PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — The director of Philadelphia’s Office of Homeless Services, Liz Hersh, is stepping down after nearly eight years in the job. She is the most recent of the top city officials leaving government as Mayor Jim Kenney’s administration winds down, and one of the longest-serving.
“It’s been quite a ride,” she said, reflecting on the challenges and rewards of her tenure.
Hersh took the job as the opioid epidemic was driving homelessness upward, spawning encampments, which the city had not seen before. Hersh’s leadership on resolving them slowly and carefully, giving notice and offering services to the residents, became a national model. But then came the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I’ll never forget that day when the stay at home order was issued,” Hersh recalled. “We have almost 5,000 people in this city who have no home to stay in. 700 or 800 of them are literally on the street, the rest are in shelters and oh my gosh, what are we going to do?”
Shelters pushed the beds six feet apart, while the city took over a downtown hotel. Just one homeless person died of COVID during the pandemic. In the midst of the response, a protest encampment took over the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Hersh chose to see them as allies and the situation ended peacefully.
“Those challenges, for me, it’s always been about responding with love,” she said. “It's absorbing those challenges and then continuing to move forward, adding housing which is the solution to homelessness.”
Kenney says Hersh was innovative in finding housing models that took people from streets to homes. “The fact that our city doesn’t have as large a problem as cities like [Los Angeles] and San Francisco, and other places, is a direct result of her and her team,” he said.
Sister Mary Scullion of the nonprofit Project HOME calls Hersh a “powerful advocate.”
“Liz moved the needle,” she said, “which was greatly appreciated and made an impact on thousands of people in our city.”
Hersh says the key to doing her job was approaching each task with kindness and compassion.
“It’s tempting to go down that hole of all the things we didn’t do and that list will always be longer,” she said, “but I think I can say with my head held high that we work really hard every minute of every day to try to alleviate the sufferings and give people a better shot at a better life.”
Next for Hersh is working for national nonprofit Community Solutions. Her former chief of staff David Holloman will step into the director’s job, becoming the first African American man to lead the department.
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the number of homeless on the street. The current version reflects that change.