In May, when PECO announced it planned on clearing out the homeless encampment on its Norristown property, the utility company met with a lot of criticism.

Since then, PECO has been working with advocates to relocate the people living in the encampment in a manner that preserves their dignity and prioritizes their needs, writes Juliana Feliciano Reyes and Alfred Lubrano for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Most of the 15 people who had been living on the Norristown site have already left. PECO will be posting signs next month giving the remaining six individuals living in tents on the PECO-owned land along the Schuylkill River Trail 45 days to move.

Anti-homelessness advocates have praised the utility company for its respectfulness and generosity. Some private property owners don’t give any notice before sweeping an encampment.

Doug Oliver, the utility’s senior vice president for external affairs, said that PECO “was forced to figure out how to make sure we were keeping the lights on from a reliability perspective, but also to ensure that the people who are there were treated with dignity and respect.”

Mark Boorse, director of program development at Access Services, a nonprofit that operates a homelessness outreach program, has been working to relocate people to a county shelter or other locations since May and will continue to work with those remaining in the encampment.

In Norristown, 21% of the population of about 35,000 people live in poverty. Some of the factors that have exacerbated the homelessness crisis there include flooding damage from Hurricane Ida in 2021 and the closing of a 50-bed homeless shelter last year.

Read more about PECO’s plans in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

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More on the U.S. homelessness crisis.