Our cities, our counties, our state, will never be reborn until it buries its dead.

Empty, decaying houses haunt West Virginia’s neighborhoods, dispirited shells where yesterday’s factory workers, nurses, lawyers mechanics and coal miners once lived. Those residents are now deceased or bankrupt, or they’ve started over in a another state.

Those who travel our country roads wait in vain for new owners and tenants to replace them. No one is coming, at least not until the old bricks and timbers are gone.

West Virginia cannot settle for the status quo and allow this problem to persist.

Blame our region’s economic stagnation or the nation’s recession; blame lenders and landlords who bend and brake rules to make a fast buck; blame speculators who bundle and resell those toxic buildings, poisoning the countryside. And yes, blame ourselves for our drive to make new suburbs out of countryside. All those reasons help explain the ruins found along our country roads. Those abandoned and dilapidated structures must be laid to rest before we can grow anew.

Vacant houses can hide muggers, drug dealers and rapists. Boarded windows, sagging porches and graffiti wreck the value of homes nearby. Gloom settles into the minds of the adults driving down our highways and the kids who walk past the wrecks on the way to school.

We no longer venture out after dark, in fear of abandoned houses. Just ask the neighbors who live near them. They are petrified. They are in danger. It’s time to hold owners accountable

So it’s time to send the bulldozers. demolish the worst and least-wanted homes, renovate the best and hold others until they can be fixed and sold.

Not every vacant house should disappear. In strong neighborhoods, re-habbers buy, restore and sell foreclosed homes. New owners buy them as fixer-uppers, often with help from government grants and nonprofits. But in the hardest-hit neighborhoods, a house’s first, second or third foreclosure can mean its end. Some abandoned houses are stripped and vandalized, even burned down by vagrants seeking shelter and setting fires to stay warm. Condemnation comes next. Or, the market pronounces a quieter death sentence: The house has no value left because no one wants to buy it.

Yet, the problem is bigger than the budget. County governments must now condemn and tear down the most-troubled houses.

Worst off is where vacant buildings mar the landscape, overwhelming the unstable county’s tiny budget. Fire-gutted houses, collapsed porches and rows of ruins, scar the worst roadways.

This problem must be addressed immediately for the sake of the county’s literal and economic health alike. It is not a reality we must accept. With statewide action and cooperation, we can restore our county to its full natural beauty.

The mere sight of these structures is enough to scare away a potential new resident or business owner.

The environmental and health hazards are enormous. While citizens look at abandoned buildings as eyesores and nuisances, rats see them as prime real estate. Often, people who do not want to pay for trash service dump trash in the structures, and this attracts rats and other vermin. The rats later move to occupied homes.

This situation is of the utmost urgency. Our environmental and economic health depends on what we do to remedy this situation. We must do what is necessary to take care of this blight, but do so in a responsible, sustainable manner that is conducive to overall economic and community development. Otherwise, this situation will continue.

West Virginia may be plagued with abandoned and dilapidated structures, but the problem is not insurmountable. Land banking, deconstruction and legislation expediting removal or renovation of such buildings can clean up this state and restore it to its natural beauty. Once these solutions are undertaken, we will be more economically viable, as well as being literally more healthy.

I urge all counties to put an investigator on the case to see whether anything rises to the level of criminal fraud.

In addition, the federal government’s Section 8 program must enforce current regulations on safe housing.

It must do a far better job of inspecting and maintaining the tens of thousands of units it subsidizes. HUD is failing to inspect units adequately or to hold private landlords accountable to standards meant to ensure that low-income families have a decent, safe and sanitary place to live.

The lack of strong housing maintenance laws and enforcement places the burden on the tenant to hold a landlord accountable when the landlord refuses to make needed repairs, leaving low-income tenants to face the choice between substandard, unhealthy and unsafe housing or no housing at all.