Local leaders, residents and housing activists launched a campaign Thursday to crack down on foreclosed homes that have been allowed to deteriorate and blight their communities. They vowed to press authorities to enforce a new city law that would impose a $1,000-a-day fine on banks and other lenders that allow foreclosed properties to fall into disrepair. 'We are here to let the community know that they have this important tool to use against the banks,' Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alarcon told a news conference in front of a Pacoima home that was taken over by gang members after the bank foreclosed on the property earlier this year. Alarcon said his 7th Council District has the city's highest percentage of single-family homes in foreclosure, with properties in just one ZIP code representing more than 10 percent of the foreclosed homes in Los Angeles. Neighbors maintain many of them have become eyesores and targets for gangs and crime. 'Who would want to live near this house?' said longtime Pacoima resident Soledad Alatorre as she toured the backyard of a house in the 13900 block of Daventry Street. Overgrown weeds, an abandoned car and discarded furniture littered the yard, and gang graffiti covered the walls of a converted garage apartment mired in filth and trash. Neighbors said homeowners had been forced out of the foreclosed home in March, and gang members had been squatting on the property. 'This is what happens when bad things happen to good residents,' said Guillermo Zamora, who has owned the house next door for 19 years. 'The people who lived here would never have allowed it to get rundown like it is now.' The City Council last Friday unanimously passed the 'foreclosure registry' ordinance allowing the city to fine banks up to $1,000 a day when they do not maintain vacant homes they own through foreclosure. Alarcon blamed the mortgage industry for creating the situation. 'First of all, the banks were involved in a scandalous scheme to create bad loans and put families at risk, then foreclosing upon them,' Alarcon said. 'And now they're not taking care of the homes that they now own because the families are gone.' A spokeswoman for the California Bankers Association said the industry supported passage of a 2008 state law that allows local governments to impose fines up to $1,000 a day on legal owners who aren't maintaining their property. But she noted that banks face some legal obstacles in maintaining foreclosed properties because they may not officially take ownership until many months after the homeowner has left the residence. 'Where some of the disconnect is, from the industry perspective, until the foreclosure process is complete -- and in California, that process could take well up to a year and possibly even more than that -- the bank's not the legal owner of that property,' said Beth Mills of the Bankers Association. 'Even if a notice of default has been filed or if somebody's just walked away from the mortgage, until that whole process is complete, the bank's not the legal owner of the property, and it's not their responsibility to maintain the property because frankly they're not the legal owners of it yet.' Leaders of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment -- a low-income and working families advocacy group made up of leaders and staff that broke away from the controversial ACORN organization -- urged residents to report blighted bank-owned foreclosures at LAHoodwinked.com or 877-633-9251. In the Pacoima ZIP code 91331, some 2,400 homes have been foreclosed -- more than a tenth of the city's 22,000 foreclosures, ACCE officials said. 'The banks have to take some responsibility,' said Martin Mariscal, who lives nearby and is a community leader of the nonprofit ACCE. 'They have the money to maintain these properties, and they're not doing it right now.' Mariscal said the dilapidated properties have become safety hazards. 'Our children walk to school past these blighted houses,' he said, 'and this is not the type of environment that our kids should be exposed to.' The Rev. John A. Lasseigne said that when he became pastor of Mary Immaculate parish in Pacoima two years ago, the foreclosure crisis in his new community immediately grabbed his attention. 'I discovered that (a map of foreclosed homes in) my neighborhood looked like it had had a case of the measles -- all these red spots,' he said. 'I asked for our parishioners to come forward if they were at risk of losing their homes. Hundreds of them came forward.' Mariscal said it would make better sense for banks to work with families at risk of losing their homes. 'Wouldn't it help both the banks, the families and the community to keep (those families) in the homes?' he said. 'It is these families who would maintain their homes, but it's the banks who have allowed these properties to deteriorate like this.' 