Twenty years ago, Dave Antil said, if he saw someone panhandling, his reaction was, “Get a job.”
Four years ago, Anctil became homeless himself. “Now I see it completely differently,” he said.
The stress of being on the street is unrelenting, he said. You can’t sleep. You’re constantly at risk of theft. Just finding a place to use the bathroom is a struggle.
Anctil recently secured a housing voucher and an apartment. But getting off the street and reacclimating to mainstream life is stressful, too. His voice cracking with emotion, Anctil admitted: “I’m really scared to be homeless again.”
Anctil is a member of the Homeless Advocacy Board, a group of individuals with lived experience organized with help from the Rev. Mandy Mastros of the Lancaster Moravian Center. Mastros interviewed him Wednesday evening to kick off a community forum on homelessness.
Sponsored by the SoWe neighborhood group and featuring Anctil and three other panelists, it drew a robust crowd to Tec Centro West in southwest Lancaster.
Like much of the country, Lancaster has seen a sharp rise in housing insecurity and homelessness since the pandemic. The number of people in shelters or on the street locally rose 13.5% from 2023 to 2024, according to the Lancaster County Homelessness Coalition’s annual Point-in-Time count.
What’s driving the numbers? Much of it involves the intersection of two problems, said panelist Deb Jones, the coalition’s director: The scarcity of affordable housing, and low wages.
The county needs an estimated 10,380 housing units affordable to households making 30% or less ($32,00 a year for a family of four) of area median income and another 9,683 units for households making 30% to 50% of median income ($53,350 for a family of four) — more than 20,000 units in all.
As for wages, Jones said, citing research by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, you need to bring in $25.63 an hour for a median two-bedroom apartment in Lancaster County to be affordable (that is, for housing to cost no more than 30% of your income).
Many common occupations pay far less, including fast food workers (median hourly wage: $13.69) personal care aides ($14.28), warehouse workers ($17.58) and nursing assistants ($18.98). At minimum wage, $7.25 an hour, it would take three and a half fulltime jobs to make a two-bedroom apartment affordable, Jones said.
Among the local street homeless, a recent survey found that 80% have no income at all, said Milan Koneff, an outreach worker with Tenfold. At least a third have two or more “co-occurring conditions” — barriers such as mental illness, addiction, physical disability and the like. The figure is almost certainly higher, Koneff said, but 30% of the respondents declined to provide the relevant data because of their distrust.
He described his ongoing efforts over many months to connect “John,” a man living out of his car, with the mental and physical health services he needed. Sadly, John was diagnosed with cancer, and died in the hospital during a medical procedure.
“I miss him so much,” Koneff said. There were many setbacks and difficulties, he said, but they reflect the kinds of struggles that are all too common among the unhoused population.
Like other outreach workers, he criticized the clearing of encampments downtown and outside the city. That makes it harder to find people and provide services ,and it erodes trust, he said. Officials and property owners have said the encampments had become public nuisances, leading to issues with public safety, health and hygiene.
Governments have more leeway to clear encampments due to the Supreme Court’s recent ruling, in “Grants Pass v Johnson,” that bans on camping in public are not unconstitutional. State Rep. Ismail Smith-Wade-El said he is collaborating on a bill that would decriminalize sleeping outside when shelter isn’t available. It would also significantly expand funding for affordable “low-barrier” housing.
Smith-Wade-El said he and other legislators are pushing for a $1 billion annual appropriation for affordable housing. That sounds like a lot, he said, but it would be around 2% of the state budget, and it’s the scale needed to address the state’s estimated shortage of 200,000 affordable housing units.
The local homelessness system is under-resourced, Jones said, but it is working as best it can with what it has. She highlighted the two city construction projects the coalition is undertaking to expand homelessness services: The 80-bed low-barrier shelter being set up at Otterbein United Methodist Church, and the Prince Street Community Hub, which the coalition hopes to open in early 2026.
The Otterbein shelter is “a dream that is finally coming to fruition,” Jones said: “We needed it yesterday.” It’s conveniently located near other service providers, including the Lancaster County Food Hub and Anchor Lancaster, and will have space for up to 60 men and 20 women. Renovations totaling more than $2 million are under way, and include bathrooms, showers and a handicap-accessible elevator.
The Prince Street Community Hub, planned at the site of the former Neighborhood Services building, will include a day center, crisis housing, long-term supportive housing and a small emergency shelter that can be opened to provide added capacity when the county declares Code Red and Code Blue weather emergencies during summer heat waves and winter storms. The coalition hopes to start construction around the start of 2025; a final budget has not been established.
During a Q&A, City Councilman Jaime Arroyo, who was in the audience, was asked if the city has considered providing safe camping spaces. It hasn’t come up within City Council to the best of his knowledge, he said, but homelessness is an important issue for council and City Hall and they are interested in “creative solutions.”
Many communities ignore homelessness or actively discourage the provision of services. Jones praised SoWe and the southeast Lancaster community for taking the opposite approach: Helping to fund a grassroots cleanup program that employs unhoused people, hosting a pilot locker program, welcoming the Prince Street Community hub.
“This is a beacon of light for others to see,” she said.
