Gary, Ind., has lost half its population since 1960, and a real estate analysis firm now raises the specter of parts of it becoming a ghost town — at least for the purposes of a tongue-in-cheek Halloween-themed survey.
Three Gary zip codes were listed among the top 10 with the highest ratios of vacant homes with dead owners in a survey ATTOM Data Solutions called “Spooktacular Zip Codes: Zip Codes Where the Vacant Home May Be the Haunted Home.”
Earlier this year, Gary was planning on demolishing nearly 700 vacant homes using a state fund to fight urban blight. As the steel industry withered, Gary’s population fell from a peak of 178,320 in 1960 to 80,000 in 2010.
Nationwide, more than 40,000 single-family homes are vacant and have a listed owner who is now dead, or one in every 1,795 homes, according to a survey of 72 million homes by Los Angeles-based ATTOM (formerly RealtyTrac).
But the ratio was eerily higher in some zip codes. The Top 10 were:
- 46407 in Gary (one in 41)
- 46402 in Gary (one in 52)
- 15110 in Duquesne, Pa. (one in 56)
- 15104 in Braddock, Pa. (one in 57)
- 36610 in Mobile, Ala. (one in 69)
- 48217 in Detroit (one in 71)
- 39203 in Jackson, Miss. (one in 74)
- 35207 in Birmingham, Ala. (one in 81)
- 46404 in Gary (one in 81)
- 44506 in Youngstown, Ohio (one in 83)
