From plywood to plastic: How Phoenix plans to fight blight

Several months ago, Phoenix Councilwoman Kate Gallego was touring the city's vacant properties and was shocked by the appearance of some of the homes.

The uninhabited properties were practically indistinguishable from their neighbors.

Property owners and banks in Phoenix had begun outfitting windows with sheets of polycarbonate, a thin, nearly indestructible plastic that mirrors the appearance of glass.

And last month, the city became among the first in the U.S. to make polycarbonate windows a matter of municipal law.

Phoenix now requires all window and door openings visible from the street to be secured with the material if the structure has been unoccupied for more than 90 days. The 90-day provision is also new, replacing the previous deadline of 180 days. The measures were the result of an abandoned buildings task force that Gallego spearheaded.

A growing number of municipalities around the country are weighing the idea of securing empty homes with polycarbonate as an alternative to plywood boarding, which many say reads like a vacancy sign to prospective squatters and drug dealers.

Detroit, Los Angeles and Chicago governments are considering similar measures, and many banks have begun using the material on the properties they own, said Robert Klein, founder and chairman of Cleveland-based SecureView, one of polycarbonate's leading suppliers.

"I saw the negative effect of what vacant houses do to a community," Klein said in a recent interview. Plywood, he contends, "didn't protect them much, is pretty easy to pry open and screamed out, 'Come and get me!'"

Unattended homes are among the types of neighborhood blight that deepened in the wake of the recession, when foreclosures claimed the homes of millions across the nation. Foreclosed and abandoned houses often become eyesores that devalue the rest of the neighborhood and magnets for crime.

"When I was campaigning there were certain neighborhoods where people would point to abandoned houses, say, 'What is the city doing about it?'" Gallego said. "They were unhappy with the standards on how we fixed up properties and how we communicated with residences."

Proponents liken the effect of polycarbonate to the famed "broken windows" theory of policing, popularized by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani in the 1990s.

The approach theorizes that minor crime begets major crime: Broken windows, vandalism and graffiti can all signal that an area is poorly maintained and ripe for undeterred criminal activity.

Similarly, plywood announces that a home is vacant and shielded from outside visibility, said Tim Boling, deputy director of Phoenix's Neighborhood Services Department.

"It just invites more mischief," he said.

Common occurrences include kids skateboarding in drained backyard pools and homeless people breaking in and building fires — sometimes razing the structure in the process. In rare but alarming scenarios, Boling said, vacant homes have served as hideouts for kidnappers and their victims.

The polycarbonate can withstand prying, bricks and sledgehammers, as evidenced by Councilman Michael Nowakowski's recorded attempt to break the plastic.

The ordinance will be most visible in the central and downtown Phoenix districts, where there are the most abandoned homes. Over the past year, Gallego's District 8 had 192 abatement properties and Councilwoman Laura Pastor's District 4 had 196.

Abatements include structure board-ups, lot cleaning and demolition. Phoenix abatements rose from 765 in fiscal year 2011-12 to 976 in fiscal year 2013-14, costing $1.3 million to $1.6 million, respectively.

Polycarbonate is about three times the cost of plywood, Boling said, but noted the ordinance wasn't necessarily intended to be a cost-saving measure.

"This was more about aesthetically securing properties to the community," he said.