[James Bond Agent 007]

The reason why they tear down houses (and there is a lot of that going on in KC) is because they're vacant (duh). The reason they're vacant is because nobody wants to live in them (duh). But many of the houses they tear down aren't all that bad, or at least they were livable maybe only 5 or 10 years ago in many cases, but nobody wanted to live there so the house went downhill with nobody maintaining it and the inevitable decline set in. The question needs to be asked, if a reasonably livable (if not fancy), affordable house has no takers, what does that say about demand for affordable housing? Given that this phenomenon occurs thousands of times in cities like KC, it tells me that either the supply of cheap/affordable housing is so great, or the demand for cheap/affordable housing is so low, or some combination of both, that much of this excess supply of affordable/cheap housing no longer gets "consumed," at which point it will start to deteriorate and eventually get torn down.

Large numbers of vacant houses in a city IMO are a sign there is an excess of inexpensive housing in the city.