Seeking answers on blight in one section of Phila.

A stone's throw from the recess yard of William McKinley School lies a wedge in a North Philadelphia section's struggle to become more: abandoned houses covered by graffiti, littered lots, and, halfway down the narrow street, a discarded toilet leaning against a utility pole.

On a tour of this community Thursday, members of the recently formed coalition called the Campaign to Take Back Vacant Land lamented the cost of such blight.

"How are our children supposed to grow and become productive members of society?" asked resident Nashanta Robinson, 30, standing in a lot on the 2100 block of Leithgow Street, between two crumbling, deserted houses, "if this is what they see growing up?"

Robinson, a mother of three, has lived for about two years in Fairhill, one of the neighborhoods east of Broad Street in the section that is struggling with blight. "With the blight and the trash, it brings crime and just produces a negative aspect to the community which we don't want. We don't want that."

According to the campaign's recent report, "Put Abandoned Land in Our Hands," 25 percent of the properties in the section, which runs from Girard to Lehigh Avenues and Front to 10th Streets, are vacant or blighted.

Such decay has been a decades-old problem in Philadelphia, a city with an estimated inventory of 40,000 vacant, blighted parcels.

Part of the problem, said Nora Lichtash, executive director of the Women's Community Revitalization Project, is that the city's system to handle vacant land is broken, partly because the city doesn't know what property it owns and the ones it does own are scattered among multiple agencies.

"This report comes up with a solution to a vacant land crisis," said Lichtash, "which is a partnership between the community and the city to put all of the land in one place. And that the community has a role that defines what happens to it in creating homes, jobs and parks."

The city spends $20 million a year to maintain vacant land, according to the report, based on city data. Adding to the problem, the owners of 18,000 vacant properties haven't paid their taxes in 10 or more years.

"There's a recognition of a land bank as something we want to move toward," said Brian Abernathy, chief of staff for the managing director. "The administration can't just wake up one day and decide to transfer its land into one bucket. We need City Council authorization, we need state legislation, and we need to analyze the impact, which is something we're actively doing."