Why a 4,500 Acre Land Sale in Alabama Became a Landowner Rights Story for the Entire Country
About this episode
Clint Flowers discusses a significant land sale in Alabama that highlights the threats posed by retroactive zoning to landowner rights across the country.
Clint Flowers has done hundreds of land deals across Alabama. He has never seen anything like what happened in Baldwin County. The transaction was straightforward on paper: 4,500 acres of former paper company land, largely un-zoned, sold to a buyer who planned to develop it for solar energy supporting a data center. The deal had been public for years, had gone through every established approval process, and was well into contract when a sudden political push attempted to retroactively rezone the property to kill it. Clint, one of the top land agents in the country and an owner at National Land Realty, wrote a widely circulated public piece about it. Not to defend solar. Not to advocate for data centers. To defend the right of a landowner to sell to a willing, legal buyer without having the rules changed underneath him after the fact. This conversation covers what actually happened, why retroactive zoning is a threat to every landowner regardless of what they plan to do with their property, and how the same precedent could be used against a family farm, a conservation easement, a commercial rezoning, or any other use someone decides to oppose loudly enough. Clint also tells the…
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