History Main / LandPoor

* ''Series/{{Ghosts}}'' begins with an average couple inheriting a sprawling but decrepit stately mansion, which later turns out to be haunted. A running plotline is them trying to scrape together the money to refurbish the place.

* ''Comicbook/TheLifeAndTimesOfScroogeMcDuck'' deals with the [=McDuck=] family becoming too poor to maintain property of Castle [=McDuck=] at one point, although their ancestors were originally driven away by a supposedly ghostly hound. This ends up delaying Scrooge becoming rich, as right after he legally became the owner of the incredibly rich Anaconda Copper Mine he's forced to sell it back to the previous owner to have the money to pay the back taxes, and in later years he uses most of what he earns from subsequent adventures to pay the new taxes and allow his family to live there until he arrives in Klondike and at White Agony Creek finds enough gold to become millionaire even with that constant expense.

* An episode of ''Series/LawAndOrder'' deals with an apartment building on the Upper East Side with a fancy boutique at the bottom, co-owned by a brother and sister whose father picked it up for next to nothing in UsefulNotes/TheGreatDepression. However, they couldn't derive anywhere enough income to even maintain it because all the tenants were long-term residents with rent control. The sister wanted to sell the property for millions, and drove away all the tenants back in UsefulNotes/TheSeventies to make it a more attractive purchase, but one stubbornly refused to leave and her brother also didn't want to sell, as he has a near-religious connection to the building and is pathetically in love with the holdout tenant. The murder of the tenant after decades of psychological warfare is what sets off the story.

* In ''Series/ModernFamily'', Cam talks Mitchell into buying the second floor apartment of the duplex they live in so they can rent it out as a form of income. As soon as they do, Cam's turbulent sister Pam comes to town after breaking up with her fiance and ends up living there rent free for months, and Mitchell loses his job outting them in financial straits.

* ''Literature/PoirotInvestigates'': The short story "The Adventure of the Western Star" finds Poirot at a castle, investigating the theft of a diamond during a film shoot. Lord Yardley, who owns the castle, admits that he's flat broke which is why he's letting a bunch of gauche Hollywood people make a movie on his property.

* An African-American variant crops up in ''Series/EverybodyHatesChris''. Although the family are [[PerpetualPoverty perpetually short on cash]], they own their home and the apartment above, giving them a valuable asset and a level of stability that most black people didn't have at the time (or now).
* In ''Series/ModernFamily'', Cam talks Mitchell into buying the second floor apartment of the duplex they live in so they can rent it out as a form of income. As soon as they do, Cam's turbulent sister Pam comes to town after breaking up with her fiance and ends up living their rent free for months, and Mitchell loses his job.

* An African-American variant crops up in ''Series/EverybodyHatesChris''. Although the family are [[PerpetualPoverty perpetually short on cash]], they own their home and the apartment above, giving them a valuable asset and a level of stability that most black people didn;t have at the time (or now).

* The other wiki's [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stately_home stately home]] article touches on the subject of the trope.
-->"The costs of running a stately home are legendarily high. Many owners rent out their homes for use as film and television sets as a means of extra income, thus many of them are familiar sights to people who have never visited them in person. The grounds often contain other tourist attractions, such as safari parks, funfairs or museums."
* The reality TV series ''The F*** ing Fulfords'' is ''all'' about this trope. The house in question still has "war damage" from the UsefulNotes/EnglishCivilWar (1641-51) that hasn't been repaired yet.
* Part of the plot of the movie ''[[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053877/ The Grass Is Greener]]'' (1960) with Robert Mitchum and Cary Grant. Part of the synopsis: "Victor and Hillary are down on their luck to the point that they allow tourists to take guided tours of their castle."

* This is the situation of several noble houses in ''Literature/ASongOfIceAndFire'', who live in castles built back in the Age of Heroes but who no longer have the money to maintain them. Most were ruined by taking the wrong side in a war or were driven into the ground by an idiot lord. Of note are the eight families who have held the cursed money sink Harrenhal, all of whom have become this except for the current owner who received it within the last two years.
* A significant portion of the series ''Series/MonarchOfTheGlen'' dealt with the financial difficulties of the [[MeaningfulName aptly-named]] Glenbogle estate.
* Audrey fforbes-Hamilton from ''Series/ToTheManorBorn'' actually sells the manor her family has held for over 400 years because the cost of maintenance, plus her husband's debts, make keeping it impossible. [[spoiler:She gets it back in the end.]]

