Shelter providers strain to meet demand in Allegheny County.

At the Light of Life Rescue Mission, signs of crisis came early this year. 

Staff at Downtown Pittsburgh’s cold-weather shelter reached out in early January to ask Light of Life to help with the overflow of people experiencing homelessness. And they did, by opening extra beds. But the crisis has not abated. 

Light of Life continues operating at overflow capacity to this day, at a time of year when they would have expected the need to have dissipated. 

“We’re expecting this to be a long-term situation,” said Jerrel T. Gilliam, executive director of Light of Life. “It is time to raise the red flag and to say, ‘It’s all hands on deck.’ We have to get some solutions quickly before this crisis is much worse than it is.”

JERREL GILLIAM

Some shelters serving people without housing in the Pittsburgh area report that they have either been operating at capacity since the beginning of the year or having a harder than usual time finding more permanent housing solutions. 

The strain is caused by what Shannon Shaffer, senior manager of operations at Bethlehem Haven, called “a perfect storm” of factors driven in part by more than two years of the pandemic.

• Providers face a changing mix of emergency needs like mental health challenges and substance/alcohol use. 
• Rents have been rising all across the United States, including Pittsburgh.
• The eviction moratorium expired in August, and the Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) phased out in May. 
• Waiting lists for stable housing solutions are getting longer. Extremely low-income households in the Pittsburgh metro area (a seven-county region) exceed the number of affordable and available rental units by nearly 43,000 homes, according to the Gap Report released in March by the National Low Income Housing Coalition.  

Social services have been strained beyond the norm, Shaffer said, and new populations require help.

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