I come from a small rural place in Norway, at the lowest point the municipalities started selling old houses for next to nothing, as in equivalent to $100. No strings attached.
But of course, the person living there would have to pay (equivalent to) $1000-$1500 / year on fees related to water, waste management, cleaning of chimney, etc. And you'd probably like to have the house insured.
And these weren't nice new houses. Mostly shacks built right after ww2, some not having been lived in for 10-15-20 years. Complete renovation projects.
What would happen is that some people from out of town would buy a house, plan to renovate it, but then mostly do nothing. Then many would forget to pay the municipality fees, often times for years. Eventually the unpaid bills would be sent to collection agency, and then a forced sale on behalf of the creditors. But now the houses were in even worse shape, so no one would purchase them at all.
I really enjoy the TV show Escape to the Chateau. A lot of couple buy an old run down French chateau and move in with their two kids. Each episode is roughly them doing up a part of it. Often with ideas for making money out of it.
Very much light entertainment, but it's eye opening how significant of a restoration and maintenance burden it is.
Thermal inertia can be a benefit: while it largely prevents you from benefiting from turning off the heat when you’re not home, it smooths out diurnal fluctuations and lets your control just the average temperature. So your windows can provide lots of solar gain, for example, without overheating you during the daytime.
The real problems are that stone is a terrible insulator, that single-pane windows are even worse, and that air leakage in old structures is incredibly wasteful.
Turns out Sam Altman accidentally bought a vacation home with broken heating in Alaska and his subsequent obsession with expensing the heating bill on the company CC is what brought us ChatGPT ;)
One very interesting idea I read about long ago was the use of low-power microwave emitters to make rooms feel much warmer - the author of the piece described the feeling as "like stepping into sunlight" when the emitters turned on.
Makes the 2.4 GHz spectrum pretty unusable, though.
Not the same effect exactly but I live in an 70s era apartment with heated ceilings in a couple rooms (which I didn’t even know was a thing).
It was a similar experience where initially it seemed great in the winter how quickly a room felt “warm”. But quickly you notice the air itself isn’t as warm which isn’t very pleasant and wait, I’m not feeling “warm” anymore I’m feeling “very hot”.
I basically gave up using them after the first winter except turned up sub-perceptually at like 25% just to add a bit of heat input to reduce the days where I need a space heater.
Interesting. The piece I read/heard didn't talk about using it instead of heating the house, but as a supplement to allow the whole-home temperature to be substantially lower.
Ah yeah that might work better. The one I read about was about having a giant magnetron in the basement, providing whole-house heating. Very 60's thing to try indeed.
The point is that if you are feeling actual thermal effects then you're probably in the danger zone of high power. They implied the effect was thermal "to make rooms feel much warmer", "like stepping into sunlight"; without clarification from them then my assumption is good that they were not talking about milliwatts.
A lot of large castle owners in France have setup a small apartment on the side for winter and use the main rooms only occasionally and during summer. This is not something new, in Versailles you can visit the king actual private bedroom that is much smaller and easy to heat than the official one.
Second point has no point, heat pumps are overhyped on expensive electricity, accumulator tanks still need be heated up by something. Lot's of energy must be spent. 3 point is silly, such "houses" have massive thermal inertia, it's gonna take a while to heat those rooms when you start using them and heat is gonna "bleed" internally anyway.
It will cost you a lot anyway, can't escape entropy.
Find someone with a suitably bottomless supply of money who wants it as the status symbol it always was. Or somehow make it nice enough to be a public attraction, but there's a real oversupply of chateaux.
> a dedicated term for "positive real asset" in Japanese?
Some seems to use the term "富動産" to mean that, but I don't think it's catching on.
Side note: normal real assets are called "不動産" (which pronounces as "fudosan"; it originates from Immobilière in French) in Japan. It's all about puns.
There's an irony in that there is often a regulatory issue with the local government, not just some "shortage of humans".
The same thing happened in one of the most populated regions in the US. The area between Boston/NYC and DC, containing Baltimore, was once a city of a million people. It contains an underground subway and was once referred to as the Paris of America, however through regulation and unions it became completely impossible to do business in or live in, and the city collapsed. They also sold $1 row houses, which should have been a dream come true, except in practice the issue was never the house, it was the city government.
Cities offering $1 houses just means the government has ignored the actual issues for decades and is probably incompetent.
Interesting. I heard that Detroit was known as the Paris of the West. Looking it up, it seems this was a fairly common phrase applied to many cities over the years. [0]
Detroit also has had $1 homes, but as with everywhere else, that isn’t the end of the story.
I would argue unions in particular destroyed Detroit, it's arguably even less complicated than Baltimore.
I think there was ~13 major auto factories in Detroit at one point, and what would happen is when the UAW would protest, they'd leave one factory and go to another, more important factory (often wherever they were producing engines) to apply pressure. The result is auto makers were forced to build new factories outside of Detroit, first in other MI cities and eventually in other states and countries. Now I think there's only ~three factories in Detroit, including for products that aren't really that exciting like spark plugs.
I didn't realize so many cities were referred to as an american Paris though, that is interesting. It was, certainly however, a beautiful city at one point.
They weren't "forced" to outsource their factory work, they chose to rather than increase wages or worker rights. And the only reason Detroit got so big to start with was because the auto manufacturers claimed they could pay people more than elsewhere and incentivized them to come move to Detroit for work, only to pull the rug on them later when profits didn't continuously rise as fast as they wanted and outsourced.
Looking it up, it seems this was a fairly common phrase applied to many cities over the years.
It’s not like there was a “Paris of the…” certification process. If Detroit was, it was well before my first visit 50 years ago. As another commenter alluded to, it is an aspirational marketing phrase. Like how Redmond, WA claims to be the “bicycle capital of the Northwest” without having a single protected bike lane.
I would argue it really isn't. Massachusetts still has some of the strongest union protections, is one of the most unionized states, and Baltimore has worked hard to maintain an incompetent government for decades. Given the outrageous rents in nearby states and cities Baltimore should have kept growing but has instead shrunk to a half million.
The rust belt as a whole was primarily just companies escaping unions. Cheaper labor may have been an incentive but it fundamentally started with companies who were forced to move production, and US regulation which prevented them from benefiting from local supply chains once they became unionized.
