[pintxo]

This style of incremental building seems to be still in existence in Southern Europe.

It‘s not uncommon to see unfinished concrete structures. Basically the raw skeleton often with exposed rebar at the top or sides, indicating future work.

They may stay in this state for years. As apparently everything is paid in cash and so building only advances whenever the owners have enough at hand.

[oxfordmale]

In Spain it also related to planning permission. Once the building work has finished, you need to have the planning permission paper work in order. Therefore they often leave one small room unfinished (exposed on the outside wall) to claim work is still in progress.

[alistairSH]

I read something similar but in Egypt. Leaving the home unfinished avoided either taxes or planning paperwork or both.

[daydream]

It also lets the eventual buyer do a lot of customization. Buy a concrete shell, complete with the finishings you want.

[happy_path]

I have lived all my life in Spain and that's not my experience. Maybe in some small rural towns you can (illegally) keep an unfinished work for years, as long as nobody notices.

However, that is absolutely not true for most Spanish cities.

[oxfordmale]

Maybe not in major cities, however, definitely applicable to a medium sized town in Catalunya.

[gkop]

I saw a good documentary on shell construction in South America as a means to improve access to home ownership, as well as to allow homeowners to significantly customize the homes over time. We don’t see this much in the US but it makes sense to me.

[bluGill]

When you are cheap labor you will have big problems getting ahead because of rent. So as soon as you save enough to buy land you do (between inflation and government revolutions banks are not useful, you have better odds your land will be recognized). Until you can afford to get a minimal shelter room on the land though you are renting while owning useless land. Once you have shelter everything that went to rent before can be put into more rooms.

It is a very different world from the ones most of us live in.

[Veen]

I once stayed in an AirBNB in Crete where the lower floors of the building were occupied and the upper floors hadn't been built. If you carried on up the stairs past our apartment, you ended up at what looked like an building site with concrete floors and exposed steel beams. I didn't see any building work happening while I was there.

[bombcar]

It’s very common in Mexico.