We left the train depot and visited a few more villages. When we left one of them, I gave my friend a link to an article by the largest newspaper in the country. A link to the article in Finnish is here, but I will tell in short what it was about.
Once upon a time in a small village far from everything was a sawmill. In the 1960’s it grew rapidly, but the infrastructure of the village didn’t. As a result there was a constant lack of apartments.
That’s why in the early 1970’s the sawmill owners arranged to build six blocks of flats to the remote village, three to the centre and three to the outskirts of it. They were built cheaply and the apartments weren’t that big, but for the company and its needs they were important.
In 1979 the sawmill was destroyed by fire and was rebuilt elsewhere. The village now had six brand new blocks of flats, which were pretty much useless. People started moving away.
The houses were idle for almost 15 years, before Kurdish asylum seekers were given apartments there. But they soon noticed that the village had no future and left for greener pastures, too.
Two of the three houses on the outskirts of the village were emptied and the inhabitants moved to the largest house. The three houses were sold to a property investor in the late 1990’s and the two empty houses were demolished. One house in the village centre has been demolished during the past decade, but that’s a different story.
The property investor sold the remaining house in a package deal of four houses to another investor. By then the inhabitans were people with a lot of social problems and alchoholism and most of them had their rent paid by the municipality. The price of this house was 15 000 euros. The buyer immediately put it up for sale because he saw no future for it due to its bad reputation.
The house was sold several times during the following few months the price going up by every sale until it reached almost 250 000 euros. It was then owned by a car dealer, who had connections to organized crime. He arranged a notorius debt collector to help evict the inhabitants and started selling the apartments.
The buyers were penniless people, who had debts to the car dealer. Apparently he forced some of the people to buy the apartments and several of the buyers were given loans from the same bank where he had loaned the money to buy the house. One of the apartments was registered to a four year old child.
The National Bureau of Investigation started investigating the house in 2007. The car dealer was convicted in 2016, but before that he was declared bankrupt. The house was sold to another company with less than 20 euros. The new owner was a company with two owners, the other one of which was a convicted murderer. He in turn had a joint venture with the abovementioned debt collector. In the most recent turn of events a charity aimed at supporting poor families claimed to be housing them in the building. The spokesperson of the charity has connections to the owning company.
The house has been empty for 15 years and is probably damaged beyond repair. Nobody wants it.
“I want to see this place”, my friend said when she had finished reading the article.
“And here it is”, I said, as I had estimated the time she needed for reading perfectly.
We got this close, but didn’t take a closer look. The reason can be seen in the picture next to the mailboxes. It’s a bike, which wasn’t there in the photos in the article. We suspected that someone was inside, and given the fact that the house had been owned by organized criminals for a long time, it was just a no go.
“…given the fact that the house had been owned by organized criminals for a long time, it was just a no go.”
This didn’t stop me in my younger years. I was perhaps more naïve, reckless, and wild then.