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ST. LOUIS — The sun rose barely an hour ago, and the bustling Bevo Mill neighborhood is quiet still.

A Chevy Impala pulls up to a house on the one-way Taft Avenue, and the two men inside get out.

They study the house.

“Should we go ’round back?�

“We can try the front.�

They cut across the lawn, bypassing a wooden trellis. A tuxedo-colored cat that sought refuge on the porch wakes and dashes off when the men walk up to the door.

As one peers into a window, the other knocks: “Police Department.�

The owner has abandoned this house in the 4100 block of Taft, leaving it vacant for at least a year and taxes unpaid since 2018. The city has since fielded more than a dozen complaints about the house: Debris piled up in the yard. Rats scuttling around the property. Overgrown weeds and grass.

It’s one of thousands of derelict and vacant properties across the city that attract crime, depress property values and frustrate residents.

But City Hall has tasked a crew with solving it. Six police officers, eight attorneys and various building inspectors and neighborhood improvement specialists form the city’s Problem Properties unit to tackle nuisances that range from loud parties and hoarding to drug houses and vacant buildings. They talk several times a week and meet together once a month to determine which properties get on their list, which owners will be charged and which strategies work best.

“We’re not like the district officers who go from call to call to call,� said John McLaughlin, a retired police sergeant who now leads the unit under the Department of Public Safety. “We can take the time to dissect (the problem) and try to deal with it.�

It’s an uphill battle. There are 24,000 vacant properties in the city, many of which land at the feet of the Problem Properties unit. And there’s no indication that number is going to dip quickly; St. Louis lost another 5% of its population, or 15,000 residents, over just the past two years.

Moreover, some residents say the Problem Properties Unit is ineffective, too reactive and underfunded — the number of officers has dropped from 18 to 6 over the years. The unit, they say, ignores vacancy and crime data that could better serve neighborhoods.

Dutchtown resident Nate Lindsey said sometimes the unit just doesn’t call him back. He has seen videos of crimes, including of gun-toting residents, that were forwarded to the department, to no avail.

“There’s ample evidence, demonstrable evidence, and there’s no action taken,� he said.

Still, relief could be coming. The city recently awarded a two-year contract to the St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative to better manage the city’s vacant properties and, hopefully, help the Problem Properties team, among other city departments, make a dent in their list.

“People want these things to be addressed quickly, but we have to follow the law,� McLaughlin said. “It takes time, but it works.�

Wading through the mess

On Taft Avenue, rust has begun to eat through the gutters and metal handrail leading up the porch. A green wall-mount mailbox hangs crooked off the porch. A wooden cabinet leans against the side of the house.

But it’s the pile of discarded furniture clogging the path between this house and the next that tips off the officers. It’s a dead giveaway.

St. Louis police Officer Louis Naes calls out: “Can you come out the front for us? You’re not in any trouble.�

Naes and Officer Dave Krapf, who patrol neighborhoods south of Highway 40, coax a woman and her son out the back of the house. The front door, the woman tells the officers, is locked.

The backyard is a landfill: Seven wooden headboards line a wire fence as tires, mattresses, a DVD/VHS player, barbecue pit, dog crate and other junk are strewn throughout the yard. A photo of three children posing for a Christmas photo lies discarded on the ground next to a plastic tub of dirt.

Naes walks inside. Nobody else is there. One of the crew from the Building Division begins kicking down the back stoop; he hopes to stop other people from getting inside. Crew member Shauntey Noel looks around at the trash. She gets why people would wade through the mess to seek shelter.

“It would be better than being dead,� she said.

It’s illegal for the woman and her son to be at the property because it’s condemned. But Naes is encouraged that the woman, who declined to talk to a reporter, says she’ll accept help.

He calls Landry Sorbel, someone who always picks up, to meet the woman here. Sorbel is a community behavioral health liaison with Places for People, an organization that connects social services with those experiencing homelessness or mental health issues.

Sorbel said it takes about eight contacts with someone before they open up to help. Most of the people he encounters want shelter and services. But the city has few homeless shelters and fewer resources dedicated to them.

“The system is difficult to navigate,� Sorbel said.

