Can’t pinpoint a specific website. There are many images of abandoned houses, stores, factories, parks in US on the internet. Some of them are not in bad condition. As a non-American person, this boggles my mind.
How come these buildings have been abandoned? Why no one tries to buy, restore or even demolish them? If there are legal issues, why aren’t they getting resolved?
If similar thing would happen in here, i won’t say which country i live in, the worst thing possible is that building getting filled with hobos or junkies.
P.S. I know about the raise of rate prices there. It’s not so different in rest of the world either. But
I’ve been watching Hollywood movies, shows and cartoons too, and such thing has been in them as well.
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>How come these buildings have been abandoned? Why no one tries to buy, restore or even demolish them? If there are legal issues, why aren’t they getting resolved?
Could be a mulrirude of issues. Location, rent, condition, etc.
>If similar thing would happen in here, i won’t say which country i live in, the worst thing possible is that building getting filled with hobos or junkies.
Plenty of them are filled with hobos. In my city, we’ve had several house fires in abandoned houses cause by homeless.
We have a lot of land. Sometimes it’s easier to build elsewhere then to demolish and rebuild.
A lot of these buildings are places, whether neighborhoods, cities, or entire regions, that are experiencing heavy out-migration. Fewer people want to live for than for how big the community is built to be. For a lot of the warehouses or factories, whatever they were built for no longer makes sense to have.
Vacant buildings in Akron, Ohio don’t matter for people in New York City, they’re hundreds of miles apart. That’s a random example but the point is that America is very large and an excess of buildings in one part aren’t relevant for other areas with supply shortages.
>As a non-American person, this boggles my mind.
Have you never been anywhere else outside of your very specific area?
>Why no one tries to buy, restore or even demolish them? I
A lot of them do. If you looked at a video or news article from 15 years ago of abandoned buildings in Indianapolis, nearly all of them would be gone nowadays.
>f there are legal issues, why aren’t they getting resolved?
We have private property rights in the US and the courts can help work out disputes but can’t just wave a wand and magic a dispute to be resolved. Everyone needs to have their day in court.
>i won’t say which country i live in,
Unless you are like the king of a micronation the likelihood of you getting doxxed because you stated your nationality is very, very low.
>I’ve been watching Hollywood movies, shows and cartoons too, and such thing has been in them as well.
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This is fiction. Even when shooting on location it can be drastically different than presented in the story.
For example, the train heist episode in Breaking Bad? I visited the location. It isn’t remote. It is in a residential neighborhood in Santa Fe County and the actual site is pretty small. It also isn’t a freight railroad, its only used for the New Mexico commuter trains and Amtrak.
There are a lot of reasons they could be abandoned. Some might have been foreclosed. Others have absentee/dead owners. In other cases they could have been properties owned by companies that went out of business years ago.
But as a general rule, you can use the $20 test. If a $20 bill has been laying out on the street for hours without being picked up, there’s probably something wrong with it. And with those building there’s generally a reason no one has done anything with them. Maybe there’s a biohazard issue. Maybe it’s tied up in litigation. Maybe it’s under the control of an incompetent local government that is taking too long to demolish it.
> How come these buildings have been abandoned?
Businesses close as more factories are moved to the suburbs/rural areas/outsourced. Office space is also becoming less used as home based jobs are more common.
> Why no one tries to buy, restore or even demolish them?
Demolition is expensive so not worth it to property owners unless there’s a plan to build something else. People do buy and restore building, and most of the time this is what happens. As for the ones that remain empty? In large cities typically the land owners are sitting on it until it becomes worth even more in the future. Why sell now when you can make 3x as much in the future. As for smaller towns, no one wants to buy them because there’s not a market in areas that aren’t growing all that much. There’s nothing to do with the building sand they’re too expensive to demolish.
> worst thing possible is that building getting filled with hobos or junkies.
Yes. This is very prevalent. [A perfect example is this from my city](https://www.wweek.com/news/2023/03/30/readers-respond-to-a-fentanyl-den-in-a-prominent-downtown-property/).
To summarize: It comes down to two reasons: either the property owners are holding onto it to make a larger profit when real estate goes up more or they’re located in areas where there’s not a shrinking need for buildings (and demolition is a useless expense when you can let it sit there).
100 or more years ago, commerce was centered around the great lakes, Erie canal and hudson valley.
Since then we have gotten more rail and road infrastructure. So alot of industry and the people that worked there have left as the industry did.
Because the rent is too damn high
Um. Yeah. Old towns. Ghost towns. Have you seen post soviet countries number of abandoned buildings. These feel like baiting but let’s do China now.
You see this in large swathes of southern & eastern Europe and Japan – when people leave an area, for whatever reason, it can get to a point where the amount of infrastructure (homes, buildings, parks, etc.) surpasses the number of people locally who can use those resources. It’s just people moving to different parts of the country where they can achieve a better standard of living.
You’re getting selection bias here. No one posts a photo of “oh, here’s a perfectly normal boring office”.
