To look at the abandoned barroom of the former Ace's and Deuce's Lounge in Pittsburgh’s Uptown neighborhood, it’s hard to see how it could excite anyone’s ideas about the future. The one-time nuisance bar has been shuttered since 2022: Its decor and furnishings recall the 1970s, and the place still faintly smells like cigarettes.
But on a tour of the site, Annete Fetchko sees only the possibilities.
“Our vision always was, how do we create a continuum of care, low-income affordable housing, but keep it in Uptown?” said Fetchko, the executive director of Bethlehem Haven, at a groundbreaking celebration earlier this month.
She envisions a new life for the location — and sees it as a model for what affordable housing could be in Allegheny County.
The site, to be called Uptown Flats, is set to open in spring of 2026. It will feature permanent supportive housing for up to 34 families who are exiting homelessness or have mobility needs. Bethlehem Haven, one of the region’s largest social-services providers, is developing the project alongside fellow nonprofit ACTION-Housing, which specializes in affordable units.
The project is part of a broader countywide initiative, called 500 in 500, that seeks to move people out of emergency shelters and into permanent housing by creating or identifying 500 units of deeply subsidized, affordable housing by October 2025.
At least half of the Uptown Flats units will count towards the goal. And there have been more immediate successes as well. Four months into the program, the county has begun renovations on 112 units and moved 99 people from shelters into stable homes. Allegheny County officials have called their progress “encouraging,” but admit more needs to be done to grow the county’s affordable housing stock.
Based on a number of surveys and estimates, officials say that the number of people experiencing homelessness topped 1,000 in January. The total has been rising nationwide — and housing justice activists argue it could be an undercount, since the tally fluctuates based on factors like weather conditions and areas surveyed.
With temperatures dropping in the coming weeks, and one of the largest emergency shelters still out of commission, new developments can’t come soon enough.
Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato said agencies are finding “incredible” ways to work together to build upon their progress.
The effort “is not a panacea to homelessness. And it doesn't pretend to be,” she said. “But it is a critical piece in solving the issue around homelessness and housing insecurity.
“We went from [counting] the number of people who we were able to house on two hands over the course of a year,” she said. Now, “we're doing that many people per month… and I only expect it to gain steam.”
‘How do they manage a stove?’
Progress on the initiative has come in fits and starts. Some larger converted properties bring on 30 or more units at once, while other developments add just a few at a time. And officials expect to create housing that meets a variety of different needs.
Erin Dalton, who heads the county’s Department of Human Services, said more people are turning to emergency shelters, and staying for longer — months instead of weeks — than before.
“We don't want people literally living in shelter[s],” Dalton said. “It's supposed to be temporary.”
Dalton said many people entering the shelter system are experiencing homelessness for the first time, and just need some help to afford rent.
“These are folks with jobs who have worked most of their life and they're finding themselves with rents increasing and … fixed incomes to some degree.”
The county’s program will target those people who are primarily facing financial hardship. County officials hope that finding housing for them will free up resources for people who need additional support, like treatment for substance-use disorder or mental health conditions.
But for now, part of the work is ensuring that when affordable homes are ready for people, the people are also ready for the homes.
The goal at Bethlehem Haven’s Uptown Flats, for one, is to be more than just a place to call home. The development is being tailored to support women and families experiencing homelessness, who typically have additional needs. Fetchko said the new project will have administrative and counseling offices in addition to affordable housing for individuals and families. It will provide resources to help tenants stabilize their lives beyond housing, helping them with basic life skills and tasks.
“The majority of the individuals and families that we're privileged to serve have never had stable housing,” Fetchko said. “How do they manage a stove? How do they manage just daily household items? So that's also a big part of it as well.”
Though the units included in the 500 in 500 program can include brand new construction, like Uptown Flats, the program largely relies on existing publicly-held and privately-held rental units, which can be set aside for people leaving shelters.
Officials are marshaling nearly $6 million in federal American Rescue Plan funds, low-income housing tax credits, and philanthropic support to help pay for the housing.
Other developments are already in the works, including 52 units at the Stanton Heights site of the former Vincentian De Marillac nursing home.
The nonprofit Community Human Services will manage the building. Some of its units will serve as transitional housing, with access to support services.
That “goes hand in hand with the 500 in 500 program,” said Alicia Romano, the nonprofit’s CEO. “This is the catalyst that preps people for being able to move into affordable units once affordable units are created or identified.”
