A tax deduction for burning your house down?

[Pottapaug1938]

Here's an interesting article on so-called "live burns". These involve a homeowner who wants to have an old house demolished so that a new one can be built; and rather than pay to have the old house demolished, the local fire departments (and, sometimes, the police departments as well) are invited to use the house for practicing things like extinguishing fires, drug searches and the like). Some people try to claim a tax deduction for this, which prompted the following article:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33023329/ns/us_news-life/

I found this article interesting because, earlier this year, the bed-and-breakfast hotel once run by my grandparents in Wells, Maine, where my parents met, was used for this sort of thing (but not for a live burn, due to the density of the neighborhood). The fire and police departments got some excellent practice in, on the old place, without the need to worry about repairing damage.

[Judge Roy Bean]

A property my wife's family owned was used in a number of made-for-TV movies and one big-screen project in the years after the kiddos were gone. In each case the restoration improved the value of the property considerably.

The set design/decorator people who did the big screen production were serious - on that project all of the potentially visible Phillips-head screws throughout the house were meticulously removed and replaced with slotted brass screws because in the period of the story Phillips screws hadn't been invented yet. Some of the door hardware was replaced with period pieces. All of the windows were temporarily reglazed with imperfect panes and then after the shoot the openable windows were completely replaced with what were then new-fangled aluminum windows. They even sent a crew into the cellar and reinforced floor areas to stop the squeaks and creaks in the hardwood floors - oddly enough, the sound effects people added their own.