A burned-out husk has loomed behind John Harris' home in North Titusville for years, its once-red condemnation notice faded to brown. Police recently found the body of a heroin addict inside, but Harris doesn't think the city will do anything about it.

"They just left us to die on the vine," he says.

The retired postman has spent years as neighborhood president pushing Birmingham City Hall to demolish ruins like this. North Titusville is teeming with blighted properties, some empty and overgrown, others burned or looted. Some are simply sagging down, slowly, like rotten jack-o'-lanterns.

Harris' isn't the only blighted neighborhood in Birmingham. More than 16,000 city properties are tax-delinquent, a third of those for more than five years, with many left to unknown heirs of long-dead owners. These infest nearly every residential area with overgrown vacant lots, rotted houses and entire condemned apartment complexes like Larkway Gardens in West End, a six-block ghost town for gangs, drug dealers and prostitution.

The city spends $6.6 million--13 percent of the public works budget--just cutting the grass.

The deeper consequences are harder to measure. Studies in cities like Dallas and Atlanta show urban blight drives down property value, fosters crime and wards off new families.

Last year, Mayor William Bell launched a new, comprehensive initiative called RISE--Remove blight, Increase values, Strengthen neighborhoods, Empower residents--designed to reclaim the city's decayed neighborhoods. The plan introduces programs from several city departments and independent organizations, which Bell says could help Birmingham reverse its decline and become "the next great Southern city."

Bell isn't the first mayor to wage war on blight. Bernard Kincaid and Larry Langford also made it a priority; yet, there has been no stopping it. After 15 years, Birmingham now has more tax delinquent properties and condemned structures than ever and has lost more residents in the last census period than it has since the "white flight" of the 1960s.

A rigged game

Kincaid witnessed the decline firsthand. He served in the Air Force during Birmingham's worst civil rights skirmishes and returned to find entire neighborhoods being deserted by white families fleeing to the suburbs. Some black residents replaced them, but their kids didn't stay.

"A lot of the natural resources left, also," Kincaid says, referring to Birmingham's iron and coal mining and the jobs they provided.

As the city shrank, it gained abandoned properties and lost the tax base needed to maintain them.

"The resources to have a tax base in the city that would help pave the streets and help keep the rights of way kind of dissipated," Kincaid says. When he was elected in 1999, thousands of city properties were in tax and title purgatory, left to find their own way out.

Fighting the blight almost makes it worse. It is illegal to let a lot simply fester, but the city's property code enforcement system can't go after a landlord when a claim is fractured over several heirs, banks and mortgages.

The best the city can do much of the time is spend money to maintain a lot and create tax liens for the expense.

However, these often only make the rightful owner less likely to take an interest.

"If a lien is put on my property so that I can't sell it (and) I didn't plan to sell it anyway, I'll just abandon it," Kincaid says. "Without the authority to take it over, there was no hammer to bring down."

The city has been working with bad tools, yes, but also a bad approach, argues Phil Amthor of the department of community development and one of the officials involved in Bell's RISE initiative.

Birmingham has been hitting blight scattershot, he says, treating it like a symptom and not a disease. It would sooner demolish one house in three different neighborhoods than three houses on the same block.

But if the city instead focused its efforts to a specific area, Amthor says, "that block is a fundamentally changed block. The marketability of it has changed. The city doesn't have to come back next year."

Thus, RISE is designed to uproot blight one neighborhood at a time, a strategy that has been the difference-maker for other cities caught in their own cycles of abandonment, says lawyer Frank Alexander, who co-founded the Flint, Mich.-based Center for Community Progress and recently consulted Birmingham leadership on blight mitigation.

Alexander points to post-Katrina New Orleans under Mitch Landrieu as a success story.

"Mayor Landrieu basically framed it by saying, 'I'm going to pick my battles one at a time. I'm not going to try and stabilize the entire city overnight,'" he says. "He made tough political calls. He directed his staff to focus their efforts on stabilization in certain neighborhoods and said to the others, 'We will get to you.'"

