I live in a predominantly rural county and I’ve seen a number of old, deserted houses rotting away - some hidden among trees, some just sitting in an empty lot. I often wonder at what point someone just walked away and that was that. I’m assuming someone is still paying taxes on the property, else the county would have sold it for back taxes and a new owner would build a new house, barring the place being condemned for health reasons.
Has anyone here ever heard the story behind a place like this? I would love to know what leads to a house being left to rot.
I live just north of Flint, Michigan which is a Detroit mini-me in terms of, sometimes, entire blocks of abandoned, ruined, desolate houses.
The typical trajectory here:
Someone lives in, or rents out the house and does not take great care of it. The neighborhood is in continuing decline and blight, and the house may only be worth (I am not joking) $1,000 or less.
House needs more repairs than it’s worth.
Owner stops paying water and taxes.
After three years of non-payment, the county takes possession of the house.
But it costs about $10,000 to demolish the house, and the county does not have the resources. At most, they might board it up and they do disconnect the electricity and gas.
Then the house sits, gradually slumping into utter disrepair, for years.
In farming communities there are fewer farmers now days and therefore less need for such housing. People sell their farms and move to the “big city” or at least a town. 100 years ago a farmer could only farm a relatively small amount of land. Now with big farm machinery such as combines, it takes fewer people to farm the same amount of land.
Then you add in things like termites and such homes lose their value and utility quite quickly. It’s often more economical to sell the farm and abandon the old homestead.
In some Baltimore neighborhoods, at one point, the city sold such abandoned houses for $1, with the understanding that the buyer had a set amount of time to make the places habitable again. Many of those dollar homes are now in very desirable areas, as city living became more popular. I don’t know all the details, but it certainly seems to have worked out for Baltimore - I wonder why other cities don’t try a similar approach.
There’s a mobile home we’ve driven past since the late 90s that is gradually being overwhelmed by vines and other flora. Over the years, it’s pretty obvious that vandals have been tearing it apart, but I think it’s to the point that it’s just rotting away. Maybe it was a rental that was trashed by its last tenant. Maybe the owner died with no family. Maybe the owner just walked away. I always wonder about it when we drive by.
This county, through the Genesee County Land Bank, sells houses for back taxes. Which in Flint is usually under $1500.
They also sell off empty lots to homeowners on adjacent lots. I bought the two empty lots next to my house for $65 apiece, which gives me four city lots.
An odd coincidence - I just finished painting the interior of a Flint house. The guy who bought it is in Maryland and has never seen the house. It’s one of two occupied houses on a block full of shot-up, burned out wrecks in a part of the city that the cops barely even bother with. Maybe this guy thinks Flint is similar to Baltimore? He’s insane in any case; he’s paying a contractor to do all sorts of work to the house and plans to live in it part-time. That won’t happen. It’s going to be robbed, stripped and maybe burned. Someone already broke in to steal the furnace and water heater, despite the alarm system, which went ignored. The contractor interrupted them and called the cops. The thieves took off, but after three hours the cops still hadn’t shown up. The contractor had to go find one and make him fill out a report.
It’s a real shame, since this house, like thousands, was once just lovely. Oak floors and trim, stone fireplace, two story with a big veranda, second-floor balcony off the master bedroom. But now it is essentially worthless. I feel sorry for the guy who bought it.
My mom was a hoarder and recently died, multiple houses not even in her name but my dead father’s name with tax liens on them for greater than their value not to mention other debts which would be exposed on probate.
Basically me and my sister have no clue what to do, one has at least one room with a completely collapsed roof, the houses were already in a shit state of disrepair because contractors couldn’t be used due to the hoard. Home insurance will not pay out on an uninhabitable house, so hurricane damage from long ago just went unrepaired.
So now they just sit there, probate will be a pain and the IRS and creditors will just snatch em anyway, we don’t have a clue how to clear em out it would take two people probably six months of 8 hour workdays just to clear it, and that is each one.
I’d be shocked if there aren’t a lot of stories like this.
But doesn’t this assume someone wants to live there?
There’s an abandoned house just up the street from me. It’s on a nice street in a marketable neighborhood and it looks like it’s got “good bones”, and yet it has been sitting there for a long time. I don’t know what that is about. But my guess is that people ain’t got no time or energy for rehabilitating crack dens.
You can’t really do anything with a meth-contaminated structure for quite some time. Around here, that’s what accounts for many abandoned/derelict buildings.
At the time that I was in RI, the problem was that the state couldn’t identify/had no resources to track down who held the deed for seemingly-abandoned properties downtown.
I’m from rural NYS. The pattern for houses I am familiar with goes something like:
Owner of a small family farm dies.
Heirs don’t want to farm, so some or all of the surrounding farm land is sold to a neighboring farmer, leaving just a small plot with the house on it.
Sooner or later the remaining house needs repair and no one can or will pay for the repairs.
NYS taxes are significantly lower on decrepit property so there’s an incentive not to spiff up a house or barn.
Eventually the structure is in such bad repair the owners just stop paying taxes on it and let the state seize it. Or they let it fall down and are then just paying taxes on an unimproved lot.
