Yep, and always with the same caveats. The dollar houses typically, but not always, need something like a house's real cost worth of renovation. There's no citizenship attached, so one can't just up and move into their new house. And of course, you'd really want to know Italian.
This is all super reasonable, but makes for clickbait headlines.
Please also note that those houses are supposed to be in declined tiny villages in the most remote places. Surely, you do not want to commute from there to a job in the city.
To a point. Economies of scale will still exist for things that cannot be done remotely, which means that population density will continue to beget population density.
True, if you need that (I do), but I have not encountered issues since the past 15 or so years. Before that it was harder. Obviously there are places that have nothing: I have lived there too and that is a lot more hassle. For me still better than a city. Each their own.
Maybe this will change with Starlink or over time but usually remote places in Europe have really, really slow internet connections (if any) so they are not really suited for remote work unless you can do everything via Citrix or similar.
There are (/recently have been) similar programs in the US too. They're not as valuable as clickbait though, because people here are familiar with how undesirable the locations generally are.
The similar programs that I've seen (over the past 10 years) in mediocre locations in my area of the US were in better locations than the these ones in Italy. They were in commuting distance to good job markets, had good internet access, easy access to building materials, labor, and capital, basic public transport, etc. Those programs have since ended, because they were successful. I'd imagine any of these programs that are in good locations don't last long.
Yes, the article mentions it's been going for at least 10 years
> Gangi has been completely transformed since it launched the one-euro housing craze in Italy in 2011, Mayor Francesco Paolo Migliazzo said. A medieval hamlet with frescoed churches and steep, narrow stone pathways, it was declared the most beautiful small town in Italy in 2014. Today, tour guides shuttle groups of visitors along historic and artistic walking routes.
Alas it doesn't go very deep into how things have turned out for people buying the houses, or for the villages those houses are in
I liked the quote from elsewhere in which an American pointed out that after the required taxes, bank charges and payments for buying the house in Italy her 1 euro house cost her about €2000 just to buy. Good marketing though.
And 2000E is not a good deal? It might not be but it sounds pretty ok even though not $1 or E1. There is not much that looks like a house in the EU for 2k, east or south, let alone north/west.
You can get a pretty decent house in some rural economically depressed parts of the USA for $100k, if you look. Use zillow, set price ceiling to 100k or 110k, 2BD and 1BA or 1.5BA, start browsing map to random small towns in the midwest and prairie states.
You still can get a house for that much in Detroit, however you'll potentially be living in a dangerous neighborhood. Safe Detroit neighborhoods have actually soared in cost even if they aren't in the downtown area, believe it or not.
If I were to do something like that for habitable, ready to move in house under $100k in some post-industrial economically depressed city, it sure wouldn't be Detroit with all the big city problems that come with that... Somewhere much smaller like Oswego, NY or Elmira, NY.
You can get a house in economically healthy cities and suburbs for $100k...
... as long your definition of economically healthy doesn't mean "top-tier school district in a trendy metro area", and your definition of house isn't "4bd/2ba recent construction"
Sure, but my suspicion is that the main driver for someone doing this is the allure of moving to a different country, especially one with such a reputation of having beautiful scenery and culture.
I moved to Italy 5 months ago (and got my Citizenship through my great grandfather). I live in a small town (~4k people). These homes are usually in very bad conditions; there's shitty internet and heating.
PS: If you have italian ancestors and are interested in getting your citizenship let me know, I'm writing a blog post with my experience so far :)
This is key. I was born in Italy, but to American parents living abroad — and I don't have any Italian ancestors. I don't qualify for Italian citizenship, because Italy is jus sanguinis, not jus soli.
Some kind of permanent and meaningful relationship with the country, beyond the fact that your parents happened to be located there when you were delivered.
Why should you have citizenship just because you were born there?
Where I live (Canada) it's jus soli and there's an entire birth tourism business because of it. Foreigners give birth here just to give their children citizenship without ever contributing.
Most of the world is jus sanguinis.
