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Comment by lildata | Hacker News Reader

Young Portuguese have been emigrating for the last 50 years. The country is full of second residences, bought by people who took advantage of cheap real estate until recently. Blaming today's inflation and cost of living on a few digital nomads or crypto people doesn't make much sense.

What also chocked me when visiting Lisbon or Porto is the number of old abandoned buildings in what I would consider nice areas. I have always wondered what was the reason for that...

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Re abandoned buildings: it’s likely due to the inheritance laws for Portugal, which are unique in the way things are automatically split upon deaths and require official signoff from all parties that are inheritors for sale. If another death occurs, then their own more inheritors for that individual.

also frozen rents: too many buildings have elders paying 50 eur rent that is frozen for decades

So landlords have no option to evict them, don't make enough money for any kind of renovations, have no option but to wait until the elders pass away and the units become available

My family is currently trying to get title to a property that should be inherited and the amount of buyouts and legal squabbles it requires just so we can repair this decrepit old building is astounding.

My guess is most families that emigrated to the US and have some inheritance right to property back in Portugal do not care to go through this legwork.

No idea about Lisbon but it was common in Brussels to let an old building "rot" to the point where the owner could destroy it and rebuild a new one. This way, they could build a bigger/better building and sell apartment at higher price than just fix the original building.

Demolition permit are hard to obtain but if your building is too decrepit, the city will force you to destroy it.

It used to be common, but then many cities got fed up of it, and now many municipalities have local laws to take ownership for the city if the owners behave this way.

-can't get permission to build due to massive amounts of red and green tape

-the only economically sensible option is to let the building fall into disrepair bad enough that the government lets you demolish

-governments close this "loophole" by seizing your property

and the problem is "the owners behave this way"? FMD.

It's entirely possible that there's non-loophole ways to solve this problem, but when a lot of money is at stake, why would landlords (or anyone else) make effort to be compliant with the spirit of the law, when they can cut corners, and abuse the letter of the law?

Well, the owners still have a couple of strikes before the city hall decides to fully take action.

I remember walking around nicer areas of Porto and Lisbon and seeing a perfectly regular house right next to a row of dilapidated, caved in buildings. Peering inside the cracked windows, I saw trees growing right in the middle of the home’s living area. It would commonly be one regular home for every 3-4 of those abandoned shacks.

In central Europe this is often done to bypass a Historic Bureau. Target of those guys is to preserve current "genus loci" of the city forcing owners to use traditional materials and processes to fix the building so outside it is still looking the same.

The loophole is that if building is too damaged, that there is no viable way to repair it, then it can be destroyed and new one can be built. So you can just let it be as is and wait you can help the decay by removing roof and let rain and cold do the work. Or in most extreme cases, just set it on fire "by accident".

(I've lived in Portugal more than 20 years ago and things (i.e. laws) might have changed significantly.) The problems with abandoned, degraded but historical/beautiful buildings had to do with several factors.

One factor was the social protection that renters (especially elderly) are afforded by law, especially keeping rents very (and I mean very low). This protection is in itself a good thing, but the downside was that landlords had no incentive to do renovations in the order of million euros for a building full of renters paying fifty euros per month each (I can't recall exact quantities). As I said, the protection of elderly is a good thing, but a balance was never achieved.

Another factor (and this ties with the bureaucracy theme) was that for some buildings, the state and municipality couldn't even locate the owner. So you might have this grade I building with a name as the legal owner, but it could be someone that emigrated to Brazil 50 years ago. Couple that with the slowness of judicial process and the building is in a limbo state for a century.

> What also chocked me when visiting Lisbon or Porto is the number of old abandoned buildings in what I would consider nice areas. I have always wondered what was the reason for that...

Likely property that is inherited to families that emigrated.

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