On Beacon Hill we’ve got two problems—we probably have more, but two problems seem intractable.

We have bad neighbors—absentee landlords who suck the revenue out of their properties while letting them go to wrack and ruin. They rent to irresponsible tenants who cause a ruckus and put their trash out on the wrong days in the wrong bags, causing a mess.

And we aren’t keeping the good neighbors—the young families who move out before their children reach school age because they can’t afford both the high cost of housing and the private schools they think they’ll need if they stay downtown. They can get a lot more for their money in real estate and public schools in Newton or Needham.

Let’s save the public schools for another day. But there is a way for young families to beat the high cost of housing, while at the same time helping the neighborhood reduce the number of absentee landlords.

That’s for young families—or old people, for that matter—to buy a tenement building now owned by an absentee landlord and occupy only the space they need, renting or selling the rest. Several families have done so on the Hill—I know of perhaps ten—but the numbers are not as high as they could be. In Boston’s three-decker neighborhoods, it is done all the time.

I know you are probably dreaming of that elegant Greek Revival rowhouse with its beautiful mantels and perfectly proportioned rooms.

But tenements have a lot to offer. First, they are already divided into apartments. It is easy to combine apartments to make an owner’s space bigger. They are flexible—live on two floors when you are a couple, and when the children come along, take over another floor. The floor plate is about the same as in a single-family house. Tenements sometimes come with gardens, just like the Greek Revivals sometimes do. The rent coming in from the space you don’t occupy eases the pain of your mortgage payments. I know personally how this works, since I live in a tenement, and our family has lived on two, three, four and now three floors, as our circumstances have changed.

Knock out all the walls and reconfigure the circulation pattern, since tenements are often laid out in an ungainly fashion. Unlike that Greek Revival house you’re dreaming of, most of the Hill’s tenements don’t contain precious architecture, so you won’t feel morally obligated to keep that irreplaceable detail you may not like, but as a responsible owner of a historic property, you should keep.

Judith and John Dowling bought a tenement on Charles Street. They installed Judith Dowling Asian Arts on the ground floor. They live on one floor in a beautiful, spacious, contemporary flat adorned with Asian antiques, and rent out the other apartments. They plan to continue doing so.

My family went another route. After awhile, we sold the space we weren’t using because we hadn’t raised the rent on our long-time tenant in several years, and he wanted to own the place he’d been living in.

Tenements aren’t cheap, but they are cheaper than beautifully finished Greek Revivals, and there is always that rental income to subsidize the mortgage payments.

There are challenges. You’ll probably have to renovate the building, since tenements owned by absentee landlords tend to be in bad shape.

Renting the floors you aren’t using means you’ll have to deal with tenants and rental agents. That can sometimes be frustrating. The Dowlings report no problems, however. And we had none either since our real estate agent vetted tenants for us. Ours paid their rent on time and were a joy to live with.

Financing this kind of a purchase could be a problem, especially after the mortgage debacle, since skittish banks have less experience with owner-occupied rental property than with single family homes.

Could we gather a group of investors and start a fund to aid families who promise to improve a Beacon Hill building and live in it? I’d volunteer to invest in it, but I think there are better people than I to run such a fund. Could we implement an advisory service to help buyers with the renovation process and the rental or sales aspect of the rest of the building? The benefit to our neighborhood would be immeasurable if more families could afford to stay here and we could eliminate some of the absentee landlords.