The three largest cities in East Central Illinois have hundreds more empty houses and apartments than they did 10 years ago.

But the reasons, and the effects, are different for each.

— Danville has hundreds of buildings that are essentially abandoned, by far the highest number in the area, according to census statistics. Hundreds more are empty rental properties, some of which need major renovation. The city has undertaken programs to demolish many of the homes and has a program to register vacant rental properties to keep track of their renovation.

— Urbana, with the biggest increase in vacancies in the area, is feeling the effects of a building boom and now is overbuilt with apartments, according to a city official.

— Champaign has the biggest number of vacant units; but with the highest population, its vacancy rate is among the lowest.

Empty homes — whether apartments or single-family houses — can cause problems of maintenance and crime for cities, and hurt the values of neighboring properties, officials say.

"The people right next to the property, it really bugs them — understandably so," said Tim Spear, a property maintenance inspector for Champaign's neighborhood services department. Even if the city uses its powers to mow a yard or take other code-compliance steps, "we can't maintain it like the homeowner would maintain it."

Residents of a neighborhood know which homes are empty, he said.

"The key is that once outsiders know it's empty, that's when perceptions start to change."

"We were finding a great deal of illegal activities in vacant structures," Danville Mayor Scott Eisenhauer said. "They were becoming the party houses of the neighborhood. ... In a community where we were trying so hard to beautify, the last thing we wanted was these dilapidated structures. ... I'm not pointing the finger necessarily at landlords. Tenants don't have the same financial or emotional investment in a property.

"When you have the balance skewed more toward rental properties, there tends to be more calls for law enforcement or code enforcement in those areas."

In Urbana, "we have been through quite a building boom over the years from 2000 to 2010," said Libby Tyler, director of community development. "There were a lot of units thrown on the market at the same time. There were a lot more places to choose from. ... Prior to those years, we had low vacancy."

From 2000 to 2010, in Urbana, building permits were issued for about 1,060 new houses and another 1,650 apartments.

In that time, the number of vacant housing units (houses, apartments, duplexes — any structure intended to be a separate living place) more than doubled in Urbana, from 984 to 2,129.

That number is slightly smaller than the number of empty homes in Champaign, but Champaign's population jumped by 13,000 between 2000 and 2010.

So while Urbana had a 13 percent rental vacancy rate in 2010, Champaign's was about half that, at 6.7 percent.

"Before the building activity, vacancy rates were too low," Tyler said. "That's been remedied, but probably overremedied. ... The market righted itself but then kept it going."

That meant more competitive rents and "more choices of places to live," Tyler said. "Apartment owners had to work harder to get tenants."

For a time in the past decade, some landlords were offering premiums to tenants, according to Andrew Timms, president of Central Illinois Rental Property Professionals and a property manager in Champaign.

"Even from the end of 2010 to six months later, we may be finding less vacancy" than when the census was taken in April 2010, Timms said.

"Talking to my peers in anecdotal conversation, we are getting to capacity without as much effort as it had taken in the past couple of years," he said. "There were, in previous years, firms with a high campus presence that, even though they had a prominent location, still had to offer big-screen TVs. I imagine we'll see less of that."

He also said some rental properties tend to fare better in down economies, because for some residents, it may be easier to pay rent than a mortgage.

But in poor economic times, "There's less money circulating around. Even though we have more residents, you may not have the cash flow to make improvements."

That's a problem with how Danville is addressing vacant rentals, according to John Cunningham, president of the Danville Area Landlords Association.

In late 2007, Eisenhauer introduced a plan to combat blight and increase compliance with rules governing rental properties. The next year, the city council approved an annual fee and enforcement measures on rental properties and requirements to register vacant structures and have a plan to rehab or demolish those that weren't being marketed for sale or rent.

The city also took out a $2 million bond and has gotten other money to use for demolitions and uses its staff to handle many of them to keep costs down.

Some landlords opposed all or parts of the rules at the time, and some still do.

The landlords' group is discussing the rules with Eisenhauer and they may be amended this year.

One problem, Cunningham said, is a one-year deadline for renovating a vacant rental property.

"Unless you've got the deep pockets, you can't do it within a year," he said. "We're talking some major money."

Eisenhauer said a basic problem lies with the nature of the housing that's available in Danville.

"The housing stock is far more than what our population requires, and the housing stock in many situations is older than what new homebuyers are interested in purchasing."

He said much of the housing in Danville was built to accommodate the city's quick post-World War II growth, which was fueled by the area's industrial base, including a General Motors foundry (which closed in 1993). Homes were built on small lots close together, he said, adding that homeowners now want "bigger houses and bigger yards."

He believes that demolishing abandoned homes can give buyers a chance at bigger lots, and reduce the number of properties overall.

Census statistics show that the major change in vacant structures in Danville is in the "all other" category. Eisenhauer said those are the homes that have been abandoned, for any number of reasons: the owner has died and family members don't want the house; the owner can't make the mortgage payments; or someone has bought a property intending to renovate it to sell or rent but can't make the finances work and walks away from the home.

He said that with a declining population, single-family homes converted to rentals put the city "out of balance between owner-occupied and rental properties."

Still, more than half the housing properties are owner-occupied in Danville.

That balance is different in Champaign and Urbana, where rental units outnumber owner-occupied homes, because of the presence of the University of Illinois.

The rental market as a whole is doing well in the U.S., according to a study published last month by the National Multi Housing Council, an apartment owners' organization. In the survey, 80 percent of the council's members said vacancies were down and rents were up.

"My sense is that we're still normalizing, and it hasn't tipped into a lessors' market," said Timms, of Central Illinois Rental Property Professionals. "The renter and the property manager are on a pretty even field."

And in Champaign, while thousands of new housing units were built during the decade, the population growth has kept the vacancy rate low.

In Champaign, building permits show that the number of new units peaked in 2007, and construction dropped below the decade average from 2008 to 2010.

"We're not seeing as many new starts," said Kerri Spear, neighborhood programs manager for Champaign.

The city's empty housing units increased half as much as Urbana's. And its vacancy rate of 6.7 percent is below the county average of 8 percent.

"When we compare ourselves on a national or even regional level, we're doing better," she said.

Champaign had nearly 400 vacant single-family homes that are for sale, according to the 2010 census, but that's less than 3 percent of all the single-family homes in the city.