This is not unheard of in the US as well. When you go into deteriorated urban neighborhoods, one of the reasons for the many vacant homes is that the accumulat

This is not unheard of in the US as well. When you go into deteriorated urban neighborhoods, one of the reasons for the many vacant homes is that the accumulated property taxes on a particular home are far more that the value of the home. If you sell the home, the taxes go with it, so a new owner would have to pay those accumulated back taxes. In my state, after three years of unpaid property taxes, the property can be auctioned, but that assumes there is someone who is willing to pay for it, and then there is a period where the original owner can refund the buyer and take possession of property again. That makes it a long and fraught process to buy one of these auctioned properties. So instead, they negotiate with the property owner to have them donate the property in return for forgiveness of the back taxes. This happened with a number of neighborhoods in Philadelphia, when I lived there. After the city took possession of the property, they would then setup a neighborhood group to give or sell the properties to people or businesses that they thought would help "gentrify" the neighborhood. The people requesting properties would fill out an application detailing how they would use the property, and the neighborhood council would select "deserving" applications (I put that in scare quotes because the process would sometimes be corrupted by people favoring friends.) I knew someone on one of these councils, and considered applying for a home, but decided I wasn't that committed to living there, and a year later moved west.