Prevention key to fighting homelessness — but it’s a slog
The best ways to combat homelessness: Keep people from losing their homes in the first place and get them back into housing as quickly as possible if they do land on the street.
Seems simple. But homelessness is a complex issue that a variety of agencies, nonprofits and advocates have been working to address for decades, using a wide range of approaches that include prevention, rapid rehousing and a focus on each individual’s needs.
“There’s no silver bullet,” said Abigail Horn, Allegheny County Department of Human Services deputy director of the Office of Community Services. “The causes and factors in homelessness are so varied and multiple that there’s never going to be one silver bullet. It’s this slogging ahead.”
Homelessness has declined in Allegheny County during the past three years, according to the county’s point-in-time counts. The number of people without shelter or in emergency shelters was counted as 675 in 2017, 631 in 2018 and 616 in 2019, according to the counts, which are done on one night annually in January.
While the data provides a look at changes in homeless populations over time, advocates say it is not a perfect tool because it can be affected by weather on the night of the count, the number of volunteers and other factors. It also doesn’t count people who
might be in an unstable housing situation but staying with a relative or sleeping on a friend’s couch instead of on the streets or in a shelter.
The Department of Human Services also tracks the number of people who interact with its street outreach teams over time, and those numbers also show that homelessness in the county is not on the rise.
Between January and mid-September 2018, 572 people entered countywide street outreach programs, compared to 557 people so far this year, according to DHS. In that same nearly ninemonth period last year, the street outreach programs saw 1,066 active participants, compared to 802 so far this year.
Part of the county’s approach to addressing homelessness includes helping people who are in danger of being evicted.
“In a lot of ways, homelessness in particular is the final disaster in what is often a series of events and causes,” said Jeanne Pearlman, senior vice president for program and policy at the Pittsburgh Foundation, which has so far this year directed about $8 million toward initiatives directly or indirectly aimed at ending and preventing homelessness.
Some agencies in the region will help pay rent; others will work with landlords and tenants to resolve a variety of other problems, such as keeping a property clean or preventing pest infestations.
“Homelessness describes where you are; it doesn’t describe how you got there,” Ms. Pearlman said, adding that approaches to the problem must consider the underlying causes.
Some residents in the Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh’s properties have for years been referred to Familylinks, an agency that provides a wide range of social services, when they are in danger of eviction, CEO Fred Massey said.
“They said, ‘We have too many people who are being evicted because they either have mental health issues or drug treatment issues, and so just evicting them is not solving the problem,’” he said. “So they wanted to contract with us to try to provide intervention so that if a person is coming up to eviction, and it’s tied to either drug or alcohol addictions or some mental health, we’re able to put a stop on that while we provide some services.”
Prevention of homelessness is key, said Becky Haberstroh, director of youth and family services at Familylinks.
“Once they go [to the streets], it is extremely hard to get them back,” she said.
For people who are experiencing homelessness, several agencies conduct street outreach, meeting people where they are in order to provide care and connect them to shelters and longer-term services aimed at helping them back on their feet.
There are more than 2,000 existing shelter beds in the county, spread across various agencies. Typically, about 50 beds open up each month, with some spaces reserved for particular populations, like families, veterans or those fleeing domestic violence. Not every bed is available to every homeless person in need of a bed on a given night.
Advocates and service providers try to move people swiftly through shelters and into other housing in order to keep the shelters from filling up.
“If we had more flow, so getting [people] out the back door, people who were stabilizing and moving out of the system, we would have a bigger front door,” Ms. Horn said, referring to the efforts to move people from shelters into permanent housing.
Finding affordable, longterm housing is key but can be difficult in Pittsburgh, experts said, depending on the need for public transportation, a particular school district or location, and the client’s personal and financial history.
“You can’t solve homelessness without a home,” said Andrea Bustos, Allegheny Link program manager.
Many agencies nationally and locally, including the Department of Human Services, have adopted a “housing-first” approach, which is designed to put people into homes quickly regardless of the other circumstances in their lives, like substance abuse or unemployment.
“With housing first, what you see is it’s really hard to achieve your other goals — whether it’s around gaining employment or improving financial wellness by learning budgeting skills or going back to school — it’s just really hard to do that if you don’t have a roof over your head,” said Gale Schwartz, the Housing Alliance of Pennsylvania’s associate director of policy and strategic initiatives.
Instead of requiring people to solve those problems before they are eligible for housing, the housing first philosophy starts with a home and then includes care for the other issues.
“It is basically making them not homeless as quickly as possible,” said Ms. Horn. “The way you make them not homeless is by having housing that they can then afford for the rest of their lives, which for different people means different things. Some people, they will not need a subsidy to make that happen; they will just need other community supports for them to make it through rough spots in life.”
It’s important to couple housing with other services and to put individuals into housing only when they are ready for the move, experts said.
“We’ve seen a lot of times we will meet a person will say, ‘Hey, are you interested in housing?’ And they say, ‘Yeah,’ and very rapidly they enter the housing system,” said Dan Palka, outreach team leader for Pittsburgh Mercy’s Operation Safety Net.
“And then not too long after that they’re back on the street. And we realized that there were these very fundamental issues or needs that we hadn’t either elicited, because maybe there wasn’t enough time spent with that individual or the rapport wasn’t such that they would have even disclose some of those underlying issues. And so they weren’t ready.”
The remedy to that problem, he said, is for service providers to build relationships with clients in order to fully understand each individual’s needs.
Another way to increase the “front door” capacity of the county’s system would be to open more shelter space — something that Mayor Bill Peduto said the city is considering supporting by donating land near the Allegheny County Jail for such a building.
The idea is not new. Nearly two years ago, Allegheny County human service officials issued a request for proposals nearly seeking an agency to operate a “lowbarrier” shelter that would reach people not being served at existing shelters.
A low-barrier shelter is one designed with flexible rules to make it easier for people to stay there. It might allow people to bring pets or belongings with them and would not require them to stop drinking or using drugs to stay there.
Pittsburgh Mercy, a community health provider, was awarded the contract; officials wanted to combine the low-barrier shelter with a day program but said they struggled to find a location that could accommodate them, particularly when looking at Downtown real estate.
“It’s tough to find a space that we can afford in this community right now and that meets the needs of the people,” Ms. Pearlman said, adding that both the foundation and a variety of stakeholders are still looking at ways to open such a shelter.
“We’re at the table, we believe in this concept, but we want to make sure we do it right and do it in away that serves the people we are trying to serve,” she said.
She and others emphasized that a multifaceted, long-term approach with a variety of partners, both public and private, is needed to address both homelessness and its underlying causes.
Charles Chapman, executive director of Living Ministries, which serves local homeless, said he’s tired of the back-and-forth between city officials, business people and others about homelessness Downtown.
“We’re fighting the wrong things. It’s one organization fights another organization. One entity blames another entity. We spend energy [on that] instead of addressing the issues,” he said. “So why don’t we just figure out what we’ve got to do?”