As metro Atlanta neighborhoods fought to recover from a plummet in property values, abandoned eyesores remain a threat to city, county and school budgets across the state.

Channel 2 investigative reporter Jodie Fleischer contacted five counties and a dozen cities in north Georgia to get a handle on the number of vacant houses.

Fleischer said she found the numbers weren’t the only mystery.

A huge part of the problem is mystery homes. In other words, houses no one will claim.

“I just can’t even begin to tell you how much I love the one I bought,” home buyer Angela Christian-Vaughn said.

She said she got a fantastic deal on a West End home and paid only $35,000. But looking beyond her own yard, she showed Channel 2 Action News one problem after another.

The house across the street was of particular concern to Christian-Vaughn.

For five years, code enforcement has repeatedly cited the home. The back taxes exceed $30,000, but the house could never sell for that amount.

“I even was going to get the grass cut, but the police have told me that I can’t touch the property because it’s not mine,” Christian-Vaughn said.

The listed owner said it’s not hers, either.

“They have never owned the houses. As far as I know, they have never been inside the houses,” the Rev. Stephen George said.

He told Fleischer two young women from his church were victims of mortgage fraud. He said they ended up as the listed owner without paying a penny.

Former Gov. Roy Barnes said his Fair Lending Act helped get him voted out of office. The bank lobby rallied against him. The legislation that cracked down on bad loans and mortgage slicing and dicing lasted just three months.

“The vacant houses that no one even knows who owns are all a result of a lack of leadership from the General Assembly,” Barnes said.

In Jonesboro, the owner of one home walked away in 2008. Then, the bank didn’t want it either.

“He came to me back last year and said the bank had given him clear title,” said next-door neighbor Peggy Foster. She said she couldn’t stand the eyesore.

“So I bought it for the taxes,” Foster said. “It will take a little time, but I can fix it up.”

Buying the home cost her $5,000.

Her latest problem, the house on the other side of hers, has been abandoned. And again, thousands of tax dollars have gone unpaid.

“They’ve gone so long without doing anything to them that its cheaper for them, you know, to eat the mortgage and forget it. And that’s what happens to a good neighborhood,” Foster said.

In some cases, a bank did foreclose but no longer exists.

Omni Bank was the listed owner of a home on Ada Avenue, but the bank failed in 2009. Unpaid taxes exceed $29,000.

“It’s a double whammy. First they don’t get any tax revenue from the house that is sitting vacant, and then because the house is sitting vacant, it devalues the property around it, which means there is less revenue from the ones paying taxes,” Barnes said.

The city of Atlanta compiled a list of 950 unowned homes, but Code Enforcement Director C.J. Davis admitted it was just a fraction of the problem.

“It is quite alarming, and it presents some very unique challenges,” Davis said.

Atlanta was the only government Fleischer found that even tried to keep a list of unowned homes. But it needs citizens to tell officials about the abandoned eyesores.

Fleischer spent months attempting to quantify the problem.

On Tuesday at 6, Fleischer digs into why it’s so difficult to do and the extreme measures critics have called for to try to bring the metro-area neighborhoods back.