Nonprofit HEARTH Moves Out of St. Benedictine Place After 15 Years

HEARTH, a North Hills housing program for homeless women with children, is the third nonprofit organization to move from behind the St. Benedictine Sisters’ monastery along Perrysville Avenue to a new location.

HEARTH made its home at St. Benedictine Place for 15 years before the sisters decided to sell the property. Over the weekend, HEARTH employees finished packing and cleaning the former 26,000-square-foot space and moved seven women and 15 children to interim housing in an apartment complex in Green Tree.  

“I’m very excited and a little nervous,” said Samantha Yoder, 29, as she helped pack the office Saturday, but she added that she was looking forward to the different setting and having more people around. Yoder, a former drug addict and the mother of two children, ages 19 months and 9, joined the HEARTH program Dec. 10.

“Change is hard for any addict, but I think it’s going to be a good change,” she said.

HEARTH is one of five nonprofits to receive notice last summer that it would have until August to move out of the building at 4540 Perrysville Ave. The Benedictine Sisters of Pittsburgh are selling the 40,000-square-foot building, which until 1985 was the former all-girls St. Benedictine’s Academy, and the 78,000-square-foot monastery.

The buildings are on about 10.8 acres, and the property was appraised in November 2009 at $3.2 million, according to Sister Benita DeMatteis. She said the sisters decided to sell the property because it was too large to maintain for the order’s remaining 52 members.

The property still is on the market, she said.

“We have interest but no buyers,” she said.

In preparation for the sale, the sisters closed the Benedictine Senior Center in November, which they operated in collaboration with Allegheny County’s Area Agency on Aging. The Easter Seal Adult Day Care Center moved out in May to a location near Downtown Pittsburgh in the Strip District at 2525 Railroad St.  

Two nonprofits remain at the site, Mercy Behavioral Health’s Adult Training and Senior Center and Perry Reserve Meals on Wheels.

HEARTH’s administrative offices will remain in the North Hills in a rented space in the Andre Building Plaza at the corner of McKnight Road and Babcock Boulevard.

The split between the housing space and the staff is temporary until plans for the purchase and renovation of two buildings on 5.8 acres in Shaler are complete, said HEARTH’s executive director Judith Eakin. That property is at 3724 Mount Royal Blvd. in Allison Park.

The nonprofit hopes to raise $5.7 million -- $4.2 million in tax credits and $1.5 million through fundraising -- for the project, which would allow it to expand from serving 15 families to serving 20. It also offers enough land for eventual construction of 12 to 14 affordable-housing town homes.

“It gives us a number of things all at once,” she said.

If the tax credits are approved in July, she said she hopes to move into the organization’s new home in 2013.