How long can an abandoned house stay habitable?

April 14, 2023 3:29 AM

I’m working on a story involving a ghost, and she needs to have been alone in an abandoned house for a long time before someone moves in. What’s the longest amount of time, realistically, that the house can have been vacant for? It’s ok if the house needs significant rehab.

PS: google sure is useless now, I tried searching this and it was nothing but house-flipping blog garbage.

posted by showbiz_liz to Home & Garden (36 answers total)

It's going to depend very much on the weather the house is in -

will there be cold snaps that cause pipes to burst?

will there be snowdrifts at the doors and windows that melt and flood?

A house in eg a dry, calm climate will stay habitable a lot longer than

a) North American/Canadian winters

b) tropical forests (rot, overgrowing vegetation)
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 3:45 AM on April 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Well, all of that is pretty much negotiable! Though I should have mentioned this takes place in America, it really doesn’t matter where. We’re talking best case scenario here, because the details you mention will only be relevant in relation to the condition of the house. How long is the “a lot longer” in your ideal climate?
posted by showbiz_liz at 3:53 AM on April 14, 2023

You mean physically or legally? Legally, if it’s tied up in inheritance disputes it can stay empty and “owned” for a really long time.

Physically, as long as the roof is intact (maybe a metal roof?) house can sustain a lot of disrepair. Think of cabins in the woods too, as long as they are winterized they can resist the elements for a long long time.
posted by lydhre at 3:55 AM on April 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

What chariot said +...

The answer will depend very much on how long the roof lasts. If the roof goes, the structure will soon follow. A good roof, with good eaves, will keep the most moisture off of a building, and moisture is what will destroy most buildings.

A book that covers this topic is The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, though I think maybe only a single chapter is about structures.

(What lydhre said, ha!)
posted by AbelMelveny at 3:56 AM on April 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: I probably should have been more specific… like, is 60 years realistic? 80? 100? Assuming that the people who have bought it are planning to renovate and live in it. The most ideal scenario would be that a small chunk of it is fairly immediately move-in-able at least in a camping-out kind of way, but I can stick the alive people in an RV outside or something if necessary.
posted by showbiz_liz at 4:00 AM on April 14, 2023

Many times in movies and other stories the property has a mysterious liminal caretaker to handwave away some of the most severe decrepitude. This person can act both as a too-knowing harbinger who can conveniently disappear once the new ownership is transferred, or later even be revealed to be a ghost themself.
posted by phunniemee at 4:27 AM on April 14, 2023 [8 favorites]

So I don't think 60, 80 or 100 years is realistic completely unattended. Roofs generally need replacing at these frequencies. And as everyone above says once the roof goes you start to get massive water damage. Additionally if siding starts to fall off if it's not maintained more of it will peel off from that base area. That said this is fiction, and there's a ghost! Do whatever you want, well suspend our disbelief! I'm in Louisiana and I've watched a house on my block with roofing and siding damage deteriorate to the point of collapse in about 1 year, but we have humidity termites and storms. This also depends on the construction of the house, and the relative maintenance periods and issues with those materials bricks need to be repointed at a certain frequency, wood is subject to dry rot and wet rot. Traditional historic glass is subject to breakage over time in a way that modern impact resistant materials aren't. But I think if you leave one section of the house intact and then describe extensive issues tied to the houses construction in other areas people will go with it.
posted by edbles at 4:35 AM on April 14, 2023 [6 favorites]

It also depends on what you mean by “habitable”. In the US, a lot of rural areas didn’t get electrical service until the 1930s. So even if your house did manage to withstand moisture and rot for 100 years, if it’s not in a city, it will probably not have electric wiring for lights or anything. Plumbing and heating have also made great strides since the early 20th century. So if you want someone to be able to move in and live a reasonably modern lifestyle, the house would have to have been updated probably around the 60s.

