Old towns eager for new blood sell Italy homes for $1
latimes.com
latimes.com
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...
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
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-...
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.
[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.
> 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
Good for them if they're able to fix those houses, I guess.
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.
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.
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.
1. https://www.amazon.com/Masterpiece-Durrells-Corfu-Seasons-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!
After the pandemic, I'll take many folks some time to be able to live without those daily Amazon deliveries again...
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.
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.