I'm far from a union sympathizer, but you've already moved from your initial, absurdly simplistic description of the issue to a major symptom (decades of ineffective government, ranging from benign incompetence to intentional malice).
Also, the rents in nearby areas to the north are far from outrageous (hint: there are no major cities for a couple hours), and the Baltimore metro area continues to grow because the area is desirable, even though the city is completely mismanaged.
It's poorly managed, but not due to over-regulation IMO as the other commenter implied (not to say that there aren't some areas where deregulation could improve things).
The core issue today is that the population of Baltimore consumes significantly more resources than they produce because the city managed to drive away a significant portion of the middle class and the government is so inefficent, leaving too many people who are unable to move, are actively part of the problem, or are one of the few that is so wealthy that they are largely unaffected by the happenings around them.
How it got there is a much more complex story than "regulation and unions" but is to some extent irrelevant if they want to look forward to solve the major systemic issues that exist.
If they want the city to recover, they need to provide the basic social services that most people want: clean streets, physical safety, acceptable schools, and minimal interference in everyday life. That has not been a priority of any city government for decades, though I think the current mayor is trying.
If poor economic choices, inept management, and inefficient government don't qualify as “badly regulated”, then you are using a stricter definition of regulation than we are.
The original commenter clearly was stating that overregulation was the issue. You're the one who keeps bringing up that it's "badly regulated", which is both an odd term and not what was originally stated.
The article headline on the $446k renovation cost is very misleading. They did not spend that much on the $1 (which they actually payed 6,000 euro for). They ALSO bought the property next door for 22k euro and combine the two into a literal mansion with four bedrooms, two terraces, sauna, library etc etc etc. $446k for all that is super cheap.
edit: the last link is also a lie. They did not buy a 1 euro house, they bought a 10k euro house (presumably not part of the 1 euro program) and renovated it themselves.
> We bought a $1 house in Italy. Here’s what happened next (CNN Travel article)
> the last link is also a lie
I was wondering if “lie” was too strong a word, but no, CNN is straight up lying in article’s title. Deep into the article they admit it:
“I’ll be honest, we didn’t buy a €1 house,” he says. “We were shown something like 25 old buildings, some badly in need of repair, so at the end we opted for a three-room decent building for €10,000 and I invested more money in the renovation.”
This looks like a follow-up to the initial flurry of interest. Have seen a few YT videos of this process, and my recollection is that the overall cost was pretty hefty once you factored in required renovation.
It's been a very common thing to see over the years, the COVID outbreak was particularly bad in Italy so I guess that took away more of the elderly population while the younger population seek more security and middle class jobs in towns and cities.
Italian here.
This is mostly a marketing initiative.
If you buy those houses, you need to completely renew them using local companies and with a lot of regulation. You will probably spend 100k doing that.
If you buy another house, in the same village, maybe you will pay 5k but you have more freedom in the renewal process and you will end spending less.
I saw a video on these and that was basically the takeaway - fun if you have money to burn, but anyone who is thinking about it and familiar with the place will do other things instead.
Reminds me of the time I was a local radio DJ. We were inundated with these promotions we had to read for "free" exotic vacations. As you can imagine, the "free" part was completely subsumed in an expensive "package" deal.
I looked into some of these a few years back, when the initiative was new. I remember one house in particular that I found very interesting, an old monastery, iirc somewhere near Parma?
I couldn't afford the renovations needed, but it came with several acres of land and generally seemed like a pretty decent deal!
Then there were a bunch of huts in some abandoned Sicilian village that seemed less attractive, if probably cheaper to renovate then the 5 story 14th century monastery.
The catch is that the entire area is in decline and there's little to do for social activities or employment.
Declining cities in the US have tried this, and they are not places people generally want to live. This is the same scenario, just in a location that is romanticized by most of the western world instead of Baltimore, MD.
Only sensible solution would be if you were starting a factory and then building company town on something existing... But even then you probably want something slightly bigger already as scaling to big enough is huge investment.
You'd think a well placed billionaire (or even a "mere" 10s-100s millionaire) could do something interesting there. Buy up 10-20 vacant houses, renovate them, finance a couple of "fun" local entertainment businesses (idk craft breweries or barcades or minigolf or climbing gyms or escape rooms or whatever would be enough of a draw), fund a local arts/music program, and start a small tech/finance/consulting business in town. How much cash investment does it realistically take to make land appreciate even just enough to make it worth it?
And I'm not talking Baltimore, which has a population of 600k and just a lot more baked in problems, I'm talking declining European "villages".
> finance a couple of "fun" local entertainment businesses (idk craft breweries or barcades or minigolf or climbing gyms or escape rooms or whatever would be enough of a draw), fund a local arts/music program, and start a small tech/finance/consulting business in town
People who do this kind of stuff without much personal involvement get surrounded by consultants who do lowest common denominator nonsense with everyone taking their 30% extra on top of costs (because the person paying isn't paying attention!), and you end up with a bunch of stupid gastropubs that aren't profitable, and your IT company doesn't have any local talent.
Almost every restaurant and business that people actually like survives by having some owner put a bunch of energy into it. I don't think there are that many people who would be willing do that... and if you pay people to do it for you the economics really stop working extremely quickly.
At one point the billionaire will be tired of dropping $5 million a year for their pubs that nobody actually cares about
I dunno, just seems like a more interesting, fun project.
I dunno, I'm sure it's confirmation/reporting bias, but it feels like all of the very wealthy aren't interested in projects that don't give them some huge amount of control or dominance. Like, middle class people will invest and collaborate in public parks, small businesses, a boat, a shared vacation rental. Musicians and athletes are often invested in giving back and revitalizing their home town, or they'll start lifestyle brands or support or invest in upcoming talent or community space. Sure you have plenty of philanthropy and foundations, but I feel like you never see self-interested personal projects that are interesting or fun these days. It's all boring rule-the-world garbage. The whole tech-city in Sonoma county is a good example, why not take over a town in the Valley or in the Sierras and put in fiber and a subsidized grocery store and try to create a small proof of concept first? But no, it always has to be the biggest shiniest bullshit.
>A core idea is that a house sells for a positive value. But that presumption is likely false. Houses at unattractive places in poor condition might actually represent a negative value.
