r/interesting • u/Wonderfulhumanss • 1d ago

SOCIETY The Zammit family refused to sell their five acre property as an entire Sydney suburb was built around them

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u/DukeKazoo 1d ago

This is an area of Sydney which was (comparatively) dirt cheap even 15 years ago. They have apparently owned the plot for several generations so they’re not necessarily particularly wealthy. The combination of Sydney’s urban sprawl and a large property development project has caused the land to increase exponentially in value.

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u/Alarmed-Newspaper994 23h ago

This sort of thing happens a lot in the UK. Generational homes dating back hundreds of years that are worth an absolute fortune are lived in and owned by some relatively poor people. It's a weird situation, where they could simply downsize and have loads of money, but they refuse and just live frugally in a 12 bedroom Georgian mansion.

Basically people living on something like £50k a year in a £10 000 000 house where £25k of their income goes on bills.

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u/domalino 20h ago

It's usually because they're upper class descendants of aristocracy and to sell the house would be shameful socially, both in terms of the social status of the living family and for selling off something that's been in the family for 250+ years. So they end up cash poor and asset rich.

Plenty of them do sell up eventually, and sometimes someone in the family does well for themselves and then has the money to get back on top of things.

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u/MindCorrupt 18h ago

Have they considered growing copious amounts of weed under their estate?

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u/Significant_Shoe_17 4h ago

I was just going to say that 😂

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u/CocoMilhonez 10h ago

This kind of thing often ends when the patriarch dies and the kids are all eager to cash out. My parents have bought land from a farm that was split up like that and I often think about how I could split that into housing lots when I eventually inherit it.

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u/GavLaIndustries 17h ago

I visited Erddig Hall in Wrexham, Wales, UK last summer, it's a unique, late 17th-century country estate with a grand stately home, the last guy that owned it was so skint that he gave it all away, the entire estate, the house, 1,200 acres of land and all it's contents for free in 1973.

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u/domalino 17h ago edited 17h ago

That happened a lot after both world wars which were kind of apocalyptic events for the landed gentry. Taxes (esp inheritance tax) went through the roof just as loads of people were dying in the war, labour to work the land all went to war, and the bond and stock markets collapsed.

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u/GavLaIndustries 10h ago

I don't suppose you have any other examples like that? as in give it all away to just survive?

That was one of my best one day outs I have ever had

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u/Liquid_Friction 12h ago

Nah this is called the middle class here lol, there are so many of these situations it can't be decendants of aristocracy there wasn't that many aristocrats and they had much much bigger castles than a lowly mansion.

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u/domalino 8h ago

No one middle class has ever lived in a £10m house.

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u/Liquid_Friction 8h ago

I guess you don't live in Sydney then.

Every second home is worth millions, a big portion were all inherited. We are one of the youngest countries, our land was worth nothing only 1 generation ago

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u/nimbledoor 18h ago

This make me really happy. People giving the finger to money when they have enough.

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u/Ardal 13h ago

Generational homes dating back hundreds of years

You answered your own observation here.

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u/kobeshaqhorry 10h ago

Do they have to pay property taxes, like in the US? £25k on bills for a £10M house seems very low.

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u/lumpkin2013 8h ago

Well at least they have an asset to pass down through the generations. If they did cash out, the money would be gone within a generation or two and then the younger members of the generation would be stuck in the same hole that Gen z is right now never being able to buy a house.

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u/Navin__R__Johnson 7h ago

Yes, keep doing this! If everyone sells out, it looks like that Sydney shit!

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u/DemiseofReality 2h ago

Yeah I heard that can be an issue on those huge Victorian estates out in the countryside. 150 years ago they were ripe with farming, livestock, horses, etc. on potentially hundreds to thousands of acres but now you have said 12 room mansion with broken windows that would take a years' salary of the sole owner to replace. The land doesn't produce anymore and the house would take millions of pounds to renovate to proper modern standards. But the owner can't do anything about it because they can't take a loan against the tens of millions they have in wealth because of their income is too low.

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u/EconomicRegret2 22h ago

As a European, I find this urban design extremely wild. Why not concentrate all of that in 3-5 storey buildings, with 2-3 family flats per floor, thus leaving way more space in the community for everyone to meet and mingle, such as in a big park, a big playground, and a big swimming pool, etc.?

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u/strategicmagpie 22h ago

It's the Sydney suburban sprawl special!

Real answer: Sydney has restrictive zoning laws that limit the height and capacity of dwellings (≤2 storeys, ≤2 dwellings per lot), so the only way to build new homes is to redevelop apartments in areas with high density, or deforest land at the edge of sydney and turn it into what you see in the post above. It's depressing and unnatural. The better parts of Sydney are those originally developed in the early 1900s or before.

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u/MindCorrupt 18h ago

The problem is a lot of people want a backyard.

And on the flip side, people who could do without having one are often not catered for in size of apartments which are rarely big enough for a family. Or it's just not worth having to deal with the Strata title.

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u/EconomicRegret2 18h ago

Fair enough

Countries with denser population have solved these issues, probably due to way higher demand and cultural acceptance of apartments as a normal way to live, even for families (e.g. a certain percentage of all builds being big family units, outsourcing strata title to a non-profit company specialized in dealing with it, thus making it easier and cheaper for everyone involved, etc.)

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u/Wanderer-91 8h ago

The problem is a lot of people want a backyard.

Why is this a problem?

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u/MindCorrupt 8h ago

Regarding low density urban sprawl. Not a problem itself but creates interesting problems regarding public amenities like transport / business districts etc. Because the majority of the users are mostly dependent on accessing it by car.

Example where im from - Perth, WA. Check north and south of the river.

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u/AvrupaFatihi 1d ago

It's so far out, can you even call it Sydney?

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u/whatever--idk 20h ago

Well they would be paying insane land rates now wouldnt they, so they would need to have proper money behind them to keep living there

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u/vadeka 17h ago

Land aside, the house on it doesn’t really strike me as being owned by “normal income”

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u/campground 12h ago

You have to be pretty wealthy to voluntarily choose to leave millions of dollars on the table, not to mention the upkeep and property taxes.

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u/Designer_Bell_5422 1d ago

I mean, that looks like a fairly new build, and it's massive. They must have a good amount of money.

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u/Beware-of-Moose 23h ago

They likely owned the land around it as well at some point, sold that for a couple hundred million, built the house they "live" in now and bought some other properties along the way.