The Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership has augmented city efforts to cut down on the number of people living in tents Downtown by adding rocks to former encampment sites. But some advocates and people who have experienced homelessness are calling the changes “hostile,” raising questions about what should be done with the sites of former tent encampments.
Last year the partnership covered three Downtown plots with large limestone boulders to “ensure compliance,” in the PDP director’s written words, with the city’s prohibition on unhoused people living in tents on private property, in parks, or within 10 feet of a road, trail, sidewalk or other public right-of-way.
Two of the covered plots had hosted encampments of unhoused people before the city required them to relocate, and one was a site that city officials feared unhoused people might occupy in the future.
Another encampment site near the Allegheny County Jail was briefly carpeted with boulders in early February after it was cleared of campers. Olga George, a spokesperson for Mayor Ed Gainey, said the rocks were placed on the site by a lone Public Works employee without a directive from the administration. They were removed by city crews the next day.
“Since the last unhoused individual was relocated from the trail, DPW crews have been working to remove items that were left behind,” George wrote in an email response to PublicSource’s questions. “An individual in the department, without prior consultation or approval, placed rocks in the area, believing it would be beneficial.”
First steps toward the practice began around a year ago. Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership [PDP] CEO Jeremy Waldrup emailed Lee Schmidt, the city’s public safety director, to confirm PDP’s intent to install 200 to 300 pounds of limestone on a plot of grass along First Avenue. Waldrup wrote that he wanted “to ensure this was the agreed upon location.” The land in the attached picture had hosted a tent encampment until the city cleared it in fall 2023.
Schmidt confirmed the location and added, “We also need some ideas on the area to the left of your outlined space.”
In early March, three days after the city announced it would decommission a tent encampment on Fort Pitt Boulevard, Waldrup emailed Schmidt and PennDOT officials with plans to cover two more sites — the soon-to-be cleared encampment site and an adjacent plot — with boulders.
An invoice, received through a public records request, indicates that the First Avenue project cost almost $40,000. In an email to Schmidt, Waldrup identified the Benter Foundation as the project’s funder. Neither PDP nor the Benter Foundation* would say whether the foundation paid for all three plots of landscaping or what the entire project totalled. The foundation referred all questions to the PDP.
In a statement emailed to PublicSource last month, PDP described these projects as attempts to “elevate the visual appeal” of the plots “while addressing critical safety concerns.” Deana Lorenzo, PDP’s director of communications, wrote in a Jan. 24 email, “Alongside our public and private partners, the PDP will continue its efforts to make Downtown a safe and welcoming neighborhood for all.”
‘Hostile architecture’ or ‘urban safety design’?
To Natalie Hancher, the addition of the limestone boulders to Downtown is a clear message that certain kinds of people are not welcome.
Hancher, a recent graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, created Pittsburgh’s first known GIS dataset of the locations of “hostile architecture” throughout the city. “Hostile architecture” is a term that describes design elements that intentionally restrict the use of public spaces. Proponents often avoid the term, employing alternatives such as “defensive architecture” or “urban safety design.” Common examples include benches with dividers to prevent people from laying down and studs, spikes or strips placed on hard surfaces to prevent skateboarding.
Hancher described design elements like benches with dividers and PDP’s boulders as “not meant for good use other than to block people out of certain spaces.”
Hancher’s project website notes that hostile design elements are often implemented to restrict the unwanted behaviors of young people and unhoused people, which is why hostile architecture is often also called anti-homeless architecture. In Pittsburgh, she said, she found the highest concentration of hostile architecture Downtown and along bus lines.
She also noticed another trend. “The closer you are to a park, the more likely you are to find hostile architecture in Pittsburgh,” which she said is “unfortunate” because parks are public spaces by definition.
Other common hostile design elements she noticed in her research were gaps between a building’s awning and its facade, an intervention designed to keep people from being able to seek shelter from inclement weather, and raised grates or spikes around heat vents to prevent people from congregating there.
Downtown felt safer than South Side
According to some scholars of the built environment and research on the experiences of unhoused people, restricting the use of public space often has a negative impact on unhoused people, many of whom don’t have access to an indoor private space.
Rebecca Goldstein had been in Pittsburgh for about two months when the police forced her to move her tent off of one of the Downtown plots now covered with boulders.