Also, you could have obtained Italian citizenship by staying until you were 18.
Well citizenship as a concept (still) exists because people cost the government money. There's also externalities associated with letting people in/out. Also because of reasons you can't leave someone stateless, and a lot of citizenship is based on that too.
> Why should you have citizenship just because you were born there?
More of a claim than if your great great grandfathers second cousins babysitters dog once visited on holiday, which seems to the be the basis that many Americans use when they say "I'm Irish".
From what I've read most of the 'homes' are basically a brick/stone shell, one would easily expect to spend 80,000-100,000 (in euros) to make them habitable.
I was wondering if you were in the North or South. I read some great things about Turin and Florence and surrounding towns and I wanted to get a perspective from someone who was on the ground.
You can expect the opening paragraphs of the article ("over 30 people stopped to help...") to be in general representative (with large individual variations).
There's also the prolific government corruption, endemic organized crime, and an aging population which brings a whole suite of sociological problems (conservative politics and social structures, poor social services for anyone not a senior, the younger generation will be unable to support the needs of the retired/elderly generation so economic collapse is inevitable.)
Meanwhile the police are driving around in lambos (yes, they're "donated"; the exorbitant maintenance / fuel / tire costs are not.)
Whenever a country's young people are not sticking around, that's a sign things are fucked. These people want to "fix" things by attracting people with money, because they don't want to fix the actual problems with their country.
So what is Italy’s main economy at this point, just tourism? I was also under the impression the a large number of immigrants are moving there to do all the odd jobs.
A lot of people get the idea that Italy is poor and only running on tourism and olive oil from popular media, but it's actually a complex economy with lots of high tech exports. The biggest exports are medical and engineering products[0].
There's a lot of problems to be sure, but it's still a competitive, high tech economy, especially in the north.
Italy is a big exporter of mechatronic products. It is the second ( or third depending on sources) manufacturing economy in Europe just after Germany. Its engineering culture has always been very strong and will stay strong for a long time to come.
One day I noticed nearly all of my food comes from Italy. They are also famous for clothes, and that seems to hold true as well - my best jacket is italian.
I suggest you take a look at the "black marble" (Earth at night from space), in the European area. You will see that together with the extended megalopolis Lille-Antwerpen-Liège up to the Bonn-Duisburg-Dortmund aggregations, the most noticeable extended megalopolis is the Padanian valley. It is not tourism to drive that.
Who are you to make such claims ? Are you an Italian, do you live in Italy? Your claims seem just cliche rather than based on actual arguments. I always understood that HN audience was against these kind of posts.
Corruption in Italy is not everywhere, and organized crime is only present and vocal in some areas.
Lamborghini from time to time apparently donates a few vehicles for service - to be used as an alternative to helicopters when feasible.
Young people are exactly the demographic that less probably will want to remain in the remote corners of the territory, with probably less service than one drugstore and a church - those places in which more easily these special properties are for sale.
This is old news and this program is a borderline scam used to inject naive (mostly American) retirement dollars into hopelessly backwards and corrupt remote Italian villages. I'm an Italian citizen and I've been to these villages. They can't even pay young Italians to live there. The local governments are so inept and corrupt doing literally anything becomes a 6 month long nightmare of paperwork and petty denials. Many people buying these houses find out later that there is a 1 year deadline for completing the work, and that unless they use the very expensive and slow local craftsman the permits will never get issued. This program is for suckers and is designed to part them from their money and give it to local mafia run govts and tradesmen.
In which region were those villages? I doubt the same will happen everywhere.
Edit: in fact, I just checked one such requirements list, and for example this local administration set the time limit for the renovations as 3 years, not 1.
Well, we all know these houses a in bad shape and require a major investment but I don't think this is a problem.
Fact is, you will create a tax liability there since most of this programs don't only require you to renovate the house, they also expect you to move there. . As much as I love Italy, I would not take the house with 50k USD on top of it for free.
