Unhoused residents moving to convention center following shelter fire

A fire at the Second Avenue Commons shelter has forced Allegheny County to move at least 180 people to the David L. Lawrence Convention Center.

The mid-afternoon fire at the Uptown shelter left one resident, who asked to be identified only as Reena, worrying about how she’ll contend with several chronic health conditions.

“All of my medications and my medical equipment is up on the fourth floor, and I’m hoping it’s intact,” she said. “If it ain’t, I got a problem.”

Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato said the fire at the 18-month-old shelter is a blow to her five-month-old administration’s efforts to address persistent homelessness, but that it won’t compromise the region’s commitment to unhoused residents.

“We are a resilient city. We are a resilient department and county. And we will mobilize the resources necessary to be able to care for our unhoused neighbors,” Innamorato told reporters.

Second Avenue Commons includes 95 beds in group sleeping rooms, 43 single-room-occupancy units, emergency shelter space, an engagement center and a medical clinic.

Officials said the cause of the fire is yet to be determined. Several people who were on the scene said they believed it started in an air conditioning unit on an upper floor. Initial reports suggested that smoke and water damage occurred throughout the building.

Reena had just come back from kidney dialysis in the mid-afternoon. “I was about to grab a bagged lunch, yech … And the alarm goes off! … You see the smoke pouring out of the corner up there, which ain’t doing my COPD any good,” she said, coughing.

Though the shelter experiences frequent false alarms, Reena said this was the first real fire.

“The sad thing is, that is the best shelter in the city. You can come and go as you please and don’t have curfews,” Reena continued. “This is the absolute worst. I lose my wife, I lose my kids, I lose my home, and now this.”

Innamorato said Pittsburgh Regional Transit will provide transportation for shelter residents to the convention center, which does not have any events currently that would conflict with the building’s use as a temporary haven.

“We’re picking the convention center because we don’t have to then resort to a dispersed shelter system,” the county executive said. “It’s really important to us to be able to provide a space that is safe and comfortable, has adequate air conditioning, and right now we have to go to an emergency protocol and use a non-traditional space such as the convention center.”

Innamorato said she did not yet have a sense of the likely duration of the convention center’s use as a shelter space.

“We need to get the city in there to inspect it. We want it to be back online as quickly as possible,” she said.

The Allegheny County Department of Human Services is looking at interim solutions that may bridge the gap between temporary use of the convention center and a return to Second Avenue Commons.

“We’ll be working with all of our community partners, with the city of Pittsburgh, to ensure that we can find a long-term solution once we have a better sense of how long it’s going to take for people to be able to get back into this building and for it to be fully operational,” she said.

Shane Gibson, 33, said that he has been staying on the third floor since March.

When the alarm went off, Gibson said, “I went outside and said, ‘Holy shit, the roof is on fire!’”

In his room are all of his belongings, including a knee brace that he uses.

Nearby, Destini Swauger became increasingly alarmed after hearing the shelter staff weren’t allowing people back in. Swauger also stays on the third floor and she said her food stamps are there.

She also said that she has a tablet on the third floor with photos of her father, along with her brother’s hoodie, both memorabilia that she said she needs to help her to sleep at night.

“I’m not going to sleep tonight,” she said.

The county is referring people who want to make monetary or in-kind donations to shelter operator Pittsburgh Mercy’s website .

Innamorato said the county plans to release, later this week, details of the “long-term vision for my administration and this county” in regard to homelessness, which will focus on getting people out of emergency shelter situations and “into more permanent housing.”

​​Stephanie Strasburg is a photojournalist with PublicSource who can be reached at stephanie@publicsource.org, on Instagram @stephaniestrasburg or on Twitter @stephstrasburg .

Eric Jankiewicz is PublicSource’s economic development reporter and can be reached at ericj@publicsource.org or on Twitter @ericjankiewicz .

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