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Philadelphia’s new push to get to “a functional zero in homelessness” — meaning no one seeking shelter is turned away for lack of space — will depend in large part on creating enough new beds in existing buildings and upgrading shelters to make them more welcoming, officials say.
Not only does the city not have enough beds, especially during crush times like January’s stretch of below-freezing days, but unsatisfactory conditions sometimes turn people off from going to shelters at all, said Cheryl Hill, executive director of the Office of Homeless Services.
The agency’s last Point-in-Time or PIT count, in January 2025, found 1,178 people living on the street and another 4,438 in some kind of shelter. The follow-up count took place last Wednesday night through Thursday morning, with the results to be released later this year.
As OHS works to improve facilities, Hill said she’s inspired by the example of Riverview Wellness Village, a long-term residential drug recovery center the city opened a year ago after spending $54 million to renovate a campus it owns in Northeast Philadelphia.
“You walk into those rooms, and it feels more like a dorm room or an apartment that somebody would want to live in, and not a shelter,” she said. “You should be able to walk in and put your own artwork up, your own pictures, and really be proud of where you’re living while you’re there, because even though it’s a shelter, while you’re living there that is your home, and it should feel like a home environment.”
Mayor Cherelle Parker announced in December that she intended to create 1,000 more long-term shelter beds, which would increase the stock of beds in public and private shelters by roughly a third, to about 3,900.
The first big project will convert a city-owned building on Old York Road in Logan into a shelter and create 350 beds for families and single adults. Hill said prep work is currently under way there.
“It almost is too simple. In unsheltered homelessness, you need somewhere for people to go,” she said. “We’re not saying you will never see anyone sleeping on the streets, but the idea is that if that person is ready to come in, or needs to come in, there’s somewhere for them to go.”
Shelter funding waxes and wanes
Hill joined the Parker administration in September 2024 after serving as senior vice president of supportive housing operations at Project HOME, a leading shelter provider in Philadelphia, and working at the Atlanta Housing Authority.
The start of her tenure coincided with an increase in homelessness. From 2021 to 2023, the city’s counts found between 700 and 800 unsheltered people each year, but the figure jumped to 976 in 2024 and climbed again last year. The number living in shelters also rose, from 3,602 in 2021 to 4,215 in 2024.
The number of people on the street and in encampments surged during the pandemic, but so did funding for shelters, which kept the homeless counts relatively stable, Hill said.
Some of those emergency dollars eventually went away, and demand for shelter rose due to factors like the emergence of the animal tranquilizer xylazine in the drug supply, she said. Xylazine causes slow-healing wounds and can lead to amputations, boosting demand for shelters that can accommodate unhoused drug users with complicated medical needs, especially in Kensington.
The opening of the city’s Philly Home at Girard shelter in 2024 and other new or expanded facilities kept the number of unsheltered people from increasing even further, Hill said. After this year’s federally mandated PIT count was initially postponed because of extreme cold weather, she said she was looking forward to seeing the findings of the rescheduled event.
“We look at data such as the Point-in-Time Count to really help inform us about trends that may be happening in the city, whether the numbers are increasing, whether the chronicity — how long people are staying homeless — has increased, so looking at that data to be able to inform policies and decisions on what we need to do next,” she said.
This year’s count will “show us if what we’ve been doing is working,” she said.
Running out of beds, and chairs
The resources the city is aiming to expand are long-term shelter beds where people can stay until they’re ready to move on, Hill said.
They’re in shelters leased by the city and operated by contracted providers such as SELF Inc., Project HOME, and Prevention Point, or owned and run by providers with city funding. Some may also be in privately funded shelters.
The city has different types of spaces that accommodate families with children, couples, single individuals, and people with pets, she said. All of the shelters offer some type of case management, with staffers who help residents access health care and other services out in the community, including pathways to a permanent home.
“The goal is ultimately to find housing for individuals, whether it’s something that we help them acquire or they’re able to find on their own,” Hill said. “Everybody’s goal plan is different in the steps they need to take.”
The work to get people on that path — and simply to provide them a safe place to stay in the first place — has been challenged by the bed shortage.
“We want to be able to say, if you’re ready to come in, we have a bed for you,” she said. During cold snaps, however, service providers run out of beds and have to resort to offering chairs indoors. “Sometimes that even reaches a capacity, and we’re not able to help everyone that we want to help.”
Health care at home
In addition to reopening the building on Old York Road, OHS plans to convert spaces that have been used for temporary winter accommodation into year-round, long-term shelters, Hill said. That’s the plan for Philly Home at Girard, which has separate long-term shelter floors and wellness/drug treatment floors.
Other facilities targeted for expansion include the Salvation Army’s Eliza Shirley House shelter for families with children at 216 N. Broad St., and Walker Hall, a shelter at 600 E. Luzerne St.
The agency is also looking into providing more health care services inside shelters, in collaboration with Jefferson Health and other organizations, Hill said.
“Individuals will use emergency rooms as a warming center, or as kind of a shelter, getting some of their needs met,” she said. “If we can provide services where they are — getting individuals into more preventative services for their health care — that will hopefully reduce some of the need and the strain on the various emergency room services at the different hospitals.”
Hill said she did not yet know how much the 1,000-bed expansion and other initiatives will cost. The city is spending about $40 million on shelters in the 2026 fiscal year that runs through June, and “expenses for everything” have been increasing, she said.
“The past couple years, we’ve just noticed that it’s more expensive. Food services has gotten more expensive, and making sure that we’re not deferring maintenance in those buildings, so that we’re keeping the buildings up to quality,” she said. “We are constantly analyzing the cost and seeing how we can make sure that we’re being fiscally responsible, but also creating a sustainable model.”
