Even more bizarre, the $10 cash never changes hands.

Sounds like that sale should be null and voided at that point

Someone apparently thought that about a Texas option contract but the Texas Supreme Court disagreed and said the contract was still valid, endorsing the fiction.

Hmm, if I refuse to pay my car note, they repossess it. If you fail to pay taxes, the gov't places a lien on the property. Can the family that never received payment put a lien in place instead? That would prevent the $10million sale. That'd get someone's attention

The thing is it's just a promise. If it would actually torch the deal to not hand over the $10, you can do it at any time. But the court agreed that it was just a fiction. Presumably if you didn't pay the option price, which may not have been specified directly in the contract, or was in some other exhibit, the deal never happened. But this technicality of consideration is not the same thing.

Generally only if there was some effort to collect it.

Would that mean the original owner gets it back? Would they have to pay property tax backlog retroactively? Might be huge..

I'd put any tax bill owed back to the city. They are the ones that cheated on the deal. Of course, I live in fantasy land with that kind of notion

There's lots of places that give 99 year leases for obscenely small amounts like $10. The neighborhood church near where I grew up owned way more land than it currently used. They "leased" the land to farmer/ranchers to grow hay in part of it and graze animals in other parts. It was leased with similarly friendly terms if not the 99 year lease.

These things are more common that people might expect. Not everyone is a lawyer-esque asshole, but that does open situations up to disagreements where people respond with "should have talked to a lawyer"

Not a lawyer but my understanding is that a valid contract must involve an exchange of value from both parties

Yes, but that value can be pretty trivial. It's not uncommon in the UK to have a 'ground rent' of one peppercorn a year (for weird reasons of property ownership rules of flats).

Having a rancher grow hay and graze their animals on your property is valuable: it means you don't have to take care of the land, which might otherwise become host to invasive species, or overgrown.

A neighbor used to let us graze horses on his property for the same reason: "that way I don't have to bother mowing it."