Pittsburgh City Council Post-Agenda: Winter Homelessness Plan (2025-12-17)
Pittsburgh City Council Post-Agenda: Winter Homelessness Plan (2025-12-17)
On December 17, 2025, Pittsburgh City Council convened a post-agenda hearing to review the county and city's preparation for the 2025-2026 winter season regarding homelessness. The meeting featured presentations from Allegheny County Department of Human Services (DHS) officials and Office of Community Health and Safety (OCHS) representatives. Speakers reported a stable shelter capacity compared to previous years, a strategic shift in Point in Time (PIT) counting methodology, and ongoing challenges regarding involuntary commitment laws, safe discharge planning, and access to shelter for vulnerable populations.
Consent Calendar
- [No items recorded as routine approvals within the transcript scope; this was a discussion-based post-agenda session.]
Public Comments & Testimony
- Councilwoman Gross: Expressed gratitude for the success in housing families with children and the increased participation in overflow and winter shelters. She emphasized the critical role of transportation (shuttles) and food access as motivators for shelter uptake. She raised concerns regarding the lack of citywide coverage for drop-in warming centers, noting constituents in certain areas were advised to travel to suburban locations like Penn Hills, which creates access barriers.
- Councilperson Strasberger: Expressed concern for constituents who worry that the county is not doing enough to compel individuals to seek shelter during extreme weather, often comparing Pittsburgh's approach to New York City. She sought confirmation that no legal or operational steps are being overlooked for those who refuse help.
- Councilman Gill Smith: voiced deep concern regarding individuals with addiction or mental health crises who lack the capacity to make decisions about shelter, arguing that safety should not be left solely to individual choice. He demanded answers on shelter oversight, specifically regarding safety, trauma (e.g., sexual assault in shelters), and who manages the shelters to ensure they are welcoming. He also asked about preventive resources beyond immediate housing aid.
- Councilman Sherlin: Requested an update on the operational status of Second Avenue Commons following the fire, specifically inquiring if it is fully functional and at capacity. He also raised questions about the new Point in Time counting methodology and trends, and inquired about the rising number of individuals sleeping in abandoned homes versus encampments.
Discussion Items
- Winter Shelter Capacity and Strategy: Mr. Andy Hafill (DHS) and Mr. Ben Tallock (OCHS) detailed the winter plan, which maintains sufficient capacity to ensure no individual is turned away. Key components include 232 additional seasonal beds, the dedicated North Side Partnership Project shelter (141 beds), and overflow programs at Second Avenue Commons, East End Cooperative Ministry, and the Salvation Army. Councilman Gill Smith noted that medical screening at intake has expanded, and outreach teams have adjusted routes to include shuttle stops at Unity Recovery to increase engagement.
- Legal Restrictions on Involuntary Commitment: In response to Councilman Gill Smith and Councilperson Strasberger, Ms. Camila Larcon (OCHS) and Mr. Aaron Dalton (DHS) clarified that Allegheny County currently lacks state or local laws allowing for long-term involuntary commitments of individuals who are voluntarily refusing help but are at risk, except in acute, short-term 302 (emergency) situations. They explained that Pennsylvania law offers fewer tools than states like New York. However, the county is scheduled to opt into the "Assisted Outpatient Treatment" (AOT) law on January 1, 2026, which lowers the threshold for civil commitment to outpatient care.
- Shelter Safety and Oversight: Councilman Gill Smith questioned who oversees shelter management to prevent trauma and ensure safety. Mr. Andy Hafill responded that the County oversees all shelters, monitors critical incidents (including violence between staff and residents), and maintains a "Director's Action Line" for complaints. He noted that the system offers "scattered site" shelters for those unable to tolerate congregate settings and that private providers run some shelters with varied environments to offer choice.
- Point in Time (PIT) Count Methodology: Councilman Sherlin inquired about the upcoming count. Ms. Camila Larcon explained that the 2026 count will utilize a new methodology developed with Bloomberg Associates. Unlike previous daytime counts, this version will occur at night (10 p.m. to 4 a.m.) to better capture the unsheltered population and will employ random sampling across the county rather than just known hotspots to allow for year-over-year trend analysis. Approximately 300 volunteers are being recruited.
- Abandoned Homes and Outreach: Mr. Aaron Dalton and Mr. Ben Tallock discussed the trend of increased homelessness in abandoned houses, particularly in Zone 3 (Councilman Sherlin's district) and Zone 2. They explained that outreach teams cannot legally break into private property, so they conduct safety checks and rely on the Property Lot Inspection (PLI) team to board or condemn properties. They requested a city policy to clarify legal pathways for operating on private abandoned properties and emphasized the need for better data sharing regarding 311 calls related to abandoned homes.
- Next Steps and Discharge Planning: Mr. Ben Tallock identified "safe discharge planning" from hospitals and treatment centers as a critical gap, noting that patients are often discharged directly to the street without coordination. He suggested that future plans should focus on increasing transportation access (specifically in the East End/Homewood area) and investing in permanent housing to reduce reliance on emergency shelters. The "Community Counts" branding is being adopted for the new PIT count methodology.
