I come from a small rural place in Norway, at the lowest point the municipalities started selling old houses for next to nothing, as in equivalent to $100. No strings attached.
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.
larsiusprime · 14h ago
Maintenance of old crumbling European castles in inconvenient locations are also often famously bad deals for the owner.
akudha · 14h ago
This might still be appealing to young people, especially those who do not like the noise/pollution of big cities and can't afford them?
bee_rider · 14h ago
I could see the appeal of a shack, but I suspect a castle would be quite a maintainence burden.
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.
AndrewDavis · 23m ago
I really enjoy the TV show Escape to the Chateau. A lot of couple buy an old run down French chateau and move in with their two kids. Each episode is roughly them doing up a part of it. Often with ideas for making money out of it.
Very much light entertainment, but it's eye opening how significant of a restoration and maintenance burden it is.
thefz · 13h ago
Do you have any idea of the thermal inertia of a castle? How are you going to heat it to an acceptable living temperature?
yread · 13h ago
If you spend 700k eur on heating instead of on the purchase price you can stay warm for quite a while
Now, Italy is a bit warmer than the UK, and most castles a bit smaller, but castles in Italy can be on colder mountaintops.
devilbunny · 10h ago
One very interesting idea I read about long ago was the use of low-power microwave emitters to make rooms feel much warmer - the author of the piece described the feeling as "like stepping into sunlight" when the emitters turned on.
Makes the 2.4 GHz spectrum pretty unusable, though.
SURA · 4h ago
Warmth from the inside out, to be honest I'm a little scared
yobbo · 10h ago
1. Accept lower temperature in the stonework/bricks/concrete
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.
Tpt · 6m ago
A lot of large castle owners in France have setup a small apartment on the side for winter and use the main rooms only occasionally and during summer. This is not something new, in Versailles you can visit the king actual private bedroom that is much smaller and easy to heat than the official one.
ASalazarMX · 13h ago
"I couldn't afford to live in the city, so I bought a castle".
umeshunni · 14h ago
Ha, yes. I found dozens of articles about castle renovations gone awry
There's an irony in that there is often a regulatory issue with the local government, not just some "shortage of humans".
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.
al_borland · 12h ago
> was once referred to as the Paris of America
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've seen "Paris of the X" and "Venice of the X" applied to many (often not particularly attractive) cities worldwide...
jonstewart · 14h ago
The history of Baltimore is a far more complex story than "regulation and unions" results in "and the city collapsed."
guywithahat · 14h ago
I would argue it really isn't. Massachusetts still has some of the strongest union protections, is one of the most unionized states, and Baltimore has worked hard to maintain an incompetent government for decades. Given the outrageous rents in nearby states and cities Baltimore should have kept growing but has instead shrunk to a half million.
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.
dougdonohoe · 8h ago
Baltimore is in Maryland.
bpt3 · 13h ago
I'm far from a union sympathizer, but you've already moved from your initial, absurdly simplistic description of the issue to a major symptom (decades of ineffective government, ranging from benign incompetence to intentional malice).
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.
db48x · 11h ago
He did say that the city is badly regulated…
bpt3 · 10h ago
It's poorly managed, but not due to over-regulation IMO as the other commenter implied (not to say that there aren't some areas where deregulation could improve things).
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.
jonstewart · 13h ago
chat, what would David Simon say in reply to this
CaptWillard · 13h ago
Indeed, with five seasons of The Wire, no city has had it's decline so eloquently illustrated.
Or at least it's continued decline. Great show. All the pieces matter.
mastax · 13h ago
Sounds like there were many strings attached actually.
tshaddox · 12h ago
Apparently not very strongly attached.
8n4vidtmkvmk · 14h ago
And that's why they should have put the "must renovate" clause!
RandomBacon · 13h ago
With a bond that can be returned with proof of renovation.
dang · 14h ago
(Pretty sure there have been other HN threads about this, but I couldn't find them. Anyone?)
The article headline on the $446k renovation cost is very misleading. They did not spend that much on the $1 (which they actually payed 6,000 euro for). They ALSO bought the property next door for 22k euro and combine the two into a literal mansion with four bedrooms, two terraces, sauna, library etc etc etc. $446k for all that is super cheap.
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.
computator · 13h ago
> We bought a $1 house in Italy. Here’s what happened next (CNN Travel article)
> 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.”
This looks like a follow-up to the initial flurry of interest. Have seen a few YT videos of this process, and my recollection is that the overall cost was pretty hefty once you factored in required renovation.
It's been a very common thing to see over the years, the COVID outbreak was particularly bad in Italy so I guess that took away more of the elderly population while the younger population seek more security and middle class jobs in towns and cities.
