Call it peeling paint, but that proves an insult to folks who manufacture paint.

Left to the elements, paint loses its grip on eaves and siding, becomes scaly after a time battling ice and sun. Unless van Gogh does the application, paint has a limited life.

The peeling seldom arrives alone. It is one signal of a greater neglect.

Windows show jags of glass and reinforcement of plywood. Roofs have waves of age. Yards convey a return to nature.

These are dangerous buildings, not only in the sense of adjective, but through legal definition. Nearly 36 percent of residential units in St. Joseph were built in 1939 or earlier. Properties fall into disrepair. It happens.

At times, property owners lack the resources to make repairs to structural problems caused by age or fires or natural disasters. At times, property owners leave buildings for the attention of others.

A perfect world, or maybe a spanking new suburb, would have municipal officials out of the dangerous property business. St. Joseph is not a perfect world.

Article VII of Chapter 7 in the city’s Code of Ordinances devotes itself at length to the dreary undertaking of places in decay. It includes almost 4,000 words explaining the standards of building salvation, the statements of ordinance violation and the procedures of last-resort demolition.

The words speak to interior walls that “list, lean or buckle,” floors or roofs with “improperly distributed loads” and amenities “so dilapidated, decayed, unsafe (and) unsanitary” that human habitation seems unwise.

St. Joseph officials preside at dangerous building hearings, those occasional sessions at City Hall where private properties get consideration for repairs or destruction.

As of Monday, the city had 401 open dangerous-building cases, many minor, some hopeless.

Civic intervention comes about for varied reasons. On Monday afternoon, parties gathered on the record to clear up a timetable for private demolition work at a Downtown site where fire destroyed a building last summer.

Property owners on either side of the hole in the ground made known their concerns about drainage issues. Sam Barber, the city’s customer assistance director, ordered a schedule. All sides hoped for dry weather.

For a coming hearing on May 20, nine properties face city scrutiny. The list demonstrates tough choices that come with this territory.

On King Hill Avenue, neat houses with neat yards line the busy street. Most homeowners keep up appearances.

But side-by-side houses mar the neighborhood, looking beyond habitation, their siding weathered, yards disheveled.

Elsewhere, on South 24th Street, a house has icicle lights from some Christmas past and a tarp looking like a permanent attachment on the roof.

One on the dangerous building list, on South 11th Street, served as home for a Goetz Brewery maintenance worker and his family 50 years ago. Today, windows in the back part of the structure lack glass.

Mr. Barber said the city works with property owners willing and able to make repairs, with safeguards added for historical locales. Taxpayers take the hit when property owners forsake their land to public indulgence.

A city 166 years old has certain problems. Older properties are many, financial resources are limited. In a nation where land rights get regularly debated, the business of tagging the dangerous goes necessarily on.

Ken Newton’s column runs on Tuesday and Sunday.