You’re also gonna run into lead paint issues in houses before that as well, but that might actually be useful for your story.
posted by kevinbelt at 4:39 AM on April 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

As a starting point, I'd say at least 20 years. I think we've all see houses sit idle that long while the bushes grow big and the paint starts looking ratty, but finally get sold and reinhabited without major restoration.
posted by SemiSalt at 4:43 AM on April 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

For those talking about how long a roof lasts:
hard slate roofs can last up to a century
metal roofs can last half a century
posted by sciencegeek at 5:27 AM on April 14, 2023 [5 favorites]

Simple adobe structures are quite durable in a dry climate. The Taos Pueblo has existed for the better part of a thousand years, and smaller structures in Santa Fe have been around since the 1600s.
posted by cubeb at 5:35 AM on April 14, 2023 [5 favorites]

70 years and still going strong for this particular Parisian apartment
posted by rongorongo at 5:36 AM on April 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

Think of cabins in the woods too, as long as they are winterized they can resist the elements for a long long time.

"The state the last residents left it in" is a larger story - did they leave suddenly, did they have time to shut all the windows, drain the pipes? All of these things are important factors.
posted by mhoye at 5:38 AM on April 14, 2023 [4 favorites]

In a dry (desert) climate, there are stone/brick houses still standing, and still liveable today, that were built in the 1880s (and have been neglected since, because gold rush became ghost town)... so that's 143 years in a dry/desert climate.

stone/brick construction can last a LONG time in a dry climate
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 5:39 AM on April 14, 2023 [6 favorites]

In line with a couple of posts above, I was thinking you'd want it to be a brick or stone house with a slate roof. You also have to figure out a plausible way it can stand empty so long. I think it would have to be in a rural place with no regulations requiring buildings to be maintained and no close neighbors to complain. And owners who don't want to sell for some reason but also don't want to live there.
posted by Redstart at 6:10 AM on April 14, 2023 [4 favorites]

You need it to be in a place with low real estate values. Abandoned properties in valuable areas are quickly seized and sold for unpaid taxes and assessments.
posted by MattD at 6:23 AM on April 14, 2023 [6 favorites]

One other issue is the presence of animals - both of the four-legged and two-legged variety.

If there are crawlspaces underneath the structure, at least in northern regions it's a battle to keep critters from inhabiting underneath, and a lack of human presence will only encourage that. But they might not make it into the upper floors.

Having lived in semi-rural environments, if the house is too close to 'civilization' it will likely attract the attention of teenagers. This will lead to broken windows, internal damage, possible fire damage, etc. And the broken windows will let the weather in along with additional critters.

I think that if the house is in the southwest and not an attractive nuisance you'd be looking at 20 on the outside to correspond with roof lifetimes.
posted by scolbath at 6:34 AM on April 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

Depends on the neighborhood. In poor areas with low home values, houses can stay empty and abandoned for many years, even a decade or two, before they are eventually condemned by the city/municipal gov't and demolished (or, less likely, purchased and rehabbed if the neighborhood suddenly starts gentrifying). In the meantime they will probably be squatted in if they are at all habitable and the roof is in decent condition. In a neighborhood where property is valuable, not more than a few years.
posted by dis_integration at 6:45 AM on April 14, 2023

Not an American example, but until she moved recently, my mother's house was part of a large stone structure that had been built in the twelfth century, abandoned in the sixteenth (thanks, Henry VIII!), partially renovated into dwellings a couple of centuries later, and periodically abandoned and renovated over time until English Heritage took it in hand and redid the whole thing properly at the start of the millennium.
posted by Hogshead at 6:45 AM on April 14, 2023 [4 favorites]

Along the same lines as the Paris apartment above, apartments above a shop can sit empty essentially indefinitely provided the shop's owner is looking after the outside of the building. Ads for shops for sale in the city where I live quite often mention that they've got unused apartments above - not quite big enough to be worth renovating and selling, but without the convenient access to convert into storage for the shop.
posted by offog at 7:26 AM on April 14, 2023

Some pictures of some houses in Detroit over the course of a few years

The lessons learned from this is that if you are facing a blight problem, then it's better to forgo fine revenue and work with lenders and owners to keep houses rented and occupied rather than force them to be abandoned for unpaid taxes.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:27 AM on April 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

