This prompted Dominique Walker to found Moms 4 Housing, a nonprofit which helps homeless and marginally housed mothers.

In Oakland, Calif., where Redfin reports that the median home price is $950,000, there are houses sitting empty and plenty of people without housing. but started documenting abandoned homes throughout the American South in 2010 when she lived in Gainesville, Fla.Īs much as it might seem like these abandoned houses are left to become playgrounds for photographers, some of them do get another chance at life. The preservation of rural houses is what drives Kelly Gomez, another photographer, to document them for an online project called The Forgotten South. Sometimes those properties can be reused, and sometimes their highest and best use is to demolish the house to make way for a cornfield. “Now they’re fields with their equipment storage yards and things largely for agriculture,” she said. Dewar and her husband drive around the small Minnesota town he grew up in, they’ll take stock of the places that were once homes of his childhood friends. In rural areas the reason is typically a loss of industry such as a factory closure. In Detroit, this was spurred by a combination of blockbusting (real estate agents who use scare tactics to convince white homeowners to sell their houses then resell the houses at inflated prices to Black buyers) and the subprime mortgage crisis which resulted in the city losing 25 percent of its population from 2000 to 2010, Dr. If there are scores of vacant houses in an area, it’s typically because of economic depression. If he’s making a contemporary cabin look like it was built 100 years ago, for example, he wants viewers to know that nothing is random, but rather the result of environmental factors, like, say, water running down a wall, causing discoloration. “It all has a structure and a sort of patina, tells a story,” Mr. Old houses have taught him what an antique surface really looks like. Sometimes this requires faux finishing and aging to make the pieces look lived in and coherent. This exploration has influenced his work, which often involves production art and set building for movies and window displays. “Just all of those kinds of details where the hand of whoever was involved in putting it together is much more visible and obvious.”

“You don’t have to go back very far where you’re dealing with rough-sawn lumber that was milled locally, and stone that was quarried from the house site you were building from,” Mr. He appreciates their craftsmanship the houses tend to have architectural details not found in newer homes. Dannels, 35, seeks out older houses throughout the United States. As a child he would explore abandoned buildings there many have since been turned into luxury apartments. Kyler Dannels is an architectural designer in Atlanta. Why, she and other looky-loos wonder, do possessions get left behind?įor some, abandoned houses are muses. “We have tried to decipher it, but we cannot,” she said. Many are empty, but she has come across items left behind such as ration cards, photo albums, and a letter dated to 1864 written in German. “You don’t see it everyday.” Some houses she’s seen are hundreds of years old. “I think it’s my love of history and antiques that make it so interesting to walk through these places,” Ms. People have long loved creepy things and even sad things, and these houses hit those notes and more. In the Facebook group “ I Love Old Houses and Gardens,” posts dedicated to abandoned houses can draw thousands of reactions. Sometimes it’s a country house standing forlornly in a field, or a mansion in Ontario where the focal point is the architectural details, or a house in Nantes, France with an Old World vibe. Online, people are attracted to a broad range of abandoned houses. It’s eye-catching.” And, he said, “I tend to really like unusual items that are left behind.” “It has to be colorful, which I think draws in the viewer. “It has to have a moody kind of light,” Mr. He’s been to hundreds of abandoned houses, but only a few make it onto his Instagram feed. “Just going to time-capsule homes where it’s like the family just disappeared.” His attention shifted to houses when he visited family in Pennsylvania and took stock of how many abandoned ones there were in the rural areas.

Abandoned house