An annual count of Allegheny County’s homeless population, taken in January, yielded surprising and troubling results, suggesting that many more people are either regularly or sporadically living on the streets than the county’s Department of Human Services (DHS) had realized. The information casts doubt on confident assertions from public officials, who have suggested or said outright that unsheltered homelessness had been solved.

The data was so surprising that DHS took the unprecedented step of taking a second count two months later. This decision has raised questions among homeless advocates and service providers, as well as observers, about its motives. Jerrel Gilliam, executive director of the Light of Life Rescue Mission, explicitly told the Post-Gazette’s Jordan Anderson, “They were saying it’s not good to be implying that the numbers are higher, that it will cause fear. It was like it was a PR issue.”

Others raised an even more sensitive possibility: Is the second count about burying data that would be embarrassing for Mayor Ed Gainey as his May 20 primary election against County Controller Cory O’Connor approaches? Further evidence for this suspicion has come in the form of the unusually late closing of winter shelters, which typically cease operations on March 15.

This year, the successful cold-weather facility at the former McNaugher School in Perry South will remain open for up to 75 people through May 15, according to a DHS email obtained by the Post-Gazette Editorial Board. This will delay the inevitable springtime resurgence of visible unsheltered homelessness along the streets and trails of the city until mid-May.

DHS can assuage these suspicions by following through on its promise to release both sets of data to the public in a timely fashion, vetted by truly independent experts. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with having more data, as long as it’s used to more completely understand the state of homelessness in Allegheny County — and not to obscure the truth.

Dueling methodologies

The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) requires regional homeless service providers to take a point-in-time (PIT) count every other year. (This is an off-year for Allegheny County, but DHS makes the PIT count every year to maintain consistency.) This is an attempt to count individuals experiencing homelessness on a single day-night cycle.

There are no standard procedures prescribed by HUD for this count, and those used by DHS have changed over time — specifically during the COVID pandemic.

For instance, from 2021 to the first 2025 count outreach workers were less likely to collect detailed survey data about each unhoused person, and more likely to rely on a “service-based approach” — that is, finding people at daytime service-providers, like soup kitchens — rather than a “night of count approach” — that is, finding people at their place of shelter.

The first four years of this amended methodology apparently produced no aberrant results: DHS Director Erin Dalton never considered redoing those counts, she told the Post-Gazette, because their results tracked with what she and her team expected.

But this year was different.

Surprising results

The key aberration in this January’s PIT count was finding 120 people who, according a letter Ms. Dalton sent the the executive committee of the Homeless Advisory Board, “had not engaged with our street outreach teams over at least the previous 5 months, of which approximately 40 people [had] never engaged with our teams.”

In other words, the January count found 80 people whom DHS figured were no longer homeless, and 40 the department had never encountered before, at least in the context of homeless services. According to data provided by DHS, most of the 120 had accessed some DHS services, such as mental and behavioral health care, but at least 13 were completely new to the department. About two dozen didn’t provide enough information to be matched with service lists.

These results are a reminder of how dynamic homelessness is, and cast doubt on confident claims of success in combatting the problem. Specifically, they impeach Mr. Gainey’s campaign claim to have “made space for all unhoused people to come indoors,” which is a laughable and dangerous assertion that implies that anyone living outside hasn’t accepted his invitation inside. It’s the kind of statement that leads to further stigmatization of homelessness, and complacency in combatting it.

But do these results warrant taking an entirely new PIT count, two months later, when conditions had significantly changed — including the clearance of the crowded Three Rivers Heritage Trail encampment near the county jail? That’s hard to say.

The necessity of integrity

Ms. Dalton argues that a second count is necessary — even though HUD didn’t even require one PIT count this year — to avoid releasing misleading data and to ensure this year’s data can be meaningfully compared with previous years’. That’s plausible, especially for a department as dedicated to data as this one.

Whether these goals were worth the time and money used to conduct the second count, however, is less clear. Further, especially given the political sensitivity of a mayoral election, DHS should scrupulously avoid even the impression of the politicization of its work. While the stated goal of the second count is to enhance the public’s confidence in DHS homelessness data, in this context it’s at least as likely to undermine that confidence.

That’s why it’s absolutely essential that the department follow through on its pledge to release both sets of data, vetted by independent experts. The information should come with as little editorializing as possible, again to avoid any impression of politicization. The department should also release the data no later than last year, May 15, and ideally earlier.

Ms. Dalton and the Department of Human Services are in the unenviable position of providing essential, life-saving services in a highly sensitive political environment. Their first priority must be preserving the public’s trust, and their own integrity.

First Published: April 13, 2025, 8:00 a.m.