Abandoned houses

When you walk around Sintra and Lisbon you cannot but notice and wonder about some beautiful old buildings that look like they are abandoned and/or falling apart. It saddens many to see the potential of these houses going to waste just sitting there with broken or boarded up windows, roof half falling and the garden overgrown. Right across the street from us there is one such building and a few times a week I tell people the story of it.

As the high fencing and basketball hoop lets you guess, it was 'Escola Academica' still about 20 years ago when we were building and moved here; a small private school. Once a beautiful building, full of life, the school mistress retired, the school lost its license, and for awhile after the death of the old school mistress, a family lived there with no rights to rental. When they were successfully evicted, we thought the house would be soon sold and were looking forward to new neighbors - with no luck until today. Many people wanted to buy it, but the story that circulates is that the elderly lady who owns it does not want to sell it so her son(s) wont benefit from it. Instead, she's willed it to someone after her death. Meanwhile the old Academica rots away and will soon be too costly to make sense to fix it.

Sadly the story is very likely to be true. In Portugal there are many old buildings that are abandoned, due to two main reasons: Old rental and inheritance laws.

Here is an example of a situation is Lisbon: a man owns two identical apartments in a building in the heart of Lisbon. One he rents for €2,750 a month, the other for €75 . The discrepancy is a result of 100-year -old tenancy rules, which have frozen the rent of hundreds of thousands of tenants and protected them against eviction. If your rental agreement was made prior to 1974, you and your family can live in the house/apartment until death, with no increase to your rent. What happens is that nowadays the small rental revenue is not enough to take care of the house - the painting, the plumbing, the everyday fixing. And the houses fall apart. We have a friend who lives in Alfama, Lisbon, in a house they bought 20 years ago that they would like to completely redo, but they cannot until the last of the tenants leaves the house (in this case the old man is 90+ years-old and still going strong).

In Sintra there are many houses for sale - beautiful, in a good location; and if they are reasonably priced have a tenant who is in his early retirement years, so whoever buys the house, will have to let the tenant stay there. Sometimes people actually 'by the tenants out' or offer them another apartment/house in return to live in - as was a case in the village of Eugaria where we lived while building our house: the owners of a building built a small house to an elderly couple occupying a part of a house they bought so that they could redo the house for themselves.

Another reason for these 'abandoned' houses are inheritance laws. A family house may be inherited in part by about 16 cousins - and it is enough if one says he doesn't want to sell 'because it is the place I spent my summer holidays when I was young' and the house is not sold. Yet the 16 cousins cannot agree who should live there or what should be done with the house, and none of them has the money to pay the other cousins their share - so the house sits alone. OR one or more cousins may live in Canada or Australia and could not care less to come to Portugal to sign a sale of the house when what he would get as his part is less than the cost of the airfare.

No matter what the reason, it is an estimate that in Lisbon, about 8 percent of houses are deserted. So when you see a house that looks abandoned, just take a look upstairs or in one of the windows, and you may signs of life; a curtain, a plant, a cat sleeping on the window sill. This means that the house is not completely abandoned, just waiting to get empty so it can be sold or fixed to the owner's liking.

(The numbers for this entry came from an article in NYT, 'Portugal follows Spain on Austerity Cuts' , May 13, 2010.)