Nobody's Home: Combating Indianapolis' Vacant Housing Problem

The collapse of the economy, especially hard-hitting in Midwestern cities, ushered in the foreclosure crisis, which in turn caused the vacant housing problem we now face. Those who received foreclosure papers sometimes abandoned their home. If the bank failed to take the title, the house eventually went to tax sale, and if no one purchased it, the house ended up on the city’s surplus list. And this happened again and again, thousands of times over, until whole neighborhoods became ghost towns. Matt says, “There were some blocks I would go on where there was maybe only one house that somebody was living in. It was like a war zone.”