Don't worry. Other countries will follow soon as online work becomes more available and the societies overage more. For some countries a collapse may be unavoidable. Crazy real estate prices? No retirement for you but please pay the retirement for the boomers? Sky high taxes? Good luck!
Compared to the rest of the world, i'd say mobile internet is great across EU. Nordic countries in particular have the best service & price i've seen so far.
It's true though, remote areas still struggle with good internet.
European governments should combine this with a European contact law for remote workers, easing up specific country residency requirements and with that pension fund management and income tax ripartitions between countries.
Right now remoting between countries is a mess, because you need to adhere to the contract law of the country of residency, and while that's good because your taxes go toward the infrastructure you actually use, it's a major limiting factor in worker mobility as not many companies have legal and financial representatives in all the countries one is free to live and work with across Europe.
It's not that simple since those refugees need to be productive. Are they going to create businesses? Invest in the town? There's a reason they usually go to larger cities... Schemes like this try usually try to attract rich foreigners or educated professionals looking to opt-out of the rat race for the investment angle. Not just labour.
This is not the Roman Empire. Those same healthy young men failed at much beyond subsistence agriculture in their home countries. IQ - a factor of genetics and upbringing - is far more important. Predilection away from violence and crime is another.
Most of the migrants from Africa/Middle East represent huge social and economic burdens that might very will permanently sink some European countries, given the differential levels of fertility between the native and introduced populations.
> economic burdens that might very will permanently sink some European countries, given the differential levels of fertility between the native and introduced populations.
And yes, EU needs productive people, I mean people who can breed well to repopulate its greying small towns.
Native population wait until mid thirties, or not having any.
A simple math tells you will soon run out of tax payers to support the government, and the government will collapse.
I was under impression that many of the European migrants from Africa are essentially the children of the upper-middle class there as that's pretty much a requirement to be able to afford the quite sizable cost of transportation and various semi-legal obstacles; someone who has "failed at much beyond subsistence agriculture in their home countries" simply can't afford to get from Somalia to Denmark; both for refugees and economic migration you would expect to get disproportionally the wealthier/powerful segments of their society.
My understanding is that since Africa is connected to Europe by either land or a very small amount of water, you tend to get the same situation as Mexican immigrants into the US. You're optimizing more for risk-takers instead of wealth (which actually works pretty well with the US's culture, but might not in continental Europe).
African immigrants to the US, on the other hand, tend to be quite wealthy/well educated. I think at one point Nigerian applicants for US citizenship were the most educated nationality. Presumably this is because the sheer cost of going there filters out a lot of people.
Villages will band together to finance people smugglers to take a few of their young men to Europe. The expectation is that from welfare and cash jobs, they will send money back and repay the loan.
That's why the boats you see full of migrants are typically 100% male.
The work they perform in Europe is menial labour that could be performed by robots. They rarely end up in factories because that work requires skilled labour and literacy. The migrants are rarely literate in their own languages, let alone Italian/German.
Its social and economic destruction for the sake of cheap vegetables and virtue signaling.
You're right about the educated migrants though. Pre-2015, if you saw a person from one of these regions in Europe, they would typically be a businessman or university student, and were treated well. Attitudes are now different because of the huge influx of uneducated and often dangerous individuals from the same places.
Those rural areas generally have a problem of unemployment and lack of jobs. These villages do not need" healthy, young and muscular foreigners (though the few employers e.g. large farms might prefer cheap slave-like labor to local laborers), they really do need rich foreigners or educated professionals (who are going to be working remotely) to create some extra demand for local labor, not compete with it.
The whole problem is that young Italians leave these towns looking for work. They need money to come to town to spur demand. Adding more labour doesn't solve the problem. Italy has plenty of young foreigners but they aren't moving to these small towns.
The regions selling 1€ homes are far away from Emilia-Romagna... ER is an agricultural and industrial hub. Might as well compare California and South Dakota or something.
Generally those are the places that are doing so well there is no good place to work and earn money. Which is why everybody young is running away and prefers doing everything else.
