With temperatures dropping and more people experiencing homelessness than in recent fall seasons, Allegheny County’s main winter shelter is being cemented into the hilly interior of the North Side.
Similar to past years, the county’s Department of Human Services (ACDHS) set Nov. 15 as the opening date for the shelter, providing 140 beds in a community facility partially turned into a temporary respite, in addition to more than 90 additional beds at three other shelters.
The county previously centered its winter shelter Downtown but in 2023 made a controversial decision to move the service to Perry South in the city’s North Side.
This year’s shelter opening comes amid ongoing efforts to reduce tent encampments that mushroomed since the pandemic, bringing positive and negative repercussions for unhoused people, according to longtime observers of area homelessness.
“There’s been a lot of encampment clearances in the last one to two years and certainly more so in the last year,” said Brian Knight, chair of the county’s Homeless Advisory Board. “In some ways, it’s a good thing,” he said, because the city, county and agencies have been collaborating on decommissioning, giving people more time to leave and finding appropriate shelter options. “But there are still problems with the process as it is now.”
The numbers
According to data collected by the county, there were 324 people known to be experiencing unsheltered homelessness on Nov. 10. That was down from 347 in late October, but well above last fall’s peak of 279 people.
The county warned against using these figures as accurate representations of the situation on the ground.
“What’s pictured here is the number of people working with street outreach. That is one metric to help us understand trends in homelessness, but cannot reliably be used as a standalone measure of trends in unsheltered homelessness,” according to ACDHS Director Erin Dalton.
The nation, and the county, saw surging homelessness after the pandemic, said Dalton, in an emailed response to questions. “Unfortunately, our community saw a dramatic spike in people staying outside – at the height, during the time period we’ve been collecting data, nearly 150 tents lined our riverfronts and downtown corridor.”
The county, said Dalton, “framed the problems simply: We had too many people living outside and too many people literally living in shelter without an affordable unit they could move on to. Both problems were unprecedented.”
The county had its official tent count down to two in late October, though it rebounded in November. It peaked above 140 in September 2024.
Staying out in the cold
Chris Miller, 37, currently lives in a tent in the North Side.
Sitting on a milk crate across the street from Second Avenue Commons, Miller spoke about his challenges underneath a city sign notifying that the sidewalks will be “deep cleaned” on Nov. 15. Identical signs were posted around the area warning of the impending move.
Nearby, a person staying in a makeshift shelter on a sidewalk festooned the area with dismembered bikes. Several mattresses lay on the sidewalk, near the cleaning notice signs.
“Being homeless is stressful,” Miller said. But he will not be moving to one of the shelters this winter. He plans to tent with a close friend and bundle up with multiple blankets and hand warmers.
“There are too many rules and regulations for people trying to eat and get out of the cold,” Miller said, adding that he was unable to get housing through the county’s services hotline, Allegheny Link.
“They told me I wasn’t homeless enough,” said Miller, who has been homeless since last year.
The county uses data to make supportive housing decisions, weighing the likelihood that an applicant will remain unhoused, undergo a health or mental health crisis or be booked in jail. Higher-risk applicants get priority.
Second Avenue Commons allows people without permanent addresses to get their mail there, and some people who live there are employed.
Miller is looking for a job in the service industry, leveraging his years of experience as a cook. “Jobs don’t want to hire you if you apply with a shelter’s address,” Miller said. “I have my resume on Indeed and I can’t get a job.”
The apartment market isn’t much more hopeful.
“A one-bedroom apartment is like $1,000. That’s insane,” he said. “Every place wants you to make three times as much and have a 700-plus credit score.”
Still sweeping
Second Avenue Commons, in Uptown, is the county’s year-round hub for services and shelter for people experiencing homelessness. This winter, it will add to its usual 95 beds a small number for people with mobility challenges, and later 40 beds of overflow shelter housing.
It’s also one of numerous areas now off limits to tents.
