Angie Calvert and her husband, Rob Uppencamp, just bought their dream house.

Others would call it a nightmare.

No one has lived in the house for two years. With a crumbling back patio, lead-based paint and sagging gutters, the house shows its neglect.

Across the street sit two more empty houses — one well-kept enough to be considered merely vacant, the other so unkempt that it’s clearly abandoned. Down the street, empty houses and desolate commercial property mar block after block.

Why would Calvert and Uppencamp, a couple with the income and credit to move wherever they wish, choose to settle in the Near-Southside neighborhood of Bates Hendricks?

It’s an area plagued with eyesores that drag down the value of the houses around them, attract squatters and can be havens for crime.

But that’s not what Calvert sees. To her, investing in her new house is an opportunity to help a section of Indianapolis that her family has always called home.

“We want to create change for the residents,” Calvert said.

She’s one of those dedicated homeowners who vow to stick it out, reinvest and rebuild, despite the complex problems facing her neighborhood. It seems there’s at least one person like Calvert in nearly every neighborhood riddled with abandoned houses. And thank goodness for that, because Indianapolis needs their help.

A ring of neighborhoods around Downtown is emptying out, as people continue to move into new subdivisions in the cornfields of Central Indiana.

About 9,000 empty houses and 1,000 to 1,500 vacant nonresidential properties plague the city.

Many of those houses are “orphaned” properties, which means the owners can’t be found. So the houses just sit, racking up delinquent property taxes, which makes them even less attractive to buyers with each passing year.

“It’s definitely one of the biggest challenges in the city,” said Bill Taft, executive director of Local Initiatives Support Corp., or LISC.

Indianapolis’ problems with abandoned properties are nowhere near as bad as Detroit’s or those in the Ohio cities of Cleveland or Youngstown. Nature has reclaimed entire blocks there.

But experts warn that if we don’t act now to confront the glut of vacant properties by creating a sustainable city for the population we do have, things could get worse.

“It’s far smarter and economical to deal with this problem now than to run the risk that it can become a contagious disease that can affect whole neighborhoods,” said Daniel T. Kildee, president of the land-use consulting company Center for Community Progress. “No city is immune to abandonment.”

Effects of slower growth

Drive through parts of Haughville, Martindale-Brightwood, Bates Hendricks or the Near Eastside, and you’ll see house after house with boards on the windows, high grass and graffiti. At night, some blocks are eerily still — like neighborhoods out of a post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie.

Some of the properties are just a street over from homes with manicured lawns, flowers and immaculate porch furniture.

It’s an odd juxtaposition — and one that’s relatively new for Indianapolis.

As in other cities, the mortgage crisis led to a record number of foreclosures. Nationwide, there are about 14 million vacant residences — about 3 million more than what was normal before the crisis hit five years ago.

That’s had an effect on how people choose to live. Homebuying is down, partly because mortgages are still hard to get and partly because many Americans have lost faith that buying a house is a stable investment.

Compounding matters, the population shift away from urban areas to the suburbs continues nationwide, as well as in Central Indiana. According to the 2010 census, Marion County’s population grew 5 percent; neighboring counties, including Hamilton and Hendricks, experienced double-digit growth.

The migration to the suburbs is forcing urban leaders to plan for shrinking cities.

“The real problem we have on this whole concept is in America, we’ve only had one definition of success, which is continuous sustained growth,” Kildee said. “Urban planners have followed this model.”

But that’s no longer realistic, he said.

Across the globe, cities grow, shrink and then grow again. The trick other cities have learned — and now we have to learn — is to create land-use plans flexible enough to handle those shifts.

That could include adding more parks, community gardens and other green space to the mix. It could include adding mass transit to strategically increase density in certain neighborhoods. It could be something as unconventional as one person’s suggestion in Cleveland to turn several run-down blocks into a winery.

“It requires people to put away their old thinking of urban land,” Kildee said.

Otherwise, what you may get is what we have in Haughville.

Franchetta Peterson lives on a block that’s almost half-empty. The houses on either side of hers are vacant. From her porch, she can see a boarded-up house across the street that not long ago had a tree growing out of the roof.

“If you don’t go outdoors a lot and pay attention to what’s going on around the empty houses, it can attract squatters,” she said.

Peterson, who bought the house and renovated it so she could live close to her mother, said she’s chased drug dealers away a few times with vows to call the police.

Empty houses can have all sorts of negative effects on a community.

There’s a financial effect on residents: The more empty houses in a neighborhood, the more that neighborhood becomes known for being run-down. That hurts the value of the occupied homes and deters others from moving in to buy a house. More renters, who don’t have as much incentive to invest in a property or the neighborhood, move in.

There’s the financial effect on the community: As homeowners move out, the tax base shrinks, which means the city collects less money for things such as schools, police and sidewalks.

