Vacant homes can cause major problems for city councils and other residents in the neighborhood. They attract youths who may vandalize or use the property inappropriately, bring down the values of other nearby Markham homes, and eat up thousands of valuable tax dollars in graffiti cleanup and inspections. In cities like Cleveland, Ohio, where property values have dropped so much in recent years that many owners are forced to abandon their homes if they want to move away, this is a real issue. In Cleveland, a pilot project has been designed that might help do something about it.

The pilot project was devised by Cleveland Housing Court Judge Raymond Pianka and funded by the Charles and Helen Brown Foundation. It involved bringing an artist called Chris Toepfer in from Chicago to make old boarded up houses more aesthetically pleasing. Toepfer, who has done the same job in Chicago and Albany and may soon be in demand for Penetanguishene real estate and elsewhere, accomplishes this by creating boards for the windows and doors that are designed to look like windows and doors.

How does this help? Well, at first glance, Erin homes with Toepfer's artistically rendered boards don't look abandoned, so it improves the look of the neighborhood which in turn raises the value of the house and the surrounding real estate. And because the boards are solid plywood, they also function as a security device to keep out trespassers and prevent abandoned homes from becoming destinations for underage partiers and squatters. Since the boards are already artistic, they also discourage others from marring them with graffiti that would become an eyesore to the rest of the neighborhood.

Though fancying up a condemned house may seem like a waste of money to some people, demolition isn't always the only option. Sometimes abandoned houses just need a little TLC and a few renovations to get them back up to code. If an investor who usually works on properties from the Toronto condo homes MLS drives by and is attracted to the charming artwork, he may decide it's worthwhile to buy the place and fix it up. Therefore the artistic boards project may help give new life to homes that would otherwise have been written off.

Though the current initiative is limited to only a few homes in the Slavic Village area, many city officials are hopefully that if it's successful it might lead to a larger scale project that might see improvements being made to other neighborhoods. A previous project involving homes in the Detroit Shoreway neighborhood is already seeing success. With Toepfer's services in demand for everything from Chicago homes to units on the Spokane, WA real estate listings, it may well result in changes to building codes that require boards to look more like real windows.