So, any good job would also have to be imported somehow.
Judging from my youtube recommendations there are a number of brits/germans/etc moving to northern Sweden to buy cheap but now crappy houses that need a very large amount of work (foundation work/insulation/fixing various rotten wooden parts/sometimes even roof leaks/etc). They seem to be seeking a homestead/off-grid kind of life. I'm kind of skeptical on how they'll survive the coming winter, but we'll see. :)
Good for them if they're able to fix those houses, I guess.
Greece has dirt cheap homes in some of the most beautiful vistas in the world. It is an administrative nightmare to buy the homes, however, and the country has no realtors. Bribery can be a necessity. But it can be an amazing place to live and extremely cheap by US standards.
I looked at doing this in Ukraine. Here you can buy 650m2 block of land on the outskirts (20-30minutes drive) of a 2nd tier city for about $10,000.
However, I decided its better to just buy land in the USA instead for the following reasons:
1. Unless you can speak the language, or have a family connection to the workers, local tradespeople will overcharge you by 100%. If you don't speak the language, you'll need to hire a local project manager/translator anyway.
2. The selection of materials is very limited.
3. The pace of construction and design standards are stuck in the Soviet era.
4. There is nothing to do and no one who speaks English in these towns.
5. With the amount of time and money spent on building a nice house, paying a bit more for better land in a better area/country does not represent a large % increase in total costs.
6. Usually a lack of connectivity to one or more of electricity, gas, water, internet, sewer.
7. Due to the poor fertility rate of these countries, finding an eventual buyer for your house is going to be very difficult. Housing outside the cities of these countries is going to trend towards scrap value.
8. The higher latitude and lower average temperature mean either greater need for passivhaus-style design, or higher heating expenses. (Less of an issue in Italy). For example most of Ukraine is located at the same latitude as Northern Canada.
9. There's no mortgage system if you need to borrow money.
If you live in one of these areas, its little different to living in a small town in the USA in terms of total housing cost. If you're willing to build something, you can design and build a simple ICF house, with off-grid electricity, geothermal heating, well water and septic system, and Starlink internet.
People are buying apartments in Valencia (300k is a lot for Spaniards but bargain bin tier for Dutch boomers) however who the hell wants to live in a remote Italian village?
Location location location as estate agents say
> who the hell wants to live in a remote Italian village?
I do. Those are very popular among tourists as you have beautiful countryside, mild weather, great food, clean air, and amazing sites to visit all around. Friend of mine bought a vacation home there (small village in Tuscany) and an invite is much sought after to go exploring the Tuscan countryside. I can see someone wanting to live there, especially if they work remote. The main problem is really lack of english, but for a young person Italian is pretty easy to pick up.
124 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] thread[0]: https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/italy-one-euro-home-w... [1]: https://1eurohouses.com/
This is all super reasonable, but makes for clickbait headlines.
The 2010s called and wants last decade's arguments back.
Cities can’t just be waitress jobs for other waitresses, they need a core of non service jobs to work.
That assumes there's viable internet connection, which is often not the case in small remote villages (that is one of the huge caveats).
Would be more fun if it were Transylvania
Would be better for them if there weren't an entire documentary episode about a community fear of foreigners and some murders.[1]
Come for the money and housing assistance. Stay if you survive.
1 - https://m.imdb.com/title/tt8119994/
> Gangi has been completely transformed since it launched the one-euro housing craze in Italy in 2011, Mayor Francesco Paolo Migliazzo said. A medieval hamlet with frescoed churches and steep, narrow stone pathways, it was declared the most beautiful small town in Italy in 2014. Today, tour guides shuttle groups of visitors along historic and artistic walking routes.
Alas it doesn't go very deep into how things have turned out for people buying the houses, or for the villages those houses are in
It depends?
…and then 100k more to bring it to normal living condition
a somewhat randomly chosen example in 45 seconds of searching: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/51-E-5th-St-Oswego-NY-131...
