Phoenix clears out homeless camp
Gathering place for hundreds reflects city’s housing crisis
PHOENIX — Rebecca Sutton has no love for her patch of “the Zone,” a sprawling homeless camp on the edge of downtown Phoenix. There are overdoses and shootings, the sidewalk where she sleeps reeks of urine, and someone once burned down her tent.
But now, moving day was looming, and Sutton did not know where else to go.
Wednesday was the start of a court-ordered operation to dismantle the hundreds of tents and tarps that have become an emblem of Phoenix’s twin crises of affordable housing and homelessness.
In March, a judge declared the Zone a “public nuisance” and ordered Phoenix to clear out the area by mid-July. The city is planning to do so block by block, carrying out what it calls an “enhanced cleaning,” starting with Sutton’s corner at Ninth Avenue and Washington.
“Refusal to permanently relocate may result in citation or arrest,” the city said in flyers handed out to residents around the Zone.
Day after day over the past two weeks, outreach workers with the city and nonprofit groups have been fanning out through the Zone to prepare people and guide them toward other housing. They are trying to nudge the encampment’s roughly 800 residents toward shelters, treatment centers and subsidized motels.
Some have taken them up on the offer. On Wednesday morning, a small army of outreach workers helped people pack their belongings and carried away empty tents.
The city had found shelter for 29 of the roughly 35 people living on the first block to be cleared, said Scott Hall, deputy director of Phoenix’s Office of Homeless Solutions.
“We don’t want to see anybody on the streets of Phoenix suffering,” Hall said. But the city does not have enough open shelter beds or housing slots for all the people living on the streets in the Zone, Hall and advocates for the homeless said.
Some people, like Sutton, worried they would end up sleeping by the railroad tracks or in some remote corner of the city not subject to the judge’s ruling. Shelters are not an option for everyone. Many of them bar pets, and some criminal convictions disqualify people from transitional housing. Sutton has two cats and a husband with a felony record.
“What can we do?” she said in an interview two days before the city cleanup began. “Where are they going to put us?”
In Phoenix, business owners and neighbors filed a lawsuit last year saying the city had allowed the Zone to spiral into a “humanitarian crisis” marked by violence, property damage, and garbage and human waste in the streets.
The encampment sprawls out from Phoenix’s Human Services Campus, a 13-acre collection of organizations that serves as the main hub for homeless people in Phoenix. The campus has 900 shelter beds, laundry service, showers and medical care, and is one of several aid groups in the neighborhood.
People camping on sidewalks and dirt strips in the Zone say they ended up there after they were kicked out of alleys or parks in other parts of the city.
Phoenix is attempting an incremental approach. Instead of clearing out hundreds of people at once, it is working with residents and homeless services groups to move people off the sidewalks and into shelter, person by person, week by week. Once the city finishes clearing and cleaning a block, it says people will not be allowed to return there to camp.
The city is offering to store people’s belongings for free and says 800 more shelter beds will be available by the end of next year.
People who advocate for the homeless say clearing the Zone will not resolve the high rents or lack of mental health services and substance abuse treatment that are a root of homelessness. Some people will simply get pushed into new neighborhoods, they say, or into hiding, and farther away from services.
“This is a shell game,” said Amy Schwabenlender, the CEO of Phoenix’s Human Services Campus.
Outreach workers say that people are already leaving the Zone before the city’s planned cleanup, migrating into neighborhoods and parks farther west. A weekly census of the Zone fell from 900 people in April to roughly 760 in the first week of May, Schwabenlender said.
The people who sleep in tents on Ninth Avenue were both anxious and hopeful in interviews Tuesday morning, as they prepared for the city to begin clearing their block.
Brian Patrick, who has a working truck, said the city had arranged a free motel room along the freeway north of downtown. He said one of the city’s outreach workers had given him $15 for gas.
Next door, tent-mates Daniel Mackey, 62, and Barry Hayes, 67, said it had been hell living outside in the dirt and heat. Mackey’s foot, swollen and infected, was impossible to keep clean. Hayes has chronic bronchitis, and his battery-charged fan barely stirred the stale air as the temperature outside climbed toward 90 degrees.
The men had not wanted to end up in a large shelter, but on Wednesday, they agreed to relocate to a 34-bed men’s shelter, with the hope it would lead to a more permanent home.
“We’ve been good, vital human beings all our lives,” Mackey said. “I just want out of here.”