Well yes and no. Every other house around here is abandoned, foreclosed, bank owned, for rent/sale and so on. There are houses here completely overgrown and a real eyesore for a neighborhood.
But...go to buy a run down, vandalized, overgrown shack and they still think it's worth the artificial prices from before. The shoebox next door, and it literally could be the garage for this house if I ran a fence around it, cost $40K originally. Then it shot up to $179k. The trapped owner was trying to get out from under it by selling it for that much, of course, unsuccessfully.
As for this young lady, it's all set up for her obviously by her mom. I don't think she can even legally own a house at her age but that's neither here nor there. It's just that the article makes it seem anyone can buy $14k houses here all day long. if that were true, I'd take three or four.
I've read that Detroit is really like this though; people buying houses for $1K.