Allegheny County controller to audit Department of Human Services over homelessness services
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — Allegheny County gets more than $100 million a year to address homelessness and yet there are still an estimated 150 people living on the street.
Now, Allegheny County Controller Corey O'Connor is demanding accountability.
The scenes have been the same since the start of the pandemic — homeless encampments lining Pittsburgh's greenways and river trails, homeless people living on the street. And while the county's Department of Human Services targets massive state and federal funds to address homelessness, the situation doesn't seem to be getting any better.
"We see it each and every day," he said. "When you're driving, you see people suffering out in the streets. Now that it's wintertime, it's even worse. And when we spend hundreds of millions of dollars, we need to see results."
O'Connor is calling for accountability, telling KDKA Investigates he is initiating the first of four audits of DHS to determine just how all of this money is being spent and whether it can be spent more effectively to get people the help they need to get off the street and into permanent housing.
O'Connor said the first audit will examine about $10 million in funding from the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services. He said subsequent audits will look into about $100 million in other state and federal funding
"We hope this audit will bring to light some deficiencies," he said. "And will hopefully put some recommendations that we can all collectively as a county come together and help solve some of these problems."
Over the past three years, the number of homeless people has grown; unemployment during the pandemic coupled with rising rents throughout the region has landed more people on the street. And while the Second Avenue Commons has helped provide some temporary shelter, the county concedes the bigger problem is the lack of affordable, permanent housing.
But DHS doesn't build housing and right now, it's distributing the bulk of its funds to provider agencies that care for the homeless by providing things like emergency shelter, rental assistance and outreach services to address addiction and mental illness.
DHS would not comment on his notification of an audit, but O'Connor wants to evaluate how effective each of these individual agencies has been and get stakeholders together to come up with a cohesive plan to get better results.
"Getting everyone on the same page would go a long way because there's so much money there that you almost feel like you're wasting it if people aren't getting the support they deserve," he said.
The performance audit is not an indictment of DHS, but a way to determine a more effective use of all these funds to get these people off the street, into shelter and eventually into permanent housing.
