But of course, the person living there would have to pay (equivalent to) $1000-$1500 / year on fees related to water, waste management, cleaning of chimney, etc. And you'd probably like to have the house insured.
And these weren't nice new houses. Mostly shacks built right after ww2, some not having been lived in for 10-15-20 years. Complete renovation projects.
What would happen is that some people from out of town would buy a house, plan to renovate it, but then mostly do nothing. Then many would forget to pay the municipality fees, often times for years. Eventually the unpaid bills would be sent to collection agency, and then a forced sale on behalf of the creditors. But now the houses were in even worse shape, so no one would purchase them at all.
Eventually they'd be torn down.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/no-way-back-1-15m-120000548....
I guess nowadays one would not need to employ as large a retinue… but you don’t get to tax the local villages anymore. Seems like a wash.
Very much light entertainment, but it's eye opening how significant of a restoration and maintenance burden it is.
Now, Italy is a bit warmer than the UK, and most castles a bit smaller, but castles in Italy can be on colder mountaintops.
The real problems are that stone is a terrible insulator, that single-pane windows are even worse, and that air leakage in old structures is incredibly wasteful.
Makes the 2.4 GHz spectrum pretty unusable, though.
They quickly found out it doesn't work well. Microwaves heats up liquid water so the people got nice and warm, but not any of the furniture and such.
So the floor would be cold to walk on, the sofa would be cold to sit down in and so on.
It was a similar experience where initially it seemed great in the winter how quickly a room felt “warm”. But quickly you notice the air itself isn’t as warm which isn’t very pleasant and wait, I’m not feeling “warm” anymore I’m feeling “very hot”.
I basically gave up using them after the first winter except turned up sub-perceptually at like 25% just to add a bit of heat input to reduce the days where I need a space heater.
2. Use heatpumps, wood furnaces, accumulator tanks
3. Only heat the rooms you use when you use them.
It's very doable, especially in Italy.
It will cost you a lot anyway, can't escape entropy.
It's such a huge social problem that people choose not to accept the inheritance if it involves old properties in rural areas.
Some seems to use the term "富動産" to mean that, but I don't think it's catching on.
Side note: normal real assets are called "不動産" (which pronounces as "fudosan"; it originates from Immobilière in French) in Japan. It's all about puns.
The same thing happened in one of the most populated regions in the US. The area between Boston/NYC and DC, containing Baltimore, was once a city of a million people. It contains an underground subway and was once referred to as the Paris of America, however through regulation and unions it became completely impossible to do business in or live in, and the city collapsed. They also sold $1 row houses, which should have been a dream come true, except in practice the issue was never the house, it was the city government.
Cities offering $1 houses just means the government has ignored the actual issues for decades and is probably incompetent.
The rust belt as a whole was primarily just companies escaping unions. Cheaper labor may have been an incentive but it fundamentally started with companies who were forced to move production, and US regulation which prevented them from benefiting from local supply chains once they became unionized.
Also, the rents in nearby areas to the north are far from outrageous (hint: there are no major cities for a couple hours), and the Baltimore metro area continues to grow because the area is desirable, even though the city is completely mismanaged.
The core issue today is that the population of Baltimore consumes significantly more resources than they produce because the city managed to drive away a significant portion of the middle class and the government is so inefficent, leaving too many people who are unable to move, are actively part of the problem, or are one of the few that is so wealthy that they are largely unaffected by the happenings around them.
How it got there is a much more complex story than "regulation and unions" but is to some extent irrelevant if they want to look forward to solve the major systemic issues that exist.
If they want the city to recover, they need to provide the basic social services that most people want: clean streets, physical safety, acceptable schools, and minimal interference in everyday life. That has not been a priority of any city government for decades, though I think the current mayor is trying.
The original commenter clearly was stating that overregulation was the issue. You're the one who keeps bringing up that it's "badly regulated", which is both an odd term and not what was originally stated.
I agree it's "badly regulated", aka mismanaged.
Or at least it's continued decline. Great show. All the pieces matter.
Interesting. I heard that Detroit was known as the Paris of the West. Looking it up, it seems this was a fairly common phrase applied to many cities over the years. [0]
Detroit also has had $1 homes, but as with everywhere else, that isn’t the end of the story.
I think there was ~13 major auto factories in Detroit at one point, and what would happen is when the UAW would protest, they'd leave one factory and go to another, more important factory (often wherever they were producing engines) to apply pressure. The result is auto makers were forced to build new factories outside of Detroit, first in other MI cities and eventually in other states and countries. Now I think there's only ~three factories in Detroit, including for products that aren't really that exciting like spark plugs.