People post the interesting stuff, and abandoned buildings are kinda interesting. Every one is unique in it’s own way.
We still have a shit ton of undeveloped land.
I am sure city planners would love abandoned buildings to get revitalized by private wealth.
But if a developer doesn’t want to start with an abandoned building they do not have to. We have plenty of undeveloped land for them to choose from.
Our country is so large and has gone through multiple major expansions…it’s easier to just leave old buildings up and build new somewhere else.
The supply of open spaces is high so costs are low for new efficient construction.
It costs money to demolish and the high likelihood of there there being lead or asbestos will make this extremely costly.
A lot of them have asbestos and lead which makes demolition a whole lot more expensive. You are probably seeing the ghettos in the big cities and the rust belt from the old industrial areas. And don’t forget about the old coal mining towns. Everything was booming back in WW2 days and a lot of those industries have since died out unlike our current baby boomer government.
Often the cost to remediate a abandoned property costs more than ground up development in a new location.
Why would I buy and restore a building that’s hundreds or thousands of miles away? I wouldn’t even be able to sell it for a profit because no one would want it.
Like ghost towns/abandoned mining towns? We like these in the West, they’re spooky and make for a great day trip/road side attraction.
You won’t say. You hardly deserve an answer in that case. It’s such a stupid thing to not say. Let’s compare two parts of the world but we’ll only name one of them.
How do we know you’re not just making things up? Maybe you don’t even understand your own country. Lots of people come on here and say “we don’t have this in my country” and a quick internet search shows they actually do have that exact thing in their country. It happens all the time and it makes it hard to take those people who don’t name their country seriously.
Anytime your question uses the line ‘I’ve been watching Hollywood movies, shows and cartoons too, and such thing has been in them as well.’ it just seems like you have no media literacy. Am I to believe that India breaks out into massively choreographed song and dance numbers everyday?
We also don’t really like it when you won’t identify your own country. We’ve found that when people do this, its because a simple Google search turns up *the exact same problem.*
Anyways, we do have abandoned buildings, but its rarely on the scale that worries us. If you want to know why they aren’t acted on immediately, it takes time to resolve legal issues and money to fix the problem.
Interesting, I’d say that empty buildings are not very common in the US. Of course, they do exist, like there’s a church around the corner from my house that is abandoned. It has a really bizarre design and I guess once the congregation disbanded no one else wanted it. 🤷🏼♀️ I have been to Detroit and seen the enormous number of abandoned buildings, which IMHO is quite shocking and not typical of the American experience.
edit: I live in a vhcol area and I assume that eventually the price of the land will make it worthwhile for someone to foot the bill to tear it down and build something else there.
In contrast I spent a couple years in eastern Europe and there are massive numbers of abandoned buildings. Like *at least* half the buildings in my village are abandoned. It’s incredibly depressing. Sometimes when I’m bored I look at property for sale and it’s uhhhh not great. The school where I did my student teaching is now abandoned and up for sale. https://m.olx.bg/d/ad/sgrada-za-razlichni-deynosti-s-upi-6-5-dka-gr-boboshevo-obl-kyustendil-CID368-ID9ej0C.html
The answer is always money.
Areas that are economically dependent on one industry (ie Detroit, Pittsburgh) are vulnerable to changes in that industry. When the local factory closes, residents can’t pay mortgages or taxes. All the supporting service industries in the community (hairdressers, restaurants, store etc.) are also affected. Residents are forced to move but can’t sell their house because it has liens on it, property values are plummeting and no one wants to move to an area with no opportunities for work. The local government and the banks become overwhelmed with abandoned houses and buildings overdue on taxes/payments as people and businesses leave the community. As people leave, the tax base shrinks leaving the government with no money to manage infrastructure, much less tear down abandoned buildings. No one wants to buy in the community because the infrastructure is falling apart (police fire, utilities, road maintenance, postal services etc.) and are no opportunities for work.
A lot of times, it’s simply easier and cheaper to close up shop and just build a new building elsewhere. A lot of the abandoned buildings in my area at least are closed up factories and outlet malls. Malls and strip malls aren’t all that popular anymore and because of offshoring, a lot of the factories were left empty to fall in
There was a ton of old abandoned industrial buildings in NJ right by NYC for decades. They have finally torn down most of it an rebuilt now. The Red Bulls’ stadium was part of it
Places like towns in the Rust Belt have had huge reductions in population as jobs and economic opportunities dried up. Factories go out of business, people get foreclosed on or just move away without selling their homes because nobody wants to buy them, and local businesses close up as the population gets smaller and poorer.
Just for an example, Youngstown, Ohio had a population of 170,000 at its peak in the mid-1900s. After the steel plants closed shop over the following decades, especially after the locally infamous “Black Monday” in the 70s when one of the largest employers left in town just closed its doors one day without warning, the population shrank to a third of that today at 60,000. That’s a lot of empty buildings.
We have land. It can be easier to get a place somewhere else than demolish an old building. You also need permits and a build plan, which can add up quick