Honestly, I wouldn’t think that land for graveyards would be a huge problem in Sweden.

The Netherlands or something densely-populated, that might be a lot more difficult. Especially since I imagine that you have to have land above the water table by a certain amount.

I wonder how the Dutch do it?

kagis

Ah.

https://www.businessinsider.com/graves-in-the-netherlands-are-rented-2016-1

“[G]raves in the Netherlands are typically rented for 10 or 20 years, with remains being cleared out once the lease expires,” as RBC Capital analysts recently noted in a report.

Interestingly, this has nothing to do with burial rituals. Rather, it’s because there isn’t enough cemetery space in the country.

Poor soil conditions and high ground water tables that slow down the “skeletonisation process” of the bodies preclude the Dutch from building up enough cemeteries, Paul J. M. Van Steen and Piet H. Pellenbarg of the University of Groningen noted in a 2004 research report on burials in the Netherlands.

EDIT: I remember an NPR Planet Money episode talking about long-run graveyard economics.

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/464628054

TANYA MARSH: In most countries in Europe, you buy the right to use a grave for a particular period of time - 20 or 30 years, 50 years.

GOLDSTEIN: And after that, they dig up your bones, and they put them in the bone house. There are these fancy words for this I actually didn’t know before I did this story. They are the charnel house or the ossuary.

SMITH: And is this just because Europe has been around so long, like, if they didn’t do this there would just be bones all the way down?

GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, I think they have a better idea, like, of what it means to say, oh sure, we’ll bury you and keep up the cemetery forever.

SMITH: Yeah, we’re so hopeful in America.

MARSH: We’re the ones who deviate. We came over here, and we said, look at all this land - we can give everybody a grave forever. And so they did.

GOLDSTEIN: Oh, is that a mistake?

MARSH: Yeah, it was a huge mistake.

SMITH: Watch?

GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, so, you know, essentially, in the law - this is in the law in most states - cemeteries are making this legal promise that is an anomaly - that’s really unusual. You know, they are promising to do something forever - to mow the lawn forever, to keep up the fence forever. And she says it’s easy enough to do this while you’re still burying people. You know, someone pays for a plot, and you take some of that money and spend it on, you know, lawn care, etc.

SMITH: It’s like a pyramid scheme a little bit.

GOLDSTEIN: Well, you could say that.

SMITH: You’re paying for old plots with new people coming in.

GOLDSTEIN: Sure. If you were a less cynical person, you might say, you know, it’s like - think about it like work and retirement, right?

SMITH: Yeah, OK.

GOLDSTEIN: So, like, the part where the cemetery is still filling up, that’s like your working life. When the cemetery is full, that’s like retirement, although in this case, you’ve got to retire forever. You’re never going to die. You’ve got to keep the cemetery going forever. But cemeteries do what we do for retirement. While they’re working - in this case, while they’re filling up with new dead people - they save money. So this is often regulated by the state. For example, in the state of New Jersey, where Andrew’s wife’s aunt is buried, the state requires that cemeteries put aside 15 percent of the cost of a new grave, put that into this perpetual care fund. So they say, you’ve got to set that money aside. You can’t touch the principle. And then forever, you know, once your cemetery is full you will have this stream of interest to, say, pay people to cut the lawn. I should say this doesn’t apply to religious cemeteries. But a lot of religious cemeteries do the same thing, even though they’re not regulated by the state.

SMITH: So when our listener, Andrew Mitchell, sees those guys mowing that old cemetery - a cemetery where they’re clearly not getting any new customers - they’re in theory, perhaps, being paid by some investment from long ago.

GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, that’s exactly right.

SMITH: But that probably doesn’t always work out, as we know, when you try and invest for the long run - meaning forever. Sometimes you don’t have the money to do it.

GOLDSTEIN: Definitely. And one of the reasons Tanya Marsh, that law professor, says it’s a mistake to make this permanent promise is cemeteries do go bankrupt. She says it happens a lot. You know, we don’t hear about it because they’re little things, but they don’t invest right, they don’t have enough money saved, and they just don’t have enough money to pay to keep the cemetery up.