Allegheny County pivots to help ‘economically homeless’

Key Takeaways

Five decades of population loss in Allegheny County, Pa. meant that when the door to one property closed for residents, another would usually open. 

Even if a house fire, medical bills or the loss of a job interrupted a family’s finances, that stable cost of housing meant people could usually bridge the bad times. But those house fires and the atrophy that comes from older housing stock ate away at the inventory when the population was starting to rebound in the 2010s. And that once-plentiful housing was getting more expensive, right around when the pandemic added financial stresses.

Now, the county is aiming to dramatically increase its stock of affordable housing over a year and a half, converting and rehabbing properties, working with landlords and coordinating assistance for residents in what is known as the “500 in 500” program — gaining 500 units of housing in 500 days. 

“It’s about creating access to affordable permanent housing to get this population of first-time homeless folks out of shelter and back into stable housing,” said Ed Nusser, county director of housing strategies. “These are people who are holding down jobs… individuals that, but for the cost of housing, could be stably housed.” 

Without any dedicated housing available for people who can support themselves, the county saw little movement out of its shelter system, just a dozen leaving the shelter in 2023. In the few weeks after the 500 in 500 program kicked off, 21 had moved into the first properties acquired through the program and after three months, nearly 70 had moved into housing, with 43 units created. 

Tight targeting

One problem, Human Services Director Erin Dalton said, is that funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is only suited to the most vulnerable homeless, not the “economically homeless” who need a few paychecks’ worth of savings to afford stable housing. So, moving them out of shelters not only helps them back into stable housing, but allows the county to focus its resources on those who need it the most.

“There’s certainly still a group of chronically homeless, very vulnerable folks who we are serving though those HUD dollars, but we don’t have state and local dollars for those lower-vulnerability people and so we’re working across our partners to house those people much more quickly,” Dalton said.

Drawing on her teenage years spent in unstable housing situations, County Executive Sara Innamorato made housing a priority during her campaign in 2023, and upon taking office in January 2024, that mandate refocused various county departments, including the county redevelopment authority, which worked with nonprofits and philanthropies and their city of Pittsburgh counterparts.

“We at DHS had not [previously] presented a clear problem statement, and more importantly, a clear ask,” Dalton said. “We hadn’t said ‘Here’s the problem and here’s what we need from you,’ so people were just doing what they do, making the best decisions they could, but not focusing on the precise needs that we had at the moment. So it did take us being able to define clearly both what the problem was and what we needed from them, and then I think equally, if not more important, having a county executive who was sitting at the table for all of those discussions, a new county executive with a housing priority, where people wanted to even do more than they would have done with a better problem statement.”

Nusser said the new administration has helped realign local, state and federal governments at a time when housing affordability has become a crisis for many.

“We are not presenting a panacea, we’re not presenting a silver bullet, but we are talking about a key challenge in the ecosystem of unhoused and housing unstable individuals and this is a clear problem and a clear sort of process toward addressing that specific problem,” Nusser said. “500 in 500 is less a development problem and more of a government coordination problem.” 

The blueprints

The first step has been looking for low-hanging fruit properties, using roughly $6 million from the HOME Investment Partnerships American Rescue Plan Program to perform moderate rehabilitations. The county and city provide gap financing for projects that also use federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit funding. 

“Vacant buildings that aren’t quite turn-key, but they’re pretty close,” he said. 

The most promising project involves revising a shuttered nursing home in Pittsburgh, convenient to bus lines, which could be home to 52 residents. 

Learn more

Hear from Ed Nusser and NACo's Mike Matthews on the County News Podcast

For a lot of the effort, the county will be trying to recruit landlords, asking them to set aside properties and give the county a head start to try to fill vacancies, with particularly a lot of “mom-and-pop” landlords, in the process disrupting what Dalton termed an information problem. The Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency requires 10% of units in a building receiving Low-Income Housing Tax Credit funding be set aside for residents at or below 20% of area median income.

“People didn’t know before now that they could come to us to fill those units,” she said, adding they have made headway “by making this publicly known and by working with … any affordable housing developer or landlord to place people and place them with tenant support. We know how to provide care and support for people including the property managers who work with these folks. People didn’t know who to call. There’s plenty of people out there who wanted to help, but they didn’t know who to contact and where to call. Now we are establishing it and can then provide some support, so that if something happens, there’s somebody to call, there’s somebody to care for the person, someone to pay for some repairs for the building.”

The county will also continue to be a resource for unhoused residents to help mix and match programs, funding and opportunities. 

“The big part of it is connecting those individuals… how we can get you onto the waiting list for a housing choice voucher, because navigating that web of public support and where to go and who to call is something that most people can’t handle on their best of days,” Nusser said. 

The program, 500 in 500, “is the first step in really beginning to address both ‘How do we expedite production of housing that is affordable?’ and ‘How do we create ways to leverage the incredibly limited resources that we have at the local state and federal level to make those dollars go further?’”