community member some random person.
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In which case C should be held culpable for the violation of the terms from A. As the condition of the sale. B should not sue D, but C. Try to get an A witness.
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Please tell me how I can just strip deed restrictions simply because I don't like them and/or they're inconvenient for me.

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.

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> Please tell me how I can just strip deed restrictions simply because I don't like them and/or they're inconvenient for me.

Easy - be a municipality. There's a reason the phrase "can't fight city hall" exists, and is for the most part universally true.

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Yeah, city law can easily override deed laws. But further, eminent domain allows the city to strip away deed restrictions through a "one weird trick". The city can eminent domain the land from themselves removing the restriction and then sell it privately.

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.

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Aren't deed restrictions usually done at the state level? If so, the city can't just magic them away. State law is going to trump city law unless the city's restrictions are tighter.
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Can they do so retroactively? If they didn't declare imminent domain beforehand, I'd expect this is contract violation.

But we're all guessing at Lawyer Facts(tm).

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So, the threat of violence (police/legal) if you complain about members of city hall lining their pockets with data center contracts.
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Dig up the names and addresses of the public officials responsible for that decision and watch the phrase disintegrate.
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It is exactly same like when OEM will make you sign agreement that you won't try to reverse engineer the car, but if you will flip it without the restriction, then all is clear.
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"standing" is a made-up concept with a fairly short history. Remember how we look back at the early part of the 20th century as being filled with virtuous people at every level of industry and govt? me neither:

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.

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B should have standing from the park designation creating a public easement. I'm guessing the deed restrictions are pretty thin, and that pages++ of legalese would have done a better job. But this is the exact dynamic that everyone (rightly) hates attorneys for, both on the giving side ($$$ to hire an attorney to copypasta all that crap), as well as on the receiving side (pages of legalese are bound to create a bunch of extra facets to be dealt with by both the city and residents). Rather than the same rough type of structure needing to be reinvented over and over out of common law cloth, we really need reform aimed at defining commonly understood constructs that can simply be instantiated by reference.
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