CHARLESTOWN, Ind. (WHAS11) – It's not the neighborhood views Josh Craven takes pride in.
"These houses were never this bad. This place looks like a war zone," he tells WHAS11.
He says his Pleasant Ridge community started going downhill when Charlestown city leaders announced plans to redevelop the neighborhood with higher priced homes.
Many of the boarded-up homes are owned by Pleasant Ridge Redevelopment and developer John Neace.
"They've ransacked them, stripped them and took the windows and everything out of these houses and made it look worse than it really should of," Craven said.
Craven says the homes attract squatters. A fire Monday morning at a vacant home caused damage to a tree. He wants the city to speed up the demolition.
"They are boarded up. They don't have any electric hooked up to them. They don't have any gas hooked up to them. They came to remove the meters. They came to remove the electric drops. There is no reason why they can't tear them down," he said.
No one from the city talked to us on camera, but city attorney Mike Gillenwater says 12 of the last 13 serious house fires in Charlestown have been at occupied homes in the Pleasant Ridge community and are generally a result of faulty wiring.
He also says police calls are down 40 percent in Pleasant Ridge since August 2016.
Craven wants the city to take a more active role in cleaning up the neighborhood, which he says he was promised.
"My family lived here before me. This is all I got," he said.