Pittsburgh commission to vote on controversial plan addressing homelessness

Pittsburgh’s Planning Commission is poised to vote Tuesday on a controversial zoning change meant to tackle homelessness, one of the city’s most vexing and intractable problems.

The move, pushed by two City Council members, would permit regulated homeless camps Downtown complete with utilities and perhaps even tiny houses.

They would be distinct from the tent cities that spring up around the Golden Triangle, such as the one cleared out last month at the Mon Wharf after flooding.

But the proposal has been met with resistance from Mayor Ed Gainey’s administration and planning commission members, who have voiced concerns that the legislation may have unintended consequences that could do more harm than good.

Council members Anthony Coghill, D-Beechview, and Deb Gross, D-Highland Park, have touted their proposed legislation as an opportunity to build “tiny neighborhoods” of tiny houses where homeless people would have access to bathrooms, electricity, heat, showers, garbage pickup and various services.

The bill would amend the city’s zoning code to permit and regulate encampments of tents or tiny houses in the Downtown area, though no specific site has been identified.

Under the proposal, regulated sites could exist for no more than four years.

Coghill and Gross have said it’s a stopgap measure to help vulnerable populations find safer, more dignified accommodations while the city works on lasting solutions to what everyone agrees is a critical problem.

City officials, public safety leaders and advocates have highlighted the urgency of addressing what many have called a crisis around homelessness and affordable housing.

Now, the divided eight-member commission must sift through the controversy surrounding the bill and vote on whether to recommend it to council.

Tiny house prototype

Coghill — who is a contractor as well as a councilman — built a sample tiny house to demonstrate how quick and affordable it would be to create such an encampment.

The prototype — an 8-by-10-foot house with a bed, storage space and a locking door — took two days to put together and cost about $1,800, Coghill said.

“It’ll give you a little more dignity as opposed to living in a tent,” Coghill said.

It’s exactly the kind of thing Kevin Seidel wishes he had when he was homeless.

Seidel, who works for Coghill’s roofing company and helped build the prototype, said at one point he had lived out of a car. He said that he also spent a stint living in a motel, which cost about $800 per week — “nearly every penny” he could muster.

He didn’t want to move into a group shelter for fear of theft, violence and drug use.

“It’s a scary thing,” Seidel said.

A tiny home, he said, would’ve been an “awesome” short-term fix.

“It would’ve let me be able to save money to get into permanent housing and buy clothes and food,” Seidel said. “It would’ve been a warm, safe place to be.”

The proposal has sparked controversy among local officials.

Planning Commissioner Rachel O’Neill said she feels that Coghill and Gross’s measure “acts in direct conflict with its stated goals.”

Her concern, echoed by Zoning Administrator Corey Layman, was based on fear that the legislation “would potentially make some of the existing temporary communities unlawful” and essentially force the city to decommission existing encampments that weren’t regulated under the new ordinance.

Lisa Frank, the city’s chief administrative and operating officer, said officials are “happy to look at” tiny homes and other options for housing, but said the zoning legislation itself “is concerning” to the Gainey administration.

“Specifying a place for unhoused people to be could have the unintended consequence of specifying places they can’t be, and it’s the city’s take that this way of moving forward, the zoning itself, may have unintended consequences,” Frank said.

But Dan Friedson, City Council’s solicitor, disagreed.

“The argument to say that unregulated encampments would be illegal if there’s a few legal encampments is absurd,” he said.

Friedson pointed out the city currently has the discretion to decommission homeless encampments and said that wouldn’t change just because a new zoning rule went into effect.

Criminalizing sleeping outside when there aren’t indoor shelter beds available for everyone experiencing homelessness is “cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment,” Friedson said, citing a federal court precedent in a Pottstown, Montgomery County case. The court found that people couldn’t be banned from homeless camps when there wasn’t adequate indoor shelter for them.

Public Safety Director Lee Schmidt said there are about 200 unsheltered homeless people in the city currently, and there’s “usually very limited” indoor shelter beds available unless additional emergency shelters open for overnight stays during frigid temperatures.

Homeless advocates told TribLive there aren’t enough shelter beds to accommodate everyone living on the street.

Out-of-the-box thinking

Richard Hooper, a spokesperson for the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership, questioned the impact that regulated encampments would have on the area.

While supportive of helping the homeless, Hooper said the proposed zoning change was overly broad, lacked input from service providers and didn’t adequately address need.

Jerrel Gilliam, executive director of Light of Life Rescue Mission, said he likes that elected officials are willing to “think outside the box” when it comes to new solutions for homelessness.

“There are definitely pros and cons to is,” he said. “It’s not a simple solution.”

Gilliam stressed the importance of providing the kinds of services at a regulated camp that are typically found at traditional shelters.

Successfully launching such an initiative would take a collaborative effort with public and private partners who could provide services, help people transition to permanent housing and maintain safety, Gilliam said.

“There is not a current infrastructure for the supportive services to expand in the numbers we’re talking about here,” he said. “There is a current network of infrastructure, but they’re already overtaxed, under-resourced, and it’s hard to get employees to stay. There’s going to have to be a whole strategy that’s going to have to come together.”

An urgent problem

Rachel Nunes, executive director at the Thomas Merton Center, has toured Coghill’s tiny house prototype and voiced support for the proposal.

“This option, I think, could help a lot of people retain their dignity because there is a huge emotional and mental cost to becoming unhoused,” she said. “Having a diversity of options and programming specific to people’s needs is really important.”

Nunes lambasted the Gainey administration’s response to homelessness. She raised alarms about the administration potentially using the proposed legislation as an excuse to clear other camps.

Schmidt, the public safety director, said that wouldn’t happen. Even if the city created permitted areas for homeless camps, Schmidt said, that wouldn’t give public safety officials license to wipe out unregulated sites without first offering an indoor alternative.

Nunes also questioned why the mayor’s office hasn’t brought more solutions to the table.

“They say they’re working hard on these things, but I don’t see them coming up with proposals that are humane or creative solutions to the issues folks are facing right now,” Nunes said.

Frank, the mayor’s office official, said people aren’t wrong to call on the administration to do more to address homelessness “as quickly as we can.”

“I think the one thing that everybody agrees on is the urgency of getting to the bottom of this,” she said.

But Frank and others said the administration wants to ensure a rush to quick fixes doesn’t lead to flawed solutions.

“Sometimes advocates want us to move quickly, but then in that moving quickly, some of the solutions (are) not safe for the unhoused,” said Olga George, a spokesperson for Gainey. “It has to be deliberate. We want to get to the best answer. Let’s not in our rush to get to that answer ignore the true needs of the people and maybe in the long run cause more harm than good.”

Possible solutions

One of the potential solutions officials are considering, Frank said, is to redevelop existing buildings to serve as shelters or affordable housing.

More information is coming soon, she said.

City Council last year passed legislation requiring the administration to provide a list of city-owned properties that could be converted to shelters and affordable housing options.

A copy of the list obtained by TribLive contained some questionable choices, including the City-County Building, police and medic stations, a park visitor center and several playgrounds and spray parks.

Frank and George said the administration did not understand the legislation aimed to identify properties that could be used for housing or shelter — even though those objectives were explicitly written in the bill.

“If that was their (council’s) intent,” George said, “it wasn’t conveyed.”