This reminds me of an incident in Vancouver, where the city sought to expropriate single room occupancy (SRO) hotels (read: slums). They felt that each property was worth negative value, but they estimated the value as $1 because:
> We are unaware of any instances of property being transferred with a negative value. Therefore, a value of $1.00 is concluded for the subject property with the knowledge that a purchaser would be required to assume the financial obligations with either holding or demolishing and redeveloping the property.
Yes, exactly. In Germany a house is to start with rather a negative value, only the ground counts. You pay for the ground minus the costs for demolishing the house, or bring it a a current standard, or up to your taste.
Of course you will be able to still an get a positive value for an (old) house if it's somehow an enthusiast's object, who wants exactly this: An old Italian small village house or a German architect's house from the 70ies.
There are indeed many places where the land value is effectively zero and the building is also worthless. But offers like these often have other obligations so the 1 euro cost is not the all in price.
Most dramatic example of this I've seen is the US Navy selling off their decommissioned aircraft carriers for $0.01. But, as you say, the purchase price is not the real expense of buying one. For these ships, it's the millions of dollars it takes to tow it to your scrap yard and tear it apart.
It's interesting as a thought experiment. You can easily make any house $1 with the "right" tax code. So I'm definitely curious about the situation here.
> Imagine the following...you pay $500 today and commit to receiving an escort at your house in 15 days. Cos your wife is traveling. This is called a futures contract.
> Unfortunately, lockdown came and your wife will be home for the next 60 days.
> You do not want this woman to show up at your house at all and try to pass this futures contract to someone else.
> Only you cannot sell this commitment because nobody can receive the escort at home anymore. Everyone is in full storage with wife.
> To make matters worse, not even the pimp (Chicago Mercantile exchange) has more room to receive girls because his house is crowded with girls.
> So you will pay anyone just to take the girl off your hands.
2020 copypasta, because its more relatable than futures and of course, "sex work is work" an inclusive phrase for the workers that choose that trade, immunizing us from criticism for making the analogy at all, hurray!
Why should immovable property differ from moveable property. How many things are sold for 1 EUR, just because everything else would be too difficult. Often those things have value that is only specific to the buyer and have negative value for the seller. The process for declaring something actually worthless and paying for waste removal is so much, but also gifting something to someone is often so much more difficult than selling for the lowest possible price that all stupid booking systems accept and that dictate what we may do.
If geography is a factor in the value of an asset, being able to move that asset allows you the ability to effect change in the value of it. I.e., my car might sell for x in one city, but only 0.7x in another.
As an immovable asset's value cannot be changed in the same ways as a movable one's, perhaps there are different ways to tax it that are still fair, or encourage positive social effects.
In this specific case the 1 EUR home is a blight in the community that makes the whole place less attractive, so it makes sense you'd have to "pay" someone to take it and fix it because it creates negative value for the rest of the place.
That is likely to lead to moral hazard issues though so i doubt it would work in the real world.
All I am saying is that while this makes sense, there is probably some stupid IT system or regulation wording, rather some moral constraints that resets things to 1 EUR.
This is exactly the point - there is a strong expectation of positive values, so just saying 1 EUR makes it easy.
IMHO this is a defect of the system as some houses has the value -50.000 EUR and should be sold on the market for that - I should get 50.000 EUR to take over the house.
In particular, as we develop building- and decomissionning codes, these impose a liability of people to decommission.
While radically liberal market forces told us that we can buy land and have full control, that was never really the case, and we are waking up to the issues of irresponsible and harmful pollution.
A lot of people feel a deep-seated unsease in their life. We're a couple of generations in to advertising and consumerism taking over the world and when people are presented with a problem, they often can't imagine any way to solve it except to buy a thing.
Modern society has trained people to limit their sense of agency down to only purchasing decisions. Then people are surprised when yanking the "buy" lever over and over doesn't make them happy.
I think you started on right track but reached a very wrong conclusion.
* Deep-seated unease: Yes
* No way to solve it except "buy a thing": No
Living in an Italian town is obviously a romantic escapist fantasy. No more Teams meetings. Instead you just pick up your daily loaf of bread from the baker down the twisty walkway. All your mundane troubles are gone.
The irony is that the Teams meetings will follow you, but with some luck, you can at least do them from antique balcony with an espresso in hand.
Maybe that hints that the sense of unease is coming from the working culture? If your job feels draining and stressful, neither feels like it advances you, nor society, nor has any kind of endgame, it makes sense that it will lead to increasing unhappiness and escapist fantasies.
> Living in an Italian town is obviously a romantic escapist fantasy.
Yes, exactly.
But note that the author presumes that the way to attain that fantasy is "buy a house". This is not an article about figuring out how to move to Italy, it's an article about buying a house in Italy.
There's almost no discussion of, saying moving logistics, visas, commutes, etc. It's not about the act of getting there. It tacitly assumes that the way you accomplish the goal is almost entirely by purchasing a thing.
Baltimore, MD has $1 houses as well. They expect you to a certain number of upgrades on it within a specific time. Some say it is actually more expensive in the overall analysis than buying a regular house.
> "All vacant sales must be redeveloped for residential or mixed-use. That includes residential or green space. So, this program is not for commercial properties. It's only for residential properties at this point in time," Department of Housing and Community Development official Kate Edwards said.
Maybe if you wanted to live with your servers? Would a server farm on the first floor, and an apartment on the second count, I wonder? Free radiant floor heating, if so…
Yeah, we could dual-use the server farms, I am open to this. We could maybe do a sustainable living co-op with free heating and solar panels to sell back energy to the grid. We could transform Baltimore into the city of the future
Almost certainly not, $1 houses in Baltimore at this point (there were some good deals decades ago) are often ones requiring significant work just to be weather-tight, structurally sound, etc.
And of course it becomes clear that no one is there and they are full of valuable hardware some problems may result, as the other commenter points out.
Lastly, our electricity rates are almost certainly not cost-effective for this purpose.
> 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.
Summary, they only sold 6 and 20 remain unsold. Most people are not serious about it because they learn they have to build a house and live in it within 2 years of the purchase (if I remember correctly).
I believe Australia also has done this for ages to try and avoid country towns dying, with mixed success.
After that it seems there has been quite lot of uptake. But idea was always the same price is token payment, and there is requirement to repair these very old and very dilatated houses.