And as projects like the Stanton Heights facility are gearing up to open in the coming weeks, the county is also expediting repairs on empty rental units and exploring conversions for former nursing homes or local hotels, like the Comfort Inn & Suites on East Ohio Street on the North Side. A DHS spokesperson noted that the department has not yet endorsed the Comfort Inn proposal, though she added that “the conversion of a hotel(s) and/or nursing home(s) is a key part of how we get to 500 affordable units in 500 days.”
The approach may differ from site to site, but the goal is the same. Since she entered office in January, Innamorato has argued that leaders should focus on finding permanent affordable housing, rather than focus solely on stopgaps like emergency housing.
That mindset has been shared by Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey, who has stalled some efforts by City Council to improve encampment safety or boost the number of shelter beds in favor of exploring long-term housing options.
To reduce the strain on shelters, “you need transitional housing,” he said. “If we want to make sure that our unhoused [population] is safe, then we have to continue to be aggressive in the market and go in and get housing.”
‘We’ll get a lot of people to sign on’
Renovating or building large, multi-unit buildings is just one part of the county’s plan. They’re also soliciting smaller private landlords to make existing housing stock available to the effort.
The Housing Choice Voucher Program, sometimes known as Section 8, offers federal subsidies for rental assistance. Locally, it’s administered by public housing agencies including the Allegheny County Housing Authority and the Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh.
But Ed Nusser, the county’s director of housing strategy, acknowledged, “It's no secret that .. a lot of vouchers that the [city’s agency] issues wind up being returned because there's a lack of landlords to accept those vouchers,” inside city limits.
Dalton said some landlords worry about the financial stability of a tenant, and the time-consuming process for obtaining the voucher itself.
As a landlord, “If I have an apartment open today, I'd like to fill it in the next two weeks,” Dalton said. “They might be willing to hold it for us for two weeks, but they're not going to hold it for six, right?”
She said the county is working to streamline that process and ensure landlords receive rent payments on time.
“If you can make the process make sense and de-risk the issues a little bit, I think we'll get a lot of people to sign on,” she said. “And we've already got folks that we maybe didn't think would be first at the door to participate, to participate.”
But it can be a difficult and time-consuming process to use city-issued vouchers in other municipalities. Which is why, Nusser said, part of the initial work on 500 in 500 has involved opening lines of communication between government agencies.
“Coordinating DHS with our housing authorities, making sure that DHS has … access [to] housing choice vouchers, but also access to vacant public housing units,” he said. “By creating this cleaner way to port [transfer] those vouchers to the county Housing Authority, now we're expanding the pool of possible units for folks to use those vouchers to rent, which is really exciting.”
The City of Pittsburgh has already transferred some of its vouchers toward the program. Dalton said that kind of effort brings fewer units online at a time, but can be as important as the larger apartment complexes.
And that kind of collaboration between city and county government, Innamorato said, could be a model for addressing other needs as well.
“We know that issues like affordable housing and homelessness really touch a lot of us and require really intense collaboration and deliberate collaboration,” she said. “And this is a system that we're building that's going to long outlive [the] 500 in 500 hundred initiative.”
‘There's just not enough affordable housing’
Some advocates say that though the 500 in 500 plan is making progress, the effort has been complicated and obscured after a fire at Second Avenue Commons homeless shelter in June displaced dozens.
Romano, of Community Human Services, said the blaze “has really thrown a wrench” into the program.
An emergency shelter at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center was established for those displaced by the fire. But Romano said, “Even if affordable units are popping up, there were just folks that were not willing or ready to move.”
The first three floors of Second Avenue Commons, which includes 93 beds, plus an additional 40 overflow beds, is slated to reopen in mid-November, DHS’s Dalton said.
“Obviously these are construction projects with supply-chain challenges and … the requirements around inspection and all of that,” Dalton said. “But the timeline that we have suggests that'll open before the traditional opening of winter shelter.”
The top two floors of Second Avenue Commons, which include single-room occupancy units, are expected to take longer.
Despite the setback, Romano called the county’s affordable housing plan “doable” and said it could bolster a desperately needed sector of the region’s real-estate market: “There's just not enough affordable housing in Pittsburgh,.”
Innamorato said she hopes to see communities like the one planned for Uptown Flats emerge from the initiative. She said the program should provide not just a roof, but a broader sense of community for those who take part in it.
“I think that's one of our greatest challenges: getting folks to understand that there's enough space and resources for all of us,” she said. “We should be wrapping our arms around our neighbors in need, not trying to relegate them to an area where we can't see or interact with them.”
