This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

Today there are thousands of vacant homes all throughout Detroit.

The motor city has been shrinking since the 1950s, but many of these vacancies

stem from a decade ago when the financial crisis devastated the city.

As I drove around, I'd seen an abandoned home on almost every block.

That's reporter Angus Chen, who we recently sent to Detroit.

Many of these houses are still in good enough condition for someone to fix up and turn into a home.

But a lot of them are damaged beyond repair. Without

caretakers, their roofs sagged in and their foundations crumbled and their

walls turned black from fire. And so in 2014, Detroit started a citywide demolition program to take down the

houses that couldn't be fixed. The city estimated they had about 40,000 homes to demolish.

Orlando Bailey is a community organizer

from the east side of Detroit,

and he says the program's rollout was chaotic.

They were really building the plane

as they fly, and I'm quoting a city official who said something like that at the time

Houses were coming down all over the city, but for a lot of residents they couldn't come down fast enough.

Orlando says people in his neighborhood were pulling their hair out,

hoping that the house next door would get demolished sometime soon.

And what made it worse was they couldn't get any information from the city explaining when it was going to happen?

It was an acute level of frustration, frustration with really just not being armed with the knowledge of how something that is

affecting everybody in the city is working.

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