A year after announcing a project to renovate or demolish 5,000 abandoned houses, Baltimore officials acknowledge that they need more help and are spending $1 million to hire 21 temporary employees.

The new workers -- three lawyers and the rest paralegals, clerks and real estate agents -- will allow Mayor Martin O'Malley's "Project 5000" to start working at full speed, said Michael Bainum, director of the program.

The goal is to breathe new life into about a third of the approximately 14,000 abandoned properties in the city. Lawyers and others are needed to conduct the often difficult work of tracking down the owners and any lien holders so the city can condemn or foreclose on the houses, Bainum said.

The city then plans to sell clusters of the properties to developers or nonprofit organizations, so they can fix them up and sell or rent them to the public. Others will be torn down.

"We are taking ownership of Baltimore again," O'Malley said yesterday. "For years, we never bothered to take title to properties once they were abandoned. And if you don't take title to them, you can't do anything with them."

When the mayor announced the project in January, he said the city would try to find lawyers willing to donate their time to help track down owners.

The city persuaded 13 local firms to handle about a third of the homes on which the city wanted to foreclose because of delinquent taxes, Bainum said. Among the most generous firms was Venable LLP, which agreed to handle 200 properties.

But by the summer, city officials realized they wouldn't be able to find enough volunteers, Bainum said. "The city was overly optimistic about how much pro bono legal assistance was out there to be obtained," he said.

City Council President Sheila Dixon said she was skeptical that the city needs to spend the $1 million during such lean times. "I've got issues with putting out another $1 million to run this program when we have a housing department that should be on top of this anyway as part of their regular responsibilities," she said.

But City Comptroller Joan M. Pratt said the investment will pay off because putting properties back on the tax rolls will bring the city more money in the long run. "There are a number of developers who are interested in these homes ... but they have been stalled because the city doesn't have title to these homes," Pratt said.

Over the past month, the city has hired 10 people -- most contract employees with one-year work agreements -- to help accelerate the acquisition process. In coming weeks, the city plans to hire another attorney, a real estate agent and several paralegals and clerks, Bainum said.

The city has approved the condemnation and purchase of about 500 properties. The goal is to acquire 4,500 properties through foreclosure, donation or condemnation over the next year.

Starting Jan. 8, large numbers of properties -- many in the Reservoir Hill, Upton and East Baltimore neighborhoods -- will start appearing on lists presented to the city's Board of Estimates for condemnation, said William N. Burgee, the city's director of property acquisitions and relocation.

"We are making a tremendous push to get more of these [acquisitions] done more quickly," said Burgee.