Pittsburgh City Council's committee on homelessness says it wants to launch an effort for new transitional housing, calling it an upgrade from overnight shelters."That is housing where you have supportive services 24 hours a day, every day," said Deb Gross, who represents District 7. "But you can stay up to two years. You're not forced out back into the street day after day, so you can really rebuild yourself."The committee introduced three different transitional housing concepts. One is a five-story facility with dozens of rooms and a common area. Another option is building small single-dwelling houses on city-owned lots. Another option is renovating vacant buildings and turning them into apartments. All are extensions of the existing Second Avenue Commons."What we need is additional sites that you can move out of Second Avenue Commons and move into to be the kind of transitional housing where you could stay however long you need," Gross said. Committee members say building on existing lots and renovating vacant buildings for long-term transitional housing is critical. Gross described it as "adaptive reuse.""There are buildings out there," she said. "They can be adapted, and the city and the county can work together to purchase those buildings." Those facilities would include social services to address mental illness, drug and alcohol addiction and other critical setbacks that lead to homelessness. But the committee says a united partnership is needed first, just like the one that spearheaded the Second Avenue Commons. Erika Strassburger of District 8 said the partnership would need to include the "city, county, business community, and nonprofit partners. We need that same type of support, both for financial support, social services and obviously the city for site identification."A location and funding for this new housing must be secured to make it happen.