Life in the 21st century sometimes means scrambling to find a plug to recharge a dying cell phone. Most folks can walk into a coffee shop or the lobby of a public building to tap into some needed electricity.
But what if you are unhoused and rely on an electric wheelchair to get to a bathroom or to find food, temporary shelter, or a cooling center in a heat emergency? You have a lot fewer options to plug in. That’s what Norman White discovered recently when he tried to recharge his wheelchair using outdoor outlets along Centre Ave. in the Hill District.
White’s quest for power in public spaces exposed a frayed safety net designed on the cheap and woven on a one-size-fits-all loom. The 55-year-old Hill District native lost his Carnegie apartment in April. Since then, he’s been navigating the streets where he grew up, panhandling and looking for food, water, and electricity. Some of the outlets White has tried to use belong to properties developed on land formerly owned by the Urban Redevelopment Authority.
“These people, they’re getting all of this money from the government or whatever they’re getting to build a community,” White said while parked at a Centre Ave. bus shelter a few days before an oppressive heatwave bore down on Pittsburgh. “I never did anything to anyone up here, and I can’t do anything without my wheelchair. I can’t stand, I can’t walk. They got plugs outside some of the buildings, so I plug up my chair and in the next couple of minutes, somebody is coming and taking the plug out, saying I can’t do it.”
White’s plight is an equity issue that was unknown to the city’s affordable housing community and to elected officials. Before Pittsburgh City Paper reached out to County councilmember-at-large Bethany Hallam, she had never considered that access to electricity by unhoused people was a survival issue. “It truly never crossed my mind,” Hallam says.
Upon learning about White’s situation, Hallam drove through the Hill looking for him. She ultimately was able to get White a cellphone, some clothes, and pathway to a shelter.
“When there are public dollars used, there should be public accessibility. That is a no-brainer,” Hallam says. “When you receive public dollars for your project, you should be required to have not just an ADA-accessible city, but also access for the public when they need to use electricity or bathrooms or water fountains.”
The New Granada Square Apartments is one of the properties where White has tried to recharge his chair. Completed in 2023, the mixed-use development bookends the 2100 block of Centre Ave. where the Hill CDC is redeveloping the long-abandoned New Granada Theater.
The Hill CDC bought the parcels from the URA. Cleveland-based CHN Housing Partners manages the 40 apartments built there.
There are two outside outlets in the property’s Centre Ave. façade. White said that he has been asked to leave the property by its manager multiple times. One time, the manager called the police.
“She was, you know, giving me orders to get out of here,” White says.
White clearly recalls what the manager told him: “You don’t pay rent here and pay for electricity, and people don’t want you here.”
The New Granada Square Apartments property manager referred questions to the company’s corporate headquarters. CHN spokesperson Laura Boustani says that tenants had complained about White, and says that the property manager had several encounters with White, including one where she told him to leave by 5 p.m.
“Please don’t come back because this is a private property and we have residents here that pay,” Boustani says the property manager told White.
After that, the apartments cut the power to the outlets along Centre Ave. White then tried to charge his chair using an outlet in the vestibule. Again, the property manager told him to leave.
Boustani confirms that the outlets were disabled after the property manager discovered White charging his chair.
“It is private property,” Boustani says. “Our responsibility is to our residents to make sure they’re comfortable and they’re secure and safe.”
Like Hallam, Hill CDC executive director Marimba Milliones had been unaware of the need for public electricity outlets. “Learning of this issue has been an education for the Hill CDC. It’s clear that additional public charging stations are needed throughout the neighborhood, city, and county,” Milliones wrote in an emailed response to an interview request.
Though he’s from the Hill and living there again, albeit on the streets, White finds compassion in the people who bring him water and who help him to move when his chair’s batteries run dry. He repeatedly apologizes for the pungent smell that surrounds him. Unable to leave his chair, White urinates and defecates in it.