A long time ago I did some IT work for a real estate agent in the US that dealt in international properties. I was stoked on a listing he had up for a beautiful French chateau for $40k. He told me to forget it. “It’ll need completely new electrical, all new plumbing. And that might not sound so bad, but just wait till you actually try to get the work done by locals on time and on budget. It won’t happen.”
An additional benefit might be that many of these small villages have a tax advantage, created also for attracting foreigners. It is a flat fee of 7%. I cannot remember the name of this rule, but this is a link for example that I found: https://magictowns.it/the-definitive-2025-list-of-italy-7-ta...
We looked into purchasing a house on the Amalfi Coast about 10 years ago. To get anything done you need permits and in order to get permits you need to bribe everyone involved. The permits are time bound and expire so you have to be ready to go when approved but the small towns don't readily have access to construction materials so in order to get materials in the time bound window you end up having to bribe a whole new set of people.
> We looked into purchasing a house on the Amalfi Coast
You really thought it's possible to buy any real estate in a location where rich Germans and Scandinavians pay €1000 for one night in a hotel and moor their €10mln yachts?
I guess you're not too familiar with the region. There are numerous depressed towns with little or no access to transit or services that have many properties selling for very low prices.
> The €1 house project seems to have been the brainchild of Vittorio Sgarbi, the Italian art critic and TV personality turned mayor of the small, rapidly depopulating town of Salemi, Sicily.
Not coincidentally, that's the same guy and same town that acquired the massive film collection from legendary NYC chain Kim's Video [1], ostensibly to create a cultural hub in Salemi, but instead they let the collection rot.
There's a documentary about it [2], but it's a bit insufferable at times, and you can basically get the gist from some articles [3].
Vittorio Sgarbi is a... character. A young university professor in history of the arts, he earned his initial fame with expletive-laden TV monologues in which he'd talk about classic paintings, or rather used them as an excuse to say whatever he wanted to say about the world and politics. Then proceeded to use his fame to kickstart a long political career among Italian right-wing parties, serving as a minister at national level before running for mayor in a few different places. In-between, he dated pornstars, partied hard, verbally abused a lot of people, and generally lived a dissolute life.
i guess this could somewhat? help homeless people. They can not be accused of loitering if they own that land... Better than getting a fine for sleeping on the street?
Having an address to your name helps a lot to get a job (classism is very harsh and bad, society is very cruel to homeless people)
There is an irony about cheap real estate. If you aren't independently wealthy chances are that you probably can't afford it anyway as the whole reason it could get so depressed is a lack of available nearby income streams.
I found the author's commentary on their goals the most interesting part of the article:
"We’d spent our careers working in schools and nonprofits with young immigrants, and, ..., we had no intention of leaving a life of service behind. Above all, though, what we wanted was an environment in which we could spend a lot of time writing and afford to do it. But Ben had another non-negotiable of his own: proximity to surfing. ...but I supposed it was reasonable enough to design a dream life according to one’s actual dreams."
They wanted to go to a different country for the adventure, to write in leisure and luxury, to surf, and to spread the good news of their superior insights and upbringing to uplift the natives.
I come from a small rural place in Norway, at the lowest point the municipalities started selling old houses for next to nothing, as in equivalent to $100. No strings attached.
But of course, the person living there would have to pay (equivalent to) $1000-$1500 / year on fees related to water, waste management, cleaning of chimney, etc. And you'd probably like to have the house insured.
And these weren't nice new houses. Mostly shacks built right after ww2, some not having been lived in for 10-15-20 years. Complete renovation projects.
What would happen is that some people from out of town would buy a house, plan to renovate it, but then mostly do nothing. Then many would forget to pay the municipality fees, often times for years. Eventually the unpaid bills would be sent to collection agency, and then a forced sale on behalf of the creditors. But now the houses were in even worse shape, so no one would purchase them at all.
Eventually they'd be torn down.
Maintenance of old crumbling European castles in inconvenient locations are also often famously bad deals for the owner.
This might still be appealing to young people, especially those who do not like the noise/pollution of big cities and can't afford them?
I could see the appeal of a shack, but I suspect a castle would be quite a maintainence burden.
I guess nowadays one would not need to employ as large a retinue… but you don’t get to tax the local villages anymore. Seems like a wash.
I really enjoy the TV show Escape to the Chateau. A lot of couple buy an old run down French chateau and move in with their two kids. Each episode is roughly them doing up a part of it. Often with ideas for making money out of it.
Very much light entertainment, but it's eye opening how significant of a restoration and maintenance burden it is.
Do you have any idea of the thermal inertia of a castle? How are you going to heat it to an acceptable living temperature?
Thermal inertia can be a benefit: while it largely prevents you from benefiting from turning off the heat when you’re not home, it smooths out diurnal fluctuations and lets your control just the average temperature. So your windows can provide lots of solar gain, for example, without overheating you during the daytime.
The real problems are that stone is a terrible insulator, that single-pane windows are even worse, and that air leakage in old structures is incredibly wasteful.
If you spend 700k eur on heating instead of on the purchase price you can stay warm for quite a while
I wouldn’t count on that. https://www.lifestyledaily.co.uk/article/2021/03/23/how-much... gives £209k as an estimate for heating the main house from Downton Abbey.
Now, Italy is a bit warmer than the UK, and most castles a bit smaller, but castles in Italy can be on colder mountaintops.
Train a LOT of models?
Turns out Sam Altman accidentally bought a vacation home with broken heating in Alaska and his subsequent obsession with expensing the heating bill on the company CC is what brought us ChatGPT ;)
One very interesting idea I read about long ago was the use of low-power microwave emitters to make rooms feel much warmer - the author of the piece described the feeling as "like stepping into sunlight" when the emitters turned on.
Makes the 2.4 GHz spectrum pretty unusable, though.
Warmth from the inside out, to be honest I'm a little scared
I would not connect it to Alexa.
I read about how they tried this in the 60s.
They quickly found out it doesn't work well. Microwaves heats up liquid water so the people got nice and warm, but not any of the furniture and such.
So the floor would be cold to walk on, the sofa would be cold to sit down in and so on.
Not the same effect exactly but I live in an 70s era apartment with heated ceilings in a couple rooms (which I didn’t even know was a thing).