... as long your definition of economically healthy doesn't mean "top-tier school district in a trendy metro area", and your definition of house isn't "4bd/2ba recent construction"
Hastily searched example:
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/14021-Lakota-Ave-Clevelan...
Add to that the $2k closing costs and it’s not a viable solution for a week’s worth of camping.
PS: If you have italian ancestors and are interested in getting your citizenship let me know, I'm writing a blog post with my experience so far :)
This is key. I was born in Italy, but to American parents living abroad — and I don't have any Italian ancestors. I don't qualify for Italian citizenship, because Italy is jus sanguinis, not jus soli.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli
Good job keeping me out, Italy.
https://www.inps.it/pages/standard/51985
Though I'm guessing you've probably spent much more time than me researching this already so this might not apply. Are you back in the US?
Where I live (Canada) it's jus soli and there's an entire birth tourism business because of it. Foreigners give birth here just to give their children citizenship without ever contributing.
Most of the world is jus sanguinis.
Also, you could have obtained Italian citizenship by staying until you were 18.
More of a claim than if your great great grandfathers second cousins babysitters dog once visited on holiday, which seems to the be the basis that many Americans use when they say "I'm Irish".
People are great. First day we were here they were already inviting us to have launch. It's a small town though.
Meanwhile the police are driving around in lambos (yes, they're "donated"; the exorbitant maintenance / fuel / tire costs are not.)
Whenever a country's young people are not sticking around, that's a sign things are fucked. These people want to "fix" things by attracting people with money, because they don't want to fix the actual problems with their country.
in the great plains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depopulation_of_the_Great_Plai...
[0]https://oec.world/en/profile/country/ita/
Here's a visualization of Italy's exports:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/It...
Lamborghini from time to time apparently donates a few vehicles for service - to be used as an alternative to helicopters when feasible.
Young people are exactly the demographic that less probably will want to remain in the remote corners of the territory, with probably less service than one drugstore and a church - those places in which more easily these special properties are for sale.
I am very interested in the citizenship process.
My pet rant is that once you are in a rural picturesque location, you get hit with all the regulation, bureaucracy and skill shortages
Edit: in fact, I just checked one such requirements list, and for example this local administration set the time limit for the renovations as 3 years, not 1.
Fact is, you will create a tax liability there since most of this programs don't only require you to renovate the house, they also expect you to move there. . As much as I love Italy, I would not take the house with 50k USD on top of it for free.
Don't worry. Other countries will follow soon as online work becomes more available and the societies overage more. For some countries a collapse may be unavoidable. Crazy real estate prices? No retirement for you but please pay the retirement for the boomers? Sky high taxes? Good luck!
The only thing avoiding me from living in a remote area is the difficulty to have reliable and reasonable priced internet.
Yes, there are things like Spacex, but is not completely ready yet, and the cost is too high at the moment.
It's true though, remote areas still struggle with good internet.
5G up to 1000 Mbps at 30-50€.
Inexpensive, 99% population cover and good networks.
Finland says hello.
Right now remoting between countries is a mess, because you need to adhere to the contract law of the country of residency, and while that's good because your taxes go toward the infrastructure you actually use, it's a major limiting factor in worker mobility as not many companies have legal and financial representatives in all the countries one is free to live and work with across Europe.
Most of the migrants from Africa/Middle East represent huge social and economic burdens that might very will permanently sink some European countries, given the differential levels of fertility between the native and introduced populations.
Non-Western migrants in Denmark cost that country about 10% of its total Government spending: https://www.thelocal.dk/20211015/denmark-says-non-western-im...
https://tradingeconomics.com/denmark/government-spending#:~:....
Here's social welfare use in the Netherlands: http://i.imgur.com/dqTa8d4.png
And yes, EU needs productive people, I mean people who can breed well to repopulate its greying small towns.
Native population wait until mid thirties, or not having any.
A simple math tells you will soon run out of tax payers to support the government, and the government will collapse.