“[The police] came by at like 4:30 in the morning one morning and said, everybody get your stuff, get your shit and get the fuck out of here,” she recounted. She remembers that the police officer told her she had to cross a bridge to leave the Downtown area. She said he suggested she move under a particular bridge on the South Side, which is where she went, along with others who were told to move their tents.
She arrived from Philadelphia after falling in love with a man who lived in Pittsburgh, spent all her money on travel, and didn’t know anyone else in town. She had never lived in a tent before and found it scary. Things got scarier, however, when the police ordered her out of Downtown.
Living Downtown was “a hell of a lot safer than on the trail,” Goldstein said. This was because Downtown is “out in the open, there’s traffic, there’s a four-way intersection, there’s lights. There’s more protection there,” she explained.
Being displaced to the South Side made her daily life more difficult and more dangerous. The move put her farther away from the Red Door Downtown and Light of Life ministries on the North Side, both locations that provide free food and clothing. And along the South Side trail, she was vulnerable to trail recreators who would shout derogatory things at people living in nearby tents. She said she recently narrowly escaped a scary situation without serious injury when four masked men robbed and assaulted unhoused people on the trail.
Goldstein is happy to be currently living indoors, in a subsidized housing unit.
While she was forced off the plots in question before the installation of the boulders, Goldstein said she doesn’t understand why an organization would spend money keeping people off of land from which they’re already legally barred. She knows some people who have attempted to return to land the city has tried to clear, and “they ended up in jail.”
For Goldstein, better uses of that money would be “to help [unhoused people] or the children in school. Or you know, single mothers,” she said. “We don’t have any funds for anything at all. And that’s what you chose to do with your money.”
Might gardens be an option?
According to internal emails, members of Gainey’s administration are considering what to do with two plots of land where encampments used to be, on Grant Street Downtown and Stockton Avenue in Allegheny Center.
Regarding the former site of the Grant Street encampment, which was cleared in October 2024, Pittsburgh Chief Operating Officer Lisa Frank wrote to the management of a nearby hotel: “We too have been thinking about what that little plot of land wants to be if it’s not an encampment.” An “area of repose for commuters and visitors” seems unlikely, she wrote, because of the traffic, noise and isolation of the plot from other spaces. “As an alternative to so-called hostile architecture,” Frank suggested a pollinator garden.
Last year, Frank also discussed potential plans for the strip of grass on Stockton Avenue, which was the location of a tent encampment the city cleared in December 2022. The area was fenced off after the encampment was decommissioned.
In August 2024, the president of the Pittsburgh Technology Council, which is located nearby, emailed Frank to ask why the area was no longer fenced off and express concern that unhoused people would reestablish tents there.
Frank replied, “We don’t have an endless supply of fence and it was needed elsewhere, essentially to deal with an issue akin to what Stockton was experiencing earlier.” Frank wrote that she would ideally like to “landscape that little spot so that we could maintain safety without fencing,” encouraging area business owners to help set up a meeting with the property owners to discuss the project.
George, the mayor’s spokesperson, did not answer questions about the current status of plans for the sites, which she referred to as “two key city parcels.” George said the mayor’s office intends “to work with community partners to create vibrant, welcoming spaces that are accessible and inviting for all residents.”
Community organizer Sam Schmidt, of Our Streets Collective and the Pittsburgh chapter of the National Union of the Homeless, said these landscaping projects and broader attempts to push unhoused people out of Downtown reflect a focus on “eliminat[ing] the image and public perception of homelessness without actually eliminating homelessness.”
“I suppose if they really wanted that space to be useful to the poor, they’d put public restrooms, drinking fountains, a warming station or medic station there. They could make a gathering place for our unhoused neighbors that give them some place to exist during the day: plenty of seating, shelter from the elements, and freedom from constant police surveillance and harassment,” she said. “Instead they’ll post signs that remind the unsheltered that they don’t have the right to exist or the freedom to camp there, even if it might save their lives or help them rehabilitate and eventually regain housing.”
* PublicSource receives funding from the Benter Foundation.
Jordana Rosenfeld is a freelance journalist in Pittsburgh and can be reached at jordanarosenfeld@gmail.com.
This story was fact-checked by Bella Markovitz.
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