The recent standoff and shooting in Garfield are tragic in multiple ways, yet it reveals fissures and issues apparent to people who work to address housing insecurity. It isn’t just a housing problem.
It is a problem of race and policing. It is a concern about where and how we age. It is a problem of a fraying social safety net and a disregard of marginalized identities. It is a human rights problem.
Preventable tragedies
But it is not an insolvable problem. We believe that we can prevent such tragedies in the future. We need the long-term, bipartisan political will and willingness to approach it from multiple angles and through collaboration, trust, and investing in the social good across siloed agencies and departments, city, and county government and providers. We need to examine how our policies and ordinances are getting in the way of creating equitable housing.
While the Sheriff’s office notes in the Post-Gazette that most evictions “go smoothly,” what about for those being displaced EvictionLab.org data from last 2022 August shows that almost one-quarter of the 12,566 eviction filings in Allegheny County were against African American renters.
A 2022 report African- American home ownership found that black home ownership significantly decreased, placing more African-Americans into rental housing at a time when privatization has reduced the volume of lower-cost housing. The shift to privatization has made the housing burden (more than 30% of income spent on housing) worse.
A University of Pittsburgh UCSUR 2022 study analyzed six housing privatization developments in the City of Pittsburgh and, concluded that the privatization developments destroyed 3,984 units of affordable housing while constructing in their place only 1,502 units — reducing affordable housing supply by nearly two-thirds. The rent burden is unequal: in Allegheny County 51% of Black renters spent more than 30% of income on rent.
Older residents’ issues
Across the United States, the HUD Office of Policy Development and Research has found, older neighbors face housing challenges due to affordability, accessibility, and proximity to needed services. The housing burden which can lead to homelessness, is projected to continue rising for older adults. Further, older adults living on fixed incomes face additional challenges in securing rental housing in a privatized market if there are application fees, savings requirements and additional monthly costs for pets or dependents.
Per a 2022 report from the University Center for Social and Urban Research (UCSUR), 62% of older Black residents in Allegheny County live alone, up from 47% in 2014. Almost 1 in 3 older Blacks report that their neighborhoods are “only fair or poor” places to grow old.
The Garfield incident had elements of these issues — older African American man, a veteran, with animals who believed he had a human right to a home. This contrasts with the view that he was a squatter prompting a wide-scale, collaborative public safety presence Pittsburgh Police, Allegheny County Police, the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office, Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the FBI. Surely, however, there was another way to intervene before bullets were fired.
Intervention in a case such as Mr. Hardison would challenging, but the first step is finding a window into the person. What if someone acknowledged his beliefs about his identity? What if someone tried to engage him around something meaningful to him, like his dogs, and engaged supports for him?
Once you establish a foothold, then professionals, family members and community members including clergy need to be convened quickly to address in a coordinated fashion the most critical and potentially harmful issues. This teaming approach has been used in other areas such as child welfare and mental health.
Give people a home
Washington D.C. and Chicago have organized rights groups to address housing insecurity and to shift the conception of it from commodity to home — the place people live, thrive, connect. Let’s explore and support alternative living arrangements such as co-living, like the Vincentian Collaborative locally, or policies to accommodate mixed-income housing developments. Let’s rehabilitate unused properties and use them as co-living spaces.
Let’s change policies that prohibit or limit pets or dependents to live in income-supported housing. Let’s increase affordable housing options in all neighborhoods so that people can age in-place. Let’s build coalitions across sectors to address these issues such as Age-Friendly Greater Pittsburgh’s housing work group.
Incidents such as the incident in Garfield last week create collective trauma, and this becomes a racialized incident in a formerly safe Black space. Pittsburgh must be a human rights city that is most livable for all, particularly where 1 in 5 are 65 or older.
Yodit Betru is the director of the master of social work program, Elizabeth Mulvaney a clinical assistant professor, and Mary Elizabeth Rauktis a research associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Social Work.
First Published: September 5, 2023, 9:30 a.m.
