Where I live there are countless rustic properties, the vast majority of which will remain empty due to generations of infighting between relatives. Similarly, plots of land are carved up over the years until a single field may have 20+ owners.
I know of one such case: they were offered a huge, insane amount of money for the land. But each one of the owners wanted more for their piece than the others, and tried to do private deals, and some refused to sell even though their piece was a mis-shapen series of lines on a government map that gained them zero benefits (farmers can't farm the land either), so nobody gets anything and the place is just rotting.
Along with the houses surrounding. That have multiple owners.
It makes me very sad seeing so many stone buildings left uninhabited and overgrown with plants when I visit Spain and Italy. I always thought it was just the cost to upgrade them to modern living standards that was prohibitive, but from personal experience [0] with similar situations in the US, I can see partial ownership being an even bigger problem.
[0] One set of my grandparents split their house equally among their 3 children. Because it has immense sentimental value to those children, they have not sold it and currently “rent” it at no cost to one of the children. Depending on the order in which those 3 children pass, the state of the house could easily become deadlocked for decades as I know one of my aunts would refuse to sell it even if the other aunt (who lives in it) passes. Thank god none of my cousins would want to live in it so we probably would eventually be able to sell it. It’s not even close to a mansion or anything… just a regular 1960s middle class house in an area where land is pretty cheap. If I had a shitton of cousins and the property was very valuable land I could totally envision it getting permanently deadlocked.
While inheritance laws in Southern Europe are weird, I don't think that partial ownership of buildings is the issue here.
The real issue is that old buildings are not useful anymore:
1. Buildings that are not longer needed. For example, you can walk in woods and see old, run down, metati [1] in Italy. While chestnuts still keep a sentimental value, mountain people do not rely on them for sustenance anymore. Therefore, the drying sheds and mills have been abandoned.
2. Buildings that are not just functional anymore. Our barn had 20 stalls. It was functional as of the 1800s, but it's no longer a viable building to host a herd of milk producing cows. It has small stalls, lack of windows, difficult sanitation. People just build new barns and abandon the old ones. The problem is that the barn is build of rock, so it won't decay so easily.
3. Buildings that are no longer comfortable. Similar to point 2, old stone houses are not that comfortable. Having 3-foot wide stone walls for each internal room seems like charming until you realize that you can't use wall space. A house with a regular footprint (maybe 100 sq. feet) is much smaller once you consider all the space that stone walls take up. Plus, old houses don't have plumbing, electricity, etc, are damp and cold in the winter (but somewhat pleasant in the summer). People just prefer to live in a modern place rather than fix up an old one (which might be marked as historical and will need much more money to fix up).
I think it's more accurate to say that there simply is no wall space, because the walls ARE the stones.
There are ways around it, probably using copious amounts of conduit etc. but it's a lot of work compared to simply living somewhere that already has utility outlets where you need them.
> I can see partial ownership being an even bigger problem.
I don't know about the US, but where I live, I think I think that if you don't want to be, the other owners have to buy your slice. If they can't they need to sell the house.
This rule in many areas is how real estate developers acquire lots of land cheaply that has been in a particular family for generations. They find a family where the previous owner has passed and thus the ownership defaults to then next kin.
They approach one next of kin who doesn’t know they even inherited it, buy out their slice, and require the remaining members to buy them out, forcing them to sell it… likely to the same investor.
Not OP but I will say I've heard stories like they describe from at least 3 different Spanish people I know, inheritance laws there do seem to cause some problems.
Thanks for reminding me the time I visited Peru in the early 2000s and saw fields of orderly criss crossing rows of rocks acting as boundaries. The tour guide said generations of owner kept dividing the land till the land's no longer usable.
This is so wild to me. Coming from a place in New Zealand where property is incredibly valuable, nothing in my city is ever vacant for more than a few weeks. The idea that land and buildings could remain empty is economically unthinkable.
A man did this in Sydney fairly recently. He discovered a vacant house whose occupant had died, changed the locks and tidied the property before renting it out to other people. After 20 years he applied for the deed. Relatives of the deceased owner were tracked down, and tried to fight him in court, but he won.
He got to keep 20 years of rent payments and a multi-million dollar property.
Seems fine to me. No one cared enough to do anything with it and people need living space, so he utilized it. After a while if you tend a property and no one complains it is yours -- squatter's rights.
I would agree, except that he rented it out. He should get compensated for the part of cleaning the place up, but the people he rented to got scammed - he lied to them, took their money and let them carry the risk of getting thrown out if the real owner turned up.
property is incredibly valuable in Dublin City centre. However there are many vacant lots and abandoned buildings. There has been an issue with "land barons" for decades. They own a lot of property in Dublin, and leave it vacant to create scarcity and drive up the price of property, and then they use the leverage of their now more valuable property to buy more.
It was identified in the 70's that there were gaps in Irish property laws that could allow this to happen but nothing was eventually done about it.
