You get a house with mold issues or wood rot and you have an expensive mess few will touch. I remember one house I liked that had this happen because of a leak by the chimney. Problem was I couldnt get a conventional mortgage for it so I couldnt buy it.
Another is you have a home that once sat next to a quiet country road. Well that road is now a 4 lane with heavy traffic and often its loud semis and nobody wants to live there so the house will just sit.
This happened to my grandfather’s house. Because it was owned jointly and he died before his second wife, it all went to her family, and none of them want anything to do with it. (Not that his family wanted anything to do with it either.)
It hadn’t occurred to me that the county might have to pay so much to take over a property, but that makes sense. I suppose unless or until a developer or someone else decides to buy a big chunk of land which just happens to have one of these wrecks on it, it would just sit.
In fact, thinking back to when we were looking for a place to live in this area, and considering the purchase of a place we could bulldoze to build what we wanted, there were several that may well have ended up abandoned. Even with basic electricity and plumbing/septic already to the site, it could be really expensive to remove an old structure so you could start again.
As for using old places as firefighter practice - we’ve encountered that a few times. I assumed the houses were donated by homeowners who wanted their property cleared so they could build, but I can see the county condemning it and turning it over to the local VFD for training.
I lived for a while in the middle-of-nowhere central Virginia, and used to see houses like this all over the place. I always wondered about them, too, as some of them ust have been someone’s pride and joy 50, 75, or 100 years ago.
What my ex and I found really off-putting was when we went poking around in a little junktique shop we found on a drive one day. The place itself was a filthy outbuilding, the proprietor a bit of a human trainwreck, but we figured, meh – my ex was a huge, robust man (and blessed with as southern as accent as the owner, which endeared him to Junior Samples almost at once).
Inside, it was amazing what this guy had for sale, such beautiful little things, antique photos, Civil-War era memorabilia, all sorts of things. Turns out Creepy Drawers had acquired his stock by breaking into those sorts of derelict houses and ransacking them. He also had a little business on the side grave robbing (there are numerous old cemetaries scattered throughout fields and woods in that area; we had an 18th century cemetary in the woods that made up our ‘front yard’); it wasn’t particularly uncommon for people to dig up the abandoned graves looking for jewelry to sell for a buck or two.
Gah.
In the rural area where I lived as a child, many isolated houses fell in ruins. They used to be small farms, the last owner died, it was inherited by some relative who had no use for it (maybe living in some city, maybe having its own home/farm close by), nobody would buy it because nobody would have an interest in living in the area, so it would just rot away. They had no value because there was no buyer. I never wondered how it worked from a tax point of view.
Doesn’t happen anymore since for the last 25 years or so, a lot of people over here (and from the UK and Netherlands too) have taken an interest in vacation/retirement houses in rural areas.
In the really rural areas this is the answer. It’s basically the same scenario that you find in ghetto neighborhoods: There isn’t anyone interested in buying that house, so even if the county has siezed the property for back taxes, it’ll likely sit abandoned for years.
We live in a nice neighborhood, but the house next door to us has been empty for about five years. The couple that lived there got a divorce and moved away. Some time later, the wife showed up again and was squatting in the house with no electricity. One night she got drunk and passed out on a neighbor’s lawn (it really is a nice neighborhood, I swear)! After the paramedics took her away, she was seen no more.
Last year we looked into renting the house, in hopes of putting some of our dern kids in there. We found that it had been foreclosed on by a bank, but then the bank had gone out of business. Apparently it will still be quite awhile before all messes are straightened out.
In the meantime, some shingles have come off the roof and a dead tree has fallen in the yard. Squirrels have moved in to the screened porch. The interior of the house looks mostly okay, but for some fist-sized holes in the walls and the stove being pulled into the center of the kitchen. Hopefully someone will get in and save this house one day.
Good point. The “family farm” in the US (and probably most other western countries) is not nearly the thing it once was. There are some remaining, yes, but the trend has been consolidation and corporate ownership. So maybe in 1950, a town had two dozen independent family farms in the metro area. Nowadays, that farmland is mostly owned by one or two conglomerates (e.g. Purdue) who hire people to work the land, and maybe one or two “independents” struggling to survive.
And that’s just the ones that haven’t burned down. A few years ago we drove through the Flint neighborhood where my grandparents lived (and a lot of their relatives and friends lived) until after my mom finished kindergarten (and she actually walked, by herself, to school in that neighborhood at that age) and there were tons of burned down houses, the school had recently been burned down, and the rest of the houses looked like crack dens at best, postapocalyptic nightmares at worst. It was sad as fuck.
There is a sad story about such a house on my aunt’s rural property (right next to my parents’) in Oro/Medonte township, southern Ontario (near the town of Barrie).
When I was growing up as a kid, my brothers and I knew about it - it was then (1970s) incredibly decrepit, the roof was falling in, and it had HUGE brambles growing out of it - it was creepy as hell, and of course, the subject of many a ghost story for us kids. [The one I remember was that the house was the dwelling of a ‘mad axeman’ who would creep out at night & kill people with his rusty old axe - which he would sharpen below the victim’s window at night … my brothers used this story to play a practical joke on me]
The truth was almost as sad and macabre as the stories - of lonely insanity, abandonment, and death.
