Patrick Brown, however, indicates that he’d like Mow to Own to expand plot-size limits for residential and commercial applicants, all as a way to expand the program. “If I could wave a magic wand,” says Brown, “ I’d make any residential lot available — especially when looking at commercial-sized areas. For now, these are just ideas we’d like to review.”

Alderman Jeffrey L. Boyd, who has represented the 22nd Ward in another North St. Louis neighborhood of Wells Goodfellow since 2003, says that for all its benefits, Mow to Own has had a limited impact on his constituency to date. He estimates that perhaps five people in his district have signed on. That’s in part because of the fact that many of the residents are elderly and simply cannot devote the time and effort required to tend a vacant lot.

Still, says Boyd, good news can’t come too soon, given that extensive vacancy has set afflicted neighborhoods spiraling downward. “No more than two weeks after a house is noticeably vacant, you’ll see pipes, gutters or electrical wiring stripped out — probably to be sold for scrap,” he says. Often, Boyd says, properties fall into a downward cycle, sometimes as a place to use drugs or even as a quick source of income, when materials are stripped from walls and foundations and cashed in. “One year, we had what we called brick rustlers, folks who would knock a hole in a house the minute it was vacant and steal bricks to sell,” Boyd recalls.

Boyd estimates that Wells Goodfellow, one Northside neighborhood in the district he represents, has seen vacancies and abandoned lots now count for roughly 40 percent of the all land parcels in the neighborhood, up from 20 to 25 percent a decade or so ago. The subprime mortgage crisis, he says, hit Wells Goodfellow particularly hard.

Other costs compound the hardship. Boyd, who owns property in his ward, knows of examples such as a two-bedroom, 1,000-square-foot home whose value cratered from $70,000 to around $25,000 at the height of the 2008 mortgage crisis. At the same time, homeowners insurance rates for a comparable house have increased 60 percent, from $500 to $800 per year, he says.

St. Louis has unpacked a wide range of other efforts in its recently launched vacancy effort. Brown says one of the first challenges is getting an accurate tally of just how much vacancy there is in the city. The work of updating and pinpointing exact numbers of vacant lots and abandoned structures runs into problems because any single property can appear in several municipal databases. “It’s a systemic governmental challenge at the municipal level since you often have a greater sense of urgency in specific departments on what they have to do day-to-day than at higher levels [of city government] where there are fewer resources,” says Brown. Departments have essentially fixated on their own siloed responsibilities and draw up lists that overlap. The forestry division keeps track of lots to mow, while the buildings department monitors permits, for example. One step toward the goal is an online LRA list of vacated properties for sale, including a selection of 19 “showcase” picks for browsers’ review.

Boyd is most encouraged by the city’s renewed commitment to boost demolition funding. He says the city passed a tax bill in 2002 on the back of promises to devote $3 million a year to tear down dilapidated, abandoned houses, but instead regularly earmarked only $500,000 to $1 million per year to the task. That will change in the current budget.