Countless American cities grapple with the problem of abandoned houses and buildings. These derelict properties tend to spread like a blight through neighborhoods and often become shelters for squatters and drug dealers.

Outdated state laws often make it exceedingly difficult for cities to seize abandoned, tax delinquent property for redevelopment. The process is complicated, time-consuming, and full of red tape.

Atlanta, Cleveland, and more recently Detroit have moved to streamline the process of monitoring and reselling vacant properties.

The Cleveland city government decided to act roughly a decade ago, when unpaid property taxes on abandoned structures in Cuyahoga County, in which the city is located, were surging toward $100 million. Municipal officials successfully pressed for new state laws that greatly facilitated the seizure of vacant and tax-delinquent structures.

Atlanta officials convinced Georgia state lawmakers to pass similar legislation in the early 1990s, and Michigan gave Detroit such tools in 1999.

In addition to pressing for changes in state law, Cleveland and Atlanta both created "land-bank authorities," which can waive or forgive delinquent property taxes, help developers obtain clear title to abandoned property in a reasonable amount of time, and serve as central managers of all the vacant land in a city.

"The big advantage of the land bank is: We take everything -- all the vacant land that has been foreclosed but didn't sell at the regular auctions," explains Evelyn Sternad, director of the Cleveland Land Bank Authority.

As Frank Alexander of the Emory University School of Law in Atlanta explains, many derelict inner-city buildings and properties don't sell at tax auctions because "the minimum sale price can't be less than the amount of taxes owed."

"This effectively means that the land can't be sold at a tax sale because no one will pay more than the fair market value of the land," he continued. "If no one is willing to buy under current laws, we need some other entity that can 'purchase' the land at a tax sale." And this is where land banks come in.

Without a single authority "feeling responsible" for vacant land management, abandoned lots often sit idle, owners remain unidentified, and taxes go unpaid. But when a vacant parcel enters a land bank's inventory, it is in the authority's own interest to return the asset to the market as quickly as possible.

The Cleveland authority uses several strategies to get parcels back on the market. For instance, it sometimes assembles small parcels into larger ones for major development projects such as supermarkets or apartment complexes. At the other extreme, says Sternad, the authority sells individual lots "for as little as $1 to adjacent homeowners, who put them to use for gardening. This land is then off the inventory and it is back on the tax roll."

The Atlanta and Cleveland land banks both work closely with nonprofit housing development organizations to expand the supply of low- and moderate-income housing.

In the mid 1990s, for example, the Atlanta land bank partnered with the city's Historic District Development Corporation to rehabilitate the Martin Luther King Jr. Historic District, a roughly five-block area near the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library on the city's East Side.

"The district had a significant number of boarded-up houses and empty lots then, all structures being heavily incumbent with tax delinquency," explains Audrey Akpan, executive director of the local land bank. "So the [historic district development commission] petitioned the land bank, we forgave the taxes, and it went ahead with the construction."

Of the 60 new houses that have been built, all but one have been sold. "The land bank has been very important for us," says Mtamanika Youngblood, the development commission's executive director. "It has been the key for the purchase of fairly large stretches of vacant land. We wouldn't have been able to accomplish that without the land bank, because of the amounts of delinquent taxes on those properties."

"It's really a blessing to see a vacant, overgrown hill turn into a beautiful house," muses Kwanza Hall, who moved to the historic district with his wife and their two sons a little less than a year ago. According to Hall, when he first visited the site of their future home -- a parcel out of the land bank's inventory -- all he could think was, "Yeah right, you want me to move here?"

But soon the neighboring lots were cleared of ruins and weeds, and a brand new residence was built. Now, the Halls are proud first-time homeowners. "And good stuff keeps happening in the district, there's new houses popping up all the time," says Hall.

-- Miriam Hipchen