There’s the effect on safety: Empty houses are magnets for crime. Crime and poverty — as well as struggling schools — often go hand in hand.

There’s the psychological effect on everyone: Being surrounded by boarded-up houses is depressing. The blight can be overwhelming. The more a neighborhood falls into disrepair, the more residents lose interest in the upkeep of their properties.

Residents’ hands are tied

One of the sadder elements of this cycle is that much of it is outside residents’ control.

The available resources in Indianapolis, whether they’re community development corporations or the city-run Indy Land Bank, are too limited to handle a housing problem of this magnitude.

Consider this: In a given year, Marion County puts 8,000 to 10,000 properties — houses, vacant lots and commercial properties — in the tax sale after their owners fall at least a year behind in paying property taxes.

The Indy Land Bank, which gets funding from grants and sales of property, can afford to buy only about 300 houses a year. It sticks to residential properties and takes over only those that are completely empty. If a squatter lives in the house, the Land Bank won’t touch it.

The city often turns over the houses it buys to community development corporations, which sell the properties to needy families or demolish them as a part of a neighborhood-wide redevelopment plan.

The thousands of other properties that don’t attract interest from a buyer sit for another year, then end up on what’s called a “surplus list.” At that point, the properties usually just sit and rot, as the owner goes deeper and deeper into debt for not paying property taxes.

That’s when houses usually move from being “vacant,” with an owner who maintains the property and is looking for a tenant, to “abandoned,” with an owner whom no one can find and who lets the place fall apart.

Often the owner listed on the deed isn’t the owner at all.

Instead, the owner is a bank that reclaimed the house in a foreclosure but never changed the name on the deed to show that it owns the property. That way, the city bills the listed owner for maintenance, such as cutting the grass, instead of the bank. The listed owner also is responsible for paying property taxes.

Sometimes the owner is a different bank from what’s listed on the deed. Mortgage companies resell mortgages, and often the city can’t keep up with the switch because too many properties change hands.

The bottom line: Once a house lands in this kind of cycle, the chance of anyone buying it is slim. After all, who would want to buy a house that’s worth less than what is owed in back property taxes?

But to do anything with such a house — tear it down and build a community garden or fix it up for a family — somebody has to buy it.

That doesn’t mean, however, that people won’t live in the houses. Squatters have taken over some abandoned properties. With up to 10,000 empty houses on the books and a small staff at the Indy Land Bank, no one is rushing to kick them out.

“Some of these homes you think are abandoned, but if you go out and knock on the door, somebody answers,” said Reggie Walton, administrator of abandoned and unsafe properties for the city. “I’ve seen properties that are $30,000 in back taxes, and people are still living in them.”

The city hopes to make significant progress in reducing the number of vacant homes by using money from the sale of the water and sewer utilities to Citizens Energy Group. It hopes to demolish about 2,000 houses by the end of 2012. Two hundred are scheduled to come down this year, and 675 were demolished in 2010.

Cutting through red tape

Walton admits that the scope of the housing problem is bigger than his small, city-run department can handle.

Still, the staffers do what they can. Their go-to weapon is the Indy Land Bank. By buying houses at the tax sale, they can wipe out back taxes and hand the deeds over to an interested buyer or community group.

There’s a movement afoot to do more. Community leaders have discussed forming a nonprofit land bank that, unlike the city’s operation, could raise private funds to buy properties.

Called the Land Bank of Indianapolis, it’s led by Frank Hagaman and a board that includes members of LISC and the Hoosier Environmental Council. It would work closely with city officials and neighborhood groups but tackle the housing problem with a larger, strategic eye.

The Land Bank of Indianapolis wouldn’t sell properties right away, as the city does, but would hang on to them until enough parcels could be assembled for major redevelopment projects. This is the strategy that Cleveland, Detroit and Youngstown are using to slowly redevelop desolate neighborhoods.

“This is definitely not a short-term solution,” said the LISC’s Taft.

Kildee, who is working with Taft and other Indianapolis officials, came up with the concept while working in Genesee County, Mich., after General Motors started laying off workers. Suddenly, a region that had one of the highest per capita incomes in the country became a ghost town of foreclosed and vacant houses. Kildee and his colleagues had to think big.

“It’s sort of like a puzzle that you have to fit together in a citywide plan,” he said.

Kildee admits this is a shift in thinking for many cities — and a tough sell in places such as Indianapolis, which aren’t as desperate as Detroit.

But as we deal with the invasive problem of empty houses, we shouldn’t be afraid to come up with radical, more sustainable uses for urban space. Just because we’re not as bad off as other Midwestern cities today doesn’t mean we’ll be safe in the future.

“Cities are realizing that they’re too big,” said Hagaman, chairman of the board of the Land Bank of Indianapolis. “It is a very bitter pill to swallow.”

at (317) 444-6424, email erika.smith@ indystar.com, or reach her on Twitter at @indystar_erika or @beyond_big_game.