Footage of abandoned housing development Larkway Gardens, with its dark, gaping windows and empty, trash-strewn streets, looks like it was shot in Chernobyl, not west Birmingham.

The site has become a notorious symbol of Birmingham's longstanding blight, but it isn't the city's only ghost town. Less than a mile away, some kids ride bikes in the shadow of the burned-out apartment cluster on their street. A tangle of charred beams sticks out of one building like exposed ribs; the rest are covered in graffiti and old condemnation notices.

"If the city cared, they would have torn these down as soon as it happened, as soon as they got burned," says Ashley Richard, the kids' mom. "They'd rather fix everything else but this."

A half century of population loss has made dead and dying housing complexes a regular feature of Birmingham's residential areas. They poison property values, attract crime, squatters and vermin, and may be one of the greatest obstacles for Birmingham's ongoing efforts at urban renewal.

Richard's representative, Councilor Sheila Tyson, has hunted ghost complexes since her days as West End neighborhood president, but after two years at City Hall, most of the sites in her district remain intact, as does her frustration with the city.

"They've found money for everything else, you could have given enough money to tear down these apartments," Tyson says. "There's no excuse for not tearing them down."

So why not just demolish them?

For starters, bigger sites are simply harder to deal with, argues Andre Bittas, director of the Planning, Engineering and Permits department, which handles demolitions.

"Just because we have tagged the building doesn't mean it is formally condemned yet," Bittas says, referring to the red (or, eventually, faded yellow) notices that adorn the city's dilapidated structures. These simply mark the start of a long, complicated road to demolition, one which involves surveys, council approval, asbestos and lead inspections and competitive bidding from contractors.

It takes at least a year for an ordinary house, and only when everything runs perfectly. For something like a commercially-owned apartment building, all bets are off.

Still, several (including most of the Larkway Gardens structures) have actually made it to the demolitions list, but they share it with more than 1200 buildings awaiting a bulldozer. The city demolished 398 last year but had 316 new cases with a much higher rate of return on simple targets--single family homes, old shotgun shacks, etc. Sites like Larkway Gardens are more expensive, though Bittas says funding increased in recent years as the city turns its attention towards blight.

Indeed, Tyson plans to ask the council to set aside an additional $5 million for demolitions in the next year's budget. To drum up awareness, she and her staff are planning a driving tour of the worst sites.

Some aren't actually condemned, or even vacant.

In North Titusville's sprawling Montevallo Gardens complex, retiree Douglass Freeman is one of only eight holdout tenants surrounded by more than a dozen abandoned buildings, some burned, the rest looted for copper wire and pipe.

Freeman says it has changed hands four times in the six years he has lived there, with each owner leaving the surrounding structures more vandalized.

"They claimed they're going to start working on it," Freeman says. "They keep saying, 'Oh we're gonna get started next week. We're gonna get started in two weeks...But I've heard that so many times before. I said, 'I'll believe it when I see it.'"

Ronnie White with the code enforcement division of the Department of Public Works has been tracking Montevallo Gardens for years. "People have tried to purchase it, to rehab it," he says. "Some people have really tried. It just hasn't worked."

Even a failed effort is something to appreciate, says White, compared to the slumlords of other sites who have willingly allowed their properties to crumble around destitute tenants.

In 2014, Public Works employed only four code enforcement officers for the city, and only about half the nearly 3000 violations involving structures were resolved. The problem goes deeper than mere funding: Until recently, the city didn't even have a real property code, just an old list of "requirements" with scant legal backing. It couldn't issue fines or take anyone court. The only real power was in outright condemnation, an option officials were hesitant to use in a city already bleeding residents.

"We didn't want to make it expensive to operate in the city of Birmingham," says Director of Community Development John Colon. "The unintended consequence was that landlords and businesses said, 'Well, since they're not going to force my hand, I'll just keep playing this game, get what I can and walk away.'"

The Bell administration is trying to change the narrative with the first real property code reform since the Civil Rights era. Last year, as part of Bell's RISE renewal initiative, the city adopted the 2009 International Property Maintenance Code, a thorough, strict set of rules that allow the city to fine landlords up to $500 per citation per day.

Code in hand, Public Works has hired four new code enforcement staff with plans for four more, and in July it will finally launch what Colon calls the "code blitz," a neighborhood-by-neighborhood survey and crackdown starting with Pratt City, where the Land Bank Authority and other RISE programs are being tested.

But the new codes probably won't save developments like Montevallo Gardens, which decades of public leniency have allowed to deteriorate past their own market values. White says landlords are more likely to simply vacate these sites and write them off rather than pay to renovate.

There are worse outcomes, White argues. "We can't make anyone rehab a building, but what we can do is make sure if it's not habitable, nobody is there."

Thus, the new code could alleviate decades of slumlording, but it could also swell the ranks of Birmingham's ghost complexes, from which a structure has only two escapes: the grueling demolitions process, or the interest of new private developers.

The city is rooting for the latter. Birmingham's the new Land Bank Authority was made to be a conduit between abandoned property and potential developers, which both Colon and Tyson interact with regularly, trying to convince the private sector to believe in Birmingham.

Birmingham's latest suitor is former NFL cornerback and Alabama native Frank Walker, who recently purchased a vast condemned complex on Center St. The $2 million project will restore some structures and demolish others, making room for greenscaping and a playground.

The Council was thrilled. "They all pitched in and offered a helping hand," Walker says. "They all told me once this project is done, look for things in their district, they would be more than happy to help me with things in their district also."

Walker has plans for more projects in Birmingham, but his motivations aren't purely capitalistic: He expects to make a profit, but not a fortune, and lists the effort alongside his youth football camps and Christmas fund for poor families.

But Walker, who himself grew up around a rough area, says a city place like Birmingham needs little charity to turn sites like these around, at least at first.

"People like stuff when it's running," he says. "It can get to that, but it starts with things like I'm doing right now. A facelift of the whole area. You start at the stop signs, and go on down to the condemned houses."

He continues: "If you've got a small chance to make a big difference, why not?"