Abandoned Properties

Renegade
Renegade Community Member Posts: 7 Listener
edited September 1 in Coffee lounge

In this age of having a housing crisis, I'm amazed at how many abandoned properties exist in the UK.

Not sure if anyone is aware, or watches on YouTube a guy called Adam Mark's explores. He uploads a new explore every Sunday normally, and has been running now for roughly 6 years.

So basically he discovers and explores abandoned properties. He doesn't enter the ones that are secure, but most of them are unlocked, or at least the ones he uploaded have been unlocked.

They are time capsules, and very often its as if the family just walked out one day and never returned, and in most cases the belongings are still there. He tries to respectfully work out the year it was abandoned by looking for clues and dates on things like food in the fridge, old news papers etc.

But the reason for this post, was I find it astonishing how many empty properties are in the UK alone, literally hundreds, probably thousands.

So instead of continuing to build more houses, should these abandoned properties be lived in. I'm assuming the councils could work out who owns it, or if all relatives connected to it are dead or not.

Some of these houses have clearly been abandoned for many years, decades in some cases. A few had power still on.

Comments

  • Renegade
    Renegade Community Member Posts: 7 Listener
    https://forum.scope.org.uk/discussion/comment/1147501#Comment_1147501

    Thats exactly my point. How ironic that there are literally hundreds of empty properties.

  • 66Mustang
    66Mustang Community Member Posts: 15,540 Championing
    edited September 1

    I'd imagine that, despite what we'd like to think, it's a lot more complex than "there's an empty house, put someone in it".

    Someone in authority would have to take legal responsibility for the decision. An empty house would probably trigger all kinds of bureaucratic red flags - even stuff that seems trivial like having an energy rating. If anything happened to the person who was housed there there'd be a huge backlash.

    Obviously a homeless person isn't going to decline a house because the boiler hasn't been serviced, but it shows the flaws or at least inefficiencies in our bureaucracy when that's essentially what's imposed and it's seemingly easier to build new houses than it is to utilise existing ones!

  • Rosie_Scope
    Rosie_Scope Posts: 9,388 Online Community Team

    I like watching those kinds of urban exploration videos sometimes. But it's always a bit sad to see the remnants of a well-loved home that's been left to rot. Those ones you talk about where the family seems to have upped and left in a rush are extra sad. Makes you wonder what they were going through that meant their home was abandoned like that.

    It would be nice to be able to turn the houses around and bring in new families who need them. But similar to 66mustang, I think there are probably a lot of hoops to jump through to get there. It must be quite a lot of work to reassign empty properties and get them safe to live in. Maybe not impossible, but probably still quite an expensive way to do it. Perhaps the more livable ones would be a good start though!

    I'll have to look up Adam Mark and watch some of his videos.

  • 66Mustang
    66Mustang Community Member Posts: 15,540 Championing
    edited September 1

    A few years ago I was on a plane with several different family members and my granny made a morbid joke that if the plane crashed, the one family member who decided to remain in the UK would become rather well-off. I imagine it's not impossible that there are situations where a whole family is on a plane (or car or other transport) that has a disaster, and there just literally isn't anyone left to take over and their possessions and material existence sort of just stops like a time capsule

  • Rag_793
    Rag_793 Community Member Posts: 650 Empowering

    All the Yuppies that have a holiday home that they leave empty for most of the year gets on my nerves. It has effected places such as the Lakes and other areas in the country.

  • prestencollin
    prestencollin Community Member Posts: 24 Connected

    Adam Mark explores quite a lot of haunted houses in his videos, doesn’t he?

    But yeah, I can say it’s pretty mad how many properties seem to have been left sitting empty for years, especially when there’s such a shortage of housing. The tricky part is that an abandoned-looking property doesn’t necessarily mean nobody owns it. There could be probate, missing owners, disputes, mortgages or other legal issues behind the scenes.

    I do think there’s a case for bringing more of these properties back into use where possible, but I imagine in a lot of cases the legal and condition issues make it far more complicated than it looks from the outside. Still, seeing perfectly decent houses sitting empty for decades does make you wonder why more of them aren’t being brought back into the housing stock.

Categories