As in, how do houses and corporate buildings become abandoned? Were certain buildings never listed for sale? Or were they, but just never sold? How does something as big as an entire mall become abandoned?
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A common reason for houses is when someone dies and the property is left to someone in their family, who already has a house or lives far enough away that they can’t live there. If the house is paid off, then the only real payment is for the property tax, which isn’t necessarily much. They might have grand plans to rent the property out or even sell it, but they find out it’s a bit more work than they’re capable of doing and the just “never get around to it.” Or their lives are just too busy to deal with it. Or it’s just going to cost way too much to clean up and repair the house, so nobody will buy it and they can’t do anything with it and don’t have the money to fix or demo the house.
For commercial buildings, it’s generally because nobody wants to buy it or lease it. That can be for any number of reasons. It might simply cost too much to make it a viable purchase after they do all the work necessary to clean it up and/or remodel it. Or it’s just not in an area that anybody wants their business to be located. And whoever owns it isn’t going to pay the huge cost to demolish the building and clean up the site. So they just use it as a tax write-off.
I know from experience with a hud contract, they buy property and flip it. However if there’s poor records,( a poorly performing department), and turnover some transactions become complicated to discern. Not saying they can’t but specific research has to be done in an understaffed department. I know I started to suspect that city decided our hud property was theirs to get developed. You quickly are disabused of anything that can cause a huge mess. To continue to dig I might have been wrong or right. I have no idea but it was going to be a huge problem that would have been decades old. And people currently lived there.
There’s an understanding in the contractor world not to get someone under a potential axe if they had zero to do with it. Known and should have known are big decisions points.
Why am I researching that property? It was in order of my list of city properties. That’ll cause tons of nightmares for everyone down to the tenants our job isn’t to displace people it’s to find property we hold and need to flip. Found one that another federal agency had to reimburse for though.
For lots of complicated, sometimes financial and almost certainly political reasons.
It depends on where you are but most localities are controlled by municipal or some kind of planning authority.
Malls, in particular, are pretty costly to operate and (in the US) take up a fairly large plot of land (mostly parking!). So if that mall cannot attract enough consumers and the stores within start to close, then it accelerates the closure. Fewer stores attract even fewer customers until no one finds it profitable – a death spiral.
A lot of time the land is owned and priced according to “market value”. Sometimes this market value is really not in line with actual “use value” and no buyers are willing to pay the price where the seller is willing to sell it at. Although the stalemate may eventually break – this process can last decades.
Add that to the fact that the planning/zoning authorities can take years to permit alternative use AND local residents/politicians will seldom face facts, it leads to years of bickering. A development company may be willing to build apartments or high density residences – usually fought by nearby residents for traffic/property price impact (and other dubious reasons). One might be willing to build luxury style apartments – usually fought by people who want affordable housing. Another might be willing to build factories – but the zoning would have to change from commercial to industrial and then go through years of litigation and environmental permitting.
Property becomes abandoned when it becomes unusable through disaster or neglect but the owner can’t or won’t do anything about it so it just sits there. Most places have policies and laws in place to make it difficult for abandoned property to become commonplace because it attracts all kinds of problems, but you’ll still get properties that slip through the cracks.
Related fact: the apartment building I live in has an adjacent lot that used to be occupied by a small house that had been abandoned. I don’t know how it ended up abandoned, I just know that it had been declared uninhabitable by the city and boarded up. The guy who owns my apartment building bought the property the house was on thinking he would demolish and build another apartment building but after the sale was closed, the city told him they wouldn’t give him a permit for the new building unless it had underground parking because the street parking in the neighborhood was already at capacity. So he demolished the house and planted grass. Now there’s a big grassy field right outside and just by getting rid of the boarded up house, the value of my apartment building (or, more specifically, the land it’s on) tripled. Don’t feel bad for my landlord. He came out pretty good in that deal.
Buildings have to be maintained. All it takes for a building to be destroyed is to be left with a leaky roof or pipe for a little too long and before you know it, the cost of repairs can ruin some people. You can’t afford the repairs and you know you’re going to lose a ton of money on the resale value by trying to sell a run down house, so you opt instead to do nothing. Nobody else is using the house so squatters move in. They wreck even more stuff, so you have to board the place up to try to keep them out, and now the building is an eyesore and worth even less. It’s a downward spiral, and when people are faced with lose-lose situations, sometimes all they can do is walk away.
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