FORT WAYNE – Some look as if they had recent makeovers and sport new siding and windows.
Others haven’t seen a paint brush in decades and feature sagging gutters and decrepit railings.
Some are boarded up. Many have foreclosure stickers in the front windows. All of them – and there are many – look depressingly empty.
They are vacant houses, and there are 11,956 of them in Fort Wayne.
The 2010 census tried to count every person in the United States, but in the process officials also counted how many people are, in a sense, missing – leaving behind empty, vacant homes as they moved somewhere else.
Vacant housing has long been a problem in many areas, and Fort Wayne and all of northeast Indiana are no exception. But the problem has been exacerbated by thousands of foreclosures, relocations forced by the loss of jobs and falling home values that have left millions owing more than their houses are worth.
Even worse, vacant homes lower the value of the houses around them, deepening a cycle that can spiral a neighborhood into financial ruin.
“We deal with this all the time,” said Mary Morris, president of the Oxford Neighborhood Association, home to a census tract with one of the highest vacancy rates in the city. “The city’s just going to have to tear some of them down.”
There are vacant homes across Allen County, including large swaths of rural areas in the northeast, south and west where up to one in every 10 homes is empty. But the hardest hit area is the central, urban core of Fort Wayne.
Of the 113,541 housing units in Fort Wayne, roughly 10 percent are vacant, according to the census.
The numbers reflect the troubled times, Morris said.
“A lot of people are moving in with relatives, so you got a house full of folks out there,” she said.
“You’ve got people stripping the vacant houses so when they are sold you’ve got to put a lot of money into them.”
Heather Presley-Cowen, the city of Fort Wayne’s deputy director of economic development for housing, said some areas of the city, especially the southeast, have been hit with layers of problems.
“The majority of the subprime loans that were made were made in those areas. Many of the rehab loans that are being turned down are in that area,” Presley-Cowen said. “On top of that, the foreclosure rate is high. You have structural obsolescence, where it just doesn’t make sense to rehab a house. … When you look at it with all those factors laid on top of each other, ‘a perfect storm’ is a good term for it.”
Census figures show that in the Oxford neighborhood – between Pontiac Street to the north and Oxford Street to the south, Anthony Boulevard on the east and Hanna Street on the west – more than one in every four housing units is empty.
The same is true in the La Rez and Williams Park neighborhoods just west of there over to Calhoun Street.
Ric Zehr, vice president of North Eastern Group Realty, used to concentrate on building new subdivisions in suburban areas; now he rehabs old houses in the city’s core. He said the number of vacant homes is sobering.
“There are some portions (of the city) where houses are in the $3,000 to $12,000 range,” Zehr said. “You look at those and wonder how there’s any hope at all for those houses.”
But officials say that while the problems are immense there is hope.
The city’s Presley-Cowen said studies show that southeast Fort Wayne is a desirable place to live for many families and that median incomes are relatively high. It’s just difficult to see the forest for all the dead trees.
“It’s not that people don’t want to live there, it’s these other factors,” Presley-Cowen said. “We know there’s market potential southeast. We know it’s a desirable area for many families. The next step is developing housing stock that’s affordable and desirable, while also addressing housing stock that isn’t affordable or desirable.”
Presley-Cowen said fixing the problems will be easier when the economy turns around.
“I think in the next five years, we’re going to see significant changes in the southeast,” she said. “It didn’t happen overnight.”
The highest vacancy rate in the city belongs to a little neighborhood behind the businesses on the northeast corner of Lima Road and Coliseum Boulevard. There, where a small mobile home park was partly removed – which may have thrown off the numbers – one in every three homes was vacant. Today, 13 of the 14 remaining trailers are empty.
Of course, Fort Wayne is hardly alone.
The Associated Press reports that in Madison County, where GM’s former Anderson parts plants are now padlocked, one in every 10 homes is empty. The adjacent counties of Grant, Delaware, and Wayne have similarly dreary numbers. Gary, once a manufacturing powerhouse, has lost nearly a quarter of its residents, though Gary officials dispute the number.
