Gwendolyn Sobkowiak | staff writer

As winter settles onto our campus in a brief and heavy mound of snow, concerns about people without housing Downtown makes its way back into public consciousness.

Having had previous volunteer experience Downtown, I wanted to provide some insight that seems to be continuously left out from the discussion.

Let’s make one thing clear, the housing crisis, as it currently stands, is not the biggest cause of homelessness in Pittsburgh.

It’s imperative that we acknowledge mental health as a massive contributor to this crisis. Turning a blind eye to it is neglectful and harmful to everybody.

According to Realtor.com, the current median price for a house in Greater Pittsburgh stands at $230,000.

While it is true the prices to live inside the city have increased across the board, this figure has largely grown on trajectory with inflation. While it is scary to think of housing prices increasing, it’s illogical to blame these changes for the disproportionate increase of people without housing.

According to CBS News, the surveyed number of people without housing in Allegheny County has increased, from 631 to 1,026 in the past five years. The Light of Life Rescue Mission estimates that they alone seasonally serve 3,000 unique individuals per year and that these numbers continue to increase.

During my freshman year of college, I was part of a program at Duquesne where I volunteered for a year at Woodstreet Commons, a transitional housing facility Downtown that worked from a “housing first” perspective of care.

Anyone that I spoke to about my work responsively lamented the high cost of housing. People would repeatedly tell me about projects like 500 in 500 — a start-up focused admirably on housing 500 people in 500 days — heralding how we would be seeing real improvements in the coming years if only we invested more in efforts like this. I failed to see this reflected within our shelter, however, and the increasing statistics, even following investment into affordable housing, put more weight behind this concern.

We’ve been investing massive amounts of money into creating affordable housing in Pittsburgh, so why aren’t we seeing the rate of people without housing go down?

From what I’ve observed, this solution fails to take into account a population of individuals who are currently taking the brunt of anger when heated debates about this topic begin. Jerrel Gilliam, executive director of the Light of Life Mission, a Downtown shelter which provides beds and meals for men, women and children, didn’t shy away from the topic in his 2024 interview with CBS.

“Since the pandemic, we’re seeing increased mental health issues. There’s not enough beds in our mental health system to treat them properly so they end up on the streets,” Gilliam said in an interview with CBS News.

Gilliam emphasized how only a small percentage of people without housing had found themselves in their shelter for “purely economic reasons.” He estimated that approximately 75% of individuals were experiencing mental illness, addiction or a combination of both. A study by the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2024, confirms these findings, estimating that over 67% of individuals who are experiencing homelessness have mental health disorders. Gilliam stated that just placing them in housing failed to address deeper rooted problems the individuals were experiencing.

While the ultimate goal for all individuals entering the Wood Street Commons facility is to receive stable housing and work, a large percentage of people seemed to be floating in the grey zone of need that Gilliam noted. Had someone scooped them up from the shelter and given them a house, this still would not have solved the majority of the problems affecting them

Mental health reform and rehabilitative programs have become an urgent necessity, and we need them now if we really want to diminish the rates of people without housing.

Since the 1960s, concerns about abuse within mental institutions brought calls for mass restructuring to a head. NPR reported on how closures stemming from a well-intended movement have led to budget cuts and policy changes which arguably played a major part in the modern mental health crisis.

Don’t get me wrong, mental institutions conjure up grotesque images of hospitals like “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” filled with numb and unfairly held individuals staring at the walls or else screaming endlessly with no response. These institutions failed the very populations they were professed to be caring for, and there were plenty of good reasons to disband them.

The sad truth now, however, is that individuals who previously may have benefited from continuous care are now left scrambling for resources or otherwise fending for themselves without medication or support.

Many individuals end up in jail or experiencing homelessness intermittently following mental health crises which impede their daily functioning. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration estimated that while 18% of the general population has a mental illness, 44% of individuals in jail and 37% of those in prison are estimated to have a mental illness.

“The system has failed since we eliminated all of the mental health hospitals,” Gilliam said. “We made a promise then that there was going to be a safety net, and that safety net has not worked.”

This is not an empathetic solution. Care facilities have been systematically removed across the United States. There are few remaining facilities where individuals can actively participate in the community with adequate support. People are left stranded with ever diminishing life buoys.

We need to come up with a new solution, something that exists to care for individuals who are likely not ever going to truly be able to live without support. Maybe institutions, even in an altered form, aren’t the option, but leaving these individuals to live out their lives in transitional housing shelters or in jail is a failure on all accounts.

Stronger emphasis needs to be placed on creating community-based care facilities, places where people can receive appropriate mental health treatments while still being allowed to be functional members of a community. Maybe we could use the money we’re spending on affordable housing to fund these projects, maybe then we’d start seeing more change.

Gwendolyn Sobkowiak can be reached at sobkowiakg@duq.edu