TAFT, Calif. -- For Sheriff's Dep. Jeff Eveland, it's not hard to spot the abandoned houses that are hotbeds of criminal activity.

"There's nothing to stop these guys, and you know a child's curiosity is going to put him in a place like this," he said, pointing to a rug he rolled up that was filled with drug paraphernalia. "This is like the world's biggest clubhouse."

The abandoned houses Eveland inspects are littered with the after-effects of drug use, evidence of squatters, and highly offensive vandalism on the walls of the homes. But knowing where they are gives law enforcement an advantage.

"We as law enforcement can know when we go into a specific neighborhood, and say, 'Hey I know there's some abandoned houses here, and there's places this joker can be hiding, and I'm going to check this part too,'" he said.

Eveland has compiled an inventory of more than a hundred abandoned homes and unsecured properties in the unincorporated communities of Taft Heights, South Taft and Ford City, to give authorities an idea of what houses are inhabited.

The problem is affecting every neighorhood, not just the low-income ones.

"This one guy ran from us, and we walked the alley and in one block we searched nine abandoned houses," Eveland recalled. "He could've went in any of these houses. If they've got basements, we're not familiar with which ones are abandoned or not until we're there. So that kind of sprung the idea that we need to do something about this."

The key is making sure that if a home is abandoned, its windows are boarded up and the doors are all padlocked.

"The unsecured houses are the issues. Those are the ones people get into, and they become vandalized," said Sgt. Martin Downs. "Criminals hide inside there, and the houses become eyesores for the neighborhood."

Thousands of foreclosures across the county have left many homes abandoned, and in Taft, many of the homes were sold sight unsees as low-end investments during the housing boom before the mortgages went belly-up.

"They came in in droves and a lot of property was sold at a really high rate," Downs said. "Now, we're paying the price for it. They have no interest in these properties, and they're really bringing the neighborhoods down. "

The banks and few remaining private owners don't have the means to secure the houses, leading to gutted neighborhoods.

"The banks are so flooded with properties in foreclosure that getting any kind of help has been non-existent," Downs said. "The owners of the properties are hard to locate, most of them are out of town, and the last thing they care about is a little house out here in Taft."

With no help in sight, deputies are working with Kern County Code Compliance to try and get as many of the homes red-tagged as possible. There is money to abate some of the problems and seal the homes, according to Robert Fenwick, a code officer.

"But once we get involved the house doesn't really have much opportunity to be saved," Fenwick said. "The costs are too high."

That leaves demolition as the only viable option for many of the properties.

"Some of them, honestly, there's nothing left to do but destroy them," Eveland said. "There's things inside of here that there should never be access for a local neighborhood child to get into a place like that and end up injured or ill."