City records say the Taft house is owned by a woman who lives five minutes south, on Toenges Avenue.

But there, the grass stands taller than its neighbors. Signs are posted to keep out visitors.

No one answers the door when a reporter knocks.

Neighbors do legwork

Officers have a list of properties they check regularly, and they’re required to know their patrol area’s “hot spots.�

Properties get on their list through an excessive amount of police calls for service, complaints filed with the Citizens’ Service Bureau, or, sometimes, violent crimes.

A lot of the officers’ work is combing through public records to track down owners as they balance assignment after assignment.

“We’re chasing our tails a lot of times,� said Krapf.

Gloria Gooden, a 50-year resident of the Baden neighborhood, credits the north city team for helping her and her neighbors. They’re in regular contact, even on the weekends. She calls them on their direct line; getting a response from the Citizens’ Service Bureau takes too long, she said.

“Patience is not one of my virtues,� Gooden said.

Lindsey, the Dutchtown resident, has tried the direct route with the south city unit to no avail. A corner store in the 4600 block of Virginia has frequently attracted crime and other nuisances — including a recent music video that depicted at least six flashing weapons at the camera. Lindsey has also messaged about a multifamily building in the 4700 block. He said those emails have gone unanswered.

The Problem Properties system is too reactive and relies on a threshold of grievances, Lindsey said: Neighbors have to do the legwork by continuously filling complaints, compiling evidence and persuading their alderman to get involved.

“The Problem Property division is a great idea,� Lindsey said. “But it is obviously understaffed, it’s poorly executed, and it doesn’t have any strategic cooperation between the various other departments in the city for it to be successful.�

The Public Safety department said the unit meets with hundreds of property owners a year. As for the Dutchtown properties Lindsey complained about, officers are aware and engaged, a spokesperson said.

Peter Hoffman, an attorney at the Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, works with neighborhood associations to sue owners and take possession of vacant properties. His organization brings about 50 cases a year and has returned about 300 units of vacant properties back to productive use over the past five years, equaling about $170,000 in restored real estate taxes.

Legal Services tries to complement the Problem Properties Unit’s work, holding the owners accountable in a way that the city cannot, like suing owners that hide behind limited liability companies and clearing clouded real estate titles that impede change, said Hoffman.

But his organization also sees how staffing shortages hinders the Problem Properties unit’s work.

“You have to have people on the ground to move the needle on this issue,� he said.

Mayor Tishaura O. Jones’ spokesperson Nick Dunne said the city has added three new attorney positions, along with support staff, in the 2022 and 2023 budgets. He said the Counselor’s Office litigated 5,400 housing court cases last year, but that the number of out-of-state property owners remains one of the “biggest barriers to resolving nuisance property issues,� he said.

Dunne declined to make the City Counselor’s Office available for an interview.

‘The stuff does weigh on you’

At one time, the 720-square-foot home on East Schrimer Street in the Patch neighborhood had blooming rose bushes, garden gnomes and a wooden cardinal whirligig.

Today, the house has been abandoned and fire ravaged. A hole gapes in the roof. Vines crawl up the wall, threatening to overtake the home. A discarded couch lies on its side in the yard.

And in the back is Ronald Howell and another man, surrounded by a fortress of discarded furniture, wicker baskets and a bucket of human waste.

It’s not clear what happened to the owner. Real estate taxes haven’t been paid since 2019. An obituary for a woman with the same name as the owner shows she died that year. The city marked the house vacant in 2020 and the Citizens’ Service Bureau reported that someone boarded up the house. It later condemned the house in 2020, posting photos of the fire damage.

The house is tucked into an “out of sight, out of mind� part of the city, said Krapf.

But unlike the woman from Taft Avenue, Howell and the other man decline help. Howell has been on the waiting list for a bed before.

The officers decide not to arrest the men. Both Krapf, a 31-year veteran, and Naes, with 20 years, know that arresting homeless people doesn’t fix the problem. The job forces them to brainstorm solutions, to pivot quickly.

That day, they move on to other assignments. Naes preps for court. But the squalor he’s found people living in stays with him.

“The stuff does weigh on you,� Naes said. “You have to focus on the wins.�

Josh Renaud of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.