Banking against Blight

The strategy is already being tested on the Pratt City neighborhood, where Bell is mobilizing RISE's flagship project: the Birmingham Land Bank Authority, which, thanks to a new state amendment, gives Birmingham the power to acquire tax delinquent properties outright.

Land banking, a tactic developed in the '80s and '90s in cities like Atlanta and Detroit, could be a key anti-blight weapon for Birmingham.

Before, the best the city could do was spend money demolishing and mowing and hope someone eventually footed the bill. Alabama's law requires a target parcel to be tax-delinquent for at least five years as well as cited attempts to notify its legal owners, but when a land bank finally gets a property, it's for keeps. The parcel gains a fresh, lien-free title that can be sold to a new developer-- or even the retiree next door who will cut the grass.

"Residents get to increase the size of their estate, and they'll do it without having to pay the full market price. And that gives them leverage," Amthor says. "Maybe that lot could be a down payment, and you'll start to see a new house in a place you wouldn't have before."

Kincaid says it's the kind of thing he wishes he had when he was in office, and he isn't the only one smitten with the Land Bank Authority. It has taken the spotlight in the RISE conversation, though the applause only makes Amthor more cautious.

The land bank is only beginning field tests; the city still doesn't know how many parcels it can handle each year or how much money it could bring in by selling them. Unraveling legal tangles is already proving expensive and slow--one in the test batch of 25 properties has at least 14 legal heirs. Less than half (about 6,500) of all tax-delinquent parcels qualify, and Amthor says Birmingham won't immediately benefit from an exciting new revenue stream.

For now, the project will be doing well to cover its own costs. This doesn't mean the Land Bank Authority won't be effective, only that it is one tool.

"It's a huge piece, but it's definitely not the whole, and it's not a silver bullet," Amthor says. "It won't work if we don't do these other things with it."

The council has already granted about $368,000 to the Land Bank Authority, but the entire RISE initiative will cost an estimated $76 million, which will fund projects from both city departments and independent development groups.

Cracking down

But the most money will likely go toward old-fashioned property code enforcement--i.e. forcing landlords to clear refuse, fix broken windows and generally keep their structures from falling down, or doing it for them and charging tax liens for the expense.

Some apartment buildings in John Harris' neighborhood are half-occupied, half-boarded-up and abandoned.

Some residents have disconnected their houses from the water line, instead using portable toilets in their yards.

"One guy lives with a tree growing up through his bedroom," Harris says. "We know the city sees it; we see them drive by, but they won't do anything unless we get after them about it."

These are out of the land bank's reach, as are 142 of the 186 condemned structures in the city's District 6 (which contains North Titusville). The biggest clusters of these are failed housing developments, taxed but blighted.

If RISE is going to work, Bell will have to deal with them the hard way. Simply removing blight on a property--even if it doesn't change hands--can have permanent benefit for an area. Alexander says Flint increased its aggregate property value by $100 million after spending just $3 million demolishing old houses.

Amthor agrees; he says code enforcement is a key RISE element. To this end, the city has already adopted the stricter 2009 International Property Code and has plans for a digital GIS system for reporting and tracking code violations.

But none of these tools has the same power as the land bank, and this is where Alexander (who helped draft Georgia's own land banking laws) begins to have doubts.

Birmingham's property code enforcement resources are notoriously overstretched; 40 percent of violations for vacant properties (50 percent for occupied properties) were unresolved last year. Yet the city's real leverage still lies in taxes, not codes. Since Alabama has the lowest property taxes in the country, it could be easy for landlords to ignore their properties but still keep them paid up.

"If you want to go after a privately owned substandard structure, you might be able to use property taxes, but odds are you can't," Alexander argues.

Amthor doesn't deny that negligent landlords are part of the problem, but insists that far more properties have simply been forgotten.

"We really attribute most of these tax delinquencies to the lack of estate planning," he says. Another RISE program offers legal estate planning workshops to help residents keep their properties from future inheritance purgatory.

"Tax delinquency is one of the biggest, most complex problems a title can have," Amthor says.

