Volunteers Clean North Side Homeless Camp For Earth Day
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) -- In honor of Earth Day, volunteers showed up on Howard Street on the North Side to remove trash and debris from a homeless camp.
Not far away, angry neighbors from the street above the camp said a cleanup is not good enough.
"They should be gone, I'm happy they're cleaning up but, clean it all up, take the tents with them, take everybody with them," Mary Ann Buggy said.
A confrontation is brewing between neighbors and people who stay in tents just below their homes.
Buggy said they keep breaking into a subbasement in her daughter's house.
"When it rains they don't want to get wet so they're making their way through this pathway from their camp down there and they're taking this off which I nailed down a few times and they living in there," she said.
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She's not the only neighbor mad about the homeless camp. Paul Hendricks complained about unpleasant sights from his kitchen window.
"I sit here at my kitchen table, this far away is my window, I get to watch them urinate, drop whatever they got to drop," he said.
"People can't put a tent up in their yard, they're told to take them down," Pittsburgh Councilwoman Darlene Harris said.
Harris said the homeless camp violates city codes. Harris, who is also running for mayor, blames Mayor Bill Peduto for not taking action.
"This is political right now, the mayor wants to try to start something, I must be dong pretty good if he's doing this," she said.
A few days ago, Mayor Peduto talked to KDKA about the situation.
"What we don't do is go in with dump trucks and police officers and make them move unless there is any type of public safety or danger," he said.