![]() ![]() Additionally, about 18 percent of the homeless people surveyed in a 2019 report by André House, a ministry that serves the homeless and poor near the Human Services Campus, said they avoided shelters for fear of exposing a personal history of addiction or a criminal background, and another 20 percent could not cope with the curfew and rules.Īddressing the homelessness problem in Phoenix is one of the key goals Mayor Kate Gallego affirmed in her State of the City address in April. Additionally, a 130-bed shelter for older homeless adults is planned for the area around Northern Avenue and Interstate 17.īut there are also many homeless people who avoid the shelters, either by choice or because of restrictions: Pets and partners are prohibited at CASS, and many shelters put a limit on the amount of belongings that shelter guests can bring in. In March, the Human Services Campus opened a heavy-duty tent with heating and air conditioning, funded with federal COVID-19 relief funds, that it filled with an additional 100 beds, and a new 100-bed shelter, operated by Community Bridges, is planned for Sunnyslope, where homelessness numbers are particularly high. Maricopa County has fewer than 2,000 emergency shelter beds, and the shelters are operating at full occupancy nearly every night. And so the city doesn’t put as many resources towards solving the problems in those areas.”Ī lack of shelters is one reason we see so many people out on the street. “We know where they’re popping up, and it’s in mostly working-class neighborhoods, where people are less likely to complain and less likely to vote. “They’re not popping up in Paradise Valley or Arcadia,” says reporter Jessica Boehm, who’s covered the homeless beat for The Arizona Republic almost exclusively since August of 2020. Police have reported large homeless encampments in West Phoenix, Sunnyslope, South Phoenix and the area around Sky Harbor and the Interstate 17 corridor, as well as in Glendale, Tempe, Mesa and Chandler. And that’s likely an undercount, given the difficulty of locating all people experiencing homelessness on a single day, as the PIT survey is conducted. At what point do you just give up on a park and close it down?”Īll across Phoenix and neighboring cities, the homeless population, once relatively confined to the Human Services Campus in Downtown Phoenix run by Central Arizona Shelter Services (CASS), has spread out into neighborhood parks, alleys, desert washes and bus stops.Īccording to the latest Point-in-Time Unsheltered Street Count conducted by the Maricopa Association of Governments in January, there are nearly 3,100 homeless people in Phoenix living outside the shelters – 716 more than two years ago, before the start of the pandemic. The pool’s open maybe four weeks out of the year. We won’t take our grandkids down there anymore. “At what point in time,” asks an exasperated Lord, “do you finally decide a park isn’t even worth staying open? They don’t play softball at Pierce Park anymore. If we can’t get the health department involved, can we at least put in a porta-potty?” “Every day under the bridge there’s cups of feces, bottles of urine, feminine products all over the place. “What we want to hear is, what can we do now?” chimes in a woman from a neighborhood running along Greenway Parkway, where the homeless have taken to camping under the pedestrian bridge on 20th Street. “Help us do what? Get you to talk to them? Try to move them along?” “You keep telling us these organizations are here to help us,” says Clayton Lord, who’s lived for the past 45 years in a house bordering the most populated part of the park. So, you also want to contact your county supervisor, you want to contact your state legislature and your state representative.”įinally, from a table way in the back, a 60-something man from the neighborhood surrounding Pierce Park on 46th and Oak streets in East Phoenix, an area Kimble singled out as one of the homeless hot spots on the city’s radar, speaks up. It’s not going to work that way, because we have county policy, and we have state law, and then we have federal. Mary Ramirez, a specialist from the City of Phoenix’s Neighborhood Services Department, hands out business cards inviting residents to call her with complaints about homeless encampments, but cautions, “The city cannot just create some type of ordinance and think that we’re going to be able to enforce it. ![]()
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