5 Abandoned Homes of the Rich and Famous

Given the massive lack of housing that the world is struggling with, seeing the many unoccupied pied-a-terres of the world’s obnoxiously rich is even more bile-inducing. It’s enough to make you cut a bump key and read up on squatters rights. At least, though, those annoying, empty apartments and homes are occupied for a couple days a year. Worse are massive, no-expense-spared mansions that, thanks to one reason or another, are completed and then entirely abandoned. At first, you might revel in how much money they wasted, until you remember that all that money is now just sunk into a literal rotting pit.

Here are five highly expensive homes that are now completely abandoned…

5 Hamilton Palace (1985)

Nicholas van Hessen, nee Nicholas van Hoogstraten, is a ruthless British businessman. I don’t just mean that in the emotional way, either. He was suspected, for example, of having a business rival murdered. It’s no surprise that someone who took such a medieval approach to negotiation would want a palace built to match, and the 40 million pound Hamilton Palace fit the bill. Despite the price tag, and the clear amount of money that’s already gone into the project, it was never finished and never occupied.

4 King Fahd’ s Summer Home

If you want to flex on the Western world, you could do what King Fahd of Saudi Arabia did, and build a massive summer home that’s a replica of the White House. Located in Marbella, Spain, the cost is rumored to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, an obscene amount for anyone not worth $25 billion themselves. Fahd died in 2005, and his not-so-quaint summer getaway was left to succumb to nature. It’s probably now filled with little mice and bugs who have no idea how good they have it.

3 Billy Hull’ s Weird Bachelor Pad

Billy Hull was a Tennessee go-go club king with a clear admiration for the lifestyle of Hugh Hefner. With a tidy sum of money provided by both his successful nightlife ventures and possibly troves of hidden bootlegging money from his grandma, he set out to construct his own, Southeastern grotto. With such a sterling set of financial pursuits, you may be hugely surprised to find out that, while in jail for a murder-for-hire charge he was later acquitted of, he also got in trouble for tax evasion. The Tennessee party pad is now empty, rotting and probably at least 10 percent grosser than it was while he was living there.

2 The Bamboo Palace

You can make all the economical excuses for wasteful billionaires you want, the owner of the next place is one you probably don’t want to go to bat for, on account of him being a literal despot. The “Bamboo Palace” belonged to Mobutu Sese Seko, who took control of the Democratic Republic of Congo after deposing and executing Patrice Lumumba with the help of the United States and Belgium. He built this palace in his hometown, but would later be unable to continue living there, on account of being exiled to Morocco, where he would later die. The palace remains, and locals charge $20 admission to go in and have a gander.

1 The Mansion of Genshiro Kawamoto

You’d think, regardless of bankroll, making the mistake of building a mansion that nobody ended up living in would be something a shrewd businessman would learn from. Which makes Japanese businessman Genshiro Kawamato’s penchant for building abandoned mansions even stranger. Across the world, he would buy up land, build expensive mansions and then simply let them decay. Why exactly he would do this is still not totally clear, though given that he's been convicted of tax evasion, my guess would be that these homes are serving as not much more than gaudy, public mattresses filled with cash.