"It's always in places where you least expect it," said Tamargo, who is on the front lines of finding and treating abandoned pools in Contra Costa County's suburbs east of San Francisco, an area with large numbers of foreclosed homes. "Could be a $500,000-home neighborhood, could be a million-dollar home neighborhood, and in the backyard there's this."
Authorities can order owners to take care of properties, such as treating or draining pools. The problem is finding who's responsible for an empty house that may have been flipped more than once.
"If you're a building official or a zoning inspector for a local government you really have to become almost like a CSI investigator just to track down who you should be talking to," said Joseph Schilling, director of policy and research for the Washington, D.C.-based National Vacant Properties Campaign which focuses on the problem of abandoned houses.
"Nobody wants to take responsibility," said Tamargo. "I guess they figure because they're not living here or whatever it's not their problem any more. The banks - this is probably the least of their worries."
So, for something that can't wait, like green pools, local officials fix the problem themselves and then try to seek reimbursement. To force ownership of the problem, officials in Chula Vista, a city south of San Diego, passed an ordinance requiring lenders to notify the city after recording a notice of default if the property is vacant, pay a $70 fee, and hire property management firms.
The ordinance has been in effect for a month and so far there have been about 30 voluntary registrations and notices of violation are being processed for another 30, said Doug Leeper, code enforcement officer.
In the Southern Nevada Health District, home to Las Vegas, officials logged nearly 1,600 complaints of standing water, primarily green pools, by early November compared to just over 1,000 for 2006, said Vivek Raman, vector control program supervisor.
"Some of them are just so thick with green scum on top," said Raman. "I've seen pools that have millions of mosquito larvae in them, literally millions."
Peak breeding for West Nile virus-carrying mosquitoes is mostly over for this year, but the problem of foreclosures isn't going away anytime soon, said Schilling.
"My sense is that the foreclosure crisis is going to rival the savings and loans debacle of the 1980s, at least as far as community impact," he said.