How timely! Here is a specific example from today's news - Willa Cather's birthplace is going to be sold (hopefully to a foundation wanting to preserve it.). According to wikipedia, it was purchased by someone and used as a "retreat" in 1976, so presumably habitable and pleasant? This is what it looks like now. Allegedly on the verge of collapse. Also - definitely ghosts.
posted by Dotty at 7:29 AM on April 14, 2023

If the story involves a ghost as it does, the reader is already being asked to believe in ghosts. That is not a scientifically proven belief. I think the actual number of years an abandoned house will stand is whatever you and the ghosts want it to be. The story is fiction. Whether you use 30,40, 50, or any number around those that can be explained by it either being a stone house or a wood frame house will work for the reader.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 7:41 AM on April 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

Once a home is no longer watertight, the incremental steps to it being uninhabitable take place extremely quickly. A well-built home can be completely waterlogged or mould-ridden in less than a year depending on environmental factors after it loses watertight integrity.
posted by parmanparman at 7:47 AM on April 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

My cousin has a modest old prewar farm house that sat empty for at about 20 years before he fixed it up and moved back in. It's been occupied for the last 15 years. This one isn't the only example, I can think of a couple of other similar but less sensational examples in my family of houses sitting empty with folks in nursing homes and then someone inheriting the property.

The old house belonged to my extended extended family, and eventually it belonged to my cousin, and that progress from group ownership to individual is likely the main reason it sat empty for so long. The house is located out in the high prairies. Its essentially skipped a full generation, with someone my grandparents age in the house in the late 70's and then jumped down to my cousin at the turn of the century.

It was a balloon frame farm house, just a regular asphalt roof and about 2500 square feet over two floors with a small attic. It was very ordinary, square box of a house, apart from being very old for that area. It was built shortly before the First World War. It had a wood ladder that lived up on the roof, which was coming apart and everyone expected to come down and murder someone.

It had been prepped for long term storage, so water was totally disconnected, and there was no power. All of the cabinets had been removed, it was completely empty. Covered up the wood floors. Over time a few windows got boarded up. And they sealed the roof in a few places with a black goop where someone noticed it leaked. It was exposed to extreme heat and cold, constant wind and prairie thunderstorms. It was partially sheltered by a row of 4 very large old non native trees. Sometimes there was the effort, and sometimes there was the resources, and when those matched up my family was able keep up with maintaining it. From appearances outside it didn't ever really look abandoned, just worn down and old.

The house had been moved, which is pretty common out there as there is both more houses than people and more than enough space. That means there was no basement, it was sitting up on a 'temporary' pad that kept it high and dry. Big farm families built lots of farm houses back in the day, now the farms are big and the families are small, and everyone wants to live in town. A significant portion of the farmland is mostly empty now. As for the kids - they know where to party, there lots of completely blown out places that fall outside of adult concerns like property damage.

The abandoned house was where my uncle who married into my family had grown up. It had to be moved again after it sat empty because the house was given to one family and the property, a functional farm, to another. In fact at this very moment there is 3 empty houses in my extended family. (and yes mefi - there are folks in my family that could a place to live, but perhaps not that place, and critically, they don't 'deserve' it). Family. As the partner would say: 'Offda'.

For about the first 10 years this old house saw regular visits and was actively 'kept up'. All that means is that the house was kept sealed from the elements and animals. For most of the next ten years it was mostly abandoned. I think two factors were key- both related to the fact that it sat in the back area of a very large lot with an occupied farm house. So there was the regular human activity around the yard, and the collection of farm cats, and they were kept outside of the house. Once a colony of cats moved into a house, and that one was later set fire so the local fire department could practice putting it out. Eventually the other house was only occupied during farming season, so they essentially had two empty places out there.

I was deeply fascinated by this house and vividly remember visiting with my cousins, who had been charged with its care. So a bunch of teenagers would "go check on it". It was a magnet for mice and flies. The smell was intense, brutal and stuck to your clothes. There was some carpet that eventually got so bad that my cousins were commanded to completely remove all of it, and then they tarped up all the exposed floors.

