Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

It's not always that different. Depending on the jurisdiction, feudal titles could be bought and sold, or not. If so, it's quite similar really.

Planning enforcement for domestic development in England is definitely 4 years, I agree with the parent comment.

There was that one guy who covered his castle in hay bales for just over 4 years before revealing it and they took enforcement action successfully, but that's a bit different. I'm guessing that's why you said "became obvious that building works had been completed" but actually the rule is simply completion date but the courts decided that this guy was taking the piss so much that he still violated the intended meaning of the law. Your odd agricultural shed example may well fall foul of the same thing but I don't see what that has to do with the parent comment.

It's 10 years (not 12) in some cases but they wouldn't concern most domestic developments.

Any insurance of the type referred to by the parent comment is 100% definitely a swindle.

Right, actual sale prices range $300-$800 per acre for many failed Southwestern (NM, CO, AZ, southeastern CA, probably UT and Eastern OR but I'm less knowledgeable in that area) suburban developments. Often they are picked up by sketchy flippers who sell them to poorly informed buyers at "highly inflated" rates of say $3000 seller financed (e.g. $99 down, $50 per month on terms sometimes as long as 30 years). Searching "land investment" will turn up a bunch of these. While described as "near town" they are often over an hour out with poor access and no utilities. Ironically the tax assessed value on these is usually more in line with actual valuation as they have seen zero or negative price change over time.

Perhaps this is different in other parts of the country, I've just never heard of a tax sale running that quickly. Typically in the city here it takes a decade or more, especially if the ownership situation is at all complex.

This is common in the United States as well, known as "heir property." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heir_property

It is a major factor why Blacks have lost ownership of farmland in the United States. Rather than try to explain it myself, here is an excerpt from "Mine!" by Jacob Heller and James Salzman:

> Currently, Black farmers constitute less than 1 percent of American farmers, and Black families continue to lose farms at a rate three times that of whites. The cause of this dramatic farm loss starts with inheritance law, in particular the consequences for family ownership when someone dies without making a will. Many poor Black farmers in the South were suspicious of local white lawyers, and for good reason, so they never made wills. This suspicion continues today, even among some wealthy Black people. Aretha Franklin and Prince could well have afforded the very best attorneys, yet both passed away without making wills. Overall, three-quarters of Black people do not have wills, more than double the percentage of whites.

> The result for Black-owned land in the Southeast is that over a quarter is now heir property, averaging eight co-owners, five of whom live outside the region. Amazingly, more land in Mississippi is owned by Black people living in Chicago than by those living in Mississippi itself. …

> Inheritance law imposes enormous costs on Black people—indeed, on anyone who does not write a will. When you die without a will, the state splits ownership among people the law designates as heirs, in a specified priority: spouses and children, grandchildren, parents, siblings, and then more remote relatives.

> Partition sales … are the primary way that most heir property is lost. Partition sales are not just of historical interest. Across the South, heir property currently makes up a third of remaining Black-owned farmland—roughly 3.5 million acres worth about $30 billion. …

> In 1887 John Brown bought eighty acres of land in Rankin County, Mississippi. He was part of the great wave of freed slaves who invested their life savings in farmland. … When he died in 1935, he did not leave a will. Ownership of his land split among his wife and nine children. In time they all died, also without wills, so the land was split further among grandchildren. … In 1978 Ruth Brown asked a court to divide the farm so she would own her share of the land outright—a manageable forty-five acres out of John’s original eighty. The other sixty-six Brown heirs would still co-own the balance, in shares ranging from 1/18th of the farm down to a tiny 1/19,440th. The court agreed to partition the parcel, but not by physically dividing the land. Instead, the judge ordered the entire farm sold and the money partitioned among the heirs according to their ownership fractions.

> As often happens in such forced partition sales, a single outside company was the only bidder. In Brown’s case, it was a local white-owned lumber company that wanted to cut the timber.

> Even though the family collectively valued the farm far above its auction price, neither Brown nor any other heir placed a bid. Why? Partly because state law often requires the bid to be fully or substantially paid in cash on auction day, a rule that makes bidding impossible for most ordinary owners. Partly because there was no simple way for the Brown heirs to organize a joint family bid that pulled together resources from the scattered owners. Many heirs did not even know they were owners. And no single Brown heir could top the lumber company’s lowball bid. This is commonplace. When a judge orders land auctioned on courthouse steps, the deal is final, even though the price is usually far below what is considered fair market value in an ordinary transaction.

> you skipped over.

Arguably, comment forms on online fora don't provide much affordances for writing college grade essays. Neither will the audience read long comments start-to-end. I was well aware of how much I left out for the sake of terseness and staying on topic.

While the Napoleonic Wars left several million dead over the course of 12 years, Europe itself counted a population of 160 million at the time. Depending on who you were, your experience may have vastly differed. Millions lived in poverty and remained living in poverty, tens thousands emigrated to the New World or within Europe, and then there were plenty who seized the opportunity to acquire wealth (small and large) and power during that time through commerce and new opportunities on a local, regional and/or international level. That doesn't downplay the horrible experiences related to early 19th century warfare: it's adding important nuance to life in Europe as it was.

I'm calling the "societal collapse" hyperbole because I was aware of it lacked that nuance. Alternatively, I could have called called it "societal disruption on macro level" or some such.

But again, online fora do not make for a great medium catering to nuanced historiography about the experience of living in early 19th century Europe. It's also pretty much off-topic as this discussion is about leftover vestiges of the Ancien Régime in modern legal systems.