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Pittsburgh construction jobs will be supported by the efforts of a local university.

The University of Pittsburgh’s property and facilities committee recently approved $46 million worth of construction and renovation projects. Of that funding, $28.2 million will go to expand the school’s physics and astronomy laboratory, $15 of which will come from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Aside from the construction jobs the projects will support, the university also plans to add three permanent faculty positions in experimental physics research, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

The committee also approved three agreements to lease space for research in neuroscience and cancer. Two of those agreements will cost the university about $160,000 per year in city and county taxes. The third agreement, which allows the school to lease space at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, will cost $12.36 million per year.

Two of the construction projects approved will allow the university to guarantee three years of student housing. The first - a $1.56 million effort to convert office space in Lothrop Hall - will create 47 undergraduate beds, bringing the number of available undergrad beds at the school to 7,241. The second project - at a cost of $2.8 million - will create a 150 to 200-bed undergrad apartment complex.

All of these projects will create much-needed jobs for the Pittsburgh areas’ construction industry, which has been hard-hit by the economic recession.

The city’s construction industry employed 51,800 workers during December 2009, according to the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is down from 54,300 workers during November and a 6.8 percent decrease from December 2008.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 26th, 2010 at 10:53 am and is filed under Construction, Pittsburgh, job search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.