* The titular Darnaway family in the ''Literature/FatherBrown'' short story "The Doom of the Darnaways" are living in the few inhabitable rooms still left in their crumbling mansion.
* In Literature/TheAldousLexicon, the Underwood family, which most of the characters are in, is like this in some of the parallel universes (in others they have managed to get rich again). At one stage the house was sold, then bought by the grandson of the woman who sold it years later. The poorer Underwoods really aren't managing to maintain the house.
* ''Film/GlobalHeresy'': Lord and Lady Foxley need to rent out their mansion just to be able to afford to pay part of the debt on it and are desperate enough for money that they are willing to pose as their own servants for the guests.

* Lady Ludlow in ''Series/{{Cranford}}''. She resists the railway being brought through her grounds because she wants to hand the estate down intact to her son Septimus, and protect the livelihoods of the estate workers. She mortgages the estate against the wishes of steward Edmund Carter.
* At least one episode of ''Series/MidsomerMurders'' revolves around this, with the landowners desperate to keep their land (though they're not always the murderers...)

* ''Series/DowntonAbbey''; The Crawleys were short of money before Robert married a wealthy American, despite owning a large stately home and most of the nearby village. [[spoiler: When Robert loses Cora's fortune in series 3, they are faced with the prospect of selling the house (and moving into a ''smaller stately home they also own''); ''Matthew'' rescues them with an [[UnexpectedInheritance unexpected windfall]] -- one so improbable that they [[LampshadeHanging lampshade]] the hell out of it -- driving much of the upstairs tension of the latter half of that series.]]

* ''Film/CrimsonPeak'' has [[ImpoverishedPatrician Thomas and Lucille Sharpe]], who live in a crumbling mansion and have completely run out of money in their quest to make the estate profitable.

* Creator/MarvelComics' [[ComicBook/TheAvengers Black Knight]] runs into this issue; he inherits his British family's ancestral castle, but since he was a former run-of-the-mill American physicist before doing so (i.e. not Tony Stark or Reed Richards caliber), he doesn't really make enough money to keep up with the property costs. This then gets worse [[ItMakesSenseInContext when he's turned into a statue for a lengthy period of time]], to the point where his friend Victoria Bentley who actually ''is'' wealthy and lives nearby, has to use some of her wealth to help him out. When she ends up being killed down the line, the Black Knight finally turns the castle into a museum, which presumably finally solves the whole finances matter.
* Creator/AgathaChristie short story "[[Literature/PoirotInvestigates The Adventure of the Western Star]]" finds Poirot at a castle, investigating the theft of a diamond during a film shoot. Lord Yardley, who owns the castle, admits that he's flat broke which is why he's letting a bunch of gauche Hollywood people make a movie on his property.
* The Everglots in ''WesternAnimation/CorpseBride'' describe themselves as "land rich bankrupt aristocracy." They fit the European version of this trope to a T.
* TruthInTelevision: cross between European and Russian examples in modern UsefulNotes/{{Romania}}. During the last 10 years of [[TheEighties the Communist era]], a large percent of the population migrated from countryside to industrial (now ghost-) towns and left behind country houses, while the property bubble [[TurnOfTheMillennium of the 2000s]] drove the prices of major city real estate to the sky, while few if any natives had anything to do with farmland. So at this moment land in the countryside is quite literally [[{{Pun}} dirt]]-cheap and a lot of otherwise poor people own significant acres of land. As a side effect, when natives worked well-paid jobs in Western Europe, they could raise huge, kitschy and mansion-like houses at home with only a few thousands of dollars to boot.[[note]]The hardest thing was fitting them with modern comforts if there was no public network of gas, water or even ''electricity'' around.[[/note]]
* TruthInTelevision: Many churches are this way, saved only by the fact that they don't have to pay property taxes in many countries. They take in enough in tithes and offerings to pay for a pastor, a cleaning person, and enough for a few programs (soup kitchen, homeless shelter, etc...) but little more.
** In a way, even the Catholic Church is this way. They are the third largest non-governmental landowner in the world, holding 277,000 square miles (slightly larger than Morocco, the 39th largest country in the world), as well as a total worth measured in the billions of dollars. But most of their holdings in held in trust by local dioceses and much of their other wealth is tied up in historical documents, art pieces, and other heirlooms probably more properly classified as "priceless". Not only that, but it has to take care of all of those holdings, some of which require highly specialized (and therefore highly expensive and difficult to obtain) care.

