If you go on YouTube, you will see tons of videos by people exploring abandoned houses. usually, these are in rural farming areas, and most of these houses have been abandoned for a long time. My explanation: these houses were owned by farmers, who either retired and moved away, or sold out to larger farmers. Now that farmers have giant machines (combines and harvesters), large farms can be run with little human labor. So these houses are just left to rot away-most are not boarded up-I guess its just cheaper to let them fall apart. With no market for renting them, they stay empty till they fall down.
I guess burning them or tearing them down costs money, so just let nature take its course. Its kinda sad, but the population of rural areas keeps dropping…and people don’t want to live in solated conditions…so houses are abandoned.
Sounds like you already have the right answer.
Small farms have to be maintained and passed down through families; the farm dies with the last family member that’s interested in that way of life, and small parcels of rural farmland is essentially worthless.
That’s pretty much it. In the old days a typical farm would be 160 acres or a quarter of a square mile section. With the economics of farming it’s hard to get into the business or to make a living on a small farm so as owners retire or get out they sell to the neighboring farmer, not a new farmer. It’s not unusual for a modern farm to be a section, so that’s 3 uneeded farmsteads. If it’s farely close to the city they might be rented out, however it’s more usual for them to be abandoned / burned down for firefighting practice / used for storage.
If anything, you underestimate how much smaller farms are today than they used to be. The farm that I grew up on (in northwest Ohio) is 72 and 1/2 acres. My grandfather (and various people before my grandfather bought it) made enough from it to support a family. When my father bought it from him in the 1950’s, it was clear that he couldn’t make a living from it. He worked in a factory and did his farming after getting home from work and on the weekends and on vacations. When he retired in 1989, he arranged for a neighboring farmer to work it and split the (rather small) profit from it. We sold the farm last year to the same neighbor. It would probably take about five times as much land to support a family on as my grandfather was able to on our farm.
Our house is so old that it will probably get torn down at some point. On the other hand, most of the houses in our area that once were farm houses but now have no independent farm associated with them will probably get bought by people who might otherwise live in a nearby small town. Further west on the Great Plains though, the abandoned farm houses are mostly too far from any small town to be a comfortable commute to any job. Those houses will probably all eventually be torn down.
We used to explore abandoned farm houses all the time when I was growing up. The area I grew up in was in the process of turning into a pretty populous suburban area during my adolescence. Developers would come in and buy farm land to turn into housing, but would leave the farmhouse standing until it was almost complete. They would clear the land, and layout streets in areas that were out of the way of the of normal traffic. On weekends we would end up joyriding around the development with the construction vehicles (which always had their keys left in them), and having huge parties in the farm houses.
Are these kind of abandoned farm houses suitable for squatters to live in?
Does anybody care? Do the big meanie corporate landowners patrol the land and kick out squatters?
Are there, in fact, squatters commonly living in places like that, and if so, are they generally left alone?
Where can I find a place like that?
It would be a bleak and meager existence, with no utilities, far from resources, and no public transportation.
Ditto this.
Our farm’s original farmhouse dates back to the 1850’s, and the farm, at its maximum extent, had about 40 acres in production. It was a hand to mouth existence, frankly.
Now I rent out the farmland to a cousin who has a busy business with probably over 1000 acres under his tillage, and the farmhouse still stands because it overlooks Lake Michigan (an impressive view) and comes with beach access, and isn’t far from an expressway to take renters quickly to work in the suburbs of Milwaukee, 30 miles to the south. As such, it’s fairly easy to rent.
Otherwise we’d have burned the farmhouse down years ago.
Also, depending on how old the house is, it may just be an older one left to stand there after the residents built a new one. Maybe our great-grandparents built before the highway was made and city water lines were put in and you decide it’s time to build a new, modern house. If you can save money by not taking the old building down, why not?
Also, some of the ubiquitous decaying structures in the Great Plains were “claiming shacks” which were thrown up by someone making a homestead claim on a piece of land they had no intention of actually living on. Out in the drylands, the homestead claims were never really big enough to run a profitable dryland farm or ranch, so it was common to have another family member make a claim on adjoining pieces of unclaimed land to enlarge your holdings. The Homestead Act required you to “make improvements” to a piece of land and live on it for 5 years, but its not like anyone regularly came out to check, so you’d just throw up a vaguely house-looking shack and leave it there until you got title to the land. Sometimes, you could even just drag it over to the next allotment and do it again.
When I worked in advertising, one of my clients had grain farmers (primarily corn / soybean farmers) as one of their primary targets for their ads. I’d go out and conduct focus groups with these farmers every six months – one thing that I learned was that, just to make the economics work for the equipment (tractors, combines, etc.), a grain farmer had to farm, at a minimum, 1000-1300 acres, and preferably more. (And, this was 8-10 years ago; the economics of it all may be even worse now.)
All of the farmers I talked to owned land, but not nearly that much. They or their families may have bought out their neighbors’ farms at some point, but that generally only put them into actually owning several hundred acres. The rest of the land that they farmed was land that they rented from absentee owners – you often have the child of a now-deceased farmer, who still owns the family’s 200 acres, but lives in the city, and rents the land out every year to someone who wants to farm the land. In many cases, the land which an active grain farmer works is quite spread out, sometimes across multiple counties, and he has to move his equipment some distance, over local roads, to get to all of the fields he works.