A polycarbonate blight buster

Boarding up the windows and doors of abandoned houses is like putting out a welcome mat for vandals, squatters, arsonists, drug dealers and other criminals in some U.S. cities struggling with a high rate of foreclosed properties.

The plywood-covered openings invite graffiti and worse for police, firefighters and neighbors.

The problems don't end there for those who live by the ugly eyesores. From unkempt lawns to illegal dumping and metal scrapping, empty buildings add to a neighborhood's deterioration.

The blight can spread like cancer in a community, making a bad first impression on would-be homebuyers, which depresses property values for residents and property tax revenue for local coffers.

But maybe the domino effect can be stopped before that first plywood plank sets it in motion.

Some cities and property managers are finding a new plastic tool in their fight against blight, and it comes in the form of polycarbonate windows. Transparent and virtually unbreakable, PC windows are 200 times stronger than glass, and they can secure unoccupied properties without drawing attention to the vacancies.

The city of Phoenix took a clear stand against blight by banning the use of plywood as a cover for windows and doors of abandoned houses and buildings. The City Council in March approved a local law requiring the use of PC windows in structures vacant more than 90 days.

Elected officials gave the word “board” the boot in Phoenix's amended neighborhood preservation ordinance, which now sets specifications for securing polycarbonate materials on all openings visible from the street.

Los Angeles could be next, according to Brian Potasiewicz, vice president of operations for SecureView, a Cleveland-based company with a PC window manufacturing plant in Mount Vernon, Ind., and 53 U.S. distribution outlets.

Potasiewicz said the market for inconspicuous PC windows as a blight buster is poised for growth with public officials in places like DeKalb County in Georgia being among the first to consider the switch from plywood in late 2013.

“It's in its infancy,” Potasiewicz said in a telephone interview. “The market is just starting. We're finally getting people's attention. Everyone said, ‘Yes, we know plywood's bad but there's nothing we can do about it.' Now there's something they can do. The amount of installations we have continues to climb exponentially as people realize there's an actual alternative.”

Options are good at a time when 9.5 percent of the 133.4 million housing units in the U.S. are vacant, according to U.S. Census figures released in January for the fourth quarter of 2014. That's 12.6 million vacant houses and while most are for rent or sale, some 3.8 million are unoccupied all year for a variety of reasons.

RealtyTrac, another source of housing data, said foreclosure filings, which include default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions, totaled 1.1 million U.S. properties in 2014. That's down 18 percent from 2013 and down 61 percent from the peak in 2010, but far from the 2006 low of 717,522 foreclosure filings.

Clear-cut benefits

To demonstrate the benefits of its product, SecureView offers durability tests of its patented technology. Council members, police officers and firefighters line up to whack a PC window designed to look like a traditional window. Videos show SecureView withstanding the impact from sledgehammers, pickaxes, baseball bats and chunks of concrete, although one fireman breaks through with a circular saw.

Long used for eyeglasses, airplane windows and motorcycle windshields, PC started gaining traction to secure vacant buildings after Fannie Mae — the federal enterprise that purchases and secures mortgages — began using it.

“The phones definitely started ringing,” Potasiewicz said. “There's a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses kind of mentality at times in government. So as soon as press comes out about Phoenix or other communities that are just looking at — they aren't even necessarily changing their ordinances — we get calls from other communities.”

Although SecureView windows cost about two to three times more than plywood — a 4-by-8-foot sheet is $115 — cities can put a lien against the properties to recover the cost. The durability of PC windows also can mean savings down the road.

“Plywood is cheaper but in the long run is it really?” asked Annette Voellinger, vice president of business development for SecureView. “You have residents and lenders putting up plywood more than once because properties have been broken into or it gets unsightly after a while and it has to be reinstalled.”

Other times, the plywood has to be installed again because it was used as a source of heat, which isn't possible with PC.

“People can't take it off a house to burn it in the alley to keep warm in the Northeast here like they do with plywood,” Potasiewicz said. “Or, they rip the plywood off the window, climb in the window and burn the plywood in the fireplace of the vacant property.”

PC windows don't shatter, weather or mold, and SecureView's products can be installed with the same board-up guidelines set for plywood by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

“That helped the industry along,” Potasiewicz said. “It made life easier for the installers. They already know how to use it. They're just using polycarbonate and a high density plastic as opposed to a 2-by-4 and a piece of plywood.”

Community development corporations and non-profit groups that revitalize houses and give them away or auction them off also are using SecureView during the renovation process

“Imagine if you had to fix up a house and it has plywood windows,” Potasiewicz said. “It's hard to work inside a dark box. There's value when you do construction work to let in light. We're part of a revitalization effort in Cleveland and we're using it on the homes we're rehabbing. It's up to the homeowner after they take it on whether they want to keep it or not.”

Window of opportunity

SecureView president and founder Howard Wedren got the idea to use PC windows while running with a friend who used the material to replace stained glass in church renovations, according to an April 2013 story in Crain's Chicago Business, which is a sister publication of Plastics News.

Also a developer, Wedren noticed how many homes were abandoned on the South Side of Chicago while driving to a warehouse he was building. He thought about the advantages of using PC as an alternative to plywood and steel, another material used in board ups, to secure the dwellings.

Wedren applied for the patent for an internal anchoring system, obtained the startup financing, lined up the manufacturer, and hit the road to pitch it.

“We think we're really a solution to blight,” he told CCB. “Our product is clear, so when it's installed you can no longer tell the property is abandoned or vacant.”

GTJ Consulting LLC, a contractor for the Detroit Land Bank Authority, which oversees about 80,000 vacant houses, was an early SecureView user. The firm put the PC sheets over the window openings of historic decommissioned firehouses that were on the bidding block in the spring of 2013 after thieves stripped the structures of radiators, hardware and other materials.

 Detroit also used SecureView at its former police headquarters and 100 abandoned houses. The product also replaced plywood at the former Spiegel headquarters in Chicago in July 2013.

“The building had been vacant for 20 years and it's in the middle of a residential neighborhood,” Potasiewicz said. “We installed SecureView and now the vacant lot next to the property, which was like a dumping site, is maintained. Kids walk by the building. They don't cross the street because they're not afraid of it any longer. It really did make a huge difference.”

More recently, SecureView was used “to protect the assets” of a $1 million house for sale in Los Angeles.

“It wasn't a big house; it was just L.A. and real estate is crazy there,” Potasiewicz said. “But if a property is worth $1 million and you can sell it for even 5 percent more than you were going to get, that's a huge return.”

Brokers also are finding that houses and buildings on the market with PC windows instead of plywood sell faster.

“The cost comparison needs to go much farther past the material itself,” Potasiewicz said, adding that the company tries to use as much recycled PC as it can.

“If the recycling industry is doing quite well we can add more regrind into our product,” he said. “Because of what we use it for, the optical clarity isn't as important as it would be on say an airplane windshield, so we can get away with producing something that uses a little more recycled material. That helps keep the cost down and makes it a real viable option against plywood.”

SecureView also has a take-back program to encourage recycling. Customers can return scrap sheets to any of the 50 distribution centers and get a credit on their account to buy more.