What happened was this: the house was the centre of a failing family farm (the land there is very sandy - it is now mostly planted with trees, but then it was a working farm). The family farm was more or less finished off by the Depression. Everyone in that family moved away, and did not come back - except one old woman, the original farmer’s wife. She stayed after her husband’s death, after her kids moved away. She stayed and tried to work the farm … with increasing lack of success as she grew more elderly, more disabled, and eventually, more mentally ill.
This was during the War Years, and social services for rural people were pretty rudementary (plus apparently she was one of those who angrily rejected ‘charity’ of any type). Her neighbours would leave food at her doorstep, but increasingly had less and less contact with her - she was (allegedly) never easy to deal with and her reaction to people towards the end was to scream abuse at them, and to run & hide.
One day, in midwinter around 1948 or so, someone came with a basket of food and found the front door hanging open. The old woman was gone, and presumably, died. Her body was never found. Presumably, she had crawled off into the woods nearby and passed away.
The land was held in some sort of legal limbo for awhile (it was, basically, worthless at the time), then ended up with the county. The county sold some of it to my aunt & retained the rest as a park (which it still is). The house lasted for some time, then the roof went, and it quickly decayed after that. I remember the house standing in the 1970s, but today, I would be hard-put to even find where the foundations were.
I heard these details as an adult, from a local farming family that had better fortune & is still farming to this day.
It really is. Most of those now burned-out, ruin porn neighborhoods were once vibrant areas, really nice houses, solid working or upper-middle class, family-friendly neighborhoods. It is so sad to see that.
Flint also has (along with the dubious distinction of being in the top three murder capitals, USA) one of the highest arson rates in the nation. Sadly, or something, the cost to contain and then raze an arson-destroyed house is cheaper than having the city do it legally.
Depending on the area, there may not be any. I don’t pay any property tax on my house. Garbage service, water, and the car tax all go to City Hall, but nothing for having the house itself - if the house is uninhabited it generates no garbage and uses no water.
I think in the US that would mostly affect unincorporated areas, but not necessarily.
Dung Beetle, how crass are you?
When I was much younger, I had need of a home to get in out of the rain. I was camping out on BLM land. I passed an abandoned old farmhouse in disrepair on my way to work every day. As far as I could tell, it was not claimed by any one. I repaired the windows, doors, & roof & moved in. I stayed there for over six months. I could have stayed longer, but my wanderlust was kicking in & I moved on to other pastures.
I know of other folks who have “acquired” their homes in this way. They fixed them up enough to live in them & just moved in. They feel as I felt when I did this, “It is cheaper then rent!” It just takes some gonades to pull this off. My “friends” did eventually go down & pay the back taxes on the property, since they had lived there for over 30 years. At this point they have the most “color of title”, or so their lawer says.
This worked for them as it did for me, in that far away place in the long distant past.
Oh, fairly, but how have I demonstrated it in this thread?
Well, this is certainly enigmatic.
First, IANAL, I recommend that you hire one if you choose to do what I am proposing.
Now for your question; you have not demonstrated it in this thread. I thought that you might be from previous threads.
I am asking because you could perhaps follow my lead & just use the house as yours. IE: “Put your dern kids in it” .
Fix it enough so that it will not deteriorate any more & so it will be able to do the job for your family. No fancy stuff, new paint OK, an elevator, not so much.
Keep all of the receipts for material and any hired labor. Keep records of your labor. Mowing the grass counts, as does replacing windows. This gives you some legal standing when/if anyone comes to “repossess” the property.
Lots & lots of both before & after pictures would be a must. Make sure to get the damage well documented. You could even hire a reputable contractor to do a home inspection & give you a quote for the needed repairs. Tell him why you want the quote. You may want him to testify in court later. Keep the receipt & quote, the larger the better. Note: a contractor, not some fly-by-night “home inspector”.
If I were you, I would consult a real estate lawyer first so you know what you are risking and how much “color of title” you would have.
Ten years ago, I did consult a real estate lawyer for exactly what I am proposing for you to do. He was able to find a way that I could purchase the property (very cheaply) directly from the lien holder. This lien holder had bought a bunch of liens from a bank that had gone bankrupt many years earlier. I do not know what magic my attorney used, but it was good stuff! Well worth the $$.
In any case, he told me what I am telling you. We did not know if he could find the owner, so he told me to just fix it & use it, but to keep track of every dime spent and every minute that I worked on the house. He thought that the most I would lose was the future use of the house. He indicated that in court, if it came to that, I would at least get my $$ back & that I would be compensated for my time.
This is why I asked you about your crassness. It is an idea. At the least, it would keep the house from being an eyesore in your neighborhood. At best, you get a fairly cheap house to use, & perhaps, to eventually sell for a profit.
Ah! I see what you’re saying. An interesting idea, though it may require more nerve and cash than we currently have on hand.
Ah. I think the better word would be “audacity” or “chutzpah”. 
This American Life did a story on one such house and it was fascinating House on Loon Lake - This American Life