It was a similar experience where initially it seemed great in the winter how quickly a room felt “warm”. But quickly you notice the air itself isn’t as warm which isn’t very pleasant and wait, I’m not feeling “warm” anymore I’m feeling “very hot”.
I basically gave up using them after the first winter except turned up sub-perceptually at like 25% just to add a bit of heat input to reduce the days where I need a space heater.
Interesting. The piece I read/heard didn't talk about using it instead of heating the house, but as a supplement to allow the whole-home temperature to be substantially lower.
Ah yeah that might work better. The one I read about was about having a giant magnetron in the basement, providing whole-house heating. Very 60's thing to try indeed.
"It is well established that high-power microwave radiation can induce cataracts via its thermal effects"
But the previous comment said “low power”?
The point is that if you are feeling actual thermal effects then you're probably in the danger zone of high power. They implied the effect was thermal "to make rooms feel much warmer", "like stepping into sunlight"; without clarification from them then my assumption is good that they were not talking about milliwatts.
It was not an article in an engineering journal, so no mention of power.
1. Accept lower temperature in the stonework/bricks/concrete
2. Use heatpumps, wood furnaces, accumulator tanks
3. Only heat the rooms you use when you use them.
It's very doable, especially in Italy.
A lot of large castle owners in France have setup a small apartment on the side for winter and use the main rooms only occasionally and during summer. This is not something new, in Versailles you can visit the king actual private bedroom that is much smaller and easy to heat than the official one.
Second point has no point, heat pumps are overhyped on expensive electricity, accumulator tanks still need be heated up by something. Lot's of energy must be spent. 3 point is silly, such "houses" have massive thermal inertia, it's gonna take a while to heat those rooms when you start using them and heat is gonna "bleed" internally anyway.
It will cost you a lot anyway, can't escape entropy.
"I couldn't afford to live in the city, so I bought a castle".
Ha, yes. I found dozens of articles about castle renovations gone awry
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/no-way-back-1-15m-120000548....
https://www.csmonitor.com/1991/1212/12121.html
so how do you make it right, just bull doze it?
Find someone with a suitably bottomless supply of money who wants it as the status symbol it always was. Or somehow make it nice enough to be a public attraction, but there's a real oversupply of chateaux.
In Japan, we have a special term for real estate that has become a financial burden on their owners: "負動産" (fudosan, negative real assets).
It's such a huge social problem that people choose not to accept the inheritance if it involves old properties in rural areas.
May i ask, is there also a dedicated term for "positive real asset" in Japanese?
> a dedicated term for "positive real asset" in Japanese?
Some seems to use the term "富動産" to mean that, but I don't think it's catching on.
Side note: normal real assets are called "不動産" (which pronounces as "fudosan"; it originates from Immobilière in French) in Japan. It's all about puns.
Sounds like there were many strings attached actually.
Apparently not very strongly attached.
There's an irony in that there is often a regulatory issue with the local government, not just some "shortage of humans".
The same thing happened in one of the most populated regions in the US. The area between Boston/NYC and DC, containing Baltimore, was once a city of a million people. It contains an underground subway and was once referred to as the Paris of America, however through regulation and unions it became completely impossible to do business in or live in, and the city collapsed. They also sold $1 row houses, which should have been a dream come true, except in practice the issue was never the house, it was the city government.
Cities offering $1 houses just means the government has ignored the actual issues for decades and is probably incompetent.
> was once referred to as the Paris of America
Interesting. I heard that Detroit was known as the Paris of the West. Looking it up, it seems this was a fairly common phrase applied to many cities over the years. [0]
Detroit also has had $1 homes, but as with everywhere else, that isn’t the end of the story.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_of_the_West
I would argue unions in particular destroyed Detroit, it's arguably even less complicated than Baltimore.
I think there was ~13 major auto factories in Detroit at one point, and what would happen is when the UAW would protest, they'd leave one factory and go to another, more important factory (often wherever they were producing engines) to apply pressure. The result is auto makers were forced to build new factories outside of Detroit, first in other MI cities and eventually in other states and countries. Now I think there's only ~three factories in Detroit, including for products that aren't really that exciting like spark plugs.
I didn't realize so many cities were referred to as an american Paris though, that is interesting. It was, certainly however, a beautiful city at one point.
They weren't "forced" to outsource their factory work, they chose to rather than increase wages or worker rights. And the only reason Detroit got so big to start with was because the auto manufacturers claimed they could pay people more than elsewhere and incentivized them to come move to Detroit for work, only to pull the rug on them later when profits didn't continuously rise as fast as they wanted and outsourced.
I've seen "Paris of the X" and "Venice of the X" applied to many (often not particularly attractive) cities worldwide...
It's aspirational, not descriptive.
Looking it up, it seems this was a fairly common phrase applied to many cities over the years.
It’s not like there was a “Paris of the…” certification process. If Detroit was, it was well before my first visit 50 years ago. As another commenter alluded to, it is an aspirational marketing phrase. Like how Redmond, WA claims to be the “bicycle capital of the Northwest” without having a single protected bike lane.
The history of Baltimore is a far more complex story than "regulation and unions" results in "and the city collapsed."
I would argue it really isn't. Massachusetts still has some of the strongest union protections, is one of the most unionized states, and Baltimore has worked hard to maintain an incompetent government for decades. Given the outrageous rents in nearby states and cities Baltimore should have kept growing but has instead shrunk to a half million.
The rust belt as a whole was primarily just companies escaping unions. Cheaper labor may have been an incentive but it fundamentally started with companies who were forced to move production, and US regulation which prevented them from benefiting from local supply chains once they became unionized.
Baltimore is in Maryland.
I'm far from a union sympathizer, but you've already moved from your initial, absurdly simplistic description of the issue to a major symptom (decades of ineffective government, ranging from benign incompetence to intentional malice).
Also, the rents in nearby areas to the north are far from outrageous (hint: there are no major cities for a couple hours), and the Baltimore metro area continues to grow because the area is desirable, even though the city is completely mismanaged.
He did say that the city is badly regulated…
It's poorly managed, but not due to over-regulation IMO as the other commenter implied (not to say that there aren't some areas where deregulation could improve things).
The core issue today is that the population of Baltimore consumes significantly more resources than they produce because the city managed to drive away a significant portion of the middle class and the government is so inefficent, leaving too many people who are unable to move, are actively part of the problem, or are one of the few that is so wealthy that they are largely unaffected by the happenings around them.
