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» VISIT US ONLINE @ DSNEWS.COM 85 employees will also benefit by being part of a company recognized in 2016 by Fortune maga- zine as one of the 100 best companies to work for in America." OHIO Clearboarding Demonstration Attracts Attention As neighbors and local dignitaries gathered to watch, a squad of Cleveland firefighters em- ployed their full complement of tools—sledge- hammers, axes, halligans, chain saws—to try to break into and get out of a blighted property safely. eir noisy assault on this particular house, located in the city's Slavic Village neighbor- hood, was prearranged as a demonstration of the new generation of vacant home security for doors and windows: polycarbonate Clear- boarding. "I'd love to get their endorsement for Clear- boarding," explained Robert Klein, founder and chairman of Community Blight Solutions, which is based in Cleveland and markets its Clearboarding product nationally through its SecureView Windows division. Klein also heads Slavic Village Recovery LLC, a partnership of Community Blight Solutions, Community Development Corpora- tion Slavic Village Development, Cleveland Neighborhood Progress and Forest City Enter- prises. e partnership formed two years ago to begin testing and promoting Clearboarding over the ubiquitous eyesore plywood boarding. e advantages are extensive. Aesthetically, Clearboarding looks and feels like glass, so vacant homes appear to have regular windows, rather than ugly plywood boards. For thieves and other criminals, that iconic brown board- ing is an automatic advertisement, Klein says: "is house is vacant. Come on in!" e extremely durable and difficult to pen- etrate Clearboarding addresses that concern by keeping people from smashing through the plywood, which then has to be replaced, usually repeatedly. Of the 15,000 properties in 2,300 communities throughout the US that Community Blight Solutions has refitted with Clearboarding, not one has been broken into successfully. is demonstration, however, related to other safety concerns with plywood board- ing, since thieves can easily break in and strip homes of piping or wiring, for example, without being seen. Vagrants or others who break in often start fires to keep warm, so if they can't get in, they can't start fires that could potentially burn down the house. Moreover, first responders cannot see through plywood, so police or firefighters don't know who or what is in the house when they arrive. Clearboarding enables them to look directly inside. "e time has come to change the legisla- tion and not allow plywood," Klein said while standing in front of the demonstration house as firefighters hacked away at the windows. "Plywood is an absolute cancer, and there's no reason to use it anymore. We have a different, superior way of securing homes now, and this is the proper way to do it." e partnership has already rehabbed more than 30 homes within a 1 square mile area, tak- ing homes that would otherwise be demolished or remain vacant, and performing between $40 and $60,000 worth of renovation per home. e refurbished home owners and families get conventional 30-year mortgages and become part of the neighborhood, which helps raise property values and restore confidence for existing home owners. "e partnership has been a big part of get- ting the houses stable, keeping them safe from a lot of the crime and break-in issues that our vacant homes have and getting them posi- tioned to resell," said Christopher Alvarado, executive director of Slavic Village Develop- ment prior to the demonstration. Matt Zone, a Cleveland City Council- man who heads the Safety Committee and is a VP of the National League of Cities, adds that Clearboarding has helped protect some of Cleveland's historic properties that were being vandalized. "at's why we want to see a more durable solution so someone is not breaking into a house 2, 3, 4, 5 times," he said. "But we also want to make sure that first responders, especially fire or emergency medical staff, have easy and safe access." Although hammers and halligans didn't work, the firefighters were able to slice through one of the front windows of polycarbonate, which is also used for motorcycle windshields, fairly easily with a chainsaw. Fortunately, thieves would never use a chainsaw, since the tool's distinctive racket would draw immediate attention. "I don't have a problem with that," Klein said after they cut through. "We want it to be easy for the firefighters to get in and out." Community Blight Solutions had already re- engineered their product with quick exit escape bars on the inside that firefighters can knock out with the help of an axe or hammer, if they need to remove a window for air flow or to exit. Tony Brancatelli, Cleveland Councilman for Ward 12, which includes a majority of Slavic Village, said he appreciates all the success the partnership has accomplished to date: "is neighborhood in 2007, even before the crisis, had the highest foreclosure rate in the United States. One of the key components is the part- nership is doing this all with no government subsidies but as part of the private market, so it can work." Klein is recognized as a national expert in this field, primarily because he founded Safeguard Properties in 1990 and grew the corporation into the largest property preserva- tion company in the U.S. before he retired in 2010 to move into new ventures, including Community Blight Solutions. Safeguard man- ages monthly an average of 1.2 million property inspections and maintains vacant properties for the mortgage servicing industry. Of course, there was only one choice for covering windows and doors, so he takes credit for being "the culprit" who inflicted plywood boarding on America in the first place. But today, he's on a mission to rectify that as a highly visible and vocal advocate of poly- carbonate boarding. "Right now when you say a boarded-up property, immediately you think plywood," Klein concludes. "So, we still need to change people's thinking to when you board up a prop- erty, you use polycarbonate Clearboarding." In addition to the Cleveland Fire De- partment Ladder Truck 11 company, other attendees of the demonstration included, Tom Schloemer, battalion chief and Wayne Nadia, acting assistant chief from the CFD; Frank Szabo, president, Cleveland Fire Fighters IAFF Local 93; Jeff Raig, project director for Slavic Village Recovery, LLC; Adam Hewit, Government Solutions Group; Mark Nylander, senior advisor for Community Blight Solu- tions; Todd Berger, creative marketing special- ist for Safeguard Properties; along with several employees of SecureView, including Brian Potasiewicz, VP of operations; Heather Best, AVP business development; and Scott Wyland, field service supervisor. Ohio, which is a judicial foreclosure state, had a foreclosure inventory of 1.7 percent in February—only slightly higher than the national average for the month, according to Black Knight Financial Services, KNOW THIS

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