More shelter beds allow officials to be proactive in shutting Pittsburgh homeless camps

Often when officials decide to tear down Pittsburgh homeless camps, it’s because serious problems have cropped up.

Sometimes it’s the presence of violent crime. In other cases, the location proved to be dangerous, or officials discovered major drug problems.

But when city and county leaders recently decided to tear down a homeless camp along the Three Rivers Heritage Trail near the 16th Street Bridge, they were hoping to step in before any such issues got out of hand, said top officials in Pittsburgh and Allegheny County.

That’s something officials haven’t been able to do in recent years, because there wasn’t enough shelter space to provide people living on the streets with better options.

Now, there is.

“We want to bring people in,” county Department of Human Services Director Erin Dalton told TribLive this week. “And that’s what’s happening in the North Shore. It’s really time for people to come in.”

Under city rules, officials must offer stable shelter to anyone staying at a camp they plan to close.

Dalton said they have done that for the roughly 30 people living at the riverside encampment, which sits at the border of the city’s North Shore and Troy Hill neighborhoods along the Allegheny River.

Signs posted at the site last month warned that the camp would be torn down Sunday. It cited as reasons drug use and reports of criminal activity, which Dalton and Pittsburgh Chief Operating and Administrative Officer Lisa Frank said occur at nearly every homeless camp throughout the city.

The difference here, they said, is officials aren’t letting those problems escalate before closing the camp.

Because there are shelter spaces available, they can offer everyone a warmer, safer place to stay than the tents lining the trail. And because they can make that offer, they can tear down the camp.

This comes as Second Avenue Commons, a major Downtown shelter, reopened recently after fire damage shuttered the site for months.

The countywide shelter system is able to provide more beds than usual thanks to various improvements, and the county and its partners are providing extra shelter space at the Community Resource Mall in Pittsburgh’s Perry South neighborhood.

“We have capacity in the shelter system, and we have flow through the system,” Dalton said. “We don’t want to have another winter where people are living outside when we have capacity.”

But addressing homelessness isn’t just about providing more short-term shelter beds, Dalton and Frank said.

Efforts are also underway to more efficiently move people through the shelter system and into transitional and permanent housing.

As that flow improves, more beds open up in shelters because people who had been using them move on to better housing options, freeing up space for the next people.

Dalton touted Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato’s 500 in 500 housing initiative — which aims to add 500 new affordable housing units in 500 days — as one example of efforts to bolster the supply of affordable housing.

Dalton said there are enough shelter beds for anyone living outside in the county to at least find a place to sleep inside for the night as temperatures drop.

Anyone forced out of a camp — like the one under the 16th Street Bridge — will be offered shelter at locations open around the clock where they can live and keep their belongings for more than a night at a time.

So far, 18 people who had been living at that camp have been moved to other shelters or housing. Outreach workers are helping match 15 more with appropriate shelter options, Dalton said.

One person has so far declined to move indoors, she said.

For people who don’t want to move inside, officials are still providing support.

“We know Pittsburgh has always had some people for whom indoors is not psychologically stable,” Frank said, adding she believes that to be a slim minority of people sleeping on the streets.

Officials work with those people to find safe places for them to stay and to offer other support and resources.

Workers with the Department of Human Services and the city’s Office of Community Health and Safety check daily on people living outside, Frank and Dalton said.

They know people by name and help people transition to indoor shelter when camps are being shut down.

Frank said the city has no plans to punish anyone for living outside, but said officials hope to close down more camps to move their residents into indoor shelters or transitional housing options.

“We have much better options to offer,” Frank said.