Erie County is among 15 communities and states chosen to take part in a new Ivy League study on the nation’s vacant housing crisis.

The initiative, led by Harvard University, will begin next week when local officials attend a three-day seminar in Boston on land banking, tax foreclosures and other land reforms.

Officials of the Genesee Institute will later visit Erie County. The institute is an arm of the Flint, Mich., land bank that many experts see as a national model.

“We want to find out what they’re doing in Genesee County,” said Erie County Legislator Robert B. Reynolds, a Hamburg Democrat and cochairman of the county’s vacant housing task force.

Land banking is seen by many local officials as an important tool in addressing Buffalo’s housing crisis. The city’s vacancy rate is the highest in New York State and among the five highest in the nation, behind cities such as Detroit and New Orleans.

The abandoned-housing problem, while largely an urban malady, is spreading to Buffalo’s first-ring suburbs, to places like Cheektowaga, Depew and the Town of Tonawanda.

“Is land banking the way to go? That’s what we want to know,” said Cheektowaga Supervisor Mary Holtz, one of three local officials picked to attend the Harvard seminar.

In Flint, the county-run land bank has acquired more than 4,000 properties through tax foreclosures and has become the primary vehicle for putting the city’s huge inventory of vacant houses back into productive use.

The agency oversees about 10 programs, including a foreclosure-prevention service for homeowners falling behind in their taxes, a program to protect renters living in foreclosed housing and a rehabilitation arm that renovates and sells or rents 25 to 50 vacant homes a year.

Joining Holtz and Reynolds at Harvard will be a representative from Buffalo, Brendan Mehaffey, an assistant corporation counsel at City Hall and, like Holtz and Reynolds, a member of the county task force on vacant housing.

Mehaffey said the administration of Mayor Byron W. Brown supports the concept of land banking but wants assurances that the structure — local officials disagree over whether it should be a city or regional land bank — meets the city’s needs.

“We don’t want a cookie-cutter approach,” he said. “We want to make sure whatever we do, whether it’s a city or regional entity, works here in Buffalo.”

The city’s opposition to a regional approach was one of the reasons Gov. David A. Paterson vetoed legislation that would have allowed the creation of countywide land banks across the state.

At the core of Brown’s opposition is the belief that land banks should be operated by cities, not counties, because vacant housing is largely an urban problem.

Brown’s opposition has pitted him against a wide array of land bank advocates. They range from the University at Buffalo’s Regional Institute to local and national housing groups.