ATLANTA - In Mesa, Ariz., officials are trying to decide what to do about boarded-up McMansions that become party pads, trashed in raucous "raves" where invitations come by text message.

In Atlanta, thieving from abandoned properties is so bad that police caught one man building a new house entirely of pilfered materials from empty homes.

Flint, Mich., has had to add firefighters and ladder trucks recently even though its population has declined. Up to 90 percent of fires start in homes where no one lives.

From Atlanta's urban core to leafy neighborhoods filled with chirping crickets in Charlotte, N.C., some 2.2 million homes are expected to go through foreclosure – and stand empty – by the time the mortgage meltdown ends, according to Global Insight, an economic research firm. As the housing dominoes fall far from Wall Street, growing urban "ghost towns" of vacant houses are resulting in a costly crush of weeds, trash, and dereliction on a scale unseen in American cities since the Great Depression, economists say.

As a $4 billion package to help municipalities deal with foreclosure-related blight hangs fire in the US Senate, US mayors met last weekend in Miami to vent about the scourge of abandoned homes. Cash-strapped cities are now scrambling – often using on-the-fly ingenuity – to rescue neighborhoods suddenly vulnerable to crime and stunned by millions of dollars in lost equity wrought by loose credit, opportunistic speculators, and predatory lending.

"Economists and folks from the lending industry will talk about it as a market correction, which doesn't adequately describe it," says Joseph Schilling, an urban affairs professor at Virginia Tech's Metropolitan Institute in Blacksburg. "This isn't just blight in the urban core; it's blight and abandonment in new suburban communities, and that's just never happened before."

In some Sun Belt cities like Orlando, Fla., and Charlotte, officials have tripled or quadrupled the number of liens they've placed on vacant homes in the past year, hoping to recoup at some point the money cities are spending to try to keep the properties from going to ruin. In California and Arizona, neighborhoods of half-million-dollar homes stand nearly empty, with some lonely residents using their former neighbors' yards as driving ranges. Meanwhile, long foreclosure lag times and uncooperative note-holders mean swimming pools go green, rain gutters fall off, weeds grow high, and ne'er-do-wells move in.

Some 44.5 million homes in the US now stand next to an empty house, resulting in a drop of at least $5,000 in property value per house. By that calculation, a total loss of home value of $220 billion across the US can be attributed to the vacancy problem.

"This is a man-made disaster that's had more dramatic impacts on real estate markets than natural disasters [have]," says Bruce Katz, a housing analyst at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington. "In a way, we have a lot of mini-Katrinas across the country."

Banks and other mortgage lenders acknowledge they've been overwhelmed by the sheer number of foreclosures, finding themselves ill-equipped to be long-term landlords of so many properties. But they say the problem is complex, and that a long foreclosure process and the fact that people walk away before trying to work with lenders to rescue their mortgages also play into the dereliction of many neighborhoods. Last year, mortgage lenders helped 889,000 families avoid foreclosure and stay in their homes, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association website.

"You can guarantee that none of our members wants to be a landlord," says John Mecham, a spokesman for the Mortgage Bankers Association in Washington. "Of course, we can also see where local officials are coming from – abandoned and distressed properties are not only a blight, but they drive down property values for entire neighborhoods."

On Drummond Street

One such place is Drummond Street, in the shadow of Clark Atlanta University. On what was once a lively street, half the bungalows and shotgun-style houses are boarded up, with trash strewn about. Here, as elsewhere, the falling market has pierced holes in inflated appraisals used to write mortgage notes.

Bobby Todd, who has lived here 35 years, now sweeps sidewalks and trims hedges around the empty homes next to his. The mostly young, college-educated speculators bought new pickup trucks with money that he says should have gone into fixing up the houses – and then left when the market tanked. Mr. Todd himself is out nearly $7,000 in carpentry work he did on the homes.

"They thought they could come make a profit, but they didn't and they just left it," he says. "I'm an old man, and now I'm working for free."

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