Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey and members of City Council’s homelessness committee have been working from different playbooks on homelessness for the better part of a year. But any city policy will need the support of Allegheny County, which provides funding and housing options for the region's homeless. And it appears the county’s new leader is on Gainey’s side.
In a wide-ranging joint interview with WESA, Gainey and Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato said the county’s $10 million budget on homelessness should be focused on finding permanent affordable housing instead of expanding the region’s emergency shelter space. Innamorato argued shelters are a Band-Aid for a larger problem: insufficient affordable housing.
“Just adding [shelter] beds isn't a solution,” she said. “What we're hearing from folks is, ‘I might not go into a shelter bed,’” because of concerns about safety or other factors. “But they do say, ‘I would take housing if you could subsidize it, if you could help me get there.’”
Innamorato’s comments echo the philosophy laid out by the Gainey administration: Move eligible people out of shelters and into longer-term housing, which frees up shelter space for people on the street.
She said the local shelter system is seeing a bottleneck of “low-needs individuals” — those without substance-use disorders or behavioral health needs who just need access to affordable housing. While that population is the best equipped to find alternative arrangements, they are residing in shelters “longer than they ever have before” due to a lack of financial resources.
“We need to move people on who have the capabilities and capacity to do so,” she said.
Though homelessness is a county-wide problem, much of the focus has remained on the city and downtown Pittsburgh, where encampments have grown along the riverbanks and near busy streets. One camp along Grant Street is just blocks away from city and county government offices.
City Council members Deb Gross and Anthony Coghill have floated ideas ranging from converting office space into dorm-style apartments to permitting government-managed tiny home communities downtown. But city leaders have argued their solutions are limited by a need for funding. Council proposals would need approval from the county’s Department of Human Services, which receives millions of dollars from the state to address homelessness. And those ideas would be a hard sell without Gainey’s support.
Council’s tiny home proposal is stalled in the city’s planning department, which is expected to weigh in this month on a needed zoning change to move the plan forward. Gainey pointed to that timeline when asked by WESA what he thought of the tiny home villages.
He also alluded to concerns about how the city would manage conditions in the proposed villages, saying the city should not create environments that “can end up [as] projects.”
“What we're looking at is how do we not only create safe, accessible places for people to be, but also move them into safe, stable and attainable housing?”
Despite criticism that city officials have ignored growing tent encampments downtown, Gainey said he wants the city to focus its efforts where the biggest impact can be felt.
“We don’t want to be emotional about anything,” he said.
Last month Gainey signed an $8.3 million plan to build affordable rental units through the city’s Urban Redevelopment Authority. While the plan focuses on permanent units, it also allocates about $1.5 million to develop dorm-style buildings for temporary stays.
While Gainey said his plan is a start, he added that the city needs more help from state and federal agencies to have an impact on homelessness. Gainey said he would advocate for a larger federal housing aid package, similar to the Biden administration’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
“We got money to fight two wars but [we haven’t] been able to feed the poor,” he said. “At the end of the day, we need a bill … to really deal with our homeless population, because if not, then it's going to increase.”
This is the last of a three-part series that asks the region’s top two local leaders about the issues they face. Find the first conversation about taxes and property reassessments here, and the second conversation about police and public safety here.