How it got there is a much more complex story than "regulation and unions" but is to some extent irrelevant if they want to look forward to solve the major systemic issues that exist.
If they want the city to recover, they need to provide the basic social services that most people want: clean streets, physical safety, acceptable schools, and minimal interference in everyday life. That has not been a priority of any city government for decades, though I think the current mayor is trying.
If poor economic choices, inept management, and inefficient government don't qualify as “badly regulated”, then you are using a stricter definition of regulation than we are.
Who is "we" exactly?
The original commenter clearly was stating that overregulation was the issue. You're the one who keeps bringing up that it's "badly regulated", which is both an odd term and not what was originally stated.
I agree it's "badly regulated", aka mismanaged.
chat, what would David Simon say in reply to this
Indeed, with five seasons of The Wire, no city has had it's decline so eloquently illustrated.
Or at least it's continued decline. Great show. All the pieces matter.
And that's why they should have put the "must renovate" clause!
With a bond that can be returned with proof of renovation.
(Pretty sure there have been other HN threads about this, but I couldn't find them. Anyone?)
Edit: thanks everybody!
I bought one of Sicily's famous $1 homes and spent $446K renovating it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42371806 - Dec 2024 (2 comments)
Italian town is struggling to sell off its empty homes for one euro - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39812671 - March 2024 (28 comments)
Old towns eager for new blood sell Italy homes for $1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29058053 - Oct 2021 (124 comments)
1-Euro Houses - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24195000 - Aug 2020 (190 comments)
We bought a $1 house in Italy. Here's what happened next - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21552701 - Nov 2019 (3 comments)
The article headline on the $446k renovation cost is very misleading. They did not spend that much on the $1 (which they actually payed 6,000 euro for). They ALSO bought the property next door for 22k euro and combine the two into a literal mansion with four bedrooms, two terraces, sauna, library etc etc etc. $446k for all that is super cheap.
edit: the last link is also a lie. They did not buy a 1 euro house, they bought a 10k euro house (presumably not part of the 1 euro program) and renovated it themselves.
> We bought a $1 house in Italy. Here’s what happened next (CNN Travel article)
> the last link is also a lie
I was wondering if “lie” was too strong a word, but no, CNN is straight up lying in article’s title. Deep into the article they admit it:
“I’ll be honest, we didn’t buy a €1 house,” he says. “We were shown something like 25 old buildings, some badly in need of repair, so at the end we opted for a three-room decent building for €10,000 and I invested more money in the renovation.”
Ah yes, ownership of a four bedroom estate, an unrealistic fantasy for most people in 2025 :)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Here's a few
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42371806
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24195000
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39812671
This looks like a follow-up to the initial flurry of interest. Have seen a few YT videos of this process, and my recollection is that the overall cost was pretty hefty once you factored in required renovation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39812671
"one euro" was my query
It's been a very common thing to see over the years, the COVID outbreak was particularly bad in Italy so I guess that took away more of the elderly population while the younger population seek more security and middle class jobs in towns and cities.
The scheme started before covid. The migration from these areas to bigger cities have long been going on.
Italian here. This is mostly a marketing initiative. If you buy those houses, you need to completely renew them using local companies and with a lot of regulation. You will probably spend 100k doing that. If you buy another house, in the same village, maybe you will pay 5k but you have more freedom in the renewal process and you will end spending less.
I saw a video on these and that was basically the takeaway - fun if you have money to burn, but anyone who is thinking about it and familiar with the place will do other things instead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoSC_I2kwMg
Reminds me of the time I was a local radio DJ. We were inundated with these promotions we had to read for "free" exotic vacations. As you can imagine, the "free" part was completely subsumed in an expensive "package" deal.
I looked into some of these a few years back, when the initiative was new. I remember one house in particular that I found very interesting, an old monastery, iirc somewhere near Parma?
I couldn't afford the renovations needed, but it came with several acres of land and generally seemed like a pretty decent deal!
Then there were a bunch of huts in some abandoned Sicilian village that seemed less attractive, if probably cheaper to renovate then the 5 story 14th century monastery.
Even 5k for a house and some land seems like a pretty decent deal. What are the strings attached? Is there local mob extorting you if you move there?
The catch is that the entire area is in decline and there's little to do for social activities or employment.
Declining cities in the US have tried this, and they are not places people generally want to live. This is the same scenario, just in a location that is romanticized by most of the western world instead of Baltimore, MD.
And also not a good idea to think as a retirement place. Probably no big hospital near. There is a reason why people do bot want to live there.
Yep, good point.
In general, services of all kinds will be lacking and will remain so unless there is a massive demographic change (which is highly unlikely).
Only sensible solution would be if you were starting a factory and then building company town on something existing... But even then you probably want something slightly bigger already as scaling to big enough is huge investment.
You'd think a well placed billionaire (or even a "mere" 10s-100s millionaire) could do something interesting there. Buy up 10-20 vacant houses, renovate them, finance a couple of "fun" local entertainment businesses (idk craft breweries or barcades or minigolf or climbing gyms or escape rooms or whatever would be enough of a draw), fund a local arts/music program, and start a small tech/finance/consulting business in town. How much cash investment does it realistically take to make land appreciate even just enough to make it worth it?
And I'm not talking Baltimore, which has a population of 600k and just a lot more baked in problems, I'm talking declining European "villages".
> finance a couple of "fun" local entertainment businesses (idk craft breweries or barcades or minigolf or climbing gyms or escape rooms or whatever would be enough of a draw), fund a local arts/music program, and start a small tech/finance/consulting business in town
People who do this kind of stuff without much personal involvement get surrounded by consultants who do lowest common denominator nonsense with everyone taking their 30% extra on top of costs (because the person paying isn't paying attention!), and you end up with a bunch of stupid gastropubs that aren't profitable, and your IT company doesn't have any local talent.
Almost every restaurant and business that people actually like survives by having some owner put a bunch of energy into it. I don't think there are that many people who would be willing do that... and if you pay people to do it for you the economics really stop working extremely quickly.
At one point the billionaire will be tired of dropping $5 million a year for their pubs that nobody actually cares about
Why, when you can just buy the entire island of Lanai?
I dunno, just seems like a more interesting, fun project.
