There is an empty house

at the end of our street. It sits on the corner, facing into the street which runs at a right angle to ours but the address makes it the last number in our street.
The house has been empty for more than two years now. It's a big  house of pale marmalade coloured bricks and a red tiled roof. It's not in good shape. I know. I went into it a number of times before the old man who lived there died.
He was a short wave radio fan - one of the extreme variety. The block the house sits on is big, very big. A good portion of the back yard is taken up with a shed that still holds his equipment. The antennae are still there. 
After his wife died I suspect any spare money T.... had went on his hobby. He would spend hours during the day tinkering with the antennae. At night, if it was a still and quiet night, I could actually hear him using Morse code. 
I have no idea what he found to say to other people or what they found to say to him. I know he spent hours at it while the house slowly decayed around him. 
Eventually he got Meals on Wheels and someone came in to do the essential cleaning. All this simply allowed him to spend more time talking to people. He would capture them as they went past or talk to them via his elaborate set up in the shed.
His computer was in the house. That was my reason for being there. He had bought one but had little idea how to use it. His son had set it up for him but was rarely there. His daughter wasn't interested in "that sort of thing" - or so he told me. I never met his children. So he approached me. I was reluctant because I knew he would, if I wasn't very careful, consume far too much of my time.  Still, I went. I went because I thought that internet access might give him something else to do and he would spend less time trying to talk to his neighbours and getting rebuffed because he simply didn't know when to end a conversation.  
And the house remains empty. Someone turns up occasionally and cuts the grass. The equipment seems to be checked. I assume the house is opened - and then closed again. 
The block is big enough to be subdivided for two houses - or even three units. 
I pass it and wonder whether, like the house at the end of the next street, it will remain empty for twenty or more years.  The grass there needs cutting again too. 
Nobody knows why these houses are empty. My guess is that the estates have not been concluded or there are disputes over ownership. 
      "There's someone at that house," Ms W informed me yesterday, "I wanted to tell him that someone should be allowed to live in it."
She is now too grown up to actually say it but I have to agree with her...that, or knock it down and build more than one. 
There are people without homes to live in.