| > the land What about people who owned a flat? Have they got compensations restoring entire value? AFAIK no in general. Or even a noticeable part of original value? One of my friends recently got compensation (after 60 years old legal battle initiated by person who died before it completed). But that was for property that survived WWII and got confiscated after it. > And descendants of the original owners get compensated In other words value of original property went down (especially given opportunity cost). And they were quite lucky, in similar cases many lost without recourse. But overall I agree with the main point: real estate is one of best stores of value, some of it can survive even that. But describing it as never, ever loosing value is not true - in many cases it lost part or all value, permanently, without compensation. |
But there is another asset class beside real estate - arable land. People see gold as store of value which is false to some degree - gold was historically more of mean of exchange (of landed wealth) while the universal asset class paying regular dividends since Roman Empire until Industrial Revolution was arable land. And to a degree still is but since Industrial Revolution there are many alternative assets available that provide better/competitive returns (like government bonds)
Of course land could also be taken away but that happens very rarely (Communist revolutions in Russia, China, Central Europe). Historically land-owning class is stable. For example in largest wealth grabs in European history (Burgundians in France, Vandals in North Africa and best of all Norman conquest of Britain) there was generally sharing and mixing between old and new land-owners.