In this 60 Minutes segment, reporter Scott Pelley visits Cleveland, Ohio, where the city is in the process of demolishing an estimated 20,000 perfectly good single-family homes—a lingering symptom of the Great Recession, and one for which we the taxpayers are still paying.

“You may not have indulged in the real estate bubble with its ‘liar’s loans’ and Wall Street greed, but you were stuck with the bill,” Pelley begins the piece. “Home values have dropped so far, so fast, nearly 25% of mortgage holders today owe more than their house is worth. And with unemployment so high, so long, many face foreclosure.”

In one Cleveland neighborhood, former Cuyahoga County Treasurer Jim Rokakis takes viewers on a tour of one foreclosed home that has been stripped inside and out of anything worth anything—exterior siding, wiring, appliances, light fixtures, even “the proverbial kitchen sink.”

The effect on surrounding homeowners is devastating, Rokakis says. “It clearly makes his house worth a lot less money because when you’ve got four, five, six vacant houses on a street like this, your house isn’t worth a percentage less; it’s just worthless.”

The “foreclosure scavengers” have gone high-tech, Rokakis explains. “They know when evictions are occurring, because they’re posted online. And they will follow the sheriff; they’re usually there that afternoon or that evening.”

It is to prevent the resulting blight that the city of Cleveland has demolished 1,000 vacant homes to date and has plans to demolish 20,000 more—to the tune of some $150 million in demolition costs, on the taxpayer’s dime.

By creating vacating lots in place of empty homes, local officials believe, they are both helping to prevent crime and blight and adding to the value of neighboring properties.

The banks could stop the bulldozers, Rokakis continues. After all, banks are at a minimum partly responsible for the housing crash and foreclosure crisis.

“In a normal real estate market, people are out looking for loans,” he says. “In the perverse real estate market we created in this country during the period 2000 to 2006, this wasn’t people looking for money; this was money looking for people.

“And that’s why so many of those loans were made without down payments and without verification of income, and, I might also add, phony appraisals.

“This is the result,” he continues, looking at the blighted neighborhood around him. “And it’s not just there; it’s all over America.”

In theory, when a bank forecloses on a loan, it is supposed to take responsibility for maintaining and reselling the property. But in many cases, banks have shirked that responsibility, Rokakis says.

“Very often a bank will take a property to the point of foreclosure but won’t go to sheriff’s sale, because they don’t want that property; they don’t want the $8,000 to $10,000 bill that comes with tearing this house down.”

But the banks, like many underwater homeowners, have in many cases turned their backs on the blight their lending practices has created, Rokakis says. He believes banks should make amends by writing down the principal balances on underwater mortgages—a practice he acknowledges could cost banks hundreds of billions of dollars. “Aren’t you better off,  let’s say, in a $150,000 mortgage preserving $75,000 in value? As opposed to letting the house go vacant, possibly seeing the house vandalized, and dropped to a value well below that?

“They helped to cause this mess, and it’s not going to fix itself without their cooperation.”