Originally published on April 3, 2024 in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
As the city grapples with a growing homeless population, some local service providers and Pittsburgh city officials have different ideas on solutions, and those conflicting priorities threaten to prolong an already escalating crisis.
City and county officials have advocated for ideas such as building tiny houses as they continue to clear homeless encampments throughout Downtown. At the Pittsburgh-based Salvation Army, shelter stays have ballooned in recent years — now averaging over five months long.
Clients must take what housing options are available and, for the vast majority of them, that’s subsidized housing or a rental on the private market.
But Sherry Rorison, the organization’s director, considers transitional housing the optimal choice for people experiencing homelessness, as that option offers supportive services for up to 24 months, including help with mental health and addiction.
“You’re working towards goals, and you don’t have to worry about taking care of yourself because you have a roof over your head,” Ms. Rorison said. “If you want to go back to school, you can. You’re working with a case manager to attain those goals. It just makes more sense to me.”
City efforts to develop this type of housing have stalled.
Homelessness in the city reached a 12-year high in 2022, and Pittsburgh City Council repeatedly considered a variety of tangible, affordable housing solutions, many of which focused on increasing transitional housing. But few of those plans have come to fruition.
A subcommittee of council members presented three options — one of which was a village of tiny homes, which made its way to legislation, but is currently languishing in the city’s Planning Commission.
The tiny homes village, spearheaded by council members Deb Gross and Anthony Coghill, was an effort to create more cost-effective transitional housing. Plans for the village also included electricity, food, shared restroom facilities and round-the-clock wraparound services, including mental health and housing assistance.
Mayor Ed Gainey’s office and members of the Planning Commission pushed back on the idea, saying there were at least two problems with the way the legislation was written: that the proposal didn’t match up with the city’s zoning codes and that it would make current tent encampments illegal. The legislation is now on an eight-week hold while the bill’s language is reviewed; it is expected to be up for a vote in mid-April.
Even if it’s approved, it has to go back to council for final passage, extending the already monthslong process.
The council subcommittee also offered options — and detailed plans — to build new transitional housing from the ground up as well as to use already existing, city-owned buildings for additional housing. Neither has advanced.
In the same time period, Mr. Gainey channeled his efforts toward increasing the city’s stock of affordable housing.
He signed into law an expansion of the affordable housing overlay zone from Lawrenceville into Bloomfield and Polish Hill. That zoning ordinance requires 10% of new construction or renovation projects that produce over 20 housing units to remain affordable for qualified, low-income individuals — whether they are for rent or for sale.
In July 2022, the mayor reallocated about $2 million of federal funding to kick-start the Downtown Conversion Project to convert Downtown office space into affordable housing units.
The focus on permanent affordable housing is part of an emerging “Housing First” homeless assistance approach that’s growing across the country. It prioritizes providing permanent housing to improve unhoused people’s quality of life.
“You can work with the client longer, teach them life skills they were never taught,” Ms. Rorison said. “You get all the programming that you need to succeed.”
Without providing the “quality care” that people experiencing homelessness need and offering only a rental unit, the cycle can perpetuate, she said. She believes that’s unfair to the person in need and to the status of overwhelmed shelters.
“It just creates a backlog,” Ms. Rorison said.
Council members have also requested that various departments work together to produce three reports: one to outline city-owned parcels of land that could be used for emergency shelters, tiny homes or the construction of more affordable housing; one for details surrounding “accessory dwelling units” — sometimes called “granny flats” — in which separate living space exists inside a primary residence or on the same property; and one for details surrounding “limited-equity cooperatives,” which are larger apartment buildings owned by the residents, with buy-in at a below-market rate.
Councilwoman Theresa Kail-Smith said last week that if the reports ever materialized, she was “not aware of it.”
The conflicting priorities in city government came to a head in March when the Gainey administration brought council a spending plan for an $8 million federal grant, about $6 million of which would go to the Urban Redevelopment Authority to create affordable rental units, specifically for people experiencing or at risk of homelessness.
Council members acknowledged that more affordable housing was something the city needed, but they wished the money was going toward things that would help people more immediately.
Officials from the URA estimated that the rental units wouldn’t be completed for at least 18 to 24 months.
“We could have already been housing people if we both had moved more quickly on allocating these funds,” Ms. Gross said, noting that even with Gainey’s $6 million allocation, it could “still take several years before a single person gets housed.”
“That was the tragedy that could have been avoided,” she said.
Council members also said they were frustrated by the lack of communication about the spending plan. Many said they were not given a chance to give their input regarding where the money should be spent.
“My concern here is that we basically have two separate tracks of conversation about what to do for the homelessness in our city,” Ms. Gross said during council discussion of the spending plan. “There shouldn’t be two separate tracks.”
As government officials battle over what plan to proceed with, some service providers are also feeling left out of the conversation.
Despite working directly with the people who experience this reality every day, Ms. Rorison noticed a disconnect between providers and city leaders.
She first learned of the city’s debate over the federal grant from one of her own clients, an unhoused person who regularly attends City Council meetings. Ms. Rorison, disappointed to have learned about millions of dollars in resources this way, said communication between council and providers like herself can be practically nonexistent.
“For me, just to go each time and wait for them to talk about homelessness, it’s hard,” she said. “You would think they’d want to invite us. I would have loved to have been part of the discussion on how we can best use that money. I think any provider would feel that way.”
Mr. Coghill recently called for a public meeting with the mayor, the county and service providers so that everyone could work out a cohesive plan together.
Getting all of the interested parties together is one of the hurdles to solving this problem, Ms. Kail-Smith said.
“It’s a challenge to find a solution,” she said. “I think that part of the problem is this is not a simple project, and there’s a lot of people with a lot of interest in what happens and where it happens.”
But the consensus is that something needs to be done.
Carlos T. Carter, the president and CEO for the Urban League of Greater Pittsburgh said a large-scale plan should be developed to address housing, both in its quality and affordability.
“We need to see this less as an individual’s problem, and more so a societal and policy failure,” Mr. Carter said. “As a community, we need to take responsibility for each member’s safety and quality of life, so that we can thrive together.”
He would like to see further examination of funding for securing and renovating blighted and abandoned properties outside the Pittsburgh city limits and thinks the initiatives around converting corporate spaces into housing should be “highly considered.”
While Mr. Carter would be interested in learning more about some of the solutions council has previously proposed, particularly the mutual-housing developments, the Urban League does not advocate for short- and intermediate-term solutions that do not put individuals “on the path of self-sufficiency and eventual homeownership,” he said.
“All individuals are entitled to a life of dignity and privacy, and this is no less true for our houseless neighbors,” Mr. Carter said.
Hallie Lauer: hlauer@post-gazette.com; Jordan Anderson: janderson@post-gazette.com
First Published April 2, 2024, 5:30am