I didn't realize so many cities were referred to as an american Paris though, that is interesting. It was, certainly however, a beautiful city at one point.
It’s not like there was a “Paris of the…” certification process. If Detroit was, it was well before my first visit 50 years ago. As another commenter alluded to, it is an aspirational marketing phrase. Like how Redmond, WA claims to be the “bicycle capital of the Northwest” without having a single protected bike lane.
Edit: thanks everybody!
I bought one of Sicily's famous $1 homes and spent $446K renovating it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42371806 - Dec 2024 (2 comments)
Italian town is struggling to sell off its empty homes for one euro - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39812671 - March 2024 (28 comments)
Old towns eager for new blood sell Italy homes for $1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29058053 - Oct 2021 (124 comments)
1-Euro Houses - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24195000 - Aug 2020 (190 comments)
We bought a $1 house in Italy. Here's what happened next - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21552701 - Nov 2019 (3 comments)
edit: the last link is also a lie. They did not buy a 1 euro house, they bought a 10k euro house (presumably not part of the 1 euro program) and renovated it themselves.
> the last link is also a lie
I was wondering if “lie” was too strong a word, but no, CNN is straight up lying in article’s title. Deep into the article they admit it:
“I’ll be honest, we didn’t buy a €1 house,” he says. “We were shown something like 25 old buildings, some badly in need of repair, so at the end we opted for a three-room decent building for €10,000 and I invested more money in the renovation.”
I couldn't afford the renovations needed, but it came with several acres of land and generally seemed like a pretty decent deal!
Then there were a bunch of huts in some abandoned Sicilian village that seemed less attractive, if probably cheaper to renovate then the 5 story 14th century monastery.
Declining cities in the US have tried this, and they are not places people generally want to live. This is the same scenario, just in a location that is romanticized by most of the western world instead of Baltimore, MD.
In general, services of all kinds will be lacking and will remain so unless there is a massive demographic change (which is highly unlikely).
And I'm not talking Baltimore, which has a population of 600k and just a lot more baked in problems, I'm talking declining European "villages".
People who do this kind of stuff without much personal involvement get surrounded by consultants who do lowest common denominator nonsense with everyone taking their 30% extra on top of costs (because the person paying isn't paying attention!), and you end up with a bunch of stupid gastropubs that aren't profitable, and your IT company doesn't have any local talent.
Almost every restaurant and business that people actually like survives by having some owner put a bunch of energy into it. I don't think there are that many people who would be willing do that... and if you pay people to do it for you the economics really stop working extremely quickly.
At one point the billionaire will be tired of dropping $5 million a year for their pubs that nobody actually cares about
I dunno, I'm sure it's confirmation/reporting bias, but it feels like all of the very wealthy aren't interested in projects that don't give them some huge amount of control or dominance. Like, middle class people will invest and collaborate in public parks, small businesses, a boat, a shared vacation rental. Musicians and athletes are often invested in giving back and revitalizing their home town, or they'll start lifestyle brands or support or invest in upcoming talent or community space. Sure you have plenty of philanthropy and foundations, but I feel like you never see self-interested personal projects that are interesting or fun these days. It's all boring rule-the-world garbage. The whole tech-city in Sonoma county is a good example, why not take over a town in the Valley or in the Sierras and put in fiber and a subsidized grocery store and try to create a small proof of concept first? But no, it always has to be the biggest shiniest bullshit.
Houses at unattractive places in poor condition might actually represent a negative value.
As such, even 1 EUR houses might be severely over-valued.
It should be interesting as tax code could also take that into consideration.
This reminds me of an incident in Vancouver, where the city sought to expropriate single room occupancy (SRO) hotels (read: slums). They felt that each property was worth negative value, but they estimated the value as $1 because:
> We are unaware of any instances of property being transferred with a negative value. Therefore, a value of $1.00 is concluded for the subject property with the knowledge that a purchaser would be required to assume the financial obligations with either holding or demolishing and redeveloping the property.
[1] https://council.vancouver.ca/20191106/documents/cfsc2.pdf
Of course you will be able to still an get a positive value for an (old) house if it's somehow an enthusiast's object, who wants exactly this: An old Italian small village house or a German architect's house from the 70ies.
> Unfortunately, lockdown came and your wife will be home for the next 60 days.
> You do not want this woman to show up at your house at all and try to pass this futures contract to someone else.
> Only you cannot sell this commitment because nobody can receive the escort at home anymore. Everyone is in full storage with wife.
