Aubrey Plesh, center, left, founder of Team PSBG, calls area shelters to secure other shelter for former guests of the Smithfield United Church of Christ homeless shelter as she sits on the church steps on the evening of Wednesday, June 21, 2023, in Pittsburgh’s downtown. Plesh and PSBG team member Amanda Fry, right, were trying to coordinate how people would get to other shelter beds after the controversial space closed that morning at 7 a.m. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/PublicSource)
An emergency fallback as cold weather loomed, the Smithfield shelter became a lightning rod, a community and a telling moment in the region’s effort to address the housing crisis.
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PublicSource journalists spent months getting to know the community that developed around the Smithfield shelter Downtown, monitoring efforts to relocate its guests and chronicling its final weeks. PublicSource has obscured identities where the use of full names could reasonably be expected to have negative repercussions.
“There was a blessing the other day,” Dee said, sitting by the gray stone steps of the Smithfield United Church of Christ shelter.
Shelter Stakes
As homelessness surged, Allegheny County and Pittsburgh scrambled, and those without shelter tried to adapt.
As she sat among plastic bags of other people’s belongings, she’d watched money float through the air outside the shelter, where she’d stayed on the sidewalk for about three months.
“A random person stood right there, had a bunch of money. He just threw it up in the air,” she remembered.
Her bad knees wouldn’t allow her to get up. Dee could only watch others scramble as the person threw bills above the hot June sidewalk.
That day, as most days, she was hungry, and it was well before 7 p.m., when the shelter at 620 Smithfield St. would open and someone might bring her a meal.
On May 22, Allegheny County confirmed, in a press release, plans to close the emergency shelter within the Smithfield church sometime in June. The county Department of Human Services and its vendors began seeking other arrangements for people staying there, and a business group began transporting them. On the morning of June 21, the shelter — which had served an estimated 540 people over the course of 30 days — formally closed.
The Smithfield shelter, though, had morphed since its reopening in November from a place with cots to something more. Six days after its closure, around 40 people were still spending the night on and around the church stairs. The shelter’s operator, Team PSBG, continued to hold vigil on the stairs through the night, keeping log of those who visited the steps. On June 27, the log had more than 110 names.
Dee recalled the feeling of stability she’d felt a few years before, when she lived in a house and had a job in Georgia, before moving back up north to reconnect with her children.
But after a week in the Pittsburgh area, her daughter kicked her out. A friend offered to put her up once she got some kind of income. But her deteriorating knees ruled out the kind of work she’d done before at 7-Eleven, Popeye’s and Wendy’s. She was hoping for a seated job like telemarketing or to figure out Social Security.
For now, though, she had Smithfield.
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