There was several years that no-one entered the building - someone had lost the keys and there was a fight about that. Or maybe there was a fight and then the keys were lost, anyway even after the keys were found there was still big drama around the house that lasted until I think someone died of old age. I was young, it didn't seem weird to just not get a locksmith.

The empty house took about two years to get fully put back into shape by my cousin who had limited experience, limited time and an even more limited budget. In a couple of rooms it was a down to studs renovation, but mostly it was just replacing the roof and painting everything. Obviously he was in no particular rush, once he finished fixing it the house had to be moved. You can be certain that everyone were bone tired of having it at the old location. Family.

Folks on the next rung up on the ladder might be able to afford all of the necessary upkeep to maintain all these sorts properties, but most of my family are folks who can afford only one house. Those that can afford two usually go for one on a lake somewhere. Or Arizona.

So there is a few houses that someone in my parents generation might feel precious about but can't afford. But mostly these properties are just heavy anchors to a time and place. Their childhood home, their beloved grandma who passed on, but now their own kids don't want to live out there, and it needs so much work. I was able, and very willing, to leave all of this sort of stuff behind. But the part of my family who stayed on, the bonds to these places, to these houses, is keenly felt. This is what motivates them, why they are committed to keeping an empty houses. They feel an obligation to hold on.
posted by zenon at 8:38 AM on April 14, 2023 [10 favorites]

The Darwin Martin house was mostly uninhabited for 20-50 years, and was/is a rather famous building in an otherwise busy and well-maintained urban neighborhood.
posted by tchemgrrl at 9:00 AM on April 14, 2023

In my area (semi arid with winters but low snow amounts) a field stone house with standing seam metal roof will easily stand habitable for a century if not vandalized. Somewhere after that wood windows would stop operating because the paint has wore out but would probably still be whole and keeping rain out. A home that old would have never had electricity or indoor plumbing.

Restoration would consist of cleaning out mice and black widows and repairing the windows and then painting and restoring floors and other wood work. And then adding modern amenities.

Even single story wood frame homes would probably be standing if they had metal roofs after a century.

Essentially water is a building solvent. Keep water out by either design/construction or climate and buildings last a very long time.
posted by Mitheral at 9:19 AM on April 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

Two examples I can think of offhand, that I happen to know about personally:

#1. 1890s era victorian style farmhouse in rural Missouri. The family lived in until until maybe the 1970s, then it is a big old leaky drafty thing so they wanted to modernize it etc. And they discovered it was far cheaper to just have a completely new modern house built on the property.

So they live next door and still use the old house for storage etc. I'm sure if the roof leaked they would repair it - one thing that allows it to survive over the decades unscathed. But 40-50 years "abandoned" easily, and you could move into at least part of it tomorrow, if you didn't mind the drafts and the mouse droppings.

#2. Another place we were staying in a different part of rural Missouri. We get snooping around the old barn - literally packed to the rim with old farm equipment and various junk - and lo and behold: The main section of the barn was the old log cabin, probably built by the family that settled the farm their in around the 1850s or 1860s.

I can't imagine that the cabin was actively used as a residence even as late as the 1820s - more likely it was abandoned as a residence around the 1880s or 1890s.

Anyway, it's a "house" or in this case, log cabin, that has been abandoned for at least 100 years and maybe 130-150 years. And yes, if you had a hankering to live in an old log cabin it would still be perfectly habitable if you just cleared out the junk - and you could probably sell a bunch of that junk at antiquing type stores for a decent profit.

The secret to preservation here is that when it was converted to farm use/barn/animal shelter/farm storage they extended the roof out on both sides to increase the usable space, and then the whole thing was roofed in with a big metal roof - the sort of corrugated metal roof you often see on farm buildings and such.

So that keeps everything dry inside over the long term - and not only the insides are protected from water but the walls as well, thanks to the very generous roof.

