Iya Kenya MahaliyaDara loves her Northwest Baltimore home, but she’s getting tired of her neighbors.

For the past seven years the 48-year-old Baltimore native has lived in a Park Heights rowhome she inherited from her mother. Next door is a vacant home where rats, mice, roaches, nests of hornets, feral cats and a family of raccoons live.

MahaliyaDara said she has tried contacting the owner — an LLC based in College Park that hasn’t been in good standing with the state since 2007 — and gotten no response. She thinks it’s time for the city to act.

A coalition of housing advocates gathered Tuesday morning outside her home to launch a campaign for a Baltimore land bank.

A land bank is a quasi-governmental agency specifically tasked with acquiring blighted properties, clearing their debts, assembling lots and selling them to qualified developers. Advocates believe it could be a powerful tool in rebuilding blocks like MahaliyaDara’s, where most of the rowhomes have boarded-up windows, caved-in roofs and rotting facades.

“I’m ready for our city’s first land bank,” MahaliyaDara told the dozens of supporters.

The city has identified about 14,000 homes in Baltimore as vacant and abandoned, but as the population of Baltimore continues to decrease developers and advocates believe the true number of vacant properties is much higher. The homes are often crime magnets and fire hazards.

“What does it mean for a child to walk past 29 vacant properties on their way to school?” said Nneka N’Namdi, founder of Fight Blight Bmore. “It means we as a community, we as a city, have actually failed them because we are creating conditions that are dangerous and traumatic to children.”

City Councilwoman Odette Ramos introduced legislation in March that would authorize the city to create a land bank, but there has yet to be a hearing on her bill. More than 200 cities across the country have established land banks.

They’re popular in postindustrial cities that have experienced population loss. Baltimore leaders nixed plans for a land bank in 2009 after concerns about transparency and financial feasibility.

Ideally, when a home becomes vacant and falls into disrepair, an individual or a company would buy the home, fix it up and either move in or sell it.

But in certain neighborhoods of Baltimore the abundance of blighted properties has broken this cycle.

It often costs more to rehabilitate an abandoned home in Baltimore than that home’s eventual market value. That means a developer can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to acquire and rebuild a vacant home, then find that no one is willing to spend that much to buy it.

Tia Richards, a developer in Baltimore, spoke at Tuesday’s event and said there are local developers like her who want to rebuild neighborhoods with homeownership opportunities, but the numbers don’t work out.

“I have developers calling me because they’re in a spot where they can’t sell their homes. They have top-of-the-line products,” Richards said. “But because there’s vacants predominantly controlling the block, no one wants to live there.”

Rather than fixing and flipping more homes, these developers are often stuck as landlords, Richards said, leading some to avoid entire neighborhoods if there are too many vacants.

“Everyone is waiting for someone else to start,” she said.

In theory, a land bank could help resolve this dilemma. It could use the legal powers of the city to take control of vacant homes in a target area — possibly entire blocks — and assemble lots that could be sold to qualified developers at discounted prices.

This would shorten the acquisition timeline, reduce costs and decrease the risk for developers who want to renovate vacant homes, but it also would cost money.

Ramos has acknowledged that creating a land bank could mean a funding cut for the city’s Department of Housing and Community Development. Ramos attended Tuesday’s event, along with fellow council members Sharon Green Middleton, James Torrence and Zeke Cohen, all Democrats.

In a statement provided by Tammy Hawley, spokesperson for the city housing department, the agency pushed back against the idea of a land bank.

“The City has an evidence-based strategy and the necessary capabilities to rehabilitate these properties under a holistic community development framework,” the statement says. “DHCD already performs the activities proposed by the Land Bank Legislation and then some.”

Last year lawyers for the agency began filing lawsuits against vacant and abandoned properties under a new foreclosure process that Ramos shepherded into law. Such “in rem” foreclosures are expected to bring thousands of vacant properties under the city’s ownership, meaning the city also must figure out what to do with them.

Ramos and other advocates say an independent land bank would be nimbler and more responsive to community concerns than the city’s housing agency, which in turn would focus more on its primary responsibilities, such as permitting and code enforcement.

The coalition behind Tuesday’s event calls itself the “Campaign for Community Control,” partly because the current housing market in Baltimore only benefits real estate speculators and absentee landlords, said John Kern of the Stop Oppressive Seizures Fund.

“We have a very, very different vision,” he said. “Our world leverages a quasi-governmental entity that’s in partnership with city agencies and like-minded investors who share this vision of community control. So this is an all-hands-on-deck approach.”

Yolanda Jiggetts, CEO of Park Heights Renaissance, said a land bank would be a powerful tool for her neighborhood, which has struggled with vacant properties for decades. The current approach clearly isn’t working, she said.

“People live next to these vacants,” Jiggetts said. “We cannot continue to let people suffer for years and years and years.”