The small
front yard is a mess of overgrown grass littered with thigh-high weeds,
broken bottles and trash from a local fast food joint.
In contrast with some of the other blight surrounding the house, it didn't look so bad.
On one side stands an old brick boarding house with a caved-in roof that's been abandoned for about 20 years. Across the street are two more abandoned homes, badly ravaged from fire and scavengers.
A squatter named Victor Zarmon, who lives on the $10 a day he makes mopping the floors at a nearby liquor store, has removed much of the debris from one of the burned-out houses and now calls it home.
"This is Gary, man," said John Riley, 48, who lives just a few doors down from the house where the yet-to-be identified victim was found. "That's just the way it is."
This city — with 8,000 to 10,000 abandoned homes — is hardly alone in dealing with the scourge of decaying and dilapidated structures that lower property values and create an environment where criminal activity can go unchecked.
Detroit has some 80,000 abandoned homes that have become dens of criminal activity. Last year, police in East Cleveland arrested a man who killed three women and dumped their bodies in the Ohio suburb that that has nearly 4,000 vacant homes. Across the border in Illinois, Cook County is struggling to deal with 55,000 vacant structures.
But after Vann, 43, led police to the bodies of six women he stashed away in several abandoned properties across the city, Gary's long festering problem is now under the national spotlight.
Following
the Hammond Police's arrest of Vann last weekend for the strangulation
murder of 19-year-old Afrika Hardy, that city's mayor, Thomas McDermott,
suggested that officials in neighboring Gay weren't moving quickly
enough to deal with their blight problem.
"Leaving houses that aren't properly secured become a danger to the community as we have seen in this case," McDermott said.
Gary's plight was created over decades, and may very well take decades to solve. If Gary officials had to wherewithal to demolish all the city's abandoned housing today, it would cost about $80 million, according to Joe Van Dyk, the city's director of redevelopment.
"We keep our costs down and we're doing the demolitions in a methodical and thoughtful way," Van Dyk said. "But we just don't have the resources. We just don't have the money."
About one in five properties in the city are abandoned, and houses like the ones where Vann dumped victims, have been growing like weeds in this urban landscape for years.
The dilapidated properties tell the story of this once booming steel town's fall. They are the byproduct of white flight in 1970s, the loss of steel jobs in 1980s, and rising crime in the 1990s that drove away much of the city's middle class.
The city's population stood at about
79,000 in 2012, down from 178,000 in 1960. City officials say that the
migration has tapered off, but times are so bad here that city's school
board recently voted to close six of its 17 schools. Gary's poverty rate
hovers around 40%.
Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson, a Harvard-educated attorney and Gary native, has made addressing the blight her top priority since coming into office in 2011.
Earlier this year, she secured $6.6 million in federal funding that will be used toward an effort to demolish 1,000 structures The city is on pace to level about 150 structures this year, and this month the city completed demolition of the old Sheraton Hotel, a 14-floor eyesore that sat right next to city hall and had become a symbol of this city demise.
Freeman-Wilson acknowledges that Vann used blight to his advantage to conceal his alleged crimes. But she pushed back against the suggestion that the city shares any blame for this incident.
"We did our jobs," Freeman-Wilson said. "When you have 10,000 structures, you can't go to every one of them all the time. I think it's hard to lay fault at the police or the city because he was able to conceal people in abandoned buildings."
Gary resident Eric Smith, 49, said it's telling that the police were unable to find even one of the women before Vann led investigators to the bodies. He noted one of the women, Teaira Batey, 28, was reported missing in late January.
While frustrated with the sight of the decaying housing stock, he knows that there is little that city officials can do to quickly solve the problem.
"This city got no money," Smith said. "And when you got no money, there ain't a damn thing you can do."
In contrast with some of the other blight surrounding the house, it didn't look so bad.
On one side stands an old brick boarding house with a caved-in roof that's been abandoned for about 20 years. Across the street are two more abandoned homes, badly ravaged from fire and scavengers.
A squatter named Victor Zarmon, who lives on the $10 a day he makes mopping the floors at a nearby liquor store, has removed much of the debris from one of the burned-out houses and now calls it home.
"This is Gary, man," said John Riley, 48, who lives just a few doors down from the house where the yet-to-be identified victim was found. "That's just the way it is."
This city — with 8,000 to 10,000 abandoned homes — is hardly alone in dealing with the scourge of decaying and dilapidated structures that lower property values and create an environment where criminal activity can go unchecked.
Detroit has some 80,000 abandoned homes that have become dens of criminal activity. Last year, police in East Cleveland arrested a man who killed three women and dumped their bodies in the Ohio suburb that that has nearly 4,000 vacant homes. Across the border in Illinois, Cook County is struggling to deal with 55,000 vacant structures.
But after Vann, 43, led police to the bodies of six women he stashed away in several abandoned properties across the city, Gary's long festering problem is now under the national spotlight.
"Leaving houses that aren't properly secured become a danger to the community as we have seen in this case," McDermott said.
Gary's plight was created over decades, and may very well take decades to solve. If Gary officials had to wherewithal to demolish all the city's abandoned housing today, it would cost about $80 million, according to Joe Van Dyk, the city's director of redevelopment.
"We keep our costs down and we're doing the demolitions in a methodical and thoughtful way," Van Dyk said. "But we just don't have the resources. We just don't have the money."
About one in five properties in the city are abandoned, and houses like the ones where Vann dumped victims, have been growing like weeds in this urban landscape for years.
The dilapidated properties tell the story of this once booming steel town's fall. They are the byproduct of white flight in 1970s, the loss of steel jobs in 1980s, and rising crime in the 1990s that drove away much of the city's middle class.
Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson, a Harvard-educated attorney and Gary native, has made addressing the blight her top priority since coming into office in 2011.
Earlier this year, she secured $6.6 million in federal funding that will be used toward an effort to demolish 1,000 structures The city is on pace to level about 150 structures this year, and this month the city completed demolition of the old Sheraton Hotel, a 14-floor eyesore that sat right next to city hall and had become a symbol of this city demise.
Freeman-Wilson acknowledges that Vann used blight to his advantage to conceal his alleged crimes. But she pushed back against the suggestion that the city shares any blame for this incident.
"We did our jobs," Freeman-Wilson said. "When you have 10,000 structures, you can't go to every one of them all the time. I think it's hard to lay fault at the police or the city because he was able to conceal people in abandoned buildings."
Gary resident Eric Smith, 49, said it's telling that the police were unable to find even one of the women before Vann led investigators to the bodies. He noted one of the women, Teaira Batey, 28, was reported missing in late January.
While frustrated with the sight of the decaying housing stock, he knows that there is little that city officials can do to quickly solve the problem.
"This city got no money," Smith said. "And when you got no money, there ain't a damn thing you can do."
From USATODAY.COM
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