Eminent domain payout America builds 400,000 acres of road a year. The country has a billion acres. Furthermore usually about a mile from a road is seized for sound barriers and other services which puts the total at 15 million acres. In other words 2% of the land area of America is eminent domained every year. There are no buildings in New York older than 1800 because literally all the land has been seized. If eminent domain paid just compensation would the payouts be trillions? The previous question was unclear.
Your numbers are off The states don't seize a mile next to every road, as farms don't suffer from traffic noise. They also don't seize land when they just rebuild a road, but that is still part of the 400k acres of road. In fact, most &quot;new roads&quot; are rebuilding old ones, and a huge part of the rest is through undeveloped land that is owned by the state or farmers - and thus cheap and doesn't need a mile-wide strip of noise protection. Eminent domain cases are RARE 2018 saw 87 cases of eminent domain in colorado - most of them for buildings no longer deemed habitable and condemned to be torn down, then re-developed. The federal government lists 1001 real property cases filed by the US in the same year's report, not indicating what kind of development or redevelopment would happen there, or if it is Eminent Domain or some other type of real property case. Under Eminent Domain, the seized land can be used for any public use. And in strange cases, it happens even to what used to be a private road and shopping complex in front of Walt Disney World - to build an interchange.
There is no money being offered or given to the voter. There is a long-running traditional bipartisan expenditure in Pennsylvania known variously as street money and get out the vote money that is legally used to reimburse volunteers for expenses to drive voters to the polls. The second article linked asserts this is a first amendment protected right. This seems in line with such historical expenditures.
Normal ways of owning a house don't allow this In common law jurisdictions (so, be careful if you set this in Louisiana which has mixed civil/common law) the normal ways that residential property is owned would either require the agreement of all parties to sell or one party could sell their share but they could not force the other party to do so. However, there are lots of ways that property can be abnormally owned. First, there is the transitional period where the property is legally owned by the Estate of the deceased for the benefit of the beneficiaries and administered by the executor of the will or the administrator if there is no will. If the house was bequeathed specifically to the beneficiaries then the executor must arrange for the legal transfer. However, if there is no will or the will just bequeaths assets without identifying them then the executor/administrator has discretion on whether to transfer the house or to sell it and distribute the proceeds. If this is shortly after the death and the sister was the administrator, she could decide to sell. The house could be owned by a company. If so, the director(s) would be able to dispose of it. The director(s) are appointed by the shareholders and if the sister had more than 50% of the shares, well. This is not a particularly common way of owning residential property because it has tax disadvantages but it is a common ownership method for industrial or commercial property: many companies own the land where they do business. Perhaps the house is a small part of a large factory complex? The property could be inside a trust with the brother and sister as beneficiaries but the sister as trustee. Trusts can be discretionary (i.e. the trustee decides who gets what) or unit trusts (like having shares in a company - you get it in proportion to your holding). The latter is the way publicly traded property trusts work. While the trustee has to operate in line with the trust deed and for the benefit of all the beneficiaries, the sister may, reasonably or unreasonably, decide that selling the house is in those interests.
The lease requires you to get liability insurance and to insure your own property. If you don't, (para D) one of the owner's options is to get the insurance for you. Then after taking out the insurance that you are required to have, you shall reimburse owner for the insurance that he took out for your benefit. &quot;Reimburse&quot; means &quot;pay back what he paid for you&quot;, which means that it is not an arbitrary sum. It is for the kinds of insurance you are required by the lease to have, and not wallpaper insurance. The only people who have to do this are renters who have leases with terms like this, not necessarily every renter in NY.
There are many ways that property can be owned other than by natural persons (not necessarily businesses). Property can be owned by entities and other legal personalities (such as corporations, corporations sole, limited liability companies, limited partner associations, nominees, non-profit corporations, cooperatives, partnerships, limited partnerships, limited liability partnerships, limited liability limited partnerships, trusts, business trusts, estates, conservatorships, governmental entities, unincorporated associations, tontines, funds, etc.), as well as by natural persons. Ownership of property by something other than natural persons dates, at least, to the Song Dynasty in China and to at least the 13th century in Europe. A good modern example is MERS which is the nominee holder of mortgages that are then traded commercially (often electronically, often in transactions not involving humans between entities). A similar example, is street name ownership of a publicly held security within which electronic trades are facilitated. Even when trusts are not created intentionally, they can be implied in law. In New Zealand, even a river can have corporate personality (an idea proposed in legal scholarship decades earlier) and thus has legal standing to sue and own property, through a representative appointed by a legal process. This river can bring lawsuits and own property. While these entities must be formed by individuals at the outset, some kinds of entities and trusts, such as non-profits and charitable trusts, do not have human &quot;owners&quot; in any meaningful sense. You can also have trusts that are for the benefit of animals or the graves of deceased people. The issue of &quot;dead hand control&quot; is a long standing one in the law, which was first addressed in the common law tradition in the Duke of Norfolk's Case of 1682 which gave rise to what is known now as the Rule Against Perpetuities (which now has many exceptions). There is also no prohibition on entities or legal instruments making decisions based upon formulas or programs, indeed, certain kinds of mutual funds (e.g index funds and exchange traded funds), which are generally organized as business trusts, are required to carry out their operational duties in a formulaic manner. Legal instruments such as deeds creating life estates and residuary estates, joint tenancy deeds, and beneficiary deeds have transferred real property by operation for law for hundreds of years without human intervention at the time of transfer, operating as simple &quot;programs&quot;. Likewise, business transactions are routinely effected electronically without human intervention. Lots of e-commerce is conducted in that manner. For example, you do that when you use an ATM or go to a self-check out kiosk for a movie or at an airport or in a grocery store. Sometimes these programs are called &quot;electronic agents&quot; but they need not be agents of a natural person, they could also be (and indeed, usually are) agents of a legal personality that is not a natural person. Even before electronics were invented, vending machines mechanically effected business transactions, transferring title to the personal property contained within them, without human involvement. An early non-human device that conducted business transactions without electronics. (Similar devices have existed as far back as antiquity in classical Greece, dispensing Holy Water.) An entity could be formed that transacts principally via blockchain and that entity would not even have to have owners. It would have to have natural persons affiliated with it in some way, but its main businesses could be conducted by a computer system that these affiliated natural persons put into place for an entity that they form. Legal instruments like paper currency, checks, negotiable promissory notes, bearer bonds, negotiable warehouse receipts, and derivatives all have some of the features associated with blockchains (i.e. incorporating a third-party non-natural person's involvement in a transaction without active management by natural persons). In general, a blockchain is not a legal innovation and introduces nothing that is legally new or revolutionary. It is old wine poured into new skins.
