Nah, those abandoned buildings are trash. Literally. There is a reason these greedy bankers havent already bought them up. They arent stupid.
In the great lakes region which has both hot and cold flashes as well as extreme humidity; those homes must be occupied perpetually or they deterioirate. The hvac units fail, foundation cracks, the pipes burst, animals move in and chew electrical lines, crackheads or Dboys move in, etc. Fruthermore, once a building has been abandoned for a certain number of years, midwestern cities require that it be brought up to modern day code before it can be used as a legal residence. Living in it, in its uncompleted state can actually send you to jail for violating ordinanaces,
And keep in mind that these houses are ancient from the 1920s-1950s , so the cost of bringing them up to code and buying their derilict prerehab state is the same price, or often more expensive than buying a newer house in good condition or an older house that has been perpetually occupied.
To give you a rough idea of what i mean here, note that the price of those trash buildings is averaging around 20k-30k (primarily based on land value). The electrical rewiring of an 80 year old home for 2023 standards costs 25k . Redoing the foundation and lifting the property up will cost 40k. Redoing warped or rotted woodwork will cost you 20k. Eliminating rodents, insects, and squatters can cost an additonal 5-10k . Redoing the pumbing and pipes will cost 15k. Various city required examinations, architectural blueprints, land surveys, and can add 5k to the cost. The city also mandates that you use their approved contractors, plumbers, electricians, architects, etc ; so you cant do any of this work yourself or go cheap with contractors. And these places are often in such bad neighborhoods that contractors refuse to work there cause their tools or raw materials get stolen when they go home for the night, which will force you to pay a premium for them to agree to the job.
So just to get that piece of trash back into livable condition will cost you more than 100,000 dollars. At that rate , you would be a fool to not just buy a functioning house in the hood, or move into a brand new tinyhouse, or buy a small condo in the gentrified sections of Detroit. And keep in mind , banks do not lend money for renovation of these derilict buildings , neither will they lend youb money to buy the land without renovation, so you have to find this 100k cost yourself as a poor black person in detroit. So the finanacing alone is motivation to just get a newer house.
seems like a scam to me. There are places in the world where you buy land you dont pay no property taxes its yours forever but it's not here in the u.s.