“What started as encampment decommissionings, in places that had become so unsafe for the people staying there that the City of Pittsburgh decided they had to close, became partnerships with housing advocates directed toward focused housing efforts,” said Dalton.
The county said that their teams focused on housing people staying in encampments along North Side and South Side trails, the Eliza Furnace Trail along the Monongahela River and a lot adjacent to Second Avenue Commons.
Those teams have engaged people living outside, getting them into shelter and housing more than two-thirds of the time, and Dalton said the results include reductions in emergency room visits, incarceration and mental health crisis care.
The City of Pittsburgh directed Public Source to the county for information on winter shelter plans.
Knight said that when people are removed from encampments, outreach workers often lose contact with people they were helping.
Read more on encampment closures
Activists pitch tents outside Downtown shelter, saying repeated encampment closures thwart their outreach
“We still can’t say for certain what the outcomes have been for these people living in encampments and if we’re serious about creating human-centered processes we have to have transparent data and track what’s happening with people,” Knight said.
The ultimate goal is to get people from encampments directly into shelter, said Knight. “DHS is collaborating and I hope to see results come out of this effort soon.”
Dalton said ACDHS “will soon be issuing a solicitation for housing-focused outreach services. One goal of that solicitation is more consistent data collection.”
Return of an outreach pioneer
David Lettrich founded a nonprofit in 2017 to coordinate resources for people experiencing homelessness in the county. Bridge to the Mountains has since expanded its services, and Lettrich retired from his lead role there last year.
Returning after a year spent traveling by train and studying other cities’ approaches to homelessness, Lettrich noted the county’s significant social service strengths. But he warned that an overemphasis on street sweeps in recent years suggests officials are overly concerned with the public’s perception of homelessness.
“You are always within a spectrum of those individuals who are acting in response to the experience of homelessness to minimize suffering and others who want to minimize the impact of homelessness on the [wider] community,” said Lettrich, who is not currently employed or under contract. “And when you get to DHS, the county executive, the mayor, you’ve got to be concerned with both those sides.”
Between 2017 and 2020, Lettrich said the county’s continuum of care system excelled at sheltering and housing everyone who needed the help. In the years leading up to COVID, Lettrich said the system had become so attuned to the needs of the unhoused that they were able to house or shelter everyone encountered on the street within a year.
He said that this year the numbers are rising, with the last few years of unmet shelter and housing needs snowballing the overall figure.
“What I’ve seen occur in the last four years has been a pendulum swing towards the community’s concerns,” Lettrich said, noting that having that perspective isn’t harmful on its own.
“But when we allow the visual impact, the negative community dialogues, to drive our decision making about services, how we treat individuals, that’s when it becomes problematic,” Lettrich said. “We’ve allowed ourselves to be pulled too far in that direction.”
Lettrich said he was particularly concerned about escalating encampment sweeps going back several years culminating in the “perpetual sweep of Second Avenue Commons,” near which people continue to sleep outside amid the city’s and county’s no-tent policy.
Earlier this year, ACDHS decided that tents wouldn’t be allowed in front of Second Avenue Commons. The department maintains that camping there hampers the long-term operations of the facility, and other options would be safer for the people staying there.
“People stay around Second Avenue Commons because it is safe,” thanks in part to security cameras, Lettrich said. The decision to bar camping there is “100% an optics-driven decision.”
Even as the winter shelter opens, anyone who won’t or can’t stay in congregate settings could be pushed into places in which they’re far from help, said Knight.
“As we close more and more spaces to people without other spaces to go to, when we move people along and say you can’t put a tent here, after we’ve done that it’s narrowing the options for folks further and further and that can be dangerous for people,” he said. “It can squeeze them to more remote areas where street outreach teams might be less likely to provide street level services.”
Eric Jankiewicz was PublicSource’s economic development reporter from July 2022 through early November 2025.
This story was fact-checked by Rich Lord.
