Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

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Where is this? Southern Europe?

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).

[1]: https://www.tuscany-exclusive.net/metato/

> stone walls for each internal room seems like charming until you realize that you can't use wall space

Why is it not possible to use stone wall space?

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.

They are saying that the footprint of 3ft thick walls takes up a lot more of your usable floor space than a modern home's walls would.

Here's a Youtube channel of someone restoring one of these remote Italian cabins to live in. It's not easy.

https://www.youtube.com/@MartijnDoolaard

> 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.

Might as well be Croatia

Just out of personal curiosity, what makes Croatia so bad for inheritance and property law?

I don’t know about Spain but why would these houses need to be filled when Italy’s population has stagnated? There’s no one to live in them!

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