Ekaros · 14h ago
The scheme started before covid. The migration from these areas to bigger cities have long been going on.
lormayna · 14h ago
Italian here.
This is mostly a marketing initiative.
If you buy those houses, you need to completely renew them using local companies and with a lot of regulation. You will probably spend 100k doing that.
If you buy another house, in the same village, maybe you will pay 5k but you have more freedom in the renewal process and you will end spending less.
PeterStuer · 19m ago
Reminds me of the time I was a local radio DJ. We were inundated with these promotions we had to read for "free" exotic vacations. As you can imagine, the "free" part was completely subsumed in an expensive "package" deal.
bombcar · 14h ago
I saw a video on these and that was basically the takeaway - fun if you have money to burn, but anyone who is thinking about it and familiar with the place will do other things instead.
I looked into some of these a few years back, when the initiative was new. I remember one house in particular that I found very interesting, an old monastery, iirc somewhere near Parma?
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.
foobarian · 13h ago
Even 5k for a house and some land seems like a pretty decent deal. What are the strings attached? Is there local mob extorting you if you move there?
bpt3 · 13h ago
The catch is that the entire area is in decline and there's little to do for social activities or employment.
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.
f1shy · 13h ago
And also not a good idea to think as a retirement place. Probably no big hospital near.
There is a reason why people do bot want to live there.
bpt3 · 12h ago
Yep, good point.
In general, services of all kinds will be lacking and will remain so unless there is a massive demographic change (which is highly unlikely).
Ekaros · 11h ago
Only sensible solution would be if you were starting a factory and then building company town on something existing... But even then you probably want something slightly bigger already as scaling to big enough is huge investment.
BobaFloutist · 11h ago
You'd think a well placed billionaire (or even a "mere" 10s-100s millionaire) could do something interesting there. Buy up 10-20 vacant houses, renovate them, finance a couple of "fun" local entertainment businesses (idk craft breweries or barcades or minigolf or climbing gyms or escape rooms or whatever would be enough of a draw), fund a local arts/music program, and start a small tech/finance/consulting business in town. How much cash investment does it realistically take to make land appreciate even just enough to make it worth it?
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".
rtpg · 2h ago
> finance a couple of "fun" local entertainment businesses (idk craft breweries or barcades or minigolf or climbing gyms or escape rooms or whatever would be enough of a draw), fund a local arts/music program, and start a small tech/finance/consulting business in town
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
sidewndr46 · 11h ago
Why, when you can just buy the entire island of Lanai?
BobaFloutist · 10h ago
I dunno, just seems like a more interesting, fun project.
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.
tossandthrow · 14h ago
A core idea is that a house sells for a positive value. But that presumption is likely false.
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.
m8rl · 14h ago
Yes, exactly. In Germany a house is to start with rather a negative value, only the ground counts. You pay for the ground minus the costs for demolishing the house, or bring it a a current standard, or up to your taste.
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.
larsiusprime · 14h ago
There are indeed many places where the land value is effectively zero and the building is also worthless. But offers like these often have other obligations so the 1 euro cost is not the all in price.
technothrasher · 14h ago
Most dramatic example of this I've seen is the US Navy selling off their decommissioned aircraft carriers for $0.01. But, as you say, the purchase price is not the real expense of buying one. For these ships, it's the millions of dollars it takes to tow it to your scrap yard and tear it apart.
Ekaros · 14h ago
Or even negative. If there is some entity that can force the buildings to be demolished by the owner.
arcticfox · 14h ago
It's interesting as a thought experiment. You can easily make any house $1 with the "right" tax code. So I'm definitely curious about the situation here.
HPsquared · 14h ago
Reminds me of the negative oil prices during lockdown.
yieldcrv · 14h ago
> Imagine the following...you pay $500 today and commit to receiving an escort at your house in 15 days. Cos your wife is traveling. This is called a futures contract.
> 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!
ridgewell · 13h ago
>A core idea is that a house sells for a positive value. But that presumption is likely false. Houses at unattractive places in poor condition might actually represent a negative value.
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.
Why should immovable property differ from moveable property. How many things are sold for 1 EUR, just because everything else would be too difficult. Often those things have value that is only specific to the buyer and have negative value for the seller. The process for declaring something actually worthless and paying for waste removal is so much, but also gifting something to someone is often so much more difficult than selling for the lowest possible price that all stupid booking systems accept and that dictate what we may do.
mattlutze · 14h ago
If geography is a factor in the value of an asset, being able to move that asset allows you the ability to effect change in the value of it. I.e., my car might sell for x in one city, but only 0.7x in another.
