Several Allentown nonprofits and agencies that help the city’s homeless population are scrambling to help dozens of people who soon will be displaced both by the early closure of a winter warming station and a city sweep of a small homeless encampment.

At a Wednesday morning meeting of the city’s Commission on Homelessness, homeless service providers said they fear for the lives of people who find their lives upended by homelessness and forced displacement.

According to Commission Co-Chair Christina DiPierro, program coordinator for nonprofit Valley Youth House, Allentown has ordered the evacuation of an encampment off Martin Luther King Drive. The nine residents who live there have until Monday to leave the area.

DiPierro said the city did not notify other homeless nonprofits ahead of posting signs in the area of the encampment telling people they must leave.

Advocates also said these forced sweeps make it difficult for street outreach workers to help homeless people they serve, because they do not know where those people will end up after the evacuation.

“Typically when winter shelters close, or a large encampment decommissions, folks will scatter, and then all the work that street outreach, or street medicine, or caseworkers, or whomever has been working with them, there’s time lost trying to find them again,” said Abigail Goldfarb, co-chair of the Commission on Homelessness and director of the Lehigh Conference of Churches. “Trust gets broken, they don’t want to tell anybody where they are, because they’re afraid they’re going to get swept again.”

The Morning Call has reached out to an Allentown spokesperson for comment about the encampment closure.

In addition to the camp closure, the Allentown YMCA Warming Shelter’s last day of operations until the fall was Wednesday, leaving the nearly 90 people who stay there every night nowhere else to go.

The YMCA had planned to remain open until May 1 — the organization received additional funding to open early last September, to help the transition for over 50 people who lived at an encampment along the Jordan Creek. The city evacuated that encampment Sept. 29, saying its location in a flood zone posed a serious safety risk to the people who lived there.

However, the YMCA warming station, which is open 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. and offers 90 emergency overnight beds for homeless people, will close two weeks early due to safety concerns, according to Crystal Messer, vice president of operations for the River Crossing YMCA.

“There have been some circumstances that have taken place with some of our guests and some of our staff that have led us to some safety concerns,” Messer said. She did not provide details.

The station will remain open for “Code Blue” circumstances — when temperatures reach below freezing overnight — which could occur Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, Messer said.

The closure of the overnight shelter and encampment left the homeless advocates scrambling to help 108 homeless people in the city who will have nowhere else to go Wednesday night.

Allentown’s unhoused coordinator, Danielle Mineo, organized “service hubs” at the YMCA Shelter several times a week to help connect homeless people with local agencies. They can also fill out paperwork for “coordinated entry,” which connects them to a case manager to help them find housing.

Once a homeless person has entered “coordinated entry,” they may be contacted when transitional housing is available, but there is no guarantee when or if that will happen because resources are stretched thin among the nonprofits and local governments.

Further, even though Allentown allocated $100,000 toward emergency homeless services including hotel stays and laundry services in the 2026 budget, that money is tied up in legal reviews and cannot be used. Mineo said the city hopes to release that funding in the coming weeks, but for now, the homeless people have nowhere to go.

“There is literally no place for people to lay down their heads in the city of Allentown,” DiPierro said.

A sense of frustration plagued the advocates at Wednesday’s meeting. All said that better coordination amongst themselves — and more resources to help connect people to housing — is needed in order to help the homeless people in the area.

“We are all feeling the stress on behalf of everyone we care for. We are all feeling the stress of this moment,” said Sherri Binder, director of nonprofit Ripple Community Inc. “We need to reset. This is really awful, what is happening right now is awful and stressful. We do not have what we need to respond accordingly, and that is terrible and I hate it.”

Reporter Lindsay Weber can be reached at Liweber@mcall.com.