I dunno, I'm sure it's confirmation/reporting bias, but it feels like all of the very wealthy aren't interested in projects that don't give them some huge amount of control or dominance. Like, middle class people will invest and collaborate in public parks, small businesses, a boat, a shared vacation rental. Musicians and athletes are often invested in giving back and revitalizing their home town, or they'll start lifestyle brands or support or invest in upcoming talent or community space. Sure you have plenty of philanthropy and foundations, but I feel like you never see self-interested personal projects that are interesting or fun these days. It's all boring rule-the-world garbage. The whole tech-city in Sonoma county is a good example, why not take over a town in the Valley or in the Sierras and put in fiber and a subsidized grocery store and try to create a small proof of concept first? But no, it always has to be the biggest shiniest bullshit.
A core idea is that a house sells for a positive value. But that presumption is likely false.
Houses at unattractive places in poor condition might actually represent a negative value.
As such, even 1 EUR houses might be severely over-valued.
It should be interesting as tax code could also take that into consideration.
>A core idea is that a house sells for a positive value. But that presumption is likely false. Houses at unattractive places in poor condition might actually represent a negative value.
This reminds me of an incident in Vancouver, where the city sought to expropriate single room occupancy (SRO) hotels (read: slums). They felt that each property was worth negative value, but they estimated the value as $1 because:
> We are unaware of any instances of property being transferred with a negative value. Therefore, a value of $1.00 is concluded for the subject property with the knowledge that a purchaser would be required to assume the financial obligations with either holding or demolishing and redeveloping the property.
[1] https://council.vancouver.ca/20191106/documents/cfsc2.pdf
Yes, exactly. In Germany a house is to start with rather a negative value, only the ground counts. You pay for the ground minus the costs for demolishing the house, or bring it a a current standard, or up to your taste.
Of course you will be able to still an get a positive value for an (old) house if it's somehow an enthusiast's object, who wants exactly this: An old Italian small village house or a German architect's house from the 70ies.
There are indeed many places where the land value is effectively zero and the building is also worthless. But offers like these often have other obligations so the 1 euro cost is not the all in price.
Most dramatic example of this I've seen is the US Navy selling off their decommissioned aircraft carriers for $0.01. But, as you say, the purchase price is not the real expense of buying one. For these ships, it's the millions of dollars it takes to tow it to your scrap yard and tear it apart.
Or even negative. If there is some entity that can force the buildings to be demolished by the owner.
It's interesting as a thought experiment. You can easily make any house $1 with the "right" tax code. So I'm definitely curious about the situation here.
Reminds me of the negative oil prices during lockdown.
> Imagine the following...you pay $500 today and commit to receiving an escort at your house in 15 days. Cos your wife is traveling. This is called a futures contract.
> Unfortunately, lockdown came and your wife will be home for the next 60 days.
> You do not want this woman to show up at your house at all and try to pass this futures contract to someone else.
> Only you cannot sell this commitment because nobody can receive the escort at home anymore. Everyone is in full storage with wife.
> To make matters worse, not even the pimp (Chicago Mercantile exchange) has more room to receive girls because his house is crowded with girls.
> So you will pay anyone just to take the girl off your hands.
2020 copypasta, because its more relatable than futures and of course, "sex work is work" an inclusive phrase for the workers that choose that trade, immunizing us from criticism for making the analogy at all, hurray!
Why should immovable property differ from moveable property. How many things are sold for 1 EUR, just because everything else would be too difficult. Often those things have value that is only specific to the buyer and have negative value for the seller. The process for declaring something actually worthless and paying for waste removal is so much, but also gifting something to someone is often so much more difficult than selling for the lowest possible price that all stupid booking systems accept and that dictate what we may do.
If geography is a factor in the value of an asset, being able to move that asset allows you the ability to effect change in the value of it. I.e., my car might sell for x in one city, but only 0.7x in another.
As an immovable asset's value cannot be changed in the same ways as a movable one's, perhaps there are different ways to tax it that are still fair, or encourage positive social effects.
In this specific case the 1 EUR home is a blight in the community that makes the whole place less attractive, so it makes sense you'd have to "pay" someone to take it and fix it because it creates negative value for the rest of the place.
That is likely to lead to moral hazard issues though so i doubt it would work in the real world.
All I am saying is that while this makes sense, there is probably some stupid IT system or regulation wording, rather some moral constraints that resets things to 1 EUR.
As they say here in the UK: Location, location, location. Or there’s Mark Twain: Buy land, they're not making it anymore.
This is exactly the point - there is a strong expectation of positive values, so just saying 1 EUR makes it easy.
IMHO this is a defect of the system as some houses has the value -50.000 EUR and should be sold on the market for that - I should get 50.000 EUR to take over the house.
In particular, as we develop building- and decomissionning codes, these impose a liability of people to decommission.
While radically liberal market forces told us that we can buy land and have full control, that was never really the case, and we are waking up to the issues of irresponsible and harmful pollution.
There's a subtext here that I think is telling.
A lot of people feel a deep-seated unsease in their life. We're a couple of generations in to advertising and consumerism taking over the world and when people are presented with a problem, they often can't imagine any way to solve it except to buy a thing.
Modern society has trained people to limit their sense of agency down to only purchasing decisions. Then people are surprised when yanking the "buy" lever over and over doesn't make them happy.
I think you started on right track but reached a very wrong conclusion.
* Deep-seated unease: Yes
* No way to solve it except "buy a thing": No
Living in an Italian town is obviously a romantic escapist fantasy. No more Teams meetings. Instead you just pick up your daily loaf of bread from the baker down the twisty walkway. All your mundane troubles are gone.
The irony is that the Teams meetings will follow you, but with some luck, you can at least do them from antique balcony with an espresso in hand.
Maybe that hints that the sense of unease is coming from the working culture? If your job feels draining and stressful, neither feels like it advances you, nor society, nor has any kind of endgame, it makes sense that it will lead to increasing unhappiness and escapist fantasies.
> Living in an Italian town is obviously a romantic escapist fantasy.
Yes, exactly.
But note that the author presumes that the way to attain that fantasy is "buy a house". This is not an article about figuring out how to move to Italy, it's an article about buying a house in Italy.
