The Problem
In Beaver County, just northwest of Pittsburgh, boroughs like Aliquippa, Midland and the city of Beaver Falls have hundreds of vacant properties which are a blight to the community and contribute to the devaluation of real estate, create health hazards, and often harbor unwanted activity. The economic challenges not only contribute to the problem of growing vacancy, but also produce rising unemployment rates. These communities are often disconnected from opportunities for employment due to geography, transportation challenges, and barriers such as former incarceration.
The problem is twofold: We need to remove the vacant properties and we need to create jobs for individuals with barriers to employment. Adding to the challenge is doing this in a financially sustainable way.
Our Solution
In 2022-2024, UWE worked with The Reclaim Project to train returning citizens from incarceration in the needed skills to deconstruct vacant buildings as well as wrap-around job readiness training. By partnering with Construction Junction, a robust reuse store on the Southeast side, we built a supply chain to capture the valued materials coming from deconstruction and demolition projects and process them into products ready for the marketplace.
40 houses in the three municipalities are part of a current deconstruction pilot. As the project wraps up, UWE is exploring other boroughs seeking to utilize federal resources to remove their vacant properties and create jobs for returning citizens. In addition to the wood coming from the reclaimed project, UWE is assessing the possibility of aggregating fallen wood from the greater Pittsburgh area (especially less dense areas to the north of the city) to establish a wood upcycling campus. This expansion opportunity would contribute to a scalable solution for capturing carbon, creating jobs, and diverting thousands of tons of wood from county landfills in the region.