Advocates for the unhoused at an unannounced protest outside Mayor Gainey’s office Credit: Photo: By Chi-Tsung Chang

Last week, a group of about 30 advocates showed up unannounced at Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey’s office to protest the City’s plans to remove the unhoused people living on the Three Rivers Heritage Trail on the North Side on Dec. 15.

The advocates, some of whom have themselves experienced homelessness, came on Dec. 6 bearing several dozen letters from Pittsburghers, both housed and unhoused, urging the City to stop decommissioning tent encampments, because, they say, there is nowhere else for people in the encampments to go.

Sam Schmidt, an organizer with Our Streets Collective and the Pittsburgh Chapter of the National Union of the Homeless who has previously experienced homelessness, stood outside the mayor’s office and announced, “We are calling an emergency meeting because, as you know, people are going to be displaced, or are currently being displaced, because of this encampment sweep,” noting that the mayor’s team has previously canceled meetings with the group to discuss this issue. (The sweep did, in the end, take place on Dec. 15, despite the protest.)

“These sweeps are not solutions; they are acts of violence against people whose only crime is being denied the human right to housing,” the above organizations wrote in a statement. “When the City displaces unhoused individuals, it deprives them of their freedom of movement, effectively criminalizing their existence. … The ongoing sweeps do more than displace; they destroy. Community connections — the relationships and networks that determine whether or not someone survives homelessness — are obliterated with every sweep. Camps are not just makeshift shelters; they are communities built on mutual aid, trust, and solidarity. Destroying these spaces compounds the harm of homelessness, leaving people even more isolated and vulnerable.”

The mayor’s chief of staff, Lisa Frank, spoke with advocates for about 15 minutes and pledged to deliver the letters and relay the group’s concerns to Gainey. However, the interaction suggested a profound divergence between officials’ characterization of the resources available for unhoused individuals in Allegheny County and the perspective of advocates in relationship with people experiencing homelessness.

The advocates repeatedly emphasized the need for each unhoused person to receive “a credible offer of adequate long-term housing that is sustainable for them,” which they claim is not happening for the individuals displaced from encampments.

In a phone interview with Pittsburgh City Paper a few days later, Frank and Department of Human Services director Erin Dalton claimed there is no lack of housing options for individuals living outside and said that outreach workers make every person living in an encampment that is slated for clearing a credible offer of housing.

“The offers can look different, and we try to make sure that people get most of what they’re really looking for,” Dalton said, but there are challenges, such as accommodating couples that want to stay together.

Dalton defined a credible offer of housing as “a place where people can stay that night and every night until they’ve got a different housing situation worked out for them. So a place where they can bring in their belongings, a place where they know they can come back to that night, a place with links and connections to other care.”

Frank said that the City has entered a new era in its implementation of the encampment decommissioning policy, in which credible offers of housing are abundant enough that the City will now move to decommission encampments without evidence that they pose a threat to public safety. Frank described the process as “planful relocation,” or “inviting people inside,” on her phone call with City Paper.

The City has said that it decommissioned previous encampments, such as those on Stockton Ave., Grant St., or Fort Pitt Blvd., based on public safety complaints.

“What we’re talking about here is a fundamentally different thing,” Frank said. “This is not decommissioning for the purposes of public safety. This is saying, ‘Hallelujah, our partners at the County have busted their tails to create both more credible shelter options and more flow in the system, so that for the first time in a long time … we are beginning to enter an era of enough, and in an era of enough, we want to have people come inside.’”

Signs posted last month on the Three Rivers Heritage Trail cite trespassing, obstruction of a public trail, and other criminal activity as justification for the City’s move to remove the people living there, according to KDKA.

Dalton says that of the people living on the North Side trail, 15 have been enrolled in emergency shelters or have accepted offers of housing, and three have been reunited to live inside with friends and family.

Advocates say that, in their efforts to help individuals relocate from previous encampments, they have often encountered people who said they had not received an offer of housing or were unaware that they were eligible for a housing program, leading them to doubt the officials’ assurances that everyone on the North Side trail has been offered housing.

Regarding the Grant St. encampment, which the City decommissioned in October, Schmidt said, “The news said that everyone was given an offer, but some of the people that we talked to didn’t even know that they were eligible” for housing. Schmidt was one of a handful of volunteers who helped people at the Grant St. site pack up and move. Of those who were living at the encampment, Schmidt recalled that one person went to a single-room occupancy (SRO) unit and someone else went to an emergency shelter.

“The other five to seven individuals just moved to a new encampment,” Schmidt said. “Those other people, I, personally, and others in this group and others in the community just moved them to a new tent encampment. They were not offered long-term housing. None of them were.”

Standing outside the mayor’s office, Schmidt mentioned this to Frank, who denied it was the case.

Schmidt has said that one of the major reasons why individuals might end up living outside is because they have been banned from or traumatized by the shelter system.

“Shelter staff citywide are culturally unaware and/or burned out and/or just entry-level and are working with folks with all kinds of overlapping needs and challenges,” Schmidt said. “And they’re exiting people and bullying people arbitrarily, not meeting their care needs, and throwing people out when they want. They don’t follow any of their own policies, which they also won’t make public. So we just have this revolving door of people struggling with the shelter system.”

These complaints echo concerns that Schmidt and other advocates shared with DHS in an open letter earlier this year. Dalton says Allegheny County has a “real, thorough process” to handle appeals when someone is asked to leave a shelter.

Dalton was not able to say how many people displaced from previous decommissionings ended up housed and how many ended up back outside. Minutes from the City’s encampment policy committee meetings indicate that people have often remained unsheltered after previous encampment decommissionings.

At a meeting debriefing the April decommissioning of the encampment on Fort Pitt Blvd., an outreach worker noted that half of those moved from the encampment to Second Avenue Commons “couldn’t stay because they couldn’t handle the walk.”

“I am still running into people who were evicted and still feel like they do not have anywhere to go,” the worker said.