There are a couple of falling-down, abandoned houses around here. There are newer houses on the same property. (Note: These are not ‘city lots’; they are half an acre or more.) My assumption is that people decided that the old house was no longer filling their needs, so they built a new one. Perhaps the old house was used for storage or guest accommodation. Eventually it fell into disuse. But ‘Hey, we’ll fix it up someday!’ Eventually it just falls apart.
I’m one of the reasons. Several of us had POA for a relative when she went into a nursing home. It was clear that she was never going to be able to return home. My vote was sell, another was maintain, the majority was “lets just wait and see what happens”. What happened was nothing for 11 years until she died.
The 84-year-old mother of a friend of mine had a massive stroke last summer and will never leave the nursing home she’s in. Her house is nice but being in Flint, not worth much. One of her daughters lives in Chicago, the other here but owns her own home. I suspect mom’s house will sit until the county takes it.
My parents had a crazy eyesore on their ritzy block in Brooklyn.
It all started with a divorce in the 80s. The parties agreed to split any proceeds from the house, but I guess it was actually owned by the husband. At the time, the block was kind of shady and resale value wasn’t so high. You could get about $30-60k for a 3 family rowhouse on the noncrackhouse side of the block, depending on what work it needed. But then the crackhouses got renovated and values shot through the roof. The ex-husband was resentful and vowed not to sell the house so ex-wife wouldn’t get a windfall (never mind he was also hurting himself, apparently such was his hate, he didn’t care).
More years passed, ex-husband got remarried and moved to another neighborhood. But he was still bitter! And wouldn’t sell the house or do even the most minor maintenence, for fear of doing something that benefitted Hated Ex. As the block got historical refurbishments and became desirable, then very desirable, then the hottest neighborhood in Brooklyn, the house became more and more valuable even as it fell deeper into decrepitude. It was appreciating from location faster than it could depreciate from neglect! Which was the worst thing in the world to Owner who still didn’t want Ex to benefit fro the sale. The City condemned the front steps and tore them down. Neighbors called in nuisance complaints on the rats, on the broken windows, on the the busted sidewalk, etc. He was fined multiple times a year and STILL didn’t care.
FINALLY, it was sold in 2009, ending a feud lasting 30 years. The property was now valued over a million $$, despite the fact it needed to be stripped down to joists and rebuilt top to bottom!! (functioning homes on the block have sold for $3mil+)). The same year his step-daughter, who was a small child at the beginning of this tale, graduated law school (where I knew her, and where she filled me in on parts of the story I didn’t know from growing up on the block). It was bought as-is by an investor, completely rehabbed with all the mod-cons, and sold for tippy-top dollar.
My grandmother’s house was turned over to the county to cover her nursing home care. It sat empty for many years while various sorts removed furniture and such.
After she died, the county took its share and put the house up for sale.
The two houses my brother is in the process of turning into one are in a half-a-dog village; one hadn’t been used in 20 years except for the old coop used as a garage and was inherited from her wife’s paternal grandparents via Joe, her father (the original inheritance had never been registered, if it had title would have been shared between Joe and his siblings, but since it hadn’t and he’d always paid the taxes on it in full, the siblings had to shut up and smile); the other one was from Joe’s uncle and hadn’t been used in 15 years, the kitchen never in living memory (he never ate there).
Even if they’d been decent construction, after so many years those houses would have been uninhabitable.
Every so often, the local fire department will practice on an old abandoned house or barn. They’ll light it up, put it out, and repeat the cycle three or four times. Attracts quite a crowd!
But, yeah, it seems to be a slow path of abandonment, mostly beginning with lack of necessary upkeep and repairs. When it would cost more than the value of the property, even to put a new roof on top, there is very little incentive to reverse or halt the deterioration.
A mobile society is also part of this. The house is in Nevada…but the kids have moved to Maryland, North Carolina, and Italy.
Then there would be no one paying the taxes. In most places the county (or other government jurisdiction) would seize the house for unpaid taxes after a few years.
Check the laws in Arkansas.
At least in my neck of the woods, seizing a house for back taxes requires a court proceeding with adequate notice to the legal owners. If the last owner is dead, the county MUST conduct an investigation to ascertain and notify any legal heirs. That can get expensive fast, and the county may not be all that interested, particularly if they don’t think they’re going to be able to sell the property for enough to recoup their expenses, so the property enters a twilight zone, sorta kinda but not really belonging to the county.
At tax sales, the new owner is required to pay the back taxes, so must pay three to five years (or more) of taxes upfront in a lump sum. If the property is truly decrepit, that’s already more than it is worth, so who is buying?
In rural areas without building codes and health dept rules, having a derelict house on your farm isn’t a particular problem, and certainly doesn’t cost much in additional taxes. The house wasn’t hived off into a separate property when the farm was consolidated with the neighbor’s; the taxes are just paid as part of the larger tax bill on the crop ground or pasture. I’ve seen some still sort-of-standing that are pre-rural electrification and indoor plumbing; when the farms were aggregated they were the less desirable residences, and it has never been worth anybody’s time to either fix them up or tear them down, so they rot away until a lightning strike or vandalism or simply the passing years destroy them utterly.