Land Poor

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

In both Real Life and fiction, it can often cost a small fortune just to barely maintain a high-value property, whether a small business, Big Fancy House, an exotic or custom vehicle, or an elegant estate with acres of gardens, farmland or pristine wilderness. For those with Fiction 500, this is not an issue. For this character, however, his lifestyle suggests that he is barely able to afford to keep the property. The property takes up a large portion of the character's time and money, and he is generally forced to live a very modest lifestyle otherwise.

Compare Down on the Farm. Contrast Fiction 500.

There are several different types, each one tending to be most associated with a geographic area:

  • European (Impoverished Patrician): the character feels that they have an obligation to all of their ancestors and descendants to keep the family estates in order, but no longer has the actual money-generating capacity to keep it going. Their efforts to earn enough to keep the property pristine while paying the property taxes make excellent plot fodder, whether Played for Drama or Played for Laughs. In some cases, the estate may have been entailed making it impossible to sell even if the character wants to.
  • 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. 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 Impoverished Patrician, keeping traditions alive and not selling out to the villainous developer, who is hoping Land Poor characters will default on their mortgages.
  • Japanese: In modern Japan, because land is 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 Artifact of Doom, etc., without being unreasonably wealthy.
Examples of Land Poor include:

European Style

  • The other wiki's 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 English Civil War (1641–51) that hasn't been repaired yet.
  • Part of the plot of the movie 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."
  • The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck 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.
  • Lady Saint Edmund from Candleshoe.
  • A significant portion of the series Monarch of the Glen dealt with the financial difficulties of the aptly-named Glenbogle estate.
  • Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind is an American example of a European-style Impoverished Patrician.
  • The titular Darnaway family in the Father Brown short story The Doom of the Darnaways are living in the few inhabitable rooms still left in their crumbling mansion.
  • In The Alduous Lexicon, 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.
  • Lady Ludlow in the 2007 TV adaptation of 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 Midsomer Murders revolves around this, with the landowners desperate to keep their land (though they're not always the murderers...)
  • The 1967 film Fitzwilly is about an elderly heiress who is unaware she is Land Poor, and her devoted but larcenous staff who commit all manner of crimes in order to keep her in the lifestyle to which she is accustomed.
  • Part of the plot of Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1944) is that the Musgraves are land poor, but the killer has discovered a document which gives them wealth.
  • Vorkosigan Saga: The style is like European aristocracy, Barrayar being Russia Recycled in Space. The Vorkosigans themselves are a high status family and never poor however they are sometimes a bit stretched. For one thing several wars took place on their district for another most of their family business was state service and they often couldn't attend to their own properly. Of late though they have had enough surplus both for redecoration of their residence and patricianist largesse for their district inhabitants. Other Vor are worse off. Some lost revenue through being mean to their renters. One is presented who is a Jerk with a Heart of Gold: he is a bit miserly but the real reason for that is because he is not about to spend rent on excess when his district is hard up to squeeze it out. This Count is more unlucky then anything else-his family chose the losing side on every power struggle in the past and got shafted appropriately long before he came into his birthright.

American Style

Film

Literature

  • In Mildred D. Taylor's YA novel Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry 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. (Truth in Television for the era, obviously—after Reconstruction, the sharecropping/tenant farming system that set it was in some ways practically indistinguishable from slavery.)

Live-Action TV

  • To the Manor Born is a Britcom about the relationship between a downwardly mobile noblewoman and the nouveau-riche businessman who bought her family estate.
  • Newhart: Dick Loudon buys a New England Inn and fixes it up. He is a subversion because the Inn is usually shown as working well and Dick becomes something of a power in the town despite being a foreigner (this is apparently one of those towns where "foreigner" means "moved in less then twenty years ago"). But earlier episodes show some difficulty in getting going including having to get the Inn working by personal manual labor rather then hiring a staff.

Western Animation

  • In King of the Hill 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.

Japanese style

Anime and Manga

  • Kagome's family in Inuyasha is obviously not unusually wealthy, but they own a house with sheds, a shrine, a well, and a huge tree in the backyard - in downtown Tokyo.
    • Played straight in that her family has been the shrine's caretakers for centuries - the house is just so that they don't have to live in the shrine itself (which might be disrespectful); the sheds appear to be mostly devoted to things used for the shrine's upkeep and specific ceremonies. As for it being located in downtown Tokyo, it's generally implied (and possibly explicitly stated at some points) that the city grew up around the shrine - it wasn't just built there overnight or anything. The well and the tree were included in the land set aside for the shrine because of superstition and people recalling them as being associated. It's also implied that a lot of the money the family brings in comes from the gift shop, plus whatever Kagome's mom might do for a living. Fanon holds that the family lives fairly comfortably because of the shrine's popularity as a tourist destination as well as a site for wedding ceremonies.
  • In Tenchi Muyo!, 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 Unwanted Harem includes a Super Villain, two princesses, the granddaughter 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 Unwanted Harem 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.
    • On the other hand, it was never shown that they are indeed poor — at most it was used for a couple of offhand jokes about the Friends Rent Control. Plus, in the OVA canon Nobuyuki and Tenchi originally lived in their relatively modest house in the city, while Katsuhito lived in his shrine in the countryside. After their house in the city was destroyed by the Unwanted Harem's wacky antics, Nobuyuki rebuilt it on the shrine grounds in an enlarged form. And, again, all this was in Okayama, where the property values are significantly lower than in Tokyo.
  • The Tendos in Ranma ½ also held a relatively large home in Tokyo, despite having very little means of support (shown that they rent out the dojo and are called to deal with things like supernatural creatures). Depending on fanon, the money comes from (eternally off-screen) students of the dojo, or Nabiki funds it with her money-making schemes. Or in other cases, some... other ways of income.
    • 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.
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