Originally Posted by
casscorridor
Yeah these houses probably should have never been built in the first place. Like many areas in Detroit, this area was built to fail.
The market for one or two bedrooms can be easily filled with apartment buildings, flats and carriage homes. There is no reason for single-family homes with two bedrooms or less.
I think our neighborhoods wouldn't see so many abandoned buildings if there weren't so many single-family homes. An apartment building can loose more than half of its tenants before being shuttered. But a single family house is stripped within weeks, if not days, after being unoccupied. We could have lost half our our population without loosing many buildings if multi-units were dominate over single-family. But since we are a city of primarily single-family/duplex housing, loosing half of our population means loosing half of our buildings, and therefore, half of many neighborhoods.