Because my family is British Italian, I live between the UK and Italy, and I’ve noticed that abandoned houses are a huge problem in both countries. Here in London, there are many beautiful but vacant houses that have been invaded by rats and drug addicted homeless people; obviously, it is impossible to find out why this is happening in such a large city as London, but in Italy, I’ve found wonderful houses were abandoned sometimes since the Second World War because people moved elsewhere, or the family can’t have it without family fights, or the landlord died a long time ago. In Italy, the worst problem is if the house is a historical archeological site, they can’t live inside because the Bello Arti Ministry has blocked the works for years because they find ancient Roman tombs, medieval items, and other valuable items. Now, in both the UK and Italy, all of these empty houses could help people without a home find a place to stay, or the houses could be used to open a neighborhood kindergarten or social whatever, but this never happens, and all that remains are ruins and decay. So, how does your country deal with this issue?
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I live next to an abandoned house. The owner’s moved to another country and left it. The Village doesn’t care and doesn’t do anything about it and I don’t think the homeless care about the house either since i haven’t seen anyone sleep in it
It’s similar in Portugal, I live in Denver but father is from Portugal. Basically most of the younger generation abandons their houses in the small towns in the country side for more opportunities in the cities. So their family homes stay vacant, sometimes when towns have festivals they come back and use those houses like a summer home. But some are abandoned for good and slowly crumble sadly.
Since land for building is pretty expensive in Switzerland, the area typically gets sold eventually, be it only to make some parking lots.
That being said, there certainly exist decaying buildings also in Switzerland.
There are plenty of blogs listing them for *urban exploration* reasons, like these ones:
[https://urbex-datenbank.ch/urbex/tag/verlassene-haeuser/](https://urbex-datenbank.ch/urbex/tag/verlassene-haeuser/)
[https://www.redbull.com/ch-de/mysterioese-orte-in-der-schweiz](https://www.redbull.com/ch-de/mysterioese-orte-in-der-schweiz) (this page requires cookies to display the images…)
Here in the city where I live,we have a LOT of abandoned houses.
As you say…many of them have been abandoned for decades.Some are partly destroyed by second world war bombs,some were just abandoned and allowed to fall into ruins.
There is some effort to trace the owners of these places and if possible to restore them (or knock them down and rebuild on the site) but it’s a long and slow process,it costs a lot of money (which the local council don’t have).
In Sicily there are also a lot more ‘modern’ abandoned houses.These are the ones that were constructed illegally…the authorities stopped people from moving into them,and the remains (often they are semi-built only) sit there,while legal battles continue.
Every now and gain the national government decides to give the ‘owners’ permission to live there ( ‘condono edilizio’…this is typical of Conservative/right wing government…the ‘left’ governments here are generally more concerned about both legality of construction and the environmental situation).
Despite the quite regular ‘condoni’,a lot of the people who built or bought properties in these ‘illegal’ developments have abandoned them..they live somewhere else,the construction company has gone bankrupt etc.
From time to time they are bulldozed,but this is rare (financial and legal reasons).
Because land and house prices are incredibly high here houses aren’t very often abandoned. Ownership records are also very good so it is easy for municipalities to find who owns what.
Furthermore, if you no longer live in a house you own you have to start paying more tax on it.
If you check out online lists for urban exploring in the Netherlands it’s always the few same buildings, which are monuments managed by the government and Land van Ooit, an abandoned theme park. There just isn’t much abandoned stuff to go around.