If you drive through many of the neighborhoods west of Ninth Street in Louisville, Kentucky, you can’t help but notice the huge number of decaying, vacant, and abandoned properties.

We need to come together as neighbors and remedy this blight, because the decay can’t be missed and should no longer be ignored. This issue was on the mind of Courier-Journal’s Joe Gerth when he addressed the problem in a recent column, “Scourge of vacant homes killing West Louisville.”

This is one of Louisville’s greatest challenges, and I believe one of the great opportunities. We have been working in the Portland neighborhood for the last four years, and one of the four pillars of our Portland Investment Initiative (Pii) addresses exactly this issue of “vacant, abandoned properties” (VAPs).

Using “urban acupuncture,” we try to acquire the worst vacant house on each block and renovate it. This takes away the negative ripple effect of a VAP and replaces it with a much-needed affordable housing opportunity. I would like to add a couple of points to Gerth’s article, brainstorm one potential out-of-the-box market-based solution, and invite the readers to weigh in with other ideas.

The discriminatory practice of redlining has been against the law for decades, and in 1977 the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) was passed to address redlining and encourage banks to lend in economically-challenged areas. Some great local banks do more than just check the box when it comes to their CRA compliance; however, many of our neighborhoods are still dealing with the real-world consequences of the legacy of redlining.