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.
mlinhares · 14h ago
In this specific case the 1 EUR home is a blight in the community that makes the whole place less attractive, so it makes sense you'd have to "pay" someone to take it and fix it because it creates negative value for the rest of the place.
That is likely to lead to moral hazard issues though so i doubt it would work in the real world.
riedel · 14h ago
All I am saying is that while this makes sense, there is probably some stupid IT system or regulation wording, rather some moral constraints that resets things to 1 EUR.
asplake · 13h ago
As they say here in the UK: Location, location, location. Or there’s Mark Twain: Buy land, they're not making it anymore.
chirau · 14h ago
Baltimore, MD has $1 houses as well. They expect you to a certain number of upgrades on it within a specific time. Some say it is actually more expensive in the overall analysis than buying a regular house.
arthurcolle · 14h ago
Can I turn them into server farms?
jboggan · 14h ago
Sure, if you can design a server farm with no copper wiring in it
> "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…
arthurcolle · 13h ago
Yeah, we could dual-use the server farms, I am open to this. We could maybe do a sustainable living co-op with free heating and solar panels to sell back energy to the grid. We could transform Baltimore into the city of the future
I will look into this
neutronicus · 14h ago
Almost certainly not, $1 houses in Baltimore at this point (there were some good deals decades ago) are often ones requiring significant work just to be weather-tight, structurally sound, etc.
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.
monster_truck · 14h ago
I would be impressed if you could get the power company to give you more than 100A at any single residential address in those zips
arthurcolle · 13h ago
Can I daisy chain a few of them together at least?
munificent · 14h ago
There's a subtext here that I think is telling.
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.
khazhoux · 4h ago
I think you started on right track but reached a very wrong conclusion.
* 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.
frereubu · 14h ago
Great sales pitch, but this is a key excerpt:
> 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.
edu · 14h ago
How much is "much more than a single euro"? 5000€ is much more than 1€, but still very cheap.
Scramblejams · 4h ago
A long time ago I did some IT work for a real estate agent in the US that dealt in international properties. I was stoked on a listing he had up for a beautiful French chateau for $40k. He told me to forget it. “It’ll need completely new electrical, all new plumbing. And that might not sound so bad, but just wait till you actually try to get the work done by locals on time and on budget. It won’t happen.”
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.
hoppp · 14h ago
They been doing it for 10+ years
Gys · 14h ago
An additional benefit might be that many of these small villages have a tax advantage, created also for attracting foreigners. It is a flat fee of 7%. I cannot remember the name of this rule, but this is a link for example that I found: https://magictowns.it/the-definitive-2025-list-of-italy-7-ta...
We looked into purchasing a house on the Amalfi Coast about 10 years ago. To get anything done you need permits and in order to get permits you need to bribe everyone involved. The permits are time bound and expire so you have to be ready to go when approved but the small towns don't readily have access to construction materials so in order to get materials in the time bound window you end up having to bribe a whole new set of people.
chrisdhoover · 14h ago
Weird, I saw a movie about the buck houses last night. The lead actors were horrible but the supporting actors weren’t half bad
evanelias · 11h ago
> The €1 house project seems to have been the brainchild of Vittorio Sgarbi, the Italian art critic and TV personality turned mayor of the small, rapidly depopulating town of Salemi, Sicily.
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].
Vittorio Sgarbi is a... character. A young university professor in history of the arts, he earned his initial fame with expletive-laden TV monologues in which he'd talk about classic paintings, or rather used them as an excuse to say whatever he wanted to say about the world and politics. Then proceeded to use his fame to kickstart a long political career among Italian right-wing parties, serving as a minister at national level before running for mayor in a few different places. In-between, he dated pornstars, partied hard, verbally abused a lot of people, and generally lived a dissolute life.
readthenotes1 · 13h ago
I found the author's commentary on their goals the most interesting part of the article:
"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.
I don’t think writing is a particularly luxurious profession anymore. Most of us in tech make maybe 5x what a typical writer would make from writing.
It is ironic/interesting that they spent so much time helping immigrants before becoming immigrants though.
skrlet13 · 12h ago
i guess this could somewhat? help homeless people. They can not be accused of loitering if they own that land... Better than getting a fine for sleeping on the street?
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)
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.
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.
Makes the 2.4 GHz spectrum pretty unusable, though.
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.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/no-way-back-1-15m-120000548....
https://www.csmonitor.com/1991/1212/12121.html
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.
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.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_of_the_West
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.
Or at least it's continued decline. Great show. All the pieces matter.
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.”
Here's a few
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39812671
"one euro" was my query
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoSC_I2kwMg
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I took his advice.
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.
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...
"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.
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)