Meanwhile on Spain, a recovered village would be demolished and the people that recovered it, are being punished to pay the demolition.
(on spanish) https://www.elsaltodiario.com/pueblos-recuperados/llamada-de...
Lake Salagou was designed to drown the village of Celles, but never did
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Re: Lake Salagou was designed to drown the village of Celles, but never did
#12> All tourist business will be conducted in a single co-op building, and will be run collectively.
IOW, guaranteed to fail.
Re: Lake Salagou was designed to drown the village of Celles, but never did
#13Article tells nice story but offers little explanation. Why did the lake end up 11 m shallower than planned? Why starting to rebuild took fifty years? What does "bail réel solidaire" actually mean? Also they are planning to have 35 people in the village, that sounds very tiny.
The French Wikipedia page on Celles [1] hints at an explanation. It says that the initial project was to fill the dam in two phases, first to 139m, then to 150m. Celles is at 144m on average. So I'm thinking that there was a change of plan for some reason and that the dam stayed filled up to 139m only. The article goes on to say that the official decision to definitively keep the water level that way was only made in 1996, which may also explain why no project to rebuild was authorised earlier.
Re: Lake Salagou was designed to drown the village of Celles, but never did
#14Article tells nice story but offers little explanation. Why did the lake end up 11 m shallower than planned? Why starting to rebuild took fifty years? What does "bail réel solidaire" actually mean? Also they are planning to have 35 people in the village, that sounds very tiny.
Le "bail réel solidaire" is a special type of lease contract in France created in 2015. It's used by state institutions to rent buildings to poorer people at decent prices. Those lease contracts grant some long term property rights. Unlike normal lease contracts, the duration goes from 18 to 99 years. The contracts don't transfer the ownership of the building itself and have mechanisms to avoid real estate speculation which drive the prices up.
Source: https://location-immobilier.ooreka.fr/astuce/voir/590869/bai...
Re: Lake Salagou was designed to drown the village of Celles, but never did
#15> “Some people think it’s good, but it would be especially good if it wasn’t in their [former] house,” This implies that some of the people expropriated didn't their get homes back. Instead of getting new families to move in why not simply return these people their homes.
It's been fifty years, the homes are all just ruins now, and there's a massive ecological shift that has completely changed it from the place they remember. I doubt anyone who isn't already there and involved wants to come back.
Re: Lake Salagou was designed to drown the village of Celles, but never did
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think in many (most?) cases the former owners simply aren't alive anymore. Presumably they were paid for the houses when they were kicked out too, so that would complicate things.
This same thing has happened in the USA as well. TVA will use eminent domain to seize a bunch of properties, paying fair market value (usually a little bit above appraisal, hardly enough to compensate for having one's farm destroyed and needing to start over), and then sometimes the project falls through or gets cancelled. 20, 30, 50 years later, the property is sitting there, now federal land, no one on it, with no…
I agree that that SCOTUS decision was horrifying, but I'm assuming that the justices did their best to faithfully interpret the Constitution.
I imagine Congress could pass laws or Constitutional amendments to undo the damage, if sufficiently motivated.