{"id":166787,"date":"2026-04-15T18:48:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T18:48:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/166787\/"},"modified":"2026-04-15T18:48:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T18:48:07","slug":"allentown-homeless-advocates-respond-to-encampment-sweep-closing-shelter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/166787\/","title":{"rendered":"Allentown homeless advocates respond to encampment sweep, closing shelter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Several Allentown nonprofits and agencies that help the city\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

At a Wednesday morning meeting of the city\u2019s Commission on Homelessness, homeless service providers said they fear for the lives of people who find their lives upended by homelessness and forced displacement.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cTypically 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\u2019s time lost trying to find them again,\u201d said Abigail Goldfarb, co-chair of the Commission on Homelessness and director of the Lehigh Conference of Churches. \u201cTrust gets broken, they don\u2019t want to tell anybody where they are, because they\u2019re afraid they\u2019re going to get swept again.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Morning Call has reached out to an Allentown spokesperson for comment about the encampment closure.<\/p>\n

In addition to the camp closure, the Allentown YMCA Warming Shelter\u2019s last day of operations until the fall was Wednesday, leaving the nearly 90 people who stay there every night nowhere else to go.<\/p>\n

The YMCA had planned to remain open until May 1 \u2014 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<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere 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,\u201d Messer said. She did not provide details.<\/p>\n

The station will remain open for \u201cCode Blue\u201d circumstances \u2014 when temperatures reach below freezing overnight \u2014 which could occur Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, Messer said.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Allentown\u2019s unhoused coordinator, Danielle Mineo, organized \u201cservice hubs\u201d at the YMCA Shelter several times a week to help connect homeless people with local agencies. They can also fill out paperwork for \u201ccoordinated entry,\u201d which connects them to a case manager to help them find housing.<\/p>\n

Once a homeless person has entered \u201ccoordinated entry,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is literally no place for people to lay down their heads in the city of Allentown,\u201d DiPierro said.<\/p>\n

A sense of frustration plagued the advocates at Wednesday\u2019s meeting. All said that better coordination amongst themselves \u2014 and more resources to help connect people to housing \u2014 is needed in order to help the homeless people in the area.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are all feeling the stress on behalf of everyone we care for. We are all feeling the stress of this moment,\u201d said Sherri Binder, director of nonprofit Ripple Community Inc. \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reporter Lindsay Weber can be reached at Liweber@mcall.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Several Allentown nonprofits and agencies that help the city\u2019s homeless population are scrambling to help dozens of people…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":116013,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[119,153,155,154,433,182,139,28,432],"class_list":["post-166787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bethlehem","tag-allentown","tag-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem-headlines","tag-bethlehem-news","tag-lehigh-county","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-pennsylvania","tag-top-stories-tmc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=166787"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166787\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/116013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=166787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=166787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}