“A friend of mine went out of his way, I guess he smelled me, and he went and brought this urinal thing that I could take with me and I could stick under my clothes and go to the bathroom,” White said.
Living on the streets in the Hill District during a record-setting heatwave is the latest in a long line of misfortunes and indignities in White’s life. When he was 19, he robbed a Hill District bar and was shot as he was fleeing.
Police arrested White for the robbery and took the gun he used. They subsequently determined that the gun had belonged to a Wilkinsburg jitney driver who died after struggling with White, whom they says tried to rob him. In 1989, a judge convicted White of third-degree murder, robbery, theft, and receiving stolen property.
“I did 15 years straight in prison,” White says. “I missed all my 20s and half of my 30s.”
After returning to Pittsburgh, White worked with at-risk youth and in retail. In 2006, he was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident. “I’ve had four operations since. I’ve been up on my feet every time. This last time, it just got so bad, I ended up in this chair,” he says.
White has used his wheelchair for a year and was living in a first-floor apartment when his landlord, Monroeville-based Arbor Management Inc., evicted him.
“They didn’t want to renew my lease because my wheelchair was messing up the walls and door hinges and stuff, and they were getting fines for my rent, and they didn’t want to build me a ramp,” White says.
The Landlord/Tenant complaint filed in Carnegie Magistrate’s Court shows that White had failed to pay multiple months’ rent. “No one here at Arbors is going to speak to you or the press,” the company’s portfolio manager and complaint author, Marlayna Marquinez, emailed in response to a request for information about the building and White’s case.
Out on the street, White’s wheelchair has two batteries that can take him between 13 and 21 miles on a single charge, according to the manufacturer. It takes between eight and 14 hours to fully recharge them. Based on the types of battery and charging time, it can cost less than 50 cents to fully recharge, according to a source who works in the electricity industry.
White rarely gets a chance to stay in one place long enough to get a full charge. If he’s not being forced to unplug from outdoor outlets, Centre Ave. businesses limit the amount of time he’s allowed to plug in. After getting a push uphill on Centre Ave. to the YMCA, he was told that he could only stay in the lobby for an hour. The building doesn’t appear to have any exterior outlets.
YMCA staff did not respond to City Paper’s request for an interview or comment.
Pittsburgh’s Office of Community Health and Safety said in an emailed statement, “OCHS hasn’t had this concern raised by our service participants.” The statement suggested that people requiring electricity could charge at public libraries, the now-closed Second Ave. Commons and other places “during hours of operations.”
The Carnegie Library Hill District branch one block away from the YMCA also doesn’t have any outside outlets. The same with a nearby First National Bank branch and The Legacy apartment building next door. The New Granada Square Apartments have the closest outdoor outlets to where White spends most of his time. In the same block, the Hill CDC headquarters and the Federal Credit Union office don’t have outside outlets.
The Zone 2 police station has an outdoor outlet in the back. Lt. Dan Reed says that White could recharge there, for short periods of time. “I would have no problem with him doing that,” Reed says. “[But] he’s going to have to find a long-term solution.”
White admits that he would never recharge at a police station. “You get a stigma about using it, being around the police and stuff like that,” he says.
But what about properties like the New Granada Square Apartments? It was built on parcels assembled by the URA and the project received financing from multiple sources, including the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency and federal Low Income Housing Tax Credits.
The long-term solution, says Hallam, requires changing the ways that developers benefit from public assistance with their projects.
The councilmember says that she will explore ways to attach conditions to future approvals for developers and projects receiving public funding. “Something that I’m definitely going to be looking into immediately is can we put the same restrictions as we do for TIFs and LERTAs for tax incentives that developers receive on public access to electricity and bathrooms,” Hallam says.
CP was unable to get responses to multiple requests for comment from Mayor Ed Gainey and Hill District City Councilmember Daniel Lavelle.
White was arrested for retail theft in Scott Township in late June. The phone Hallam got him is no longer in service.
This article appears in Jul 10-16, 2024.