> To make matters worse, not even the pimp (Chicago Mercantile exchange) has more room to receive girls because his house is crowded with girls.
> So you will pay anyone just to take the girl off your hands.
2020 copypasta, because its more relatable than futures and of course, "sex work is work" an inclusive phrase for the workers that choose that trade, immunizing us from criticism for making the analogy at all, hurray!
As an immovable asset's value cannot be changed in the same ways as a movable one's, perhaps there are different ways to tax it that are still fair, or encourage positive social effects.
That is likely to lead to moral hazard issues though so i doubt it would work in the real world.
IMHO this is a defect of the system as some houses has the value -50.000 EUR and should be sold on the market for that - I should get 50.000 EUR to take over the house.
In particular, as we develop building- and decomissionning codes, these impose a liability of people to decommission.
While radically liberal market forces told us that we can buy land and have full control, that was never really the case, and we are waking up to the issues of irresponsible and harmful pollution.
You really thought it's possible to buy any real estate in a location where rich Germans and Scandinavians pay €1000 for one night in a hotel and moor their €10mln yachts?
A lot of people feel a deep-seated unsease in their life. We're a couple of generations in to advertising and consumerism taking over the world and when people are presented with a problem, they often can't imagine any way to solve it except to buy a thing.
Modern society has trained people to limit their sense of agency down to only purchasing decisions. Then people are surprised when yanking the "buy" lever over and over doesn't make them happy.
* Deep-seated unease: Yes
* No way to solve it except "buy a thing": No
Living in an Italian town is obviously a romantic escapist fantasy. No more Teams meetings. Instead you just pick up your daily loaf of bread from the baker down the twisty walkway. All your mundane troubles are gone.
Maybe that hints that the sense of unease is coming from the working culture? If your job feels draining and stressful, neither feels like it advances you, nor society, nor has any kind of endgame, it makes sense that it will lead to increasing unhappiness and escapist fantasies.
Yes, exactly.
But note that the author presumes that the way to attain that fantasy is "buy a house". This is not an article about figuring out how to move to Italy, it's an article about buying a house in Italy.
There's almost no discussion of, saying moving logistics, visas, commutes, etc. It's not about the act of getting there. It tacitly assumes that the way you accomplish the goal is almost entirely by purchasing a thing.
https://www.wbaltv.com/article/how-to-buy-baltimore-city-1-d...
> "All vacant sales must be redeveloped for residential or mixed-use. That includes residential or green space. So, this program is not for commercial properties. It's only for residential properties at this point in time," Department of Housing and Community Development official Kate Edwards said.
Maybe if you wanted to live with your servers? Would a server farm on the first floor, and an apartment on the second count, I wonder? Free radiant floor heating, if so…
I will look into this
And of course it becomes clear that no one is there and they are full of valuable hardware some problems may result, as the other commenter points out.
Lastly, our electricity rates are almost certainly not cost-effective for this purpose.
> What was the catch? It seemed most municipalities required you to renovate the house within a couple of years of its purchase, and due to high levels of interest, the houses often went to auction, ultimately selling for much more than a single euro.
Summary, they only sold 6 and 20 remain unsold. Most people are not serious about it because they learn they have to build a house and live in it within 2 years of the purchase (if I remember correctly).
I believe Australia also has done this for ages to try and avoid country towns dying, with mixed success.
After that it seems there has been quite lot of uptake. But idea was always the same price is token payment, and there is requirement to repair these very old and very dilatated houses.
I took his advice.
"We’d spent our careers working in schools and nonprofits with young immigrants, and, ..., we had no intention of leaving a life of service behind. Above all, though, what we wanted was an environment in which we could spend a lot of time writing and afford to do it. But Ben had another non-negotiable of his own: proximity to surfing. ...but I supposed it was reasonable enough to design a dream life according to one’s actual dreams."
They wanted to go to a different country for the adventure, to write in leisure and luxury, to surf, and to spread the good news of their superior insights and upbringing to uplift the natives.
Reminds me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_savior
It is ironic/interesting that they spent so much time helping immigrants before becoming immigrants though.
Not coincidentally, that's the same guy and same town that acquired the massive film collection from legendary NYC chain Kim's Video [1], ostensibly to create a cultural hub in Salemi, but instead they let the collection rot.
There's a documentary about it [2], but it's a bit insufferable at times, and you can basically get the gist from some articles [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim%27s_Video_and_Music
[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt24132144/
[3] https://news.artnet.com/art-world/kims-video-documentary-246...
Having an address to your name helps a lot to get a job (classism is very harsh and bad, society is very cruel to homeless people)