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Board-up program helps with housing problem
Deborah Carter, at left, leans over the railing of her porch after looking at the mess between her home and the abandoned building at 2031 9th Avenue. Carter is hoping to see further progress with the Abandoned Building Stabilization Initiative, which calls on property owners to secure their buildings within 30 days of receiving a notice from the Huntington Fire Marshal's Office or pay the Fire Department to do it for them. This effort goes a long way in deterring vagrants from entering the buildings for illegal activities. Carter says she still worries that her four-year-old grandson might wander in to the tall grass in the back yard of the empty house and be bitten by a snake or be injured on debris.
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HUNTINGTON -- Deborah Carter no longer has the fear of her apartment catching on fire in the middle of the night.
Two months ago, the abandoned home next to her apartment in the 2000 block of 9th Avenue was overrun by drug users and prostitutes.
"I used to find homemade crack pipes on my window sill," she said. "If I was the type of person who could tear that down, I'd be at it right now."
Just before Carter moved into her apartment, someone set the abandoned home on fire. The back of the building that she lives in with her 4-year-old grandson is still charred from the blaze.
It's unlikely that will happen again. Huntington firefighters recently boarded up all of the windows and doors to the home using a method established by the U.S. Fire Administration. Rather than hammering or screwing the boards, the method makes it nearly impossible for vagrants to get inside.
Their work is part of a new program called the Abandoned Building Stabilization Initiative. Under the program, property owners are required to secure their buildings within 30 days of receiving a notice from the Huntington Fire Marshal's Office or pay the Fire Department to do it for them.
If they refuse to reimburse the city, they will receive a $500 fine and/or 30 days in jail.
"It doesn't make the neighborhood look any prettier than before, but it stops the drug traffic and the potential fire loss to neighboring homes," Fire Marshal Dave Bias said.
The program is one of several efforts Huntington is making to deal with long-running problems stemming from hundreds of dilapidated or burned-out homes. A state panel recently gave the city the authority under a five-year home rule pilot program to create a land bank and capture fire insurance claim proceeds from property owners who pocket the money rather than tear down their fire-damaged buildings.
Since City Council approved the program in June 2007, the Fire Department has boarded up six homes, but has forced property owners to secure approximately 40 more, Bias said. It only costs property owners about $20 to board up each window or door. The Fire Department charges $85 per opening.
"That's exactly how I want this program to work," Bias said. "We're a strategic tool that will board up the worst of the worst from a fire prevention and crime standpoint. But ultimately, it's the property owners who are responsible for doing this."
The program is an extension of the city's Unsafe Building Commission, which condemns dilapidated property if the owners don't rehabilitate it. But because of numerous state and federal requirements, demolishing a condemned piece of property can take a year, if not longer.
In the meantime, many of these abandoned properties are a welcome refuge for drug dealers, users and prostitutes.
Bias said vacant properties are always prone to fires, but the Fire Department has noticed a disturbing trend. Drug addicts are using candles to cook heroin before injecting it. Once they get high, they leave the candles burning, he said.
"Huntington is full of homes that are too close to each other, so it doesn't take much for a fire to spread," he said.
Ethel Pierson's home in the 900 block of 17th Street suffered thousands of dollars in damage when someone started a fire in the abandoned home next door. The Fire Department has since boarded it up.
"It really was a hardship for us," Pierson said. "The insurance company paid us $20,000, but that doesn't even touch what our house needs.
"At least I'm not scared to go to sleep at night and wonder if I'm going to wake up in the middle of the night to the house on fire."
The board-up program also reduces the chances of injury when firefighters respond to a fire, because it requires the property owner to remove everything from the home before it is secured, Bias said.
He cited statistics from the U.S. Fire Administration showing that one firefighter is injured for every 34 fires that occur in an occupied property. A firefighter is injured every six fires that occur in a vacant property, he said.
"In just one of the houses we boarded up, we found 12 hypodermic needles on the floor, a box-and-a-half of .25-caliber ammunition and a bucket of human feces," he said. "Imagine crawling on the floor in a burning house with all of that stuff."
Bias said he hopes to add another element to the board-up program in the near future. People who are ordered by the municipal court judge to perform community service would cut down tall grass and weeds around abandoned homes, he said.
Reporting housing complaints
Do you live in Huntington and have problems with dilapidated homes, trash or high weeds in your neighborhood? Call technical housing inspector Michael Thomas in the Huntington Fire Marshal's Office at (304) 696-5960.
