Editorial: Flooded homeless camp highlights failure to address problems
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Imagine you have almost nothing.
The clothes you have are on your back. If you have a blanket, it might be around your shoulders. Your mattress is the cardboard from an old box. The only roof is the thin fabric of a collapsible tent. If you have things that are important to you or small comforts that make life just a little easier, they might be in a backpack or something else easily toted.
This unsteady semblance of home isn’t easy to maintain. There is no permanence. There is nothing in reserve. Everything you own and everything you are is within arm’s reach.
Now imagine there is a flood.
On Sunday, a tent camp in the Mon Wharf area of Pittsburgh flooded. The foot-deep water in the camp was the kind of thing that might be annoying in your basement or backyard. It is devastating when you live outside in January.
Just one man was still in the camp. He was rescued with a ladder. Three found shelter earlier. Others had relocated after warnings about the danger of living in a spot known for its regular flooding.
Pittsburgh has shelters, like the Second Avenue Commons. Additional beds for about 80 people have been opened at the Ammon Recreation Center. What Pittsburgh — like Pennsylvania and other cities and states — doesn’t have is a solution to a serious problem.
Homelessness needs to be addressed as the chronic condition it is rather than as a periodic storm that swells the capacity of services like the river floods the wharf.
In December, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s annual homeless assessment showed at least 12,556 Pennsylvanians living without a home.
Of those, 10,792 were counted while they used some kind of emergency or temporary housing. In Pennsylvania, especially rural areas, that often means spending a night on one friend’s couch and the next night with another. But another 1,764 people were the picture of homelessness that we have — the people whose need for some kind of shelter drove them to the Mon Wharf.
And at any point, emergency housing could disappear — or the next friend’s couch isn’t available — pushing someone to sleeping in a car or tent or wishing they had even that much protection.
Homelessness isn’t an easy problem because of how it tangles together so many other issues. It’s the intersection of low wages and high housing costs, but, for many, there is also a mix of medical, mental health and family issues, as well as addiction or court interactions. Trying to tackle homelessness as just the lack of an address doesn’t fix the problem.
Homelessness is an issue that needs to be a priority in June as much as January. It is easier to fix a roof in good weather than during a thunderstorm.
By the same token, it would be better to help people fix the problems contributing to homelessness months earlier and avoid a last-minute scramble to clear out an encampment.