They need to start remodeling these homes into apartments. One big house should be able to provide 6-8 apartments that could be rented out. It wouldn't be a good idea to allow these houses be vacant and vandalized.
They'll make lovely rooming houses for aging baby boomers who put all of their money in stocks that went bad.
Enough tongue-in-cheek (bad, Grania). It really is a horrible situation that you have baby boomers who have worked hard for over thirty years, paid for their kids educations, and trusted the hype from the mutual funds, even when they were losing value. These 50-somethings, most of them anyway, aren't going to get jobs with salaries that will help them build back their savings. These aren't the people who planned to live off handbacks; they did what the system told them to do and the system failed them.