Key Outcomes
- Shelter Capacity Status: The winter shelter system is fully operational with no nights of turned-away individuals; all seasonal beds opened on November 15th.
- Methodology Change: The county will transition to a nighttime, randomized sampling-based Point in Time count starting the last Tuesday of January 2026.
- Legislative Action (Planned): Allegheny County is scheduled to officially opt into the Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT) law on January 1, 2026, to provide a lower-threshold civil commitment option for mental health and substance use.
- Resource Solicitations: The County issued a solicitation last week to engage new outreach partners and will soon issue a solicitation to increase the capacity of scattered-site shelter beds.
- Volunteer Recruitment: A call for approximately 300 volunteers has been launched to support the new nighttime PIT count methodology.
- Policy Gap Identified: Council members and officials identified a specific lack of legal guidance and policy for accessing abandoned private homes to ensure safety, requesting future collaboration with the city to address this.
Meeting Transcript
Good afternoon, and welcome to Pittsburgh City Council's cable cast post agenda on winter time and homelessness for December seventeenth, twenty twenty five. I am Council uh Councilman Bob Sharland, and uh this is a post agenda that we've called in in years past here and want to continue making um an effort to to kind of understand where we are in in the city um and in the region in terms of homelessness and uh our preparation for the winter here. I will uh allow our guests to uh introduce themselves and uh then listen to a presentation here and uh we may be joined by other members um as the uh presentation goes on. Thank you so much. Uh Camila Larcon, Assistant Director in Public Safety overseeing the Office of Community Health and Safety. I am Ben Tallock, the program manager for the Roots program, also with the Office of Community Health and Safety. Hi, Aaron Dalton, I'm the director of the county's Department of Human Services. I am Andy Hafill, administrator of homeless programs at the Department of Human Services. Um technologies set up. Okay, cool. Um great, thank you. Thanks for having us. Um I'll just offer a couple of higher level comments, and then I've asked Andy Hafel, who um just introduced himself to present just where we are with the homeless system uh this winter. Um I think he will present a pretty stable picture in comparison to previous years when we were here, thankfully. Um just to add to that, we've got um a number of warming centers, including doing a lot of work with Second Avenue Commons this winter, um, some of which we'll start to see in early January, uh, trying to improve the experience there during during the day, and we'll be happy to have Jubilee Kitchen also back online providing providing warm meals. Um just to mention, we issued a solicitation just last week to engage outreach partners to be part of our continuum of care. So um, we issued that and wanted to make sure the folks from the city were aware of it. Um we're also issuing a broader um call for volunteers for our point in time count. Um so that's something that happens every January in alignment with HUD requirements, and the new methodology we're using requires a lot more volunteers, so encouraging people to um engage with us and and volunteer to to help us get a census of unsheltered homelessness this winter. Um also just want to mention uh gratitude to our city partners for all kinds of things. Um, but also for being a backup for us when um winter shelters have challenges, including um this morning where we had a a pipe burst, and so worked with city partners to have a backup plan there. We're you know really critical partners in getting people housed through 500 and 500. Um and then lastly, um we've been engaging um through our continuum of care in a five-year strategic plan for the homeless system, and so um we'll be releasing that soon. So just some higher level updates, and we can um update on any of those or provide more information. But Andy can talk through the actual winter plan for for homelessness. Great. Um before we start, I just want to acknowledge we've been joined by uh Councilwoman Gross and Councilperson Strasberger and uh take it away, Andy. Great. All right. We just have a few slides to kind of uh lay out our what our plans are for this winter and um answer any questions. Uh I think you'll see that our plan for this winter is very similar to what you you heard last winter. Uh I think last winter was very successful, and so we've really just building upon what we did last year. Um our plan uh is to is to have a sufficient capacity across our shelter system for anybody that would like to come inside um throughout the winter. We were successful in that last year by um adding additional shelter spaces and um working closely with our outreach partners to get get folks inside. So feel good about our our plan, but we'll be continuing to monitor this. Um I'm actually monitoring this daily to see how our our counts are looking so that we can adjust our plan if we need to. Um just a little bit of background. So our our shelter system, I'll talk a little bit about our shelter system for um adults without children. We have a separate uh shelter system that is for families with children. But just thinking about our our uh system for uh households without children. We have around 400 beds that are available year-round across a number of shelters across the county. Um each winter we we add capacity to that. So for this winter specifically, we're at we've added 232 additional winter seasonal beds. Uh those all opened up on November 15th. Um, and just the details here. So we have three overflow programs, so Second Avenue Commons here downtown, East End Cooperative Ministry in East Liberty, and then the Salvation Army and East Liberty as well. So those three programs are each sort of like flex their capacity, add additional beds in the winter time. Um those all opened uh about a month ago and have been serving people well, sort of gradually filling up and serving people. And then we have the dedicated winter shelter that's at uh the North Side Partnership Project on the North Side, that's 2610 Maple Avenue. Um that program has 141 beds.
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