We often see stuff like that across rural Missouri - old buildings that have clearly been pretty much abandoned for decades, but they've had a corrugated metal roof put over them, so they're still standing at least structurally OK. Often they were preserved in that way because they had some interim use - barn, storage, etc. Though even the interim use might have lapsed decades ago.
posted by flug at 12:09 PM on April 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

Here is one that was last inhabited in 1986 (Sauer Castle in Kansas City, Kansas), and people still consider it possible to rehab. So 40 years is believable for sure, even without much in the way of upkeep.
posted by flug at 12:19 PM on April 14, 2023

This is kind of an indirect answer to your question, but from about 01:32:13 to 02:00:00 in this episode of the Well There's Your Problem podcast on the 2021 snowstorm in Texas, there's an extensive discussion of how the failure of so many modern building systems during the storm shows how contemporary construction requires a constant supply of energy to maintain moisture and temperature control to prevent the physical deterioration and eventual collapse of a structure.

This includes...

- examining how, traditionally, solar radiation hitting the exterior of a building in the summer and furnaces or fireplaces heating the interior of a building in the winter were adapted with things like shutters and porches to make pre-modern buildings livable within an acceptable temperature range

- looking at examples of buildings that did this well, like Roman insulae, Shibam Hadramawt in Yemen, and New Orleans' French Quarter (built in brick in the middle of the Little Ice Age!)

- considering how radiators, forced-air systems and air conditioning changed the construction industry by talking about how thermal mass works and how modern buildings are more thinly built than pre-modern ones because they make up for it with fiberglass/polystyrene insulation, which works as long as the power keeps the HVAC systems working so the insulating materials' design limits for temperature and moisture are never exceeded

With that in mind, I feel like this old house would predate modern construction techniques like the use of oriented strand board (1963), glass wool insulation (patented in 1933), and perhaps even suburbanization itself (streetcar suburbs in the US date from as early as the 1890s!), to have it be still standing in some way that could be house-like enough (intact walls, mostly intact windows and doors, and an intact roof?) for a ghost to be, uh, contentedly inhabiting it for a long time.

You might also want to look for data on the launch of residential electrification in the house's area, as well as when local utilities stopped supporting the installation of new gas lamps, if the ghost interacts with other characters through the flickering of lights.
posted by mdonley at 12:29 PM on April 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Not only has this thread given me lots of good potential characteristics for a plausibly old and abandoned house, some of those characteristics have incidentally provided two or three ways to make the story even more emotionally devastating than it already was! Thanks mefi!
posted by showbiz_liz at 3:56 PM on April 14, 2023 [6 favorites]

You might be interested in, or find some fun inspiration from, the history of Kam Wah Chung, a Chinese grocery and trading post in eastern Oregon built in the late 1800s. It was abandoned around 1952 (with the assumption that the owner would return soon), eventually deeded to the city but forgotten, and then rediscovered and restoration begun in 1967. It's not a super-long time period, but it's a really interesting time-capsule of a building that you can actually go visit. There was a shrine behind the counter with fresh oranges that essentially mummified in the dry desert air, and are still there today. It's a fascinating place and seems much older than the 1950s since it was never updated with things like indoor plumbing. There's also a PBS documentary about it (although I haven't watched it, so can't say specifically how much relevant info it would have.
posted by duien at 4:38 PM on April 14, 2023

At least some living green roofs are meant to have a 50 year lifespan. And things last longer than their rated lifespan sometimes. The roof is basically pool liner with a garden in it.
posted by aniola at 6:23 PM on April 14, 2023

If I were writing this story, I'd put the house out in the desert. It would be made of stone. It would have been abandoned because of lack of water. I would do back research on the environment and figure out which human-inflicted actions caused the water to dry up. For rehab, my characters would be environmentalists who are working on supporting a healthier watershed.
posted by aniola at 6:32 PM on April 14, 2023

Backup candidates included brick, cinderblock, and earth. I rejected brick for its mortar, cinderblock because I'm the only one who loves it, and earth because I think it needs regular plaster if you don't want it to start crumbling but maybe it would be fine.

In the desert in southern California, it is not uncommon for people to live in RVs, shipping containers, vans, etc., outside vacant abandoned shack-sized houses from the olden days.
posted by aniola at 6:47 PM on April 14, 2023

whatever supernatural energy sustains the ghost is also keeping the house eerily well-preserved

there, sorted
posted by Jacqueline at 2:46 AM on April 15, 2023