"They actually were cooking with fire in the building," Frye told Trib Live. "They had a fire inside the floor and were cooking Chef Boyardee raviolis."Squatters were heating up cans of Chef Boyardee on an open fire in a house.
Officials are hoping to use funds from the American Rescue Plan to tear the 10 vacant homes down, while dozens of other dilapidated homes are awaiting consideration to also be deemed public nuisances and eventually demolished. "It’s a blessing for a lot of people to take this pressure off," Mayor Curtis Antoniak said, according to Trib Live. "It’s a wonderful, wonderful thing the county is doing for these people."
Frye said another vacant home on Third Street was reportedly used by kids to play inside, leaving accumulated trash.Officials in Jeannette, Pennsylvania, are working to demolish homes that are dilapidated and the site of squatter activity. A report from earlier this year found that there are roughly 16 million homes that sit vacant in the U.S., according to Census Bureau data. In recent months, homeowners across the country have been sounding the alarm on squatters taking over a home after it had been sitting unoccupied, or through squatters forging paperwork to claim residency.