Is it normal i find it weird that abandoned homes were town down?

Normal to find abandoned stuff interesting. It is so fascinating how they leave stuff to waste.

There are 2 common reasons for this; and I assure you that the communities that did not do either of these this really wish they had.

1) If homes are not selling, allowing a vacant home to stand invited degradation and lowers the property values in the area - and perhaps the entire town as they attract homeless and crime.

Tearing them down is actually a very good long term investment and is cheaper than dealing with the long term outcomes of multiple abandoned buildings.

Unfortunately, it takes some money to do this; and right now many cities with abandoned (or cannot sell) properties do not have the funding available to tear them down; and it really negatively affects the overall community.

The second factor is that many cities develop long term plans on what they would like to do with certain areas in the future. They may be thinking of changing the use of an entire area 20 - 40 years down the line. Thus the city will aggressively acquire the properties and either rent them or tear them down so that their long term plan can occur.

It sounds to me like your city is doing it right up front. Nice looking buildings do not stay nice looking once abandoned. It's best to stay ahead of the issues than fall behind.

I've never heard of a town demolishing houses or buildings in order to promote the growth of nature. My city is the opposite; every piece of farm land and even some really nice houses are prime targets for redevelopment. The area I live in was mostly farmland with a couple of neighborhoods and maybe 2 or 3 stores when I was born, and is now surrounded by a huge outdoor shopping center, several stores and restaurants, etc. 25 years later. We unfortunately lost some beautiful houses for crap places like CVS (like we need any more of those or Walgreen's) and a couple of other crummy places, and there are two beautiful older houses on acreage for sale that are unfortunately commercially zoned, which means they will probably meet the same fate. I hate it because I'm not a big fan of change, and have never liked outdoor shopping centers. They seem to always be very poorly designed where I live, full of snooty overpriced and massively overrated shops, and they almost always struggle less than a decade into their existence, yet more and more keep popping up. The newest one is like 3 years old and already massively struggling (and was already struggling pre-COVID).

Anyway, yes, it's definitely unusual, at least where I am from, to demolish anything to promote nature and wildlife growth. I know vacant houses and buildings will sometimes be demolished to prevent them from deteriorating, becoming a liability, or becoming a crime spot. In the worse areas of my city, it's common for buildings to be torn down because people will do anything they can to get inside and steal all of the copper and anything else valuable they can find, and we've already lost several vacant historic buildings due to fires started by homeless people in the winter.

Was there a reason the houses were recently abandoned? A certain part of my city is a known flood area and lots of buildings have been abandoned and subsequently demolished because they frequently flood, for example.

I am curious, too, approximately how old were these houses? Were they in seemingly good shape? Do you know for sure that the reason was to promote the growth of nature?

Maybe they were haunted?

... and people think it's weird when some of us prefer animals to other humans.

Huh?