Rubia Daniels flew to the town of Mussomeli in Sicily after hearing about her cheap houses. She ended up buying three crumbling homes for $3.30 in 2019, and she’s now restoring them. Many Italian cities have implemented similar programs in an effort to repopulate rural Italy. Something is loading.
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When Rubia Daniels first heard about cheap homes in Italy, she knew she had to check it out herself.
“I was so amazed. It was one of those things where you have to see it to be sure it’s true,” San Francisco-based Daniels told Insider. “I did my research, and in three days I had my plane ticket, a rental car, the hotel, and I was off.”
At the end of a 10-day trip to Mussomeli, a small town in Sicily, in July 2019, she was the proud owner of three dilapidated houses she had bought for just €1, or $1.10 each.
A representative of Case 1 Euro, the organization responsible for the housing project in Mussomeli, confirmed the sales.
Rubia Daniels standing in front of one of her Mussomeli Rubia Daniels properties.
Daniels, who moved from the outskirts of Brasilia in Brazil to California 30 years ago, said the Italian city reminded him of his childhood home.
“People were super welcoming and everyone wanted to have coffee with me. The real estate agents hugged me like a sister – they were with me everyday while I was there,” Daniels said.
Not only was she charmed by the rich history of the town and its people, but she also loved the idea of restoring an abandoned house.
A collage showing the roof of one of his houses before and after restoration. Rubia Daniels.
“It’s an environmental concept,” added Daniels, who works in the solar industry. “We have to stop building and start remodeling the existing things that we have.”
Daniels said she has different plans for each of her new homes.
“The one I’m working on now, I plan to turn into an art gallery. One will be for me to stay. And the third house, which will be my biggest project, I want to turn into a wellness center center to give back to the community,” she added.
The building with the green door is the third property that Daniels owns. Rubia Daniels
The 49-year-old restarted the restoration of properties towards the end of 2019 but had to put the project on hold due to the pandemic.
“COVID-19 happened and we weren’t allowed to go back, so I started the renovations again last year,” Daniels said. She currently splits her time between San Francisco and Mussomeli and spends at least a month in the Italian village each time.
So far she has completed the exteriors of two houses but has not started the last one, she said.
Italy desperately needs people like Daniels
Daniels isn’t the only person jumping on Italy’s desperation to repopulate its empty, sleepy towns.
In 2021, nine villages in southern Italy offered to pay millennials $33,000 to move there, on the condition that they help repopulate rapidly emptying towns. The villages – all located in the Calabria region of southern Italy – offered people under 40 a cash payment to make the move. Proposed towns included the cliffside village of Civita and Aieta, a coastal resort town.
The one thing these places had in common was that they all had fewer than 2,000 residents and were only a few years away from turning into ghost towns.
The Calabria region also made the news in the summer of 2020 by offering homes for $1.14 in the village of Cinquefrondi. Twelve houses have been put up for sale at this price in a frantic race to repopulate the city dubbed “Operation Beauty”.
And in 2019, Insider’s Will Martin reported on Cammarata – a town in central Sicily offering houses for free to anyone who wanted to live there. According to the city’s mayor, Vincenzo Giambrone, it was part of an effort to prevent the city from turning “in ruins”.
However, repossessing a $1 home is no small feat. The catch, according to Insider’s Tom Murray, is dealing with a house that might be in disrepair and need major renovations just to be habitable.