While it is not illegal to own, it may still be illegal to ride on public property. Private property owners can ban them even if they were legal and need to be consulted individually. I have been unable to find out if new laws spoken about have been passed in New York since the beginning of the year. Based on what I have found (as of the end of 2015), it would be best to consider that they are illegal to use on public areas just as any other unlicensed motor vehicle. As of November 2015 Some property owners have banned them for liability reasons, as it is easy to see how a rider could trip on a bump or unexpected curb. And although they have taken the Upper East Side and other parts of New York City by storm, the state classifies them as motorized vehicles that cannot be registered, so riding them in public can incur a steep fine. Earlier this week, the NYPD's 26th Precinct tweeted: "Be advised that the electric hoverboard is illegal as per NYC Admin. Code 19-176.2*." and December 2015 some lawmakers were talking about making them legal. Truth or Fiction Collected on: 12/28/2015 gives the following summary A spokesperson for the New York City Department of Transportation has explained that the law’s definition of “electronic personal assist mobility device” was broad enough to include hoverboards, and that they would be regulated as such. In NYC, because the population is above 1 million people, electronic personal assist device riders must be licensed, and the devices must be registered with the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles. Hoverboards are illegal, the spokesperson said, because the NYSDMV would refuse to register them for legal use: NYSDMV’s position is that these vehicles are likely “Electric personal assist mobility devices.” NYS Vehicle and Traffic Law 114-d defines “Electric personal assist mobility device” as “Every self-balancing, two non-tandem wheeled device designed to transport one person by means of an electric propulsion system with an average output of not more than seven hundred fifty watts (one horsepower), and the maximum speed of which on a paved level surface, when propelled solely by its electric propulsion system while ridden by an operator weighing one hundred seventy pounds, is less than twelve and one-half miles per hour.” NYS VTL 125 generally defines “motor vehicles” as “Every vehicle operated or driven upon a public highway which is propelled by any power other than muscular power.” However, VTL 125 specifically excludes some classes of vehicles from the definition of “motor vehicles.” Under VTL 126(a-1), “electrical personal assistive mobility devices operated outside a city with a population of one million or more” are not considered motor vehicles. However, in NYC, because the city population is greater than one million, NYSDMV considers “hoverboards” that meet the definition of “electric personal assist mobility devices” the same as motor vehicles. Based on that interpretation, it would be illegal to operate a hoverboard in NYC without a valid license to drive a motor vehicle. Beyond that, the motor vehicle would need to be registered by NYSDMV (which NYSDMV will not do), inspected, insured, and otherwise treated as, and subject to regulation like, any other motor vehicle. A person who operates a hoverboard in NYC (or any other NYS city with a population greater than a million) would be subject to arrest and prosecution for myriad NYS VTL violations, including, but not limited to, driving a motor vehicle without valid registration or insurance.
The primary question is why the trustee is disposing of the asset at all. The trustee has a particular fiduciary duty (we haven't seen the document so we have no idea what that duty is). It could be justified because, for example, the grantor needs cash for a brain operation. Self-dealing (acting in one's own interest, which is a conflict of interest), is prohibited for a trustee. With real estate, &quot;fair market value&quot; is a fluid concept, but within limits one can determine that a sale (to self) at $900,000 undervalued the house and that a sale to another would have garnered $1,100,000, therefore this would be an illegal self-dealing. However, the simple act of a trustees purchasing an asset from a trust that he is the trustee of is not categorially prohibited.
The attorney's responsibility is framed in terms of the interest of the client, which is not always money. If the trust has some social agenda, that rather than the dollar amount would be the attorney's responsibility. I would want my property to not be subdivided into smaller lots, and I would communicate that interest to my attorney, but that's just me. Since we don't know all of the facts (about you and the trust), all we can say is that &quot;interest&quot; and &quot;duty&quot; are not always about dollar amounts.