African immigrants to the US, on the other hand, tend to be quite wealthy/well educated. I think at one point Nigerian applicants for US citizenship were the most educated nationality. Presumably this is because the sheer cost of going there filters out a lot of people.
That's why the boats you see full of migrants are typically 100% male.
The work they perform in Europe is menial labour that could be performed by robots. They rarely end up in factories because that work requires skilled labour and literacy. The migrants are rarely literate in their own languages, let alone Italian/German.
They end up in places like this: https://www.dw.com/en/spains-sea-of-plastic-where-europe-get...
Its social and economic destruction for the sake of cheap vegetables and virtue signaling.
You're right about the educated migrants though. Pre-2015, if you saw a person from one of these regions in Europe, they would typically be a businessman or university student, and were treated well. Attitudes are now different because of the huge influx of uneducated and often dangerous individuals from the same places.
You can see it in the USA Household Income stats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
Groups that were brought in as refugees have very poor incomes, whilst those who came over as students and businessworkers have high ones.
I worked in the industry for 10 years.
The two best mechanical engineers I knew weren't engineers as such, as they had no university education.
People who talk of robotisation rarely ever dealt with one, and if did they often go back.
>> That's why the boats you see full of migrants are typically 100% male.
That's even better honestly. They don't bring families, they will work more, and will not take maternity leaves.
>> Villages will band together to finance people smugglers to take a few of their young men to Europe.
Why actually not to make it more civilised, and put a visa on deposit.
The deposit goes towards initial accomodations, and most basic courses/boot camp.
If everything goes well, the guy can draw it once his taxes exceed that amount n-fold.
> The migrants are rarely literate in their own languages, let alone Italian/German.
That's because most of Africa speaks either French, or English. You see very little Bantu speakers in Europe.
So, any good job would also have to be imported somehow.
After the pandemic, I'll take many folks some time to be able to live without those daily Amazon deliveries again...
Good for them if they're able to fix those houses, I guess.
1. https://www.amazon.com/Masterpiece-Durrells-Corfu-Seasons-1-...
Of course being truly remote also means lack of accessibility to basic facilities that we take for granted.
But there is a certain romanticism about being able to work remotely while enjoying the beautiful vistas.
However, I decided its better to just buy land in the USA instead for the following reasons:
1. Unless you can speak the language, or have a family connection to the workers, local tradespeople will overcharge you by 100%. If you don't speak the language, you'll need to hire a local project manager/translator anyway.
2. The selection of materials is very limited.
3. The pace of construction and design standards are stuck in the Soviet era.
4. There is nothing to do and no one who speaks English in these towns.
5. With the amount of time and money spent on building a nice house, paying a bit more for better land in a better area/country does not represent a large % increase in total costs.
6. Usually a lack of connectivity to one or more of electricity, gas, water, internet, sewer.
7. Due to the poor fertility rate of these countries, finding an eventual buyer for your house is going to be very difficult. Housing outside the cities of these countries is going to trend towards scrap value.
8. The higher latitude and lower average temperature mean either greater need for passivhaus-style design, or higher heating expenses. (Less of an issue in Italy). For example most of Ukraine is located at the same latitude as Northern Canada.
9. There's no mortgage system if you need to borrow money.
If you live in one of these areas, its little different to living in a small town in the USA in terms of total housing cost. If you're willing to build something, you can design and build a simple ICF house, with off-grid electricity, geothermal heating, well water and septic system, and Starlink internet.
Why go through all this trouble in Europe when you can still buy cheap, decent housing like this in the Midwest USA: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/5017-Madison-St-Omaha-NE-...
I do. Those are very popular among tourists as you have beautiful countryside, mild weather, great food, clean air, and amazing sites to visit all around. Friend of mine bought a vacation home there (small village in Tuscany) and an invite is much sought after to go exploring the Tuscan countryside. I can see someone wanting to live there, especially if they work remote. The main problem is really lack of english, but for a young person Italian is pretty easy to pick up.