Members of the Homeless Oversight Coordinating Committee climb a hill to remove collected garbage from an encampment on the South Side, Monday, May 12, 2025. The group works to integrate services for people who are unhoused in Allegheny County. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/PublicSource)
Allegheny County declared its Perry South winter shelter a success, but its closure comes as beds are scarce and tents are increasingly discouraged.
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by Stephanie Strasburg, Eric Jankiewicz and Rich Lord, PublicSource
May 15, 2025
Allegheny County’s winter shelter is set to formally close today, ending what the Department of Human Services characterized as a successful season. But that closure comes at a time when options for unhoused people are increasingly scarce and some may be resorting to perilous alternatives, including abandoned buildings.
Since December, the department [ACDHS] has provided winter shelter space for people in Perry South, two winters after the controversial closure of a longtime Downtown location. ACDHS spent the last week working to find other offers of shelter or housing for the last 21 people staying at the former McNaugher Education Center. Run by the North Side Partnership Project and Community Family Advocates, it averaged 80 people per night in winter and topped out at 132 guests in mid-February.
That endgame came against the backdrop of multiple changes in the homeless shelter landscape.
- Closed earlier in spring were overflow shelters run by the Salvation Army, Light of Life Rescue Mission, East End Cooperative Ministry and Second Avenue Commons.
- Following those closures, shelters reported to the county in early May that there were only three available beds in the system, and those were reserved for people ages 18 to 24 identifying as women or nonbinary.
- Unity Recovery, which at one point had as many as 39 beds in Homewood, closed that location on April 30, based on an ACDHS decision, according to Unity Executive Director Robert Ashford.
- The City of Pittsburgh, working with the county, is focused on clearing encampments along the South Side Riverfront Trail and ending all tent activity there by July 1.
- The county is trying to counter camping in front of Second Avenue Commons, in Uptown.
ACDHS told PublicSource that emergency housing “will be stretched but spaces open regularly, and anyone newly experiencing homelessness can access these resources” through the department or allied street outreach teams. The county also holds that its 500-in-500 plan to add housing units over roughly a year and a half will help the department to place people in longer-term lodgings, wrote department spokesperson Courtney Lewis in response to questions.
Sam Schmidt, an organizer with the Our Streets Collective, said city and county leaders have given advocates an ear, but not always provided clear information.
“We keep asking people where they can camp but we never get answers,” said Schmidt. “But they tell people where they can’t camp.”
Heading for ‘the woods’
On a May day, Steve Easterwood, 62, was hanging out near a dozen tents just outside of Second Avenue Commons, the county’s flagship shelter and services center since late 2022.
He said he comes to Second Avenue Commons for the drop-in center, and has stayed there at times but “they’ll put you on the street,” for rule violations.
Easterwood had spent time at Unity in Homewood, where he appreciated the barbecues, and then at the winter shelter in Perry South, but found that noisy. Next? “I got a tent and I’m going to take it into the woods. I’ll stay there all summer.”
The county recently reported around 860 people either in shelters (623) or living outside (237), down from around 1,000 in November.
“Even including the tents at Second Avenue Commons, the number of tents in our community is now amongst the lowest that we’ve seen since we started weekly counts two years ago,” wrote Lewis. Tents won’t be “allowed to persist” in front of the Uptown facility, the department spokesperson added, “due to safety issues.”
The city and county appear intent on discouraging outdoor living, at least anywhere near Downtown. A spring proliferation of tents, though, would match historic norms.
When the weather warms, “there’s natural occurrence of people leaving and choosing to stay outside,” said Annie Cairns, communications manager for Light of Life. “It creates an illusion [of increasing homelessness] where, like, the winter you see fewer tents and then weather breaks and you see tents going up.”
Some observers believe there’s a powerful countercurrent this season: The coming of the National Football League draft in less than a year. The looming mega-event could spur accelerated efforts to discourage encampments, said Calla Kainaroi, executive director of Bridge Outreach, which works with people living outside.
“There’s a countdown for the draft, and looking at other cities we know this is unsafe for people that live outside and people will be further displaced,” Kainaroi said in an interview. “We have this looming in the back of our minds come spring.”
Encampment actions aren’t tied to the draft, said Olga George, spokesperson for Mayor Ed Gainey, in response to questions. “The speed with which we can house people has nothing to do with any event and everything to do with our ability to secure options and create flow through the system.”
South Side encampment next to go
The longstanding, ever-changing string of tents along the South Side Riverfront Trail is already under pressure. Officials and advocates have been told that people tenting there have until July 1 to leave.
“What is happening on the Southside is the next step in the work we began this fall and winter along the North Side and the Eliza Furnace trails and we are confident in our ability to make credible [shelter] offers to people who are living unsheltered there,” wrote George. “This effort isn’t about displacement” but rather about connecting people to safer, healthier, more dignified environments, she continued.
“They don’t want to call it a sweep, but it’s a sweep,” said Pittsburgh Councilman Bob Charland, whose district includes South Side.
“I’m glad that we’re trying to address this. I definitely feel like I’ve been sounding the alarm on this for far too long.”
The city and county, wrote Lewis, “are currently focusing our geographic housing efforts on the South Side trail, where tent camping is a persistent concern.” The department and vendors are making “individualized offers of shelter, permanent housing, or family reconnection, depending on the person’s needs,” modeled on the closure of an encampment along the Eliza Furnace Trail in Uptown, across the Monongahela River from the South Side.
Charland said the area has attracted steadily more encampment activity.
“We are close to Downtown, but removed enough, and there are places that you can be in South Side that are remote enough that you can kind of stay out of people’s way,” he said. As the city closed other encampments in recent years, he said, people drifted to South Side.
He said more tents means less patience on the part of residents and business owners, some of whom perceive a public safety issue. He said he hasn’t heard much about altercations, though there have been fires that got out of hand.
“I feel very comfortable on the trail,” he added. “The way that I feel on the trail versus the way a 19-year-old Duquesne University student feels on the trail may be markedly different.”
Charland said that changes in shelter availability and increasing encampment clearing have had unintended consequences.
“What we have had more of in the South Side, in the slopes specifically, has been unauthorized occupants in abandoned houses,” he said. “We’ll get them boarded up, they’ll be pulled open and we’ll see the reality that there is someone in there,” sometimes evidenced by small, indoor fires.
George said that this year “working with people who live in abandoned structures will be a new area of focus.”
Kainaroi said her team has heard people talk about moving into abandoned buildings, and noted that it makes outreach work harder and creates safety risks.
“With every single camp closure we’ve lost track of people that we’re working with and maybe that’s because they’re moving to other outdoor space but maybe that’s because they’re moving to some kind of abandoned indoor space, which makes it hard to stay connected,” Kainaroi said. In residential neighborhoods, it may not take long for neighbors and law enforcement to become aware of people staying in an abandoned structure, “and now people are being displaced even again.”
Kainaroi said there are “still a lot of people outside right now,” and that some could be forced into “couch surfing, returning to harmful family relationships or living with an unhealthy partner relationship.” Meeting needs of unhoused people “is complicated, and the things that are available don’t meet the needs of the people that need them.”
Stephanie Strasburg is a photojournalist with PublicSource who can be reached at stephanie@publicsource.org or on Twitter @stephstrasburg.
Eric Jankiewicz is PublicSource’s economic development reporter and can be reached at ericj@publicsource.org or on Twitter @ericjankiewicz.
Rich Lord is PublicSource’s managing editor, and can be reached at rich@publicsource.org.
This article first appeared on PublicSource and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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