There's almost no discussion of, saying moving logistics, visas, commutes, etc. It's not about the act of getting there. It tacitly assumes that the way you accomplish the goal is almost entirely by purchasing a thing.
Baltimore, MD has $1 houses as well. They expect you to a certain number of upgrades on it within a specific time. Some say it is actually more expensive in the overall analysis than buying a regular house.
Yup, you have to look at the total cost, and also consider things like safety.
Can I turn them into server farms?
Sure, if you can design a server farm with no copper wiring in it
Golden wires in $1 house sounds about right.
I don’t think it is designed for that.
https://www.wbaltv.com/article/how-to-buy-baltimore-city-1-d...
> "All vacant sales must be redeveloped for residential or mixed-use. That includes residential or green space. So, this program is not for commercial properties. It's only for residential properties at this point in time," Department of Housing and Community Development official Kate Edwards said.
Maybe if you wanted to live with your servers? Would a server farm on the first floor, and an apartment on the second count, I wonder? Free radiant floor heating, if so…
Yeah, we could dual-use the server farms, I am open to this. We could maybe do a sustainable living co-op with free heating and solar panels to sell back energy to the grid. We could transform Baltimore into the city of the future
I will look into this
Almost certainly not, $1 houses in Baltimore at this point (there were some good deals decades ago) are often ones requiring significant work just to be weather-tight, structurally sound, etc.
And of course it becomes clear that no one is there and they are full of valuable hardware some problems may result, as the other commenter points out.
Lastly, our electricity rates are almost certainly not cost-effective for this purpose.
I would be impressed if you could get the power company to give you more than 100A at any single residential address in those zips
Can I daisy chain a few of them together at least?
Great sales pitch, but this is a key excerpt:
> 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.
How much is "much more than a single euro"? 5000€ is much more than 1€, but still very cheap.
It was also possible to buy land in Sweden for 1 krona (less than 20 cents) some time ago. This article tells what happened (in Swedish): https://www.livetiskaraborg.se/berattelser/tomter-for-1-kron...
Summary, they only sold 6 and 20 remain unsold. Most people are not serious about it because they learn they have to build a house and live in it within 2 years of the purchase (if I remember correctly).
I believe Australia also has done this for ages to try and avoid country towns dying, with mixed success.
Oldest mention I found was from 2008: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7596341.stm
After that it seems there has been quite lot of uptake. But idea was always the same price is token payment, and there is requirement to repair these very old and very dilatated houses.
They been doing it for 10+ years
A long time ago I did some IT work for a real estate agent in the US that dealt in international properties. I was stoked on a listing he had up for a beautiful French chateau for $40k. He told me to forget it. “It’ll need completely new electrical, all new plumbing. And that might not sound so bad, but just wait till you actually try to get the work done by locals on time and on budget. It won’t happen.”
I took his advice.
Plot twist is he actually bought that chateau and now is full time painting naked French ladies lying on a chaise longue.
An additional benefit might be that many of these small villages have a tax advantage, created also for attracting foreigners. It is a flat fee of 7%. I cannot remember the name of this rule, but this is a link for example that I found: https://magictowns.it/the-definitive-2025-list-of-italy-7-ta...
https://archive.is/20250708052212/https://www.theguardian.co...
We looked into purchasing a house on the Amalfi Coast about 10 years ago. To get anything done you need permits and in order to get permits you need to bribe everyone involved. The permits are time bound and expire so you have to be ready to go when approved but the small towns don't readily have access to construction materials so in order to get materials in the time bound window you end up having to bribe a whole new set of people.
> We looked into purchasing a house on the Amalfi Coast
You really thought it's possible to buy any real estate in a location where rich Germans and Scandinavians pay €1000 for one night in a hotel and moor their €10mln yachts?
I guess you're not too familiar with the region. There are numerous depressed towns with little or no access to transit or services that have many properties selling for very low prices.
Unfortunately the cost of flight to Italy is not cheap.
Weird, I saw a movie about the buck houses last night. The lead actors were horrible but the supporting actors weren’t half bad
> The €1 house project seems to have been the brainchild of Vittorio Sgarbi, the Italian art critic and TV personality turned mayor of the small, rapidly depopulating town of Salemi, Sicily.
Not coincidentally, that's the same guy and same town that acquired the massive film collection from legendary NYC chain Kim's Video [1], ostensibly to create a cultural hub in Salemi, but instead they let the collection rot.
There's a documentary about it [2], but it's a bit insufferable at times, and you can basically get the gist from some articles [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim%27s_Video_and_Music
[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt24132144/
[3] https://news.artnet.com/art-world/kims-video-documentary-246...
Vittorio Sgarbi is a... character. A young university professor in history of the arts, he earned his initial fame with expletive-laden TV monologues in which he'd talk about classic paintings, or rather used them as an excuse to say whatever he wanted to say about the world and politics. Then proceeded to use his fame to kickstart a long political career among Italian right-wing parties, serving as a minister at national level before running for mayor in a few different places. In-between, he dated pornstars, partied hard, verbally abused a lot of people, and generally lived a dissolute life.
i guess this could somewhat? help homeless people. They can not be accused of loitering if they own that land... Better than getting a fine for sleeping on the street?
Having an address to your name helps a lot to get a job (classism is very harsh and bad, society is very cruel to homeless people)
There are absolutely no jobs nearby or even within 6 hours commute to these "€1 houses". Probably no running water in summer as well.
There is an irony about cheap real estate. If you aren't independently wealthy chances are that you probably can't afford it anyway as the whole reason it could get so depressed is a lack of available nearby income streams.
I found the author's commentary on their goals the most interesting part of the article:
"We’d spent our careers working in schools and nonprofits with young immigrants, and, ..., we had no intention of leaving a life of service behind. Above all, though, what we wanted was an environment in which we could spend a lot of time writing and afford to do it. But Ben had another non-negotiable of his own: proximity to surfing. ...but I supposed it was reasonable enough to design a dream life according to one’s actual dreams."
They wanted to go to a different country for the adventure, to write in leisure and luxury, to surf, and to spread the good news of their superior insights and upbringing to uplift the natives.
Reminds me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_savior
I don’t think writing is a particularly luxurious profession anymore. Most of us in tech make maybe 5x what a typical writer would make from writing.
It is ironic/interesting that they spent so much time helping immigrants before becoming immigrants though.