But today, more than 1,200 houses stand condemned, a number which has held steady in recent years. The city issued 398 demolition permits last year, but demolishing a building in Birmingham remains a notoriously inefficient affair that takes a year at best. It involves approval from several departments, competitive bidding by demolition companies and an asbestos inspection.

Harris' neighborhood association has successfully pushed for dozens of demolitions, but others have been thwarted by landlords who stall the process with a repair permit and vanish again.

Amthor says RISE doesn't need land-bank caliber leverage for these cases; it just needs the city to pay attention.

That's exactly what the initiative is designed to do: streamline the red tape so that when it targets North Titusville, it won't just be Harris and the neighborhood association fighting the blight, but the city as a whole.

Tough calls

Acting as a whole might be the greatest challenge of all for city leadership. Blight isn't confined to specific areas; it's sprawled over most of the nine districts and 99 neighborhoods. That's a rusty framework fit for a population twice Birmingham's size, argues Alabama Media Group columnist John Archibald, who has covered the city for 29 years (Archibald is also a contributor to Birmingham magazine, which is an AMG publication).

"If you were going to think about how to rebuild the city, you would look at north Birmingham," he says. "You'd probably buy up that land, turn it into something, probably green space, and have those people fill in the properties in West End."

This kind of move isn't unprecedented, Alexander says. Flint, which had shriveled by more than half when it first launched its own renewal initiative, demolished entire decayed blocks and turned them into parks and woodland.

"What I encouraged the leadership to do was get realistic," Alexander says. "Flint, as a city, no one saw any prospects that it would once again become 225,000 (people)."

Birmingham has no plans for Flint-style depopulation, but Alexander says the important thing is for a city to know when to stop rebuilding and start changing.

"You're going to encounter huge resistance there. Those are tough political calls," he says. "If you take a close look at Youngstown, Ohio, there's a good example where the leadership said, 'We're not going to regrow nor will we aspire to be what we were 20 years ago. Instead, we want to become the very best city of the population we think we will likely be in the next five years.'"

Bell expects Birmingham to grow by 10,000 people in the next five years. But the city has lost more than 150,000 people in the last half-century, and Archibald doesn't see things changing until the city can set aside its longstanding factionalism.

"I think one of the things that has done more harm than anything in this city is its neighborhood association," Archibald says."It was developed in the '80s, Richard Arrington's idea. I was a fan of it, it was ballyhooed nationwide and all it has done is create a farm team for leaders who only care about this micro area."

"It trains us to be Balkanized even more than we already are. Instead of being divided by just nine districts, we are now divided by 99 neighborhoods with ridiculous boundaries, which--who cares? I would blow the whole egg up."

Indeed, Kincaid identifies inter-district squabbling as the single greatest challenge of his own anti-blight efforts, spurred by the idea that richer neighborhoods get special treatment.

Yet, Bell is banking on council members' willingness to think beyond their districts. Pratt City was chosen as the first RISE target because it had already gained a foundation of development projects after being hit hard in the April 2011 tornado--a decision based not on its need, but its potential to bring lasting benefit to the entire city.

Changing to fit

Archibald believes Bell has a chance.

Birmingham has been changing, even if it has remained blighted. He says 20 years ago demolitions were little more than salvage operations awarded to political cronies, "which meant if you had a property that had nothing of value on it, it basically never got cleaned up."

Kincaid and Langford made blight a priority, but RISE is the first time both the mayor and council have thrown in with a long-term citywide plan. That RISE exists at all could be the biggest reason to maintain hope.

"People have started to see more value in the city of Birmingham," Archibald says. "You see a lot more young people doing that. Older people largely gave up on Birmingham a long time ago. Young people don't know that they're taking a risk as much, and they're braver. They see something a lot of old people don't."

Harris, 66, is the exception. He has watched his neighbors vanish one by one, and the only things he sees are empty places. He keeps a scrapbook of blight-related news clippings going back 12 years, and the motifs don't change: rats and fleas, drug dealers and arson, long battles with city hall and official pledges to reclaim, rebuild and restore the city.

The real test might not be what Birmingham can win back, but instead what it can give up.