Lauren Markham in The Guardian:
We’d heard about the “€1 house” programme in which poor, depopulating towns put their abandoned or unused buildings up for sale. The programme, I soon learned, was actually a loose collection of schemes that economically struggling towns used to lure outside investment and new residents. The campaigns seemed to me to have been largely successful – some towns had sold all their listed properties. I pored over dozens of news articles that had served as €1 house promotion over the years. By attracting international buyers to a house that “costs less than a cup of coffee”, as one piece put it, some of Italy’s most remote towns now had new life circulating through them. Many local officials had come to see €1 house experiments as their potential salvation.
What was the catch? It seemed most municipalities required you to renovate the house within a couple of years of its purchase, and due to high levels of interest, the houses often went to auction, ultimately selling for much more than a single euro. But what we wondered about were the ethical considerations – the classic tensions of gentrification. What would it mean just to buy our way into a foreign place where we had no connections and try to set up a home there?
Still, we kept looking.
More here.
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