My guess would be an estate sale or a secondary foreclosure. It's not really "what happened" to some neighborhoods like that, a lot of times people pay way too much for a 100 year old home to find out that, since it's so old, it's listed as "historic" and there's only so much they can do to it to make it something people would want (so they just stop paying the mortgage and take the credit hit). Some people need to watch less crap on the TLC channel.