The cities selling homes for one dollar
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 796 Ratings
🗓️ 6 October 2024
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Is selling off abandoned homes for a dollar or a pound the answer to invigorating a city?
We meet some of the people in the port cities of Baltimore in the US and Liverpool in the UK who have taken part in similar housing revival schemes. Is it an easy win, or is solving a city's problems more complicated?
(Picture: Maxine Sharples, who bought a house in Liverpool for a £1, holding a photo showing her undertaking renovation work in her home.)
Presented and produced by Rowan Bridge
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. I'm Rowan Bridge. Today, the cities around the world selling off houses for a dollar. The idea is to reinvigorate areas where homes have been left empty. These properties, a lot of them don't have roofs. They don't have windows. They are not fit for human habitation and you need |
| 0:23.2 | 150 to 200,000 or greater to do the work. The buyers have to commit to investing in the houses to do |
| 0:30.1 | them up, often no easy task. There was a huge hole in the roof. There was asbestos. There was a rat |
| 0:35.7 | infestation. I had a tree growing out the front |
| 0:38.1 | bay. Above the bay window on the first floor collapsed while we were actually working on it. |
| 0:42.9 | We'll find out how the scheme has worked in two cities, Baltimore and the US, and the UK |
| 0:48.0 | city of Liverpool. I think we just felt that there was an appetite for people who |
| 0:53.7 | keen to renovate the adult |
| 0:55.6 | houses, starting from scratch, putting their own stamp on it. |
| 0:59.6 | So can selling off homes for a dollar regenerate a city? |
| 1:02.9 | That's all coming up on Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 1:12.2 | You must be Judy. |
| 1:14.6 | You must be Rowan. |
| 1:23.7 | Judy Alex Salzer's red brick house is part of an immaculately kept street in the Pigtown area of Baltimore, not far from the Orioles baseball stadium. |
| 1:28.8 | There are well-cared for pot plants outside the front doors in period street lighting from the 1800s. But it wasn't like this when she first purchased it. When she and her neighbours bought |
| 1:34.1 | their homes, they were in a state of decay and needed significant renovation. Some had serious problems. |
| 1:40.9 | Fortunately, mine didn't have serious problems. It just, they were old and run down, |
| 1:46.8 | and everybody had to gut the houses and build, fill the shells in, each one of us with an |
| 1:52.7 | individual plan. Taking on a property in such a state, as Judy discovered, was a massive challenge, |
| 1:59.0 | one that almost bankrupted her. The fact that I went through |
| 2:02.9 | one contractor who gutted the house, tore out the roof, excavated the basement for a living space, |
| 2:10.4 | and then he left, and for three months, it rained 29 days out of every month. So it was horrible. I had to get a new |
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