* In ''Sea Lord'' John Rossendale has inherited the title of Earl of Stowey after his older brother committed suicide. The inheritance consists of the Stowey Manor and a very large tax debt. The family hopes to pay off the debt by selling a Van Gogh painting they own but it disappears under mysterious circumstances. Fed up with the situation and unwilling to sacrifice the rest of his life to care for a piece of land, John leaves England and sails the world for the next four years. When his mother dies, he finally returns home and tries to deal with the mess once and for all.
* Creator/NoelCoward tackled the topic in ''The Stately Homes of England''.
--> The stately homes of England, how beautiful they stand
--> To prove the upper classes maintain the upper hand
--> Though the fact that they have to be rebuilt
--> And frequently mortgaged to the hilt
--> Is inclined to take the gilt
--> Off the gingerbread and certainly damps the fun
--> Of the eldest son
--> Still we won't be beaten, we'll scrimp and scrape and save
--> The playing fields of Eton have made us frightfully brave
--> And although the Van Dycks have to go and we've pawned the Bechstein Grand
--> We'll stand by the stately homes of England
* VideoGame/GabrielKnight: The Ritter family is a textbook example. Wolfgang Ritter, the last of the line, is severely in arrears on property tax on Schloss Ritter, and can only afford to actually use about five rooms in the immense castle. Gerde mentions that Wolfgang's pride is partly to blame; he could have made at least some money by holding tours or leasing it to film productions, but Wolfgang preferred to let the castle slide into ruins to allowing outsiders to romp around his ancestral home, [[spoiler: which, considering the importance of the castle, the artifacts there and the Schattenjäger line and rituals, might not have been a bad call.]] After the events of the first game [[spoiler: Gabriel inherits the castle from his uncle Wolfgang, and uses the money from his book and what he stole from the Voodoo Cartel to pay the back taxes and begin repairs and restoration.]]
* In ''Film/GreystokeTheLegendOfTarzanLordOfTheApes'', they titular character's grandfather describes how neighboring Lords have had to sell off their land in bits and pieces, while he has refused to do so.
* ''Film/TheVIPs'': A duchess is moving to Florida and taking a job at a resort, because she is unable to afford the old family mansion anymore.
* A regular trope in the writings of Creator/PGWodehouse. A typical example is Bertie Wooster's pal "Chuffy" Chuffnel in ''Literature/ThankYouJeeves'', who is trying to sell his ancestral pile and thus have money to marry his American beloved Pauline Stoker.

* In ''Film/TheMoneyPit'', the protagonists buy a BigFancyHouse for a huge discount -- and the repairs become a [[http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/5826/herculean.html HerculeanTask]].

* Helen Hayes plays this role in ''Film/HerbieRidesAgain''.
* In ''Film/SpacedInvaders'', the trope is [[PlayedForLaughs played]] [[SoBadItsGood so straight it's funny]].
* In Mildred D. Taylor's YA novel ''Literature/RollOfThunderHearMyCry'' and its sequels, which are set in Mississippi during the Depression, the fact that the black Logan family owns its own land gives them relative freedom and dignity compared to the other black families in the area, who are all sharecroppers and thus totally beholden to the people whose land they live on and farm. (TruthInTelevision for the era, obviously -- after Reconstruction, the sharecropping/tenant farming system that set it was in some ways practically indistinguishable from slavery.)
* Another African-American variant crops up in ''Series/EverybodyHatesChris''. Although the family are perpetually short on cash, they own their home and the apartment above, giving them a valuable asset and a level of stability that most black people didn;t have at the time (or now).
* In ''WesternAnimation/KingOfTheHill'' its revealed that Bill's family is a land poor family with a European touch to it, they used to be wealthy plantation owners, but modern times have reduced their income to near nothing causing the family to live alone in a large manor with no servants and likely a rising debt.
* In Creator/MichaelConnelly's book ''Literature/TheLincolnLawyer'', it's revealed that Mickey Haller bought his home ignoring maintenance costs. He believes bail bondsman Fernando Valenzuela wouldn't accept it as collateral for a five-thousand-dollar debt.
* ''Film/MagnificentObsession'': The Phillips family seems to be wealthy, owning a huge house on the shore of Lake Tahoe, as well as a hospital. Yet when Dr. Phillips dies his wife Helen is unpleasantly surprised to find out that the rather excessively generous Dr. Phillips gave away literally all of their money, leaving Helen broke.
* TruthInTelevision The fate of James Madison's Montpelier estate. The plantation switched from tobacco to wheat as a cash crop since the former depleted the soil too much. However, when the switch was made wheat grown in the newly opened Midwestern states began flooding the market. The result was that Dolly was forced to sell the estate after James' death and move to Washington, DC.

* In the ComicBook/DisneyDucksComicUniverse, when Duckburg was a small village the Coot Kin used to own most if not all the land around it. This started to change when Casey Coot entered the Klondike Gold Rush but failed to get rich, and to get money to go back home he sold Killmule Hill to a fellow prospector who had instead become a millionaire-Scrooge [=McDuck=], who'd later move to Duckburg, build the Money Bin on the hill (renamed Killmotor Hill), and build most of the Coot lands to turn Duckburg into a metropolis. Grandma Duck, the eldest living descendant of the Coots, still own a farm with largish lands.

** This is only true for certain versions. The OVA version gives no mention to this trope, nor do any of the girls work.

* The Tendos in ''Manga/RanmaOneHalf'' also held a relatively large home in Tokyo, despite having very little means of support (they rent out the dojo and are called to deal with things like supernatural creatures). Downplayed as their dojo is in Nerima, which is a border district and was mainly farmland in the past. Up to this day it still has the largest proportion of farmland among all of Tokyo's special wards, and thus the property value isn't on the general Tokyo level. So the large estates aren't all that unusual for the neighborhood, even if it's decidedly middle-class.
* In ''Manga/AhMyGoddess'', Keiichi is an ordinary college student who owns an old Buddhist temple. This is a result of Belldandy's magic convincing the monk who previously occupied the place to move on and leave it to them; her magic also renovated the run-down place.
* Example from outside Japan: in ''Literature/TheSilkworm'', the missing novelist Owen Quine is not particularly well off, but he inherited a half-share of a large London house in the days when they were much, much cheaper. The co-owner, Quine's bitter rival, refuses to sell, even though the house is empty. Ownership of the house has so little impact on the Quines' lives that Quine's wife doesn't even think to tell Cormoran Strike about it at first, but it becomes a major plot point because it's a perfect place to hide.

* TruthInTelevision: cross between European and Russian examples in modern UsefulNotes/{{Romania}}. During the last 10 years of [[TheEighties the Communist era]], a large percent of the population migrated from countryside to industrial (now ghost-) towns and left behind country houses, while the property bubble [[TurnOfTheMillennium of the 2000s]] drove the prices of major city real estate to the sky, while few if any natives had anything to do with farmland. So at this moment land in the countryside is quite literally [[IncrediblyLamePun dirt]]-cheap and a lot of otherwise poor people own significant acres of land. As a side effect, when natives worked well-paid jobs in Western Europe, they could raise huge, kitschy and mansion-like houses at home with only a few thousands of dollars to boot.[[note]]The hardest thing was fitting them with modern comforts if there was no public network of gas, water or even ''electricity'' around.[[/note]]

* TruthInTelevision: There used to be a rumor that one of the colleges of the University of Cambridge owned a large amount of land but was perpetually bankrupt, because it had been unwise enough to enter into a great number of 99 year leases in 1910, when real estate was a quite a bit cheaper and money was worth a great deal more. As a result, the college would regularly get checks for five pounds, ten pounds or other ridiculously low amounts from the lucky leaseholders of properties that should have been paying "ground rents" of thousands of times higher than that. [[note]] Presumably, all these 99 year leases would eventually expire, if indeed they ever existed, and the college would re-negotiate the leases at market rates. But until that time? Sucks to be them.[[/note]]

* Japanese: Land in modern Japan is scarce and astronomically expensive. Few people own substantial real estate, and many who do received the property through inheritance, and would not be able to afford to buy it now. Unlike Western media, in Anime, being Land Poor is less often a critical plot element, but rather used to give a character a place to be alone, find a long-lost MacGuffin or ArtifactOfDoom, etc., without being unreasonably wealthy.

* American: Land could be purchased very cheaply as recently as within living memory, and land far away from big cities still can be purchased for far less than other parts of the world. As a result, lots of people gained land without having money to buy fancy manufactured goods, and having to pay property taxes to boot. As time went on, even though theoretically they had more wealth, farmers tended to became more economically pinched compared to city dwellers, since their income depended on keeping their wealth tied up maintaining the farmland. In fiction, the character is often portrayed as an uncultured counterpart to the ImpoverishedPatrician, keeping traditions alive and not selling out to the villainous developer, who is hoping LandPoor characters will default on their mortgages. It's also PlayedForDrama in places like a DyingTown where the characters have no economic prospects since the local factory relocated overseas, and can't sell their land and move elsewhere since no one ''wants'' the land.
* Japanese: Land in modern Japan is scarce and astronomically expensive. Few people own substantial real estate, and many who do received the property through inheritance, and would not be able to afford to buy it now. Unlike western media, in Anime, being LandPoor is less often a critical plot element, but rather used to give a character a place to be alone, find a long-lost MacGuffin or ArtifactOfDoom, etc., without being unreasonably wealthy.

* Creatore/MarvelComics' [[ComicBook/TheAvengers Black Knight]] runs into this issue; he inherits his British family's ancestral castle, but since he was a former run-of-the-mill American physicist before doing so (i.e. not Tony Stark or Reed Richards caliber), he doesn't really make enough money to keep up with the property costs. This then gets worse [[ItMakesSenseInContext when he's turned into a statue for a lengthy period of time]], to the point where his friend Victoria Bentley who actually ''is'' wealthy and lives nearby, has to use some of her wealth to help him out. When she ends up being killed down the line, the Black Knight finally turns the castle into a museum, which presumably finally solves the whole finances matter.

* ''Series/ToTheManorBorn'' is a BritCom about the relationship between a downwardly mobile noblewoman and the nouveau-riche businessman who bought her family estate.

* ''Comicbook/TheLifeAndTimesOfScroogeMcDuck'' deals with the [=McDuck=] family becoming too poor to maintain Castle [=McDuck=] at one point, although their ancestors were originally driven away by a supposedly ghostly hound.

* ''Literature/TheHouseOfTheSpirits'' is about the Tueba family, the rich landowners in Chile. Esteban Tueba, the partiarch of the family, spends his life first making fortune as a plantationer, then fighting for his land, then getting large part of it nationalised without compensation, ''then'' trying to get it back once military junta rises to power. By the end of the book, the Tres Marías is abandoned, with all it's former land laying fallow and Esteban and Blanca, his daughter, visiting the ruins out of sentiment, no longer owning the place.

* The Sparrow Clan of ''TabletopRPG/LegendOfTheFiveRings'' is in an odd position -- despite being a minor Clan, they own some of the richest and most fertile land in all of Rokugan. And, due to a rather extraordinary political debacle involving a [[NoodleIncident poorly received poem]], they are not allowed to farm ''any'' of it, by Imperial edict.

* In ''Anime/TenchiMuyo'', Tenchi's family owns property that apparently includes a shrine, carrot farm, lake, large wilderness areas, and a Big Fancy House. His father is a professor of architecture, and his UnwantedHarem includes a SuperVillain, two princesses, the grandaughter of the chief of the galaxy police, and a super-scientist. Despite this, his family can barely afford to send him to college, and his UnwantedHarem can barely afford to eat even working multiple jobs. The one time he asked one of the princesses to ask her dad for some money, ''he sent enough gold to destabilize the Earth's economy'', which, of course, they had to send back for fear of runaway inflation.

* The Apple family in ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic'' draw on many archetypical American Southern traits, including this one. While they're respected by most of Ponyville for their apple farming and have played important roles in local history (matriarch Granny Smith was present for Ponyville's founding), they live modestly (Applejack attends the Grand Galloping Gala to raise funds for improvement around Sweet Apple Acres; Apple Bloom is looked down upon by her wealthier classmates), and they struggle to compete with modern apple